COMMUNITY ALLIANCE WITH FAMILY FARMERS
PO BOX 363, DAVIS, CA 95617 www.caff.org

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Organizations Filed Purposes: CAFF's mission is to build sustainable food and farming systems through policy advocacy and on-the-ground programs that create more resilient family farms, communities, and ecosystems.

CAFF connects farmers and businesses, providing growers with a suite of tools and marketing materials - and also coordinating product availability with aggregated purchasing to ensure supply and demand grow together. The Farm to Market program couples consumer education with technical assistance in tracing value through the supply chain. CAFF works with food service leaders to provide staff trainings, education for students, and collaborative purchasing and resources sharing structures. 2019 highlights in Farm to Market include:(1) Farm to Cafeteria: Farm to Cafeteria targets school districts and hospitals that serve low-income communities and increases access to fresh fruits, vegetables and proteins within these institutions while simultaneously expanding market access for local family farmers. Purchasing Collaboratives are groups of school and hospital food service purchasing representatives from the same region,utilizing common distributors and farmers. While our reach has grown, there is still significantly higher demand and opportunity to help cafeteria leaders increase access to local food. (2) Food Safety: Our food safety outreach in 2019 included workshops, webinars, and in-depth one-on-one guidance to over growers--as well as the development of our new podcast which debuted in February 2019. The first few podcast episodes were recorded at different farms discussing various food safety "quick tips" for small growers.(3) Community Supported Agriculture (CSA): In an effort to increase the economic viability of CSA operations, CAFF partnered with technical assistance groups from across the nation to develop a CSA Community of Practice so they can more easily share marketing innovations and other best practices. The Community of Practice allows for the combination of extensive marketing expertise and collation of resources for the betterment of CSA farmers across the United States. By providing space for collaborations, we can facilitate the exchange of hard-won lessons and innovative ideas between service providers and CSAs nationwide. This exciting national effort feeds into a noteworthy international CSA movement, in which CAFF also participates, aimed at improving social justice and solidarity economies throughout the world through CSA and other farm-direct models.

Policy - CAFF continues work focusing on state and federal policies, defending the rights of family farmers, as well as educating them about new policies that affect their farms. CAFF is a strong advocate for family scale agriculture that cares for the land, sustains local economies, and promotes social justice. It is CAFF's goal to change the course of agriculture, and to do that we need to influence institutions, commodity boards, state and federal agencies, and legislators who set public policy. 2019 efforts focused on the Farm Bill; working with California Climate and Agriculture Network (CalCAN) on State Water Efficiency and Enhancement Program (SWEEP), the Alternative Manure Management Program (AMMP), and Healthy Soils Program; the Compost General Order; immigration reform; surface water; and groundwater (regulatory changes and water use efficiency); managing the California Agricultural Water Stewardship Initiative (CAWSI) website and resource library; and California legislation.

Climate - The Climate Smart Farming program continued its work investigating and promoting climate smart farming practices that build farm productivity and resilience, conserve natural resources, and mitigate and adapt to climate change. CAFF works with growers and partners with organizations on winter cover cropping, on-farm applied research in integrated crop-livestock systems, dry farming, biointensive no-till systems, hedgerows, and water conservation. Highlights include publishing the second edition of CAFF's Hedgerow Manual, carrying out a barrier/motivations survey of grazing sheep vineyards, planting cover crops in nut orchards and hosting our first cover crop farmer-to-farmer event, interviewing irrigation/water districts on regulation and ag water use, and continuing our biointensive no-till pilot project with five farms differing by soil type and climate. CAFF started our Climate Resilience project which focuses on helping farms and farm communities adapt to the inevitable consequences of climate change, namely the increased number of wildfires California has suffered these past few years.

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