About me
I came to agricultural policy because I cared about farmers, and I stayed because of what I learned about the system they work inside.
I earned my degree in animal science because I genuinely loved agriculture and the people who make their lives inside it, and that education gave me a great deal of sympathy for farmers, because farming is already an extraordinarily difficult way to make a living before somebody else begins controlling the conditions under which your work can become profitable. The more I learned, however, the more interested I became in the contradiction between the cultural image of the independent American farmer and the economic reality facing many of the people we still describe that way, because ownership of land or equipment means considerably less when another institution possesses enough market power to determine what you produce, how you produce it, and whether the financial risk you carry will ever produce a reasonable return.
I think the American food system is sitting in a particularly precarious moment. People have become deeply suspicious of the institutions producing their food, and although some of that suspicion gets expressed through misinformation, I think it would be a mistake to dismiss all of it as irrational when consumers repeatedly watch consolidation reduce accountability while farmers themselves describe having less control over the economic systems governing their livelihoods. We have spent decades allowing enormous concentrations of corporate power to develop inside agriculture and then continued speaking about the resulting market as though every participant entered it with roughly comparable freedom, when in reality a small farmer can technically possess the right to refuse a contract while also knowing that refusing may mean losing access to the only viable purchaser available to them.
That is especially difficult for me to accept because I did not come into this believing farmers were the problem. I came into it because I cared about them, and the longer I have worked around agricultural policy, the more convinced I have become that defending farmers sometimes requires being willing to challenge the corporations that have learned to profit from their dependence. The same system that can leave consumers wondering whether they can trust what is on a grocery-store shelf can leave producers wondering whether another year of work will make them more economically secure or simply more indebted, and I am interested in the legal architecture that allows those outcomes to reproduce themselves while still appearing inevitable.
Where that shows up
It shows up most directly in Community Agriculture Corporation, which I founded in 2023, and in the policy and local government work collected in my portfolio. My academic background is on the education page, and the creative side of all of this is Range & Reverie.