1. Establish a victory lawns and gardens initiative through a $36 billion investment to help urban, rural, and suburban Americans transform their lawns into food-producing or reforested spaces that sequester carbon and save water. Lawns account for 40 million acres in America, and we spend tens of billions of dollars each year taking care of them each year. Let’s reinvest that money in climate smart practices that encourage everyone to be a part of the solution.
2. Invest $14.7 billion in cooperatively and community owned grocery stores. Local groceries and co-ops are more likely to buy local products, which will help grow markets for farmers to sell their goods. We will also use these funds to bring grocery stores to food deserts ensuring all people have access to healthy, local food.
3. Incentivize schools to procure locally produced foods. Institutional purchasing can be a huge boost to local producers and build local farm economies.
4. We will give a meal incentive for schools that acquire at least 30 percent of their food from local sources.
5. Invest $31 billion in local food processing, including slaughter and dairy processing. Rampant consolidation in processing has led to a lack of facilities for small-scale, local producers. Investing in local facilities will help smaller producers to compete with the Tyson Foods of the world.
6. Allow meat slaughtered at state inspected facilities to be sold across state lines. State inspected slaughter facilities must meet or exceed federal regulations.
7. Currently, imported meat must meet the same standards as meat from a federally inspected slaughterhouses and it may cross state lines. We need to level the playing field for locally produced meat.
8. Bolster existing programs that help farmers process their products on farm with a $263 million investment. There are already some programs that support on-farm processing and farmers markets. We need to continue to support these efforts as we expand opportunities.
9. Help states develop food recovery and composting programs with a $160 billion investment to help solve hunger. If food waste were its own country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases after the U.S. and China. Meanwhile, 40 million people in this country are food insecure. We need to give states the resources they need to reduce food waste and hunger in their communities.
10. Enforce country of origin labeling.Unfair trade policy has let foreign countries overturn our country-of-origin-labeling laws even though 90 percent of the American people support country-of-origin labeling. We must respect the will of the people and allow them to know where their food is coming from.
11. Incentivize community ownership of farmland. One of the barriers to being able to choose a career in ecologically regenerative farming is the cost of acquiring farmland. We want communities to be able to join together to own farmland to help people grow our local, ecologically regeneratively produced food and help solve the climate crisis and will provide government assistance to do so. We will support a robust future for rural America that will be essential to addressing the climate crisis. This is consistent with our Revitalizing Rural America plan.

Source: Sanders

Empowering Farmers, Foresters & Ranchers to Address Climate Change and Protect Ecosystems – BS