In this post we will walk you through how we set priorities using the input from our focus groups and farmer survey. Transparency is key to community, so come with us through the process and learn how we turn your voice into change in Oregon Ag policy!

TL;DR
(Although we hope you’ll read this!)

• FoFF is a grassroots organization that gets its policy direction directly from the people we serve. 
• Every 2 years we conduct surveys and focus groups to get the information that becomes our short term campaigns for the next biennium and contributes to the long term movement building that helps us make systemic change.
• We mean business! The results of these focus groups and surveys led directly to the changes to the 2023 changes to the Farm Direct Producer Processed Exemption and the 2025 changes to the Domestic Well Exempt Use statutes.
• This years focus groups were by topic, not by region like previous years.

Thank you for being part of building a better food future with FoFF!

Context:

Friends of Family Farmers prides itself on being a voice for the independent, diversified and local market farmers in Oregon policy. We show up to state agencies, industry meetings, and the Oregon State Legislature to represent a different type of farmer than typically dominates these spaces. While our farmers also need to make a living, there is a triple bottom line approach that puts community and environmental concerns on the same footing as profit in our philosophy. But we also are a small organization with limited capacity. So how do we represent our farmers’ interests when we decide what to focus on? The community we serve is the bottom line on what we choose to prioritize. 

FoFF was founded in 2005 as a group of farmers and rural residents in Linn County who were sick of being lumped into a group with industrial agribusiness that didn’t share their values. These farmers looked around and saw that commodity commissions and conventional ag lobbying groups were not sharing their ideals, weren’t promoting the way they were farming and stewarding their land, and were working on policies these farmers opposed. Like all industry and identity groups, farmers are not a monolith and we deserve to have a nuanced approach to agriculture in policy. FoFF was born from this small community group but in the last 20 years, we have grown to represent more than 1,600 farmers across Oregon. So how do we get all these people involved to make sure we are staying true to our creed?

Biennial Data Gathering

Because Oregon’s legislature operates on a biennial calendar, we take advantage of the even numbered years when the session is only 35 days long to gather input from our base. There are also limitations on how many bills each legislator can introduce during the short session. This all adds up to the fact that new policy ideas and programs are rarely launched in a short session. There is more of a focus on budget adjustments and tying up loose ends from the previous long session. This makes even numbered years the perfect time to devote energy to getting out and gathering information from the people we serve about how to help them break down barriers and make the most of opportunities.

We gather information in 2 ways during this process: 

1. Focus groups (previously known as listening sessions)
2. The statewide family farms survey. 

Focus groups allow us to gather deep information, ask follow up questions and gather more information about the topics that farmers bring up. The survey allows us to get the most people possible involved in the process. We know that we need to have both quantitative and qualitative data on the issues we take up, so both approaches are necessary. The bottom line is that if we don’t hear that something is a priority for our base through the survey and focus groups, we don’t work on it. Although we know that a lot of issues are interconnected and that the food system touches most policy areas by osmosis, we have to limit our scope to the things our base tells us are the most important if we are going to be effective. We would rather do a few things well and strategically than just weigh in on everything in a general fashion.

Focus Groups

The focus group process started over a decade ago with FoFFF’s listening session tours. We used to send FoFF staff all over the state every 2 years to discuss all the opportunities and barriers, joys and challenges of small farming in Oregon. While this was a wonderful tactic for building face to face relationships and engaging the whole state, it was a struggle from a resource perspective. Because we are a small organization and the people we serve already live rurally, some of the meetings were not very well attended and we felt that it would be a better use of the donations that fuel our policy work to focus in more on making change, rather than spending all our program funding on hotel rooms and mileage reimbursements.

History

In 2020 we moved the process online because of these resource concerns and to accommodate the pandemic. We started doing online regional gatherings that started as a discussion of all barriers, had attendees vote on their top 3 concerns and then discussed solutions for those issues. This was a successful model in as much as we had regionally specific information. In 2022 we introduced our partner organization focus groups by which we worked with culturally specific farmer groups around the state to gather more information from farmers of different backgrounds to make sure our data and policy setting process was not in an echo chamber. We found that this model worked well, but that people who came to the sessions with specialized knowledge, ready to talk about a particular issue that was really affecting them and their farm, were not able to give us that deep expertise if the rest of the group focused on other top issues. We also found that the same issues were topping the list cycle after cycle: the impacts of climate change, access to affordable and appropriate land and capital, water availability and access, and market access for small operations, to name a few. With the same issues cropping up over and over, we began looking for ways to make the most of our time with our farmers and focus on solutions.

Moving Forward

In 2026 we hosted virtual topic driven focus groups so that we can create spaces for people to talk about solutions to the persistent issues we have had highlighted for us by our farmers. We are also reserving time slots for emerging issues identified through our survey at the end of the focus group calendar. Here was the line up:

• 2/23 – Climate change and extreme weather
• 2/24 – Land access/ Land Use
• 2/25 – Agritourism
• 2/26 – Water Resource Resilience
• 2/27 – Workforce
• 3/2 – Capital access
• 3/3 – Industrialization and fair competition – Canola and CAFO
• 3/4 – Emerging issues

Statewide Farmer Survey

This survey was introduced in 2020 when we knew that the pandemic would limit the number of people we could engage with in person and we wanted to open a different channel for feedback. Since then we have kept the survey in the data collection landscape because it enables us to gather information about the people we serve for policy, programs and more. We ask information about your place in the food system, what your farm produces, how you do it, where you sell and who you are so that when a lawmaker comes to us and asks “Who do you serve?” we can confidently tell them all about the diversity of the small farm movement in Oregon and the rich tapestry of diversified, local market farmers who call our state home. 

