In early October Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced the USDA’s reinvestment in the Dairy Business Innovation (DBI) program. Based within the agricultural marketing service branch of the USDA, the DBI program splits the country into four groups covering the Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, and West, with each hub based in an agricultural institution in that region. These Dairy Business Innovation Centers (DBIC) award small- to medium-sized grants to dairy businesses in their region for marketing, product innovation, business development, and distribution. So far, the Northeast DBIC (NE-DBIC), operating within the Vermont Agency of Agriculture and Food Markets, has awarded $31 million to farmers in the Northeast. The USDA specifically uses the term “resilience” to describe the nature of these grants.
The NE-DBIC has funded projects to revamp marketing for specific brands, to increase awareness of the dairy industry in rural and urban areas, to bring together new farmers with technical assistance providers, to expand infrastructure for milk storage and handling, and much more. The grants all revolve around dairy production, processing, and management, but also have an element of community embedded in them. These grants go to projects not just to expand a dairy’s ability to produce and sell, but to expand their impact in their town, and across their food system. In doing so, they reiterate the worth of the dairy farming community in those systems. Here’s where the resiliency piece comes in – the idea with this funding is not just to support projects and keep dairy ventures in operation in the immediate term, but to stimulate growth and development in a way that protects the future of dairy in the region.
To me, the term resilience would mean that the funding is going towards programs that work to create a dairy food system that can thrive into the future, providing jobs, nutritious food, and protecting the working landscape of the area. A grant supporting resilience would fund projects that increase the wider community’s interdependence on the existence of that dairy business. They would fund projects that steer dairy businesses to operate in a way that makes them able to change with the world around them.
There’s a current trend in government allocation of funds towards resiliency projects; last year the USDA announced almost half a billion dollars would go to funding the Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure program. This program was created to strengthen the middle of the food chain, similar to how the DBIC program supports processors, not just producers. Similarly, when describing the reinvestment in the DBIC program, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack described resilience as the program’s multiplicative effect. This program won’t just pay for more marketing plans but will “build new markets and expand economic growth in rural economies.” Both the DBIC program and the Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure program are designed to maximize the impact of the dollars going out into the food system.
I’m curious to see how resilience will play a role in the long-term relationship between government bodies and American farmers. Is resilience the buzzword of the time, and will soon be dropped for the next word that inspires some hope? Will the principles of resilience, the ability to absorb change and come out alive, work their way into how we view agriculture in America? Maybe most realistically this focus on resilience will fund some exciting projects, some of which will go on to create long-lasting change in their sectors. I hope that the intention of resilience — the drive to create something that can last through changing climates, governments, and eras — will be left from these resilience programs. In the meantime, the NE-DBIC will be administering $3.45 million to dairy businesses in the Northeast and spreading the concept of resilience in big and small ways. Interested parties can find out more about the NE-DBIC program at nedairyinnovation.com.
— Bridget Craig