It was raining on Dec. 31, 2022, when Maria Narez pulled off Highway 101 at the turnoff for her farm. It had been raining in Prunedale, California, since just after Christmas, and the final half-mile was too muddy to keep driving. She parked on the gravel shoulder as cars slicked past on the highway.
After four years of drought, rain had come to Northern California, and even more was forecast. Soils were saturated, waterways brimming and rainfall records being set. Neighborhoods in Salinas, just south of Prunedale, were evacuating, and Narez and her wife, Esmeralda, were worried. The day before, they dug a ditch near rows of radish and broccoli to channel water away. Today’s rain was worse.
Narez, sturdy and stubborn, fought the mud on foot for half an hour before their 10-acre rented plot came into view. Strawberry rows, covered in plastic, sloped down to her farm. Across the small valley, hills rose into pastures dotted with mansions. Stormwater had funneled down the slopes; the creek at the bottom was swollen, and most of her crops were underwater.
A porta-potty on the far side of her land tilted, then started drifting toward the creek. As the floodwaters neared her tractor, Narez broke into a run.
Narez bought that tractor for $20,000 in 2019. It wasn’t expensive, as tractors go — it was already 15 years old — but it took everything she’d saved. For years, she’d worked on other people’s farms, saving up for her own, sick of how she was treated when people realized the woman she worked with was her wife.
She’d dreamt of farming since childhood. When her cousins ran off to the mall, she followed her grandfather to his Salinas strawberry fields. He had taught her how to drive a tractor. She had promised him she’d succeed.
She fell in the mud, got up, then fell again. “My mom says, ‘God always sends you warnings,’” she reflected later. “That was my warning. But I kept running.”
When she reached the tractor and climbed up its side, the long cultivator attachment parked beside it started rotating, pulled by the flood. “In my crazy mind, I figured that if I got down and held onto the implement, it wouldn’t be washed away,” she said. But her shoelace caught, and she fell a third time, onto the metal tines that worked her fields. Her face struck one, hard.
She remembers calling home, but not how she drove there, while Esme waited, carless and afraid. Neither knew that Narez’s injury had split and collapsed an iris, leaving metal shards and bacteria inside it. Or that, without insurance, they could not afford all 27 surgeries and an implant her doctors would recommend — that ultimately, most of the vision in that eye would be lost.
The income the couple and their four children relied on was lost, too. The flood destroyed all their vegetables and mangled their irrigation pipes. The cultivator was gone, the tractor drowned.
Their crisis was only beginning: A dozen more atmospheric rivers would hit California from January through March. The support Narez and hundreds of other small farmers would need to weather them would not.
A dozen more atmospheric rivers would hit California from January through March. The support Narez and hundreds of other small farmers would need to weather them would not.
California’s smallest farms — those cultivating less than 50 acres — comprise two-thirds of the state’s farms. The backbone of rural communities, they play a vital role in the nation’s food security and climate resilience: They hire and spend locally, bring competition to a market dominated by industrial-scale agriculture, and grow a greater diversity of crops than the biggest producers, which usually focus on a tiny range of products or a single commodity for fuel or processing. Research shows that small farms feature greater biodiversity and are more likely to use climate-resilient or regenerative practices. But the safety net that helps big operations through disasters — which are worsening with climate change — wasn’t built to protect them.
“We expect so much from small farmers,” Josefina Lara Chavez, who, until recently, ran Latino farmer programs at the Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF), said. “We expect them to solve the food system, to be ecological, to have the best produce, everything.” But when 17 back-to-back storms wiped out their livelihoods, realistic government help didn’t exist.
TO BE A FARMER is to live at the whims of the weather. Drought, fires, floods, heat, frost — growing food requires as much optimism as it does sunlight. But business resilience, especially after a disaster, takes more than personal strength.
“I think about recovery as a formula,” Poppy Davis, a farm business and policy consultant who formerly worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said at the EcoFarm conference in January 2024. “The key things are your personal savings, the amount of insurance you have, and your ability to access credit,” she said. “Plus government disaster payments,” depending on the disaster.
But many small farmers — especially farmers of color, who own more than a quarter of California’s farms — are short on those resources, which require things that small growers seldom have: enough money to get by until aid arrives; the time and business records needed to navigate government programs and applications; the assets or documents necessary to borrow money.
