01/15/2025
Farmers Need Help to Survive. A New Crop of Farm Advocates Is on the Way.
Farmers with expertise in law and finance have long guided the farming community through tough situations, but their numbers have been dropping. Now, thanks to federally funded training, farm advocates are coming back.
By Cara Nixon January 14, 2025
Benny Bunting in his home office in Oak City, NC. Bunting keeps a library of farming regulations and laws, and a binder of relevant documents for each farming family that he has helped. On the desk, he scours federal and state regulations for the exact piece of the legal puzzle that he needs for a farming operation that he is currently helping. (Photo credit: Wayne Gray)
Young organizers with Student Action with Farmworkers visit a labor camp in eastern North Carolina. (Photo courtesy of SAF)
Students Are Building the Next Generation of Farmworker Advocates
In 2007, fourth-generation farmer Luciano Alvarado Jr. and his family were looking for a fresh start. Their business had been booming in Florida, where they farmed citrus and vegetables. But after a family member died, they decided to pack up and head to land they owned just outside of Fayetteville, North Carolina, to process their loss in a new place.
Alvarado hoped they could turn the acreage into a blueberry farm and make a decent profit. But their fresh start quickly turned sour. The family found themselves in deep financial trouble after learning how different and complicated North Carolina’s loan regulations were from those in their home state. And, still struck with grief, he and his family struggled to make sound financial decisions.
In September 2024, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) pledged $30 million to establish the Distressed Borrowers Assistance Network (DBAN), an initiative designed to help financially distressed farmers and ranchers.
It was by a stroke of luck that Alvarado learned about North Carolina-based Rural Advancement Foundation International-USA (RAFI), a nonprofit which helps farmers in tough situations free of charge. “Well, I’ve got nothing else to lose,” Alvarado recalls thinking.
He called the number he had been given and soon was connected with a farm advocate named Benny Bunting. Farm advocates, often farmers themselves, help their neighbors navigate codes and regulations—pertaining to things like zoning, food safety, and property rights—that can save their operations.
Bunting, now 79, runs a family farm with his son in Oak City, North Carolina, where he once raised poultry and hogs and now grows h**p and corn. During his first day helping the Alvarados untangle their messy financial situation, he sat at their kitchen table for eight hours straight, drinking coffee with them in the morning and sharing dinner with them that night.
If not for that help, “I don’t think we would be having this conversation right now,” Alvarado said. “We could have ended up with nothing.”
Though farm advocates like Bunting have made a massive difference for the farmers they’ve helped, a good number have aged out of the work or died, leaving a void for farmers in need of guidance. For a while, a lack of funding for these positions—and a shortage of people willing to take up the emotionally taxing and sometimes unpaid work—made it difficult for organizations to recruit these advocates, and the profession was at risk of disappearing altogether.
Now, a new federal effort is looking to create a fresh team of helpers. In September 2024, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) pledged $30 million over three years to establish the Distressed Borrowers Assistance Network (DBAN), an initiative designed to connect financially distressed farmers and ranchers with personal assistance to help them regain their footing. A large part of this work consists of recruiting and training a new generation of advocates to help farmers struggling with complex financial and legal issues.
Through a series of cooperative agreements, the USDA’s Farm Service Agency (FSA) is facilitating the network, along with a handful of farmer support organizations and land-grant universities: RAFI, Farm Aid, the University of Arkansas, the University of Minnesota, and the Socially Disadvantaged Farmers and Ranchers Policy Research Center at Alcorn State University in Mississippi.
“It’s a high-stakes kind of work,” said Margaret Krome-Lukens, RAFI’s policy director. “Our goal here is to be able to train folks without having the mistakes that are part of the learning process be those that impact farmers. I have so much admiration for the farm advocates who just sat down and started figuring it out, and I want to give the next generation of farm advocates the benefit of that hard work, experience, and hard-won lessons and knowledge.”
As one of the last experienced farm advocates remaining, Bunting has valuable knowledge that the organizations working to create DBAN hope to capture and pass on to the next generation.
“I don’t feel like I’m overstating in saying that I think Benny is a national treasure,” Krome-Lukens said. “He has a good, strategic mind. He can quote the Code of Federal Regulations to you, chapter and verse. Knowing all that in his head enables him to put the pieces together in a way that sees possibility and if there could be unintended consequences. He also just brings so much compassion.”
The Life of a Farm Advocate
Bunting first got involved with farm advocacy because of his own financial struggles and was recruited by RAFI in the early 1980s. He’s been with the organization ever since, serving as lead farm advocate for the last 20 years. When Bunting is not out working his own fields, he’s advocating for others out of his home office, which is full to the brim with crates and binders of loan regulation information and farm finance manuals.
Over his four decades in the farm advocate profession, Bunting has used his vast knowledge to save many farms—and sometimes, farmers’ lives. On average, he counsels between 75 and 100 farmers each year, devoting around 60 hours to each client. Between 2010 and 2013 alone, he helped preserve an estimated $50 million in assets for farm families, according to RAFI.
While the job once sent him to farms all over the country, Bunting now works within North Carolina, still making home visits. Many people he has helped consider him family. “When we go in with a farmer, most of the time that farmer would call me up after a meeting and say they got the first good night’s sleep that they’d had in months,” Bunting said.
Krome-Lukens said the RAFI team frequently hears that Bunting offers farmers reassurance that was previously out of reach for them. “What happens is, they are very freaked out about their situation, and they talk to Benny, and Benny is not freaked out about it,” she said. “He can help them figure out a plan and next steps, and that takes a farmer from a place of, ‘I have no idea what to do; everything is crashing and burning,’ to seeing potential pathways through.”
The Birth of Farm Advocacy
The role of farm advocate arose during the farm crisis in the 1980s, when farming was in a state of frightening flux, particularly across the South and Midwest. Drought was worsening, interest rates were skyrocketing, and oil prices were increasing, resulting in thousands of foreclosures.
Attorney Sarah Vogel represented North Dakota family farmers in the landmark class-action case Coleman v. Block in 1983, which saved an estimated 16,000 farms from foreclosure. Vogel told Civil Eats that farmers often had to seek finance information themselves and help one another in order to get by.
“One way to think about farm advocates is that they exist to help keep people alive, keep them on the farm, and preserve a chance for the future.”
At the outset, farm advocacy work was often spearheaded by women. In traditional farm households, men would often work longer hours during times of financial stress in hopes of solving their problems, while their spouses would field the delinquent bills piling up on the kitchen table.
It was some of these women, like Oklahoma-based Mona Lee Brock and Minnesota-based Lou Anne Kling, whose activism became legendary. Brock was commonly referred to as “the angel on the end of the line” for setting up an independent 24/7 hotline to talk farmers through mental crises.
And Kling traveled all over her home state saving farms from foreclosure after studying federal regulations and helping one of her struggling neighbors. These women died in 2019 and 2017, respectively, and the farm community feels their absence keenly.
At the peak of the profession, there were probably hundreds of people serving as farm advocates across the U.S., says Jennifer Fahy, co-executive director of Farm Aid, which runs a farmer assistance hotline and financially supports agencies like RAFI that employ advocates.
Farm advocates help farmers weather tough situations. The profession was on the verge of disappearing until federal funding stepped in.
