Catskills Agrarian Alliance: Where Mutual Aid and Food Sovereignty Meet

According to the USDA’s latest Census of Agriculture, 96.8% of farms in the United States are owned by white producers. In New York, the percentage is even higher, with 99.4% of farms being owned by white people. But the Catskills Agrarian Alliance is slowly working to change that.

The non-profit is guided by the principles of mutual aid and food sovereignty, with a focus on breaking down the systemic barriers that have historically excluded queer and BIPOC farmers. The local farms under the organization primarily distributes food to communities in the Catskills, Hudson Valley and New York City through mutual aid, wholesale and farm-to-institution programs.

While the non-profit was only established back in 2022, the major projects it oversees — the 607 CSA, a CSA composed of local farms in the Northern Catskills, and Star Route Farm, their own farm that focuses on agroecological farming practices have already been around for a decade. In addition, their Land Access project, referred to as the West Branch Commons, serves as a community land trust that focuses on providing up-and-coming BIPOC farmers affordable farming land. But it was the COVID-19 pandemic that saw these initiatives really grow to try and meet the heightened needs of their neighbors.

Co-executive director Tianna Kennedy, who has been farming in the Delaware and Otsego Counties of New York for over a decade now, said that’s what it’s about — increasing New Yorkers’ self-determination over their food by building connections between local farmers and to their consumers.

“The way in which we’re hoping to construct our organization and how we’re hoping to work with other groups in our region is to create a sort of mesh network, a very resilient multiple-communication-point food system where all the stakeholders have agency in the process,” Kennedy said. “It started as just us being a little farm trying to survive, and none of us can survive on our own. I think farming is, in the small scale, inherently collaborative.”

According to the Catskills Agrarian Alliance, to do so requires addressing the systemic racism that has long driven this country’s agricultural system and determined who actually has access to the resources needed to farm. Francis Yu, the non-profit’s other co-executive director, described how the USDA’s policies have historically limited their granting of capital to white farmers. While the civil rights movement regenerated the conversation on the USDA’s discrimination against Black farmers, which would finally result in policy changes during the 80s, Yu said the Trump administration is once again dismantling these reforms.

“There has been a really big loss in terms of the number of Black farmers, of Asian farmers in this space, and who has the support, access to resources or community to enter farming as a real livelihood,” Yu said.

But disparities exist not only on the food production side but also food consumption. The non-profit is actively partnering with mutual aid groups, charities and organizations throughout New York to combat food insecurity. Yu explained that it is an issue that has especially harmed Black and brown communities who have faced “food apartheid” in the intentional redlining of their neighborhoods, as well as rural communities where resources like transportation have also not been invested in.

“And it’s interesting because, in a space like the Catskills, where you have I think some of the best farmland that the state has to offer and some really amazing growers and farmers, you can have neighbors who are also kind of dealing and grappling with food insecurity,” Yu said.

And this food insecurity is also impacting farmers themselves, Kennedy explained.

“The food system is based on [the] exploitation of labor,” Kennedy said. “It always has been, and it continues to be. Especially with subsidized large [agriculture], food pricing is so cheap that no small farm can compete with that, and so there can never be a margin that creates a viable income for small farmers.”

Amid USDA cuts to programs like the Local Food for Schools and Local Food Purchase Assistance (LFPA) programs — which provided schools, food banks and other institutions funding to buy from local farmers — Yu said food insecurity is going to be exacerbated for both farmers and consumers. The local farms that the non-profit works with, many of which make a living through these wholesale purchases, are feeling the cuts, they explained.

“LFPA has had a very big impact on our farmers and the ability to do work from the mutual mutual aid programming side,” Yu said. “And it’s something that we’ve seen across the landscape. Beyond just our network of farms, it’s really affecting our food ecosystem — the food pantries and food banks and community organizations that relied on that funding to be able to support their communities through their food distributions.”

Kennedy said the Catskills Agrarian Alliance, in transparency, is struggling to navigate the constant barrage of USDA cuts, especially in terms of balancing their goal of equitable distribution with economic stability. She explained that the CAA’s origins as a small farm was primarily funded through private donors, and its transition to a non-profit came out of the hope to gain funding through the very state and federal grants that are now being rescinded.

With that being said, the non-profit is driven by the goal of long-term sustainability — in terms of both using ecologically-sound farming practices and connecting the next generation of farmers to those who are retiring in addition to land. While this goal has yet to be seen, as it remains the Catskills Agrarian Alliance’s early years, Kennedy said she has seen positive changes over the 15 years she’s farmed here in New York.

“When I showed up, it was mostly dairy farms that had been forced out of business, whether through buyouts or price fixing,” Kennedy said. “So it was sort of a struggling and dying ag economy here…In the past 15 years since I’ve been here, there’s been a proliferation of small, often queer, communal, radical farms popping up all over the Catskills, Adirondacks, and Hudson Valley. And it’s been hopeful and exciting — most of those farms are using regenerative practices or at least responsible stewardship practices for both livestock and veggies, and we’re all learning from each other…The other thing that’s very different is: when I first joined it was sort of every man for themselves — solo trip to the city to do a market. Especially in the past five years, this collaborative approach is way more prevalent.”

Despite major challenges coming down from the federal government, the non-profit had a successful past year — growing 50,000 lbs of food at Star Route Farm, supplying 15,000 lbs of organic produce and dry goods to local schools, collaborating with 39 mutual aid organizations and 35 CSA locations, etc. But Yu also pointed to the relationships that have been able to bud, even those across generations, as a source of both success and hope.

“I think that’s one thing I really love about our land access project with West Branch commons because I think that that intergenerational piece is so strong,” Yu said. “It’s like a fourth-generation dairy farmer helping mentor a couple of queer BIPOC farmers coming from the Bronx, which is a really interesting and a very beautiful kind of relationship that has come out of that. But it’s just thinking about, what are the ways that we can provide a continuation of the agricultural legacy that we have in the state.”

Image: Farmers at the Catskills Agrarian Alliance’s Star Route Farm are preparing for their August 2024 fundraiser. (Photo credit: @starroutefarm on Instagram)

Note: The headline of this story was updated on June 30 from “The Catskill Agrarian Alliance” to “Catskills Agrarian Alliance.”