For some, education, language or immigration status create further barriers. In the Central Coast counties of Monterey, San Benito, and Santa Cruz, where the USDA counted 595 Latino-owned farms in 2022, CAFF counts more than 250 owners who only speak Spanish. The region also has a large Indigenous Mexican community, whose first or only languages include Mixtec, Triqui and Zapotec.
“We expect so much from small farmers. We expect them to solve the food system, to be ecological, to have the best produce, everything.”
Narez, raised in the U.S., speaks some English, but is fluent only in Spanish. She has dual U.S. and Mexican citizenship — she was born in Mexico while her parents, who had gained asylum in the U.S., were attending a funeral. Her siblings tease her for being “the Mexican one,” but her U.S. citizenship affords her more options for help than people with temporary or no legal status.
Nonprofits that support small farmers and federal officials who administer relief programs say that even tools designed for farmers like Narez often fail to help them. As a result, many small farms fail, launching a cascade of consequences: Farmers and their workers lose income, and sometimes housing; families are traumatized and suicide risk rises; land, stewardship and power are consolidated into fewer and larger hands. “Look at the ripple effect on their lives,” Chavez said. “It’s not just, ‘I lost my farm.’ It’s at the family level, the community level, the ecological level.”
For decades, small farms have evaporated at a far higher rate than large ones. According to the latest USDA census, the U.S. lost nearly 150,000 farms from 2017-2022, even as the largest grew in number. At least 6,237 of them were California farms smaller than 50 acres. Meanwhile, the frequency and scale of extreme weather are rising — events that affect rural, poor and non-white communities most.
AMONG THE WORST disasters American farmers ever faced was the 1930s Dust Bowl. That disaster wasn’t just weather; it was the result of Depression Era poverty and settler farming practices, fueled by the Homestead Act, that stripped millions of acres of the Great Plains bare. The fallout — tens of thousands of families abandoning their farms and homes — spurred unprecedented federal action that became the foundation of modern farm policy.
Before the 1930s, opposition to disaster relief was deeply entrenched in the American ethos. But the Great Depression “helped to soften deep-rooted, hard-line attitudes of free enterprise, individualism, and the passive role of government,” researcher Richard Warrick wrote in his 1980 analysis of the Great Plains droughts’ social impacts.
Using the framework created by New Deal-era programs, government disaster relief was born. At least 20% of all rural Great Plains families got federal aid. Soil conservation programs began. An experimental crop insurance program was created. The first Farm Bill was drafted. Consequently, Warrick noted, major droughts in the 1950s and ’70s wrought far less societal harm.
The Federal Crop Insurance Act of 1980 and reforms in the early ’90s formalized what is now the core of federal farm-disaster response. The 1930s version of crop insurance never took off — it was expensive and covered fewer crops — and Congress was tired of signing large ad-hoc relief bills. Droughts had destroyed swaths of Midwest commodity crops in the ’70s and again from 1988 to 1990.
“Look at the ripple effect on their lives. It’s not just, ‘I lost my farm.’ It’s at the family level, the community level, the ecological level.”
Today, nearly every acre of American commodity corn, wheat and soybeans is insured, making the program, by some measures, a success. But this cornerstone of disaster recovery was “not designed to help small farmers,” Anne Schechinger, an agricultural economist at the Environmental Working Group, said. Few in California have it.
Crop insurance is usually purchased for individual crops, from a narrow list that doesn’t include most vegetables. A small farmer with an eligible crop — say, storage onions — first needs “an agent willing to sell a policy to a really small farm,” Schechinger said. Those are hard to find; agent pay is based on policy size. Then, they’d need records of their historical yields, so they could prove a loss — difficult for small farmers like Narez, who grow dozens of crops in short rotations over several seasons each year.
Two newer tools, one covering non-insurable crops (launched in 1996) and one covering a whole farm’s revenue (from 2015), were supposed to fill this gap. “But they feel like retrofits, made unenthusiastically by people not steeped in the needs of small producers,” Davis said, weeks after speaking at EcoFarm. Both, she said, require records far beyond what the farmers they’re meant for can keep.
The insurance gap is especially stark in California, the nation’s largest agricultural economy, famous for its diversified farms. The Central Coast alone produces half the nation’s lettuce and broccoli, a third of its spinach and most of its artichokes. Strawberries are common, too, part of the annual rotation that makes this region anything but monocrop. Of those five crops, only strawberries are insurable in California, and only since 2021. The latest USDA data shows just 2% of them are insured.
