Janie Hipp on Agricultural Finance, Protecting the Food System and Rebuilding Trust

Janie Hipp on Agricultural Finance, Protecting the Food System and Rebuilding Trust

Janie Simms Hipp has spent more than 40 years working on food and agriculture from almost every vantage point: as a lawyer, educator, federal official, philanthropist, institution builder, and now lender. A citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, she served as General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Agriculture — the first Native woman to hold the post — and was the founding director of USDA’s Office of Tribal Relations. She has also served as National Program Leader at USDA, Senior Advisor to the Secretary, and has taught agriculture law for decades.

Janie founded the Indigenous Food and Agriculture Initiative at the University of Arkansas and was the founding CEO of the Native American Agriculture Fund. Today, she serves as the founding president and CEO of Native Agriculture Financial Services, the first Other Financing Institution within the Farm Credit System built to serve Indian Country.

In this conversation, Hipp reflects on affordability, finance, trust, and why societies that lose sight of the people and institutions that feed them eventually put their own future at risk.

Thinking of agriculture, food, and nutrition in the United States, what does affordability mean to you in practice?

For me, affordability has a very practical meaning. It means that anyone who needs food can find good, safe, healthy food they can actually afford — and that food is located as close to them as humanly possible. Many people in this country suffer from a lack of affordable food: most often from not earning a livable wage, or from living a far distance from safe, healthy food without reliable transportation to reach it. Affordability takes into consideration all those variables, and we — as a society — must decide that it is our duty as fellow citizens to ensure a “food safety net” exists.

No society in history has been able to succeed and thrive long-term without ensuring their people are fed. If my grandson can access good, safe, healthy, and affordable food but your grandson cannot, then all of us are weaker for it. Affordability is central to that equation.

If we want food to remain affordable without sacrificing resilience, where could policymakers be focused?

I challenge your question. Food is becoming — and in many instances has already become — unaffordable for many, and we have already sacrificed the resilience of our food systems.

We can’t tug on just one or two threads and hope for the best. We can’t focus on resilience and ignore affordability. We can’t focus on affordability and sacrifice resiliency. We need a serious “re-do,” top to bottom and side to side, to prepare ourselves for the future. If we don’t, we will continue careening back and forth between the twin pillars of lack of resilience and lack of affordability.

What is one part of the food system that deserves far more attention than it receives?

That’s a hard one for me. Let me try.

Right now, we are unraveling the basic infrastructure that has supported our national food systems for decades and decades. If we knock the legs out from under our feeding programs while we simultaneously knock the legs out from under our farmers and ranchers, then we will set in motion a set of consequences that our children and grandchildren will have to climb out from under for decades.

Everything can always be improved, but you do not tear down the house and then scream about it later. Don’t tear down the house — just put in the hard work to make it better.

Our farmers and ranchers are the canaries in the coal mine, and many are hurting. But I cannot, in good conscience, pick and choose what “needs more attention.” The whole system is under significant strain, and it doesn’t serve any of us to pick winners and losers. We need the entire food system to be shored up, and we need to “get over ourselves” to do it.

You’ve worked across government, philanthropy, finance, law, and agriculture. Which lessons have you become more convinced of over time?

Agriculture is a mission and a calling. It is a “harsh mistress,” just like law is a harsh mistress. It will take all of you. But that’s a great thing and a humbling thing.

Law is infused into agriculture, whether we like it or not. Finance is necessary to agriculture, whether we want it to be or not. Philanthropy can help incubate alternatives and solutions, but it will never substitute for solid policy and sound finance. And government — all governments — are deeply important in agriculture, because without them a country full of people likely will not be fed. Just because you eat it doesn’t mean you have a full understanding of how agriculture works.

What experience changed the way you think about agriculture the most?

This will sound strange, but along the way in my agriculture law career I took a minor detour and opened a retail fabric store in Fayetteville. I suppose I was still linked to agriculture — I was selling fiber!

I had the store for several years, but agriculture law had its claws in me and kept pulling me back full time. And suddenly, we looked up and there was this thing called “online purchasing.” Customers who would come into our store on a weekly basis never showed up again, because they were staying at home purchasing fabric they never touched — all without ever leaving the comfort of their lounger. We chose to close. I don’t regret that decision at all.

But what it taught me changed how I approached talking to any farmer or rancher or food business from then on. My lessons were: you can’t “flip on a dime.” You live and die by cash flow. Your customers can be very fickle. After that, I never told another farmer “just find a new market” or “just open an online sales avenue,” because I had gained a deeply pragmatic understanding that those things are much harder than they seem.

Why is access to capital so foundational to building stronger agricultural communities?

Anyone who believes that capital isn’t critical to agriculture needs to go back to the drawing board and be honest with themselves. Capital is critical — for the smallest to the largest operations and everything in between. But it needs to be “smart capital” — capital that can be deployed in ways that match the reality of agriculture. That idea needs to be re-infused into how we think about agriculture’s capital needs. One size doesn’t fit all: we need capital for those who are just starting out, those hitting their stride, those needing to re-tool and re-imagine their production, and those trying to exit the sector.

If we don’t have capital, and if people can’t access the capital that is out there in meaningful and flexible ways, then agriculture can’t be stable enough to long-term feed us. Plus, there need to be capital pools that come up under what seem like risky paths ahead.

We don’t become truly resilient if everything looks the same. We become resilient by taking chances, learning from mistakes, and being willing to invest long term in what we need to remain with us forever.

What do you think is the real challenge America should be focused on?

That’s a big question, so be ready for a big answer. America has lost its way on the food front. We are starting to think that farmers and ranchers are expendable — that we can replace them with robots and automation, that those who work in our fields are useful but not important as human beings. We think that abundant food will always be at our fingertips — and it rapidly is not becoming the case. We seem to think it is okay to not feed our babies and not feed our elders or people who are struggling. And we have decided rural and remote people and places aren’t worth the effort. Somewhere along the way, we’ve allowed food to become dispensable, and the people who bring us food and the people who need food to also become dispensable.

The real challenge is to get serious about how we are developing a society whose food and agriculture needs are going to be met for the next 100 to 200 years. The next five years or the next ten years isn’t a long enough horizon. That’s not how agriculture works. Agriculture needs attention today for the world we wish to live in 100 to 200 years from now.

What have you learned about earning and maintaining trust over the course of your career?

I tell people regularly that when I worked for Republicans they thought I was a Democrat, and when I worked for Democrats they thought I was a Republican. I work for food and agriculture and rural America. Period, full stop. I drive down the middle, and I tell people what they don’t want to hear.

You also need to stop being angry all the time. I’m really fed up with folks who think we can spew hatefulness “over our food” and not have our food absorb our attitude.

No one person and no one group has a “lock” on the truth. And if you are telling the truth, citing facts, doing your homework, and trying to see the other side — and above all resisting the temptation to “gatekeep” who is “in the club” and who isn’t — then you will get more done along the way, and you will be trusted by more people.

We’ve spent the better part of the last forty years putting people in camps and thinking we know what is going on with the other person. We don’t. If we intend to feed our grandchildren and their grandchildren, and hold onto our lands, then we must be able to talk and learn how to trust each other.

If you had five minutes with every American to talk about agriculture, what would you want them to remember?

I would want them to remember not to take this abundance for granted, and not to take advantage of the people and systems that bring them food every day. I would ask them to not put more on the plates of those who feed us than they can bear. I would ask them to do their homework and understand the complexities of the food system. And I would ask them to remember that without food security, instability follows.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity while preserving the interviewee’s voice and meaning.