What Tennessee Gets Wrong About Food and Farms
As food prices rise, tariffs loom, and Waffle House announces a $0.50 surcharge on eggs—giving “scattered and covered” new meaning—here’s a tough question for Tennessee: Are we good with losing what’s left of our farmland at a blistering pace, or should we at least do for family farmers what other states have done?
During COVID, people reconnected with their local farms concretizing a decade of increased demand for local meats and veggies. Families drove to the farms for non-industrialized food they could see, taste, and trust. Farmers’ markets still enjoy the life breathed into that model, but it is not enough.
There are larger, mid-sized distribution models that coalesce the once fledgling “local food movement” into real money business. Those models provide regional farmers and growers a place to sell in bulk, every day, not just once a week with a booth and limited hours. In addition to those models, state programs can drive far more technical help direct to farms to scale up or stay where they are, but become more profitable.
The time for Tennessee to create that food future and bring the funding together is now.
Tennessee has not exactly crushed it on the agricultural food business development front. As we lose farmland at a five-alarm fire rate, we import our food from Canada, Mexico, and South America. We lack a farm-based regional food system. Other states such as Ohio and Kentucky have planned ahead, saving farmland in the process.
The 2024 Economic Report to the Governor puts no lipstick on the pig. In the 10-year period between 1997 and 2017, Tennessee lost 1.1 million acres of farmland to residential development—or 152 acres per day. Between 2017 and 2022, the loss accelerated to 237 acres a day. Twenty years of unmitigated loss while big industries came to Tennessee and the farms went out.
At the start of 2025, one initiative supported by Governor Lee revives a bill providing state funds for conservation easements on farmland but exactly who gets what and whether it makes a dent in the land loss remains to be seen.
Whatever the bill does, the core problem remains. If you had a back breaking job, no support to do it, lost money or broke even and then a developer offered you a few million to retire comfortably, you’d take it. Food farming has to make money too, and that has become nearly impossible without government support, creative models, and social impact investing. The only reason we can feed a population of 8 billion is a story (to tell another time) of forward thinking by non-profits and government for over 100 years. Time to do it again.
Family farms need a market built for the farmer, not a retail giant. They need shared warehousing, coolers/freezers, and a broker that prioritizes the farm—every year—over a fat profit. TVA was built with government money and now is self-supporting.
What happened to beef cow farmers across the U.S. is happening to farms writ large. The price of meat went way up at retail, while the percentage of each retail dollar paid to the man or woman raising that animal went way down. Large companies raked in the wealth while farms collapsed. You can hear it straight from the farmers who went bankrupt or sold off herds that took decades to build while the “Big Four” meat companies made billions.
While Tennessee focused on other things, Kentucky steadily reinvested in their family farms.
Kentucky has been funding and executing on plans for family farms to grow and get to the market at many levels. While Tennessee exports a couple billion in cotton, whiskey, cereals, candy, and lumber that comprise the majority of our “agriculture” revenue, it’s not what’s for dinner. Kentucky’s state funded programs actively reach out to growers with informed and often free support to find the food markets based on the size and type of farm, or get insurance and GAP certification so they can sell to large distributors who require it. They hired and trained value chain coordinators to help match buyers to sellers. They don’t leave it to an overworked farmer to take the test and fail—they provide market answers. Kentucky elects their Commissioner of Agriculture and he has his own budget.
The Bluegrass state reinvested millions from their tobacco settlement money and focused on farms and the families that run them to improve statewide health. They saw a future business for farms growing food instead of tobacco, and now have it. Meanwhile, Tennessee received $3.9 billion from that same settlement fund and our farmland is on a path to extinction.
In 2023, I attended the Kentucky Local Food Systems Convention, met their Ag Commissioner Ryan Quarles, and spoke with several key farmer/architects of the state-wide system. An eye-opener to say the least.
Another revelation came last summer. The non-profit Nashville Grown food hub organized a meeting for farmers and producers to hear from federal, state, and local officials about millions in grants for a regional food supply chain. Preparing for that meeting, one of the large food distributors (who buy from farms) shared some key data on how they satisfied the growing demand for “local” produce. The answer was that they sourced four times as much of it from Kentucky farmers as they did from Tennessee—$2.899 million worth from Kentucky compared to $662,478 in Tennessee. The distributor wanted to buy here, but could not find enough qualified sources.
Ouch. Where a state government decides to invest our tax dollars matters very much.
Nashville Grown is one, small, non-profit and underfunded food hub model where chefs can buy direct from the farms. We keep millions of dollars in our regional farm system. Larger models in other states show us we can do so much more for our farmers and win, instead of lose.