2. What the CALF Project Confirmed About Small Farmers

The Capital Assistance for Local Farmers Project was designed to answer a practical question: why do small farms struggle to access capital even when programs exist?

By engaging farmers, lenders, service providers, and agencies across Oregon, the study reached a clear conclusion. The barriers are structural, not personal.²

Most farmers indicated they could complete applications if the process was understandable and relevant. Far fewer felt confident identifying which programs applied to their operation or how to move through them efficiently. Funding pathways were frequently described as fragmented, difficult to interpret, and poorly coordinated across agencies.²

Timing emerged as a critical issue. Application windows often conflict with planting and harvest cycles. Reimbursement-based grants assume upfront capital that many small farms just do not have. Over time, even motivated producers disengage when participation feels misaligned with operational reality.

Perhaps most telling was the absence of a clear pathway. Farmers reported navigating multiple agencies without a central point of guidance. The problem was not a lack of support programs, but the lack of cohesion among them.² This distinction matters because it shifts the focus from farmer readiness to system design.

3. Capital Exists in Oregon, but Access Remains Uneven

The challenges outlined in the CALF Project are not occurring in a vacuum. Oregon continues to receive significant agricultural investment. Recent USDA funding supported rural projects statewide, including technical assistance for small farmers, business training programs, and feasibility planning for a USDA-certified meat processing facility.³ These investments demonstrate that capital is present.

Agriculture also plays a foundational role in Oregon’s economy. According to the 2025 Oregon State Board of Agriculture report, the sector accounts for approximately 15.4 percent of statewide sales, more than 20 percent of jobs, and nearly 13 percent of value-added economic output.⁴ Supporting small producers is not a niche concern. It is directly tied to economic stability.

Despite this, access remains fragile. In 2025, a federally funded local food delivery program serving Oregon farmers ended early due to federal cuts. The sudden loss disrupted distribution for small-scale and socially disadvantaged producers, highlighting how quickly progress can reverse when programs change.⁵

For small farms, this instability affects planning, hiring, and investment decisions. Growth becomes reactive rather than intentional, reinforcing caution rather than innovation.

4. Research Gaps Extend Beyond Capital

Capital access is only part of the picture. Research capacity and technical support shape whether farms can adapt, comply, and remain viable over time. In 2025, Oregon State University’s agricultural research portfolio experienced funding interruptions that slowed applied research in areas directly relevant to producers, including specialty crops, mechanization, climate adaptation, and labor innovation.⁶ Nearly one-third of OSU’s research relies on federal competitive grants, leaving continuity vulnerable to policy shifts and administrative delays.⁶

Alignment remains an additional challenge. Oregon State University Extension research on organic agriculture has documented a persistent gap between institutional research priorities and farmer-identified needs. While researchers often focus on production-level challenges, farmers consistently prioritize market development, costs of production, labor availability, and access to inputs.¹ These economic and operational pressures are central to farm viability but receive comparatively less formal research attention.

The issue is not misuse of resources, but misalignment. Support systems frequently emphasize administration, eligibility, and navigation rather than outcomes at the farm level. As a result, resources can move through planning, coordination, and financing layers without consistently reaching producers at the point of need. When systems prioritize process over practicality, funds circulate without building durable local capacity, limiting their ability to strengthen the regional food economy.

5. Why Individual Farmers End Up Carrying the Burden

Taken together, these gaps help explain why responsibility continues to fall on individual producers rather than on the systems intended to support them. Many support programs rely on fragmented pathways, reimbursement models, or intermediary-led processes that require significant administrative capacity to navigate. In practice, this shifts the work of alignment, compliance, and verification away from institutions and onto farmers themselves.

Small farmers often juggle growing, marketing, compliance, documentation, staffing, and financial tracking at the same time, usually without dedicated administrative support. As a result, regulatory paperwork, process approvals, labeling requirements, and market coordination compete directly with the core work of producing food. Each new requirement adds time and cognitive load, even when the program itself aims to be helpful.

As systems become more unclear, fragmented, or time-intensive, many farmers choose quiet disengagement instead of public failure. Burnout typically emerges long before an operation visibly collapses. Consequently, producers pass over opportunities not because they lack value, but because the time and effort required feel uncertain or out of proportion to the return. Over time, this pattern narrows participation, favoring those with administrative capacity rather than those with strong production potential.

Effective systems reduce duplication, integrate into daily operations, and make outcomes easier to verify without increasing individual burden. They preserve independence while lowering friction. Without that structure, each producer absorbs the cost alone, reinforcing inequity and limiting the long-term resilience of the regional food system.

6. Evidence That Shared Infrastructure Works

Research and policy examples from other states demonstrate that a different approach is possible when infrastructure is designed to match the scale and complexity of local production.

In Illinois, Local Food Infrastructure Grants were used to support shared commercial kitchens, expand food hub capacity, increase small-scale processing, and improve regional distribution networks for small and mid-scale producers.⁷ These investments focused on physical and organizational infrastructure rather than individual project outcomes. The results were not incidental. They reflected deliberate alignment between program design and the realities of how local food systems operate.

Shared systems reduced duplication while maintaining producer autonomy. Farmers retained control over their land, production decisions, and markets, while benefiting from coordinated access to processing, storage, distribution, and compliance support. This lowered overhead, reduced administrative burden, and made participation feasible for a wider range of producers.

Specialty crop and value-added producers benefited in particular. These operations often fall outside conventional commodity frameworks yet face the same regulatory, food safety, and market access requirements. By addressing those pressures collectively rather than individually, shared infrastructure allowed smaller producers to remain viable without forcing them to scale beyond what their operations or markets could sustain.

7. A Local Proposal Within a Broader County Conversation

Within Josephine County, conversations are emerging about how to apply these lessons locally. One proposal under exploration is a guild-style coordination model for pepper growers and value-added producers, often referred to as the Pepper Guild.

This concept does not yet exist as a formal organization. It is being explored through community discussions, including input from a local Master Gardener and producers connected to Three Little Peppers Sauce Co. The focus is not centralization or exclusivity. It is feasibility.

The underlying question is whether shared documentation, coordinated purchasing, clearer compliance pathways, and aligned timelines could reduce overhead without diminishing independence. Any potential launch would depend on community interest and practical validation, with 2026 identified as an early horizon rather than a commitment. Importantly, this conversation extends beyond peppers. It reflects broader questions about how Josephine County might build lightweight, shared infrastructure that supports diverse producers across the local food system.

8. Connecting Local Proposals to CALF Findings

The CALF Project emphasized navigation, coordination, and clarity as the most significant barriers to capital access.² These challenges are not abstract. They show up in fragmented application processes, inconsistent requirements across agencies, and timelines that conflict with the seasonal realities of farming. Even well-designed programs lose effectiveness when producers cannot determine, quickly and confidently, whether a program applies to their operation or how to move through it without sacrificing critical production time.

Shared infrastructure models respond directly to these gaps by reducing friction at the system level rather than shifting additional responsibility onto individual farmers. Standardized documentation limits the need for producers to repeatedly recreate the same compliance materials across programs. Coordinated timelines allow producers to plan participation around planting, harvesting, and processing windows instead of choosing between funding opportunities and core operations. Clear, centralized pathways reduce dependence on informal networks or insider knowledge, making access more equitable and predictable.

When systems are understandable, participation increases.² Increased participation, in turn, improves the likelihood that capital and technical assistance programs reach the producers they are designed to serve. The CALF findings suggest that improving how support is organized and delivered may be just as impactful as increasing funding itself, particularly for small and diversified farms operating at the margins of existing systems.