This Legislator is a Local Food Leader

Read cogent comments that Illinois state Rep. Sonya Harper made at Farm Aid

Sep 27, 2023

The sun continues to move south in the sky. Soon it will clear the edge of our highrise and we’ll see six months of sunsets and sunrises from our living room.

We’re not quite there yet, but close. The above photo was taken Monday, and it produced a lovely sky show.

A Local Food Ally in the Illinois Legislature

Yesterday, Local Food Forum shared powerful quotes from Indiana regenerative livestock farmer Greg Gunthorp, made during a panel at the Farm Aid festival Saturday (September 23) in Noblesville, Indiana. But he was not alone in providing rhetoric and calls to action to help build a better food system.

Illinois State Rep. Sonya M. Harper has served a South Side Chicago legislative district since 2015. She came in with a strong interest in urban agriculture and increased access to healthy food, having served as director of outreach for Growing Home, the non-profit based in the West Englewood neighborhood that grows tons of organic produce while providing job skills for ex-offenders and other hard-to-employ individuals; and as executive director of the Grow Greater Englewood organization.

She has emerged as a leading legislative advocate for policies that advance our local food ecosystem, serving on J.B. Pritzker’s Agriculture Transition Committee after he was elected governor in 2018 and gaining her current role as chairperson of the state House Agriculture and Conservation Committee. She is closely aligned with Illinois Stewardship Alliance, the state’s leading non-profit public policy advocate for local farmers and eaters.

The following are quotes from her Farm Aid comments, which cover some recent legislative achievements and put forth her ideas for what more needs to be done.

I was brought to this industry by living in a community that is called a food desert. And so we decided in my home in Chicago that we were going to take our food access into our own hands, use the vacant land that we have and the resources that we do have to grow our own food, since we couldn’t get grocery stores to sustain our community.
And it's through that work that I'm learning that there are lots of disparities in the agriculture industry, that we don't have the infrastructure, in rural areas and in the cities, to create our own local food systems and economies. And so I spend my time in Springfield passing bills on all of those issues, passing bills on equity and innovation as it relates to making sure our new and beginning farmers are getting the support that they need, passing bills as it relates to making sure that we are considering every farmer when we're making plans and policies, and of course the type of outreach that we're doing as well.
So I think that it's important to know, we do have the federal Farm Bill, how are we reaching out to our state legislators? And how are we doing the things that we need to do on the state level, because we also have a say in what our food system looks like and how we're supporting our farms.

One of the bills that I just passed is a Farm to Food Bank program, which makes sure that we are sourcing our products from local family farms in the state of Illinois as it relates to getting them to food banks. We also passed a Local Food Infrastructure bill that's going to help us to take more advantage of those federal dollars that are coming down for local food procurement, and also making sure that we're including farmers of color in the process.
One of the bills that come to mind is the Black Farmer Restoration program. It's called Black farmer restoration, but it's for all farmers of color as well as limited-resource farmers to be able to take advantage of special grants as relates to equipment and special technical assistance that will better help them to do their work, better help them be the producers that we need in order to improve our local healthy food systems.

I actually started off working in an urban farm in Englewood. And so it is very important to us that we are able to give the support that we need to our local farmers, be that in the form of grants, be that in the form of equipment, be that in a form of access or protection on the land that they serve, or helping them to access different markets. And again, we can do this on the state level.
It takes work, it takes a collaboration, it takes a lot of educating your lawmakers. I spend a lot of time taking my lawmakers across the state and taking them on farms, introducing them to the concepts and the issues that are present in agriculture. Not every legislator knows about that. So we have work to do. And further educating and doing the outreach that's necessary so that people clearly understand what the issues are. Then we can write laws to help them as well…
Right now, the states are leading the way as far as what needs to be included in the Farm Bill. If you look around in so many of the states right now, we've already introduced a lot of these measures in our own legislatures, they just have not reached up to the federal level as well. So we can wait on them all day long to pass the perfect Farm Bill, or we can get busy in our state legislatures and pass some of those same initiatives to help right here in our own states.

I think that this group of people knows more than anything else: Food is medicine. We need it to live. There are many people dying early across this country and my community from preventable diet-related diseases. So we need food, food is medicine, who produces the food? Those are the most important things. That's where our attention needs to be focused the most, and our policies should align directly with us.
So when you're talking about the future, I envision a future where people are living longer and healthful lives, right? Where there isn't a community such as Englewood, where I'm from, where people are dying early, in their 30s and 40s, simply because they have no healthy food in their community that's affordable, that they can get to.
And it's not just happening in the urban centers. It's happening in our rural communities as well. How are we, the richest country in the world and the biggest country producing as far as ag, but we're not eating healthfully…. So it is important that we get it right now, right for the health of future generations, for their physical health, for their bodies, but also for our economic health.

When I think about the next generation of farmers, food producers, advocates, growers, lawmakers, they really excite me, and I find comfort in the fact that they exist. I was really revved up after the Farm Aid Forum yesterday. I don't think I've ever been in a room full of so many different people and farmers, where I felt like we just all felt the same way, and we all want to get the same thing done. And so I think that's what excites me, the movement. I'm an organizer by trade and a journalist. So that's the part that excites me, all of this momentum. I am excited to be part of it for years to come, and then pass the baton on to the next generation of farmers and food producers and advocates that will continue the work that we will need to ensure our food access, our local healthy food economies, and that our family farms are taking care of from here on out.