Farm and Food Workers Receive USDA Grants

• Author: Jacob Greene
• Posted: 2024-08-27

America's farm and food workers are every bit the heroes that we heard ER nurses and doctors were throughout the pandemic. These are people who were told daily that they were at risk of imminent death from a virus that the media claimed was even deadlier than the Bubonic Plague of hundreds of years ago. Yes, they really hyped COVID-19 to those levels. So the fact that Americans farm and food workers still continued to work throughout all that mass hysteria to feed people is something that should be commended. The USDA recently announced that they will be offering financial relief grants to these Americans in the coming weeks.

The US Department of Agriculture has set aside a pool of $700 million in federal funding to offer relief aid grants to meatpacking workers, farmers and grocery store front-line workers (register operates, stockers and baggers) who have been impacted by COVID. This is part of the Farm and Food Workers Relief grant program (FFWR) and additional money will be set aside specifically for grocery store employees.

The way these grants are going to work is a little odd, however. Rather than giving money directly to the employees impacted by COVID, much like a stimulus check, the money will instead by sent through different state agencies. This means that, for instance, if there are farm workers in Ohio who are struggling financially, then a government organization in Ohio will receive a grant ranging from $5 million to $50 million in order to disperse the funds. This sort of money exchanging hands so many times before getting to the actual employees who need it is a recipe for misappropriation, like the $5 trillion that's already disappeared in the past year, and nobody has any idea where it went. We just know it didn't end up in the hands of American citizens.

Since this is a Joe Biden program, we also do not know if it will end up happening or not. There are a lot of things Biden has announced that have just been ignored, and it's not as if mainstream media will investigate. The best we can hope for is that America's farm and food workers will receive a lot of this money.

Higher Costs but Stagnated Wages

The Biden administration has said and done some very suspiciously bad and incorrect things over the course of nearly a year in power, yet you would never know it if your source of information was mainstream media. For instance, this past Independence Day, the Biden administration bragged that the average American would save 16 cents on a cookout for July 4th. The caveat, however, was that this was factored in if families purchased the generic store brand items. That's how much prices went up. Instead of saving a bundle by buying the store brand, like is typically the case, prices have went up so much that buying the generic items in 2020 was only 16 cents cheaper than buying name brand in 2019. The admin also recently came out and blamed higher meat and vegetable prices on "meat packing" corporations and farmers.

No mentions of rising fuel costs, electricity costs, water costs, material costs, etc. No mention of inflation. Instead, the Biden administration blamed the food industries for the higher food prices, claiming innocence (and even ignorance) on their suspected role in these higher prices. Though for people who work in the food industry, they have it even worse. Not only are they forced to pay the exceedingly higher food prices like the rest of America, but their wages are also stagnated. They're the people getting the food out to the rest of America, and their wages are not at all increasing to help them deal with the higher costs.

The bottom line is that these relief grants from the USDA are very welcomed among the farmers and other food workers, but the fact is that it's the absolute least the federal government should be doing to help. Whether you are a die-hard Joe Biden supporter or not, the fact is that the Biden administration has bungled the economy in ways that no other president in America's history has. The only thing propping up the entire American economy is the fact the Federal Reserve prints billions of dollars of currency daily. When that blows up, we hope everyone's sitting down and prepared for the shock.

Hopefully things will balance out and start to turn around, especially for our farm and food workers. They're the people who feed us. And it's about time they got some relief grants.