Privacy and Data Protection

This survey is protected by our data privacy policy and no contact information about individuals who take our survey is ever released or sold to any other party, even trusted partners. We sometimes share data in aggregate to demonstrate support or concern on a local basis, for example we might say that “75% of farmers from Clatsop County who responded to the survey cited the new county policy on home based farm business taxes as a concern” (this is a fictional example, don’t worry Clatsop county farmers!), but would never publicly say that “Farmer Mary Jones told us that her county clerk spit in her eye when she applied for a farm stand permit.” The goal of this survey is to document the problems farmers face in their community and gather info about which proposed solutions our farmers are most in favor of.

Who is represented?

The survey is open to everyone and we have different questions based on where you fall in the food system. We want your feedback whether you are a farmer, food hub operator, farmers market connoisseur, or farmer support advisor. The movement we are building is about food and how we produce it, and everyone plays a role in that. We ask different questions to people with different positions in the system, but we all need to be included in viable solutions.

What do we do with the data?

Especially since the pandemic there have been a LOT of surveys floating around. It can be very overwhelming to feel like you are being mined for data and then the organization never tells you what they did with the information, and what changes they made because of you. This is not the case with Friends of Family Farmers. We put the information we receive into direct action. 

Prioritizing the issues

After the focus groups and surveys are conducted and we analyze the feedback to see themes and undercurrents in the feedback. Then we have our staff, board and farmer policy advisory committee (the subject of blog post #2) fill out the decision matrix to make sure that the issue and the solution align with the values of the organization and are within our scope. We consider things like: 

• Does our base agree on the solution to this problem?
  • If our farmers agree there is a problem, but don’t agree on the right way forward, more community input and organizing is needed before we bring a policy forward.
• Will this solution address root causes of the issue?
  • FoFF is committed to solving problems at the heart of the issue, not just putting a band aid on a bad situation. Sometimes a solution proposed by the community would leave the underlying problem unaddressed, and further digging is needed.
• Do we have strong support among our membership and would it have a big impact?
  • We want to work on things that will have a tangible impact for our base. It is not aligned with our mission to work on tiny fixes while leaving larger problems unaddressed.
• Is this work feasible on the timeline we’ve identified?
  • Grassroots organizing means understanding the power mapping we need to make change. If we don’t have the political capital to win on an issue, what partners and coalitions would we need to bring in to make the impact needed? How long will that take?

And more! This is influenced by further conversations with experts in the field (including farmers who raised their hands during the data gathering process), policy advisors, and statewide policy coalitions and lawmakers. We want to be sure we are solving the problems in an effective way and not just paying lip service to our members. Your problems are real and our solutions must be too. After ranking all the issues through this process, we identify our biennial priorities and get to work!

Policy Reports

We aggregate all the information we gather into a biennial policy report that we distribute to legislators and partner organizations. This helps us keep all our work grounded in the people we serve and reminds decision makers that we are not making up our positions, they are based on the needs of our community.

You can read our last two reports here:

• 2024 Policy Report
• 2022 Policy Report

Campaigns we’ve won

Short Term Campaigns

Our short term campaigns might seem like small changes or technical fixes, but we identify the places where we can make the biggest impact for our farmers with a small legal language fix and prioritize solving specific problems. Here are some examples of ways we’ve done this:

• 2023: We heard from farmers in our 2022 focus groups that there was unequal enforcement of the Farm Direct Producer Processed exemption when it came to dried herbal teas as a value added product. This meant that we heard from some herbalists and farmers that although they were following all the laws related to preparing and drying herbs for sale, some folks in some parts of the state were being told their product was ineligible. We changed the wording of the law in this case to explicitly allow these products and keep our farmers in business. Read more here.
• 2025: We heard from our farmers in the 2024 focus groups and subsequent community meetings that enforcement changes in the domestic well statute had been causing the shut down of many micro farms around the state. Although domestic well users are allowed to land apply water to a half acre for irrigation and allowed to use a limited number of gallons for commercial purposes, at the time commercial irrigation was illegal on a domestic well on any scale. We worked with advocates and community to find a solution that did not expand overall water usage but allowed small scale commercial gardening as an option for domestic well users. This change to domestic well exempt use legalized hundreds of small farms across the state. Read More Here.

Long Term Campaigns

Long term campaigns can be culminations of years of work, sometimes decades, and be much more sweeping in the change they make. This could be the establishment of a new program, a suite of changes to an existing one or a re-alignment in state resources on a large scale. Here are some examples of actions we take in this space:

• 2023: FoFF was founded as a counterpoint to the “get big or get out” mentality of American Industrial agriculture. Our members have always been concerned with the resource use and corporate control of growing practices in contract livestock facilities. We were instrumental in passing SB 85 which introduced water supply plans and limitations for confinement operations, required additional site and construction inspections, and instituted new options for counties to enforce siting requirements for the health of the people and natural environment. Read more here.
• Coming Soon in 2026! We are launching the Oregon Farmland Access Policy Coalition in 2026. We have tried to find solutions for years to support farmland transitions, make new and young farmers more competitive in the market, and support programs to keep farmland in production (including OAHP, tax credits for sale to new farmers, Aggie Bonds, loan options a la the Bank of ND), and we have not been able to stymie the staggering farmland affordability and access crisis in Oregon. It is time for us to stop working alone and bring together land trusts, beginning farmer groups, and land use experts to find real collaborative solutions. We are bringing this coalition together this year to make real, coordinated change in the future. Look out for updates.

At the end of the day

FoFF is not taking any action without the backing of our community. We rely on you coming to the table through our programs and our biennial data gathering process (survey and focus groups) to tell us what is the most important thing to work on. FoFF’s limited resources need to be directed where we know our community needs help or has an opportunity, make sure we know what is happening in your neck of the woods. Grassroots organizing takes all of us, and to make real change for small farms we need you to follow along and jump in when you are able!