Narez didn’t have crop insurance. Neither did Nancy Nuñez, who, 15 miles north of Narez, lost half her strawberries and vegetables in subsequent storms.
WHEN NUÑEZ and her mother came to the Central Coast from central Mexico in 2003, she’d wanted nothing to do with farming. At 17, the youngest of 10, she left everything behind to escape her father’s abuse. They fled to Watsonville, where her siblings had already relocated, but a month later, he followed them. When he attacked her mother again, “my brother said, ‘No, no more,’ and called the police,” Nuñez said. Her father’s arrest helped both women gain legal status.
Nuñez hoped to keep studying — she’d been an IT student in Mexico — and learn English. But once she arrived, all that ended. “Here, everybody had an (adult) life already,” she said, full of work and chores. Her siblings gave her two months rent-free. After that, she knew, “If you don’t work, you don’t live.”
She started in her niece’s fields, but didn’t like it, so she handled sales at her siblings’ market booths, tried housecleaning, and eventually drove for Uber, enjoying the travel and being her charismatic, social self. By the time she met her partner, José, she was also single-parenting four young children. José had been farming since his teens, and at first Nuñez wasn’t impressed.
“I thought, he’s too short, he’s too ugly,” she recalled, through a Spanish interpreter. He had grown on her anyway; he was kind, generous, hardworking and didn’t mind that she had children. “Even when he’s doing his work, he does it with love,” she said. “That’s why we’re here.”
In 2020, they started with four rows. By the end of 2022, they’d grown to eight acres on leased land that sloped from the 101 to a creek near the Pajaro River. José worked the fields, Nuñez managed sales. They called it Picoso Farm, making José its secret namesake: Nuñez and her sisters had decided he was chiquito pero picoso — short but spicy, someone whose strength and goodness far outshone his size.
When floodwaters crept up their land on Jan. 9, 2023, reaching the top step of the RV where the couple and their 11-month-old baby normally slept, they took it in stride. They harvested all they could and moved belongings to the highest part of their land, above the plywood structure José built to house a kitchen and the older children’s bedrooms. That night, they lost some equipment, but not their home.
When the creek started rising on March 10, Nuñez recalled, “We didn’t think it could happen again.” Or, at least, that it couldn’t be worse. Around 1 a.m., with water approaching fast, they changed their minds. Her 9-year-old watched the baby while she woke her other children to help move everything they could, including $3,600 worth of vegetable seedlings — all their plantings for March.
It was cold, windy and difficult. Wearing trash bags as raincoats, they moved tablecloths, scales and tools. They didn’t have time for furniture or clothing. José climbed onto the roof he’d built beside the RV, and the family shuttled 60 trays of broccoli, cauliflower and lettuce seedlings up to him as the water rose around them.
At 3 a.m., after all the trays were up, they fled.
THAT STORM, March 9-11, wasn’t the winter’s largest, but it was among the most destructive. Parts of the Central Coast saw 13 inches of rain, and flooding farther down the Pajaro breached a levee, devastating a farmworker community. January’s storms had already dumped more than 32 trillion gallons of water on the state.
In the Salinas and Pajaro valleys, tens of thousands of cropland acres were submerged. In Monterey County alone, trade groups estimated total losses at more than $2 billion.
From January on, staff at CAFF and at California FarmLink and Kitchen Table Advisors, which provide business training and advice to small farmers, including Narez and Nuñez, started getting calls from farmers who couldn’t access their land, needed to evacuate, or had lost everything. “It was awful,” Chavez said, still burnt out a year later. “They lost their dogs, their cattle, they didn’t know how to rescue their chickens, they didn’t know where to go.”
When disaster hits a farm, USDA crop insurance is the first line of defense. For those without it, or with other losses, the next option is emergency aid from the USDA’s Farm Service Agency (FSA). Applicants must have legal status in the U.S., navigate myriad programs and complex requirements to determine which suit their losses, fill out onerous applications, and then wait.
For large farms, this isn’t insurmountable: They’re less likely to lose everything in one event, and more likely to have a professional support network. “A successful mainstream farm bureau member pays the people that take care of that complexity for them,” Davis said. But small farmers often muddle through alone.
