Community Farm Alliance
Deborah Webb, Executive Director
624 Shelby St.
Frankfort, KY 40601
(606) 223-3655
Fax: (502) 223-0804
Web site: www.communityfarmalliance.com
E-mail: cfa@kih.net

Modeled after the small-farm "resource councils" of the Upper Midwest, Kentucky's Community Farm Alliance, like its cousins on the Plains, was organized to help farmers band together against the Farm Crisis of the early 1980s.

Although the typical Central and Eastern Kentucky farm, usually less than 150 acres devoted to tobacco, livestock and milk, is significantly different from the larger farms of the Midwest, similar organizing principles were brought to bear here: Farmers in local communities form individual, self-governed groups headed by democratically elected boards, and the state organization's staff provides support but stays behind the scenes, leaving direction, decisions and public comment to the farmers themselves.

Like the resource councils, CFA initially focused its attention on the immediate need: Providing referral and counselling to small-farm operators faced with foreclosure and other debt crisis, followed by legislative action and lobbying efforts to blunt the force of policies that push farmers off the land. Like Iowa Citizens for Community Development, CFA has also effectively used the federal Community Reinvestment Act to persuade rural banks to ease credit for farmers, an extremely effective tool that, however, has been used much more widely in urban than rural communities.

With the initial fight out of the way, CFA, which now has 1,100 dues-paying members in 10 non-contiguous counties scattered through Central Kentucky's rolling farmland and creeping up into the foothills of Appalachia, has become a rural, multiple-issue group, reaching beyond farm interests into such areas as waste dumps and incinerators. In coalition with other rural organizations in the South and elsewhere, it investigates concerns about GATT, NAFTA and trade treaties, and its members take positions on them.

CFA is also joining with other Kentucky institutions, from burley-tobacco farmers to anti-smoking groups, in an effort to ensure that a 3 percent share of President Clinton's proposed tobacco-tax increase goes into a $750 million annual reinvestment fund intended to help farmers diversify into other crops than tobacco.

"People have been talking about alternatives to tobacco for many years," Hamilton said. "But now a moment of opportunity seems to exist."

And, as a member of the 13-state Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group, CFA is participating in various efforts to encourage sustainable agriculture efforts by farmers, government and the University of Kentucky's agriculture program.

Among initiatives already under way, the group has worked with farmers forming a marketing cooperative; growing tomatoes in tobacco greenhouses; growing organic white corn for specialty markets; and running two "community supported agriculture" projects in which city residents buy shares in organic farms in exchange for a ration of produce.

With a staff of six, including three full-time field workers, CFA works out of a little white-frame office building just off the Berea College campus, operating on a lean annual budget of $240,000. (Note: Since my visit, CFA has moved to Frankfort, Ky., the state capital. See current address and contact info above.)

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

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