The nation’s Agriculture Secretary made a stop in California to announce additional aid for specialty crop growers. Brooke Rollins toured Allied Potato in Bakersfield this past Friday and announced additional help for farmers.
Rollins says the Specialty Crops Farmers Program will provide $1.6 billion in payments to eligible specialty crop producers as a way to offset higher input costs and market disruptions caused by unfair foreign trade.
California Republican Congressman David Valadao joined Rollins when she made the announcement.
“That’s one of the frustrations, specialty crop guys have always felt left behind. And so Secretary announced that of that $11 billion bridge program, she got $1.6 billion for specialty crops to help them as we’re waiting for some of the things that we put in the Porky family tax cut bill, the reconciliation that we did last year. We’re waiting on some of those, and even those dollars are trying to offset some of the effects of what’s going on in the world with trade and fuel prices and things like that. And so that announcement was welcome news.”
Valadao says it’s also important that the Agriculture Secretary see and hear firsthand the needs of Central Valley growers. Rollins took part in a roundtable focused on key issues impacting producers across California’s Central Valley, including rising input costs and workforce shortages.
“A lot of farmers across the country grow one crop or two crops—corn, soybeans, things like that. When you get in the Central Valley, you have a lot of much smaller farms who are farming very specific commodities, and it could be a different variety of a specific commodity. And getting a large bureaucracy like the USDA to understand that and handle that and help our farmers either market their products, look for different markets overseas, or even assistance in a disaster-type situation, those are all complicating factors that we brought to the Secretary’s attention so that she could to help— they could help her understand what we’re dealing with and try to find a path forward on some solutions.”
The Specialty Crops Farmers Program enrollment starts this week and runs through August 7th.