And in 2023, navigating FSA aid programs was even harder than usual. Staff at CAFF and FarmLink said FSA was unprepared for the scale of the disaster, despite being designed for this. Farmers drove to one FSA office, only to be sent to another, and the agency had just two Spanish-speaking staff in the region.
“It was quite crazy,” Navdeep Dhillon, executive officer at FSA in California, said of those early months. The agency’s Monterey and San Benito county offices — among the state’s smallest —were still bogged down with applications from previous disasters, and “the sheer number of producers that were impacted was quite overwhelming.” The USDA’s 2022 census counted 1,600 farms across both counties; Dhillon estimated that they received about 800 aid applications.
“There is a gap,” Blong Xiong, head of California’s FSA since 2022, acknowledged, between the needs of underserved farmers and what FSA can currently provide. Xiong, who previously led a Fresno nonprofit supporting small Asian growers, said he was pushing for better programs and outreach. Language, technology, access — all are issues, he said. “But at the end of the day, it’s also because it’s a government process. We have to be able to get (small farmers) to be part of the system.”
That system, though, has a long-documented history of discrimination, adding still more real and perceived barriers. Starting in the early 2000s, the USDA faced lawsuits from Latino, Black, Indigenous and women growers alleging discrimination concerning aid, loans and more. The USDA settled those suits, but as recently as 2021, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that racial and income-based disparities persist.
Meanwhile, any funding that does get awarded often takes so long to arrive that it can’t help growers who lack deep pockets in the first place. Dhillon said most of the applications FSA received were for a program that covers post-disaster cleanup, such as debris removal or irrigation repair. But that program, which covers up to 90% of an approved project, reimburses farmers only after cleanup is completed. Farmers who have lost substantial income can’t always front these costs.
When it comes to lost crops, FSA emergency aid requires congressional approval, creating yearslong delays. In March 2024, FSA was awarding funds for 2022 disasters. Aid for 2023 will require new legislation and likely wouldn’t start paying until at least 2025.
State aid was hard to come by, too, in a state more accustomed to drought relief. That July, urged by CAFF, Gov. Gavin Newsom dedicated $27 million to winter storm relief for small farms in the state’s 2023-’24 budget. Of this, $5 million was promised to a program that allocates funds to community organizations that farmers already trust, such as CAFF. But as of July 2024, none had yet been allocated.
Meanwhile, $20 million went to a program administered by Lendistry, a private lending firm hired by California’s Office of the Small Business Advocate (CalOSBA). CAFF was upset at how poorly it served farmers, so staff compiled a memo, later shared with legislative staff and High Country News, documenting myriad failures, including inadequate Spanish-language support, requiring forms that were irrelevant to small farms, and customer service that was condescending and unhelpful. Lendistry declined to comment. CalOSBA said that few other firms were large enough to administer this program, and that language capacity was a “key consideration” in awarding the contract.
FarmLink program manager Stephanie Stevens said that after she helped a farmer apply last fall, she spent six months responding to requests for more documentation — some of which had already been filed — only to learn this spring that funding had run out. Other farmers just gave up, she said.
CalOSBA said 4,203 farmers applied, requesting $39 million. Only 385 grants were made.
So, CAFF, Kitchen Table Advisors and FarmLink started making their own donor-funded grants, totaling about $600,000.
Some money went to Narez, who put it toward her mounting medical bills. With help from a GoFundMe campaign, she bought seedlings and leased new land. But the family couldn’t afford their apartment, so the teenagers stayed with Narez’s parents, while the couple and their 3-year-old rented a small room. Esme cleaned houses, and their oldest children chipped in, too. “I was taking savings away from my son, who’s trying to save for college,” Narez said. “I’m the parent. I’m supposed to be supporting my kids.”
CalOSBA said 4,203 farmers applied, requesting $39 million. Only 385 grants were made.
A cascade of crises followed. They finally started harvesting lettuce in July, selling to several distributors. But the company that took most of it never paid, claiming it hadn’t reached its destination intact. Even when distributors control shipping and storage, the risk still often lies with farmers — a shady but legal practice that farm advisors say is especially common in immigrant and vulnerable communities. Narez estimated she lost $80,000 in vegetables, yet owed the company $2,700 for packing materials.
Then the water pump on their new land broke — a loss her lease didn’t protect. Narez was told it would cost more than $200,000 to repair. Without irrigation, the rest of her crops started failing.
