By Molly Ashford
After a day of agricultural tours across Nebraska and a roundtable with farmers and ranchers from around the state, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced a series of policy proposals meant to support small family farms.
"There's been a lot of conversation about how we keep America strong and bring prosperity back to rural America," Rollins said after a closed-to-media roundtable with Nebraska ag leaders at Ohnoutka Family Farm in Valparaiso. "And the face of all of that, the foundation, is our small family farmers."
The 10-point policy proposal, dubbed "Farmers First," includes some technical actions, like digitizing paper applications through the USDA and combining loan programs, as well as loftier goals like "aggressively exploring" solutions for a "stable, reliable and legal" agricultural workforce through nonimmigrant visas, which allow immigrants to come to the U.S. for a short time for a specific purpose, such as a seasonal job. Among some of the more specific goals were reforming certain environmental regulations, like the National Environmental Policy Act and provisions of the Clean Water Act, as well as disincentivizing the use of federal funds to install solar panels on farmland.
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