Farmers are part of the solution. 

This is a fundamental tenet of American Farmland Trust.  Since our founding, AFT has upheld that farms are vital to feeding our society, providing jobs, and sustaining the vitality of rural America.

Critically, AFT believes that farmers are key allies in solving many of the greatest environmental challenges facing our planet.  Ensuring that we have enough clean drinking water, fighting the climate crisis, ensuring the availability of wildlife habitat – farmers continuing to care for the land are vital to these needs. 

In 2020, AFT launched the Farmer Relief Fund to provide small grants to help farmers doing direct marketing impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. These grants were born from an urgent need to help avert crisis for many farmers previously selling at farmers markets or restaurants that were no longer open. 

Recognizing continued need in the agricultural community, AFT launched the Brighter Future Fund soon after. The Brighter Future Fund was launched in 2020 to assist farmers in successfully launching, growing, and sustaining farms in the face of forces impacting the food and agricultural system, including the COVID-19 pandemic, changing markets, severe weather, and climate change. The Fund was initially seeded with a generous contribution from Tillamook, one of America’s favorite farmer-owned co-ops. The Fund offers direct payments to forward-looking farmers who know they are part of the solution to many of our society’s greatest problems. 

Combined, we have provided more than $3.5 million to more than 2,000 farmers in all 50 states and Puerto Rico since 2020.  Farmers use these grants to construct irrigation to be more resilient to drought, improve equipment to better cultivate, harvest and process crops, take steps to access land, and much more. 

The impacts of Brighter Future grants ripple beyond individual awardees. Microgrants help drive new solutions for resolving key challenges facing our society, by:

• Scaling up the adoption of regenerative farming practices and increasing the resilience of farms to climate change;
• Strengthening local food systems to be more resilient to disruptions caused by global events as well as providing equitable access to healthy food;
• Creating greater equity in opportunities for historically underserved farmers;
• Ensuring the availability of sufficient clean water and habitat for threatened wildlife;
• Improving long-term farm viability and community vitality. 

This direct support is an emerging way to help farmers help all of us.