Later, battling a debilitating cough, she learned she’d contracted Valley Fever, a deadly infection caused by a soil-borne fungus that thrives after heavy rains. It’s becoming more common, especially in California and the Southwest, likely due to the flood-drought cycle fueled by climate change. The medication Narez needs can cost more than $1,000 a month, but when she skips it, everything is harder.
“When I start to feel depressed, I tell myself, I can do it,” she said. “I will do it.
“But every time I see that shimmer of light at the end of the tunnel, something else covers that light,” Narez continued. “They say once life starts hitting you, it hits you, and it hits you, and it hits you again. And once you say, ‘I’m gonna be able to recover, I’m getting up,’ you get hit once more.”
NUÑEZ AND JOSÈ returned after the March storm to find that the seedlings on the roof had survived. But the home below did not: Water had risen thigh-high in the RV and over the bedframes in the older children’s rooms. Clothing and bedding were everywhere. Half their crops were destroyed.
After the January flood, Nuñez went to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which gives aid for household losses, but she wasn’t eligible since a disaster hadn’t been declared in her county. This time, one was, and with her information already on file, FEMA called her — but said they’d need to send someone to the farm. Nuñez was worried: The plywood house wasn’t legal, and the RV’s registration had expired. “But I (told myself), ‘It’s OK, they don’t want me to sit with my children under a bridge,’” she said. “So I took the risk.”
FEMA gave her $5,000 for the RV. That came in days, but there was little she could do about the farm losses: She lacked the paperwork that federal aid required. FSA suggested she seek the government’s third farm disaster relief program: an emergency loan.
Nuñez was sure that a loan could tide her over. Enough crops had survived that she continued selling at two markets, and a small GoFundMe campaign helped, too. But in order to keep earning, she needed to pay workers; she’d already had to let several go. She also needed to buy transplants and cover large monthly payments on the land and the two vans they drove to markets. Soon, she’d owe rent, too: After years of searching, she’d found an affordable apartment that would accept their large family.
Getting a loan is complicated for small farmers; even programs designed for small businesses seldom help. Farms are hard to finance: Risk is high, and small farmers often lack the records, credit scores or collateral conventional loans require.
FSA offers loans designed to work around this, but, as with other USDA programs, “There’s a perception of discrimination and a hesitancy to work with them,” FarmLink’s Stevens said. Her organization, a community development financial institution, makes similar loans — many backed by FSA — but works intimately with small farmers to do so, helping them with paperwork, flexible terms and more.
“They say once life starts hitting you, it hits you, and it hits you, and it hits you again. And once you say, ‘I’m gonna be able to recover, I’m getting up,’ you get hit once more.”
Nuñez quickly gave up on FSA: “They were asking for so many things that I didn’t even know if I had,” she said. The 17-page application required, among many other things, three years of financial and production records, cash-flow projections for every crop grown, and a “certification of losses” documenting yield per acre for every crop in a normal year as well as the disaster year — all challenging records to keep on a small, diversified farm.
In April, Nuñez applied at FarmLink instead, with help from Kitchen Table Advisors. At first, she didn’t qualify; her farm was too new. But a few months later, she got a call.
The loan would be $90,000, at 0% interest, to refinance her vans, cutting her monthly payments in half. The loan would take a few months to finalize, as long as she didn’t take on other debt.
But another emergency intervened: A relative in Mexico called, desperate for $15,000. Days later, Square, the credit card payment system Nuñez used at farmers’ markets, offered a $40,000 merchant cash advance. Operating outside the financial regulatory system, advances like this, based on expected sales, are risky, and often considered predatory. This one had a $7,000 fee, with 18 months to pay — the equivalent of at least 21% interest. Square would take a large cut of every transaction until she did.
“What could I do?” she said. She took the advance, and let the better loan go.
SOMETHING DEEPER, beyond the safety net, is broken, say the advisors, advocates and researchers who know these systems best.
In the 1930s, when farm programs were first created, most farms were under 500 acres, drought was the primary concern and wheat the crop most at risk, Schechinger, from the Environmental Working Group, said. Between climate change and the consolidation caused by federal policy, “our industry has changed so much,” she said, while “the thought process has stayed the same.”
Nonprofits, researchers, legislators and officials are all advocating for changes.
Many call for crop insurance reforms that ease access to policies or shift subsidies from commodities to diversified food crops, thereby helping farmers with less capital and greater need. Schechinger cited a bill introduced in 2023 that would streamline whole farm revenue insurance, reducing the paperwork and changing the incentives for agents that sell it.
California FSA officials have recommended changes to the non-insurable crop insurance program. Xiong said that shortly after he was appointed, he wrote to national officials about trimming the requirements. But without legislative action, his hands are tied.
When it comes to improving credit programs, Brett Melone, who heads FarmLink’s lending program, supports a bill introduced in 2023 that would ease access to USDA loans and make it easier for farmers to appeal denials — important steps, advocates say, for addressing historic discrimination. A rotating line of credit for farmers waiting for aid payments could fill an important gap, too, he said.
As for aid, CAFF Policy Director Jamie Fanous wants to see more state dollars funneled through community-based organizations, rather than for-profit companies that lack relationships and experience with small farms. She also wants a permanent relief fund to replace ad hoc appropriations. Political and administrative delays “are not sustainable for anyone,” she said. “Look at COVID: They moved money like it was nothing. The government can work when it wants to.”
Several California Democrats, including Sen. Alex Padilla, have also pushed for a permanent federal disaster fund. After an embattled Congress failed to draft a 2023 Farm Bill, Padilla and others pushed to include such a fund in the 2024 bill. Congress finally began Farm Bill hearings in May 2024, but this was not included. In July, Padilla’s office said another option was still being discussed. It would require recipients to buy crop insurance after getting aid.
Many, including Fanous, Schechinger, Kitchen Table Advisors staff and Poppy Davis, believe more holistic change is also needed. They want resource hubs to help farmers manage bookkeeping and insurance, more business education, better access to affordable health care. “Crop insurance is very important, but it comes behind a number of other issues that are much more critical,” Davis said. She pointed to farmers like Narez, who increased her risk by investing all her cash in a tractor, and to farmers who don’t know they need things like workers’ compensation coverage.
“Look at COVID: They moved money like it was nothing. The government can work when it wants to.”
Above all, “I would rather a farmer have health insurance than crop insurance,” she said; illness and injury are more common than floods. Even when small farms struggle to make ends meet, they often show enough profit that the owners don’t qualify for Medicaid or health-care subsidies.
Without any of these changes, the U.S. stands to keep losing small farms and all that they offer the nation: jobs and security in rural and vulnerable communities, more sustainable land stewardship, a diversity of fresh, healthy food. Some of their land will be swallowed by bigger farms, or investors might develop it instead. While new farms start every year, the newer a farm is, the more likely it is to fail.
IN JANUARY 2024, most of Narez’s fields were weeds. Without irrigation, four acres of broccoli had gone to flower, and her kale wasn’t far behind. She and Esme had both gotten COVID the week before, and the furrows between their onion rows had gone untended.
They’d decided to keep trying until the end of the year, hoping to find another plot of land — one small enough for the two of them to manage, and safer for the thousands of seedlings they’d ordered months ago, which needed to be planted soon. Doing so wouldn’t be easy: Affordable small plots of land are hard to find. And they’re usually the most vulnerable to disasters.
“I have this fire in my heart,” Narez said, standing beside her wife near a row of tiny lettuce. “I feel like we can do it.”
In the kitchen above her farm, reheating the tamales her family made the day before, Nuñez was optimistic, too. A Christmas wreath still hung on one peach-colored plywood wall. José chose the color a year before to lift their spirits. Before the storms, they’d never wanted to paint: They worried authorities would realize the structure was a home. The new apartment had made so many things easier.
Two of the children napped in the next room, while José and several workers harvested lush rows outside, carrying overflowing crates of greens up toward boxes packed for farmers markets that weekend.
On Sunday morning, Nuñez woke at 4 and drove two hours north to Martinez, van loaded with produce. All day, customers came to her stall. Above her clean denim apron, her eyeliner was perfectly winged and she chatted with nearly everyone as she weighed produce and counted change. When customers held out a credit card, she offered the Square-branded reader atop her cashbox. Each swipe was one small payment on the advance.
Soon, she’d take a FarmLink course to improve her recordkeeping and business practices. “I don’t want to be small,” she said. “My dreams are bigger.” She wants a home, surrounded by many acres of farmland, where her children are safe. “That is the ultimate dream. To be on our farm, to know that this is our home, this is our farm, we made it.”
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This article appeared in the August 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “After the floods.”
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