Santa Fe supports growers

Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company (SFNTC) has donated $100,000 to the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association (CFSA) for the creation of the Hurricane Relief Partnership for Carolina Sustainable Farms.
SFNTC is a subsidiary of Reynolds American, which is an indirect, wholly owned subsidiary of British American Tobacco.
SFNTC, a member of the non-profit CFSA, said that the new hurricane relief partnership had two key purposes:

• To provide access to low-cost capital and financial planning to between 30 and 50 small sustainable farms in North and South Carolina that suffered damage due to the impact of Hurricanes Florence and Michael; and
• To create an endowment fund to guarantee availability of low-cost financing for small sustainable Carolina farms in the event of future catastrophic weather events.

“The Hurricane Relief Partnership for Carolina Sustainable Farms marks the beginning of a new strategy in building the financial resilience of our region’s sustainable agriculture community,” said Roland McReynolds, CFSA’s executive director.
“The probability of disasters in future years presents a long-term threat to the survival of sustainable family farms serving the markets for local and organic agricultural products in this region.
“These farms, some of which are SFNTC’s grower partners, are not reliably served by the safety net that exists for large-scale conventional commodity production. Yet the contributions they make to their communities — enhanced soil and water quality, biodiversity, healthy food, economic growth — are vital, and when one of these farms is lost, it has long-lasting negative effects.”
According to a press note on the Reynolds American website, CFSA will work with the Natural Capital Investment Fund (NCIFund) to leverage SFNTC’s donation to create up to $250,000 in low-cost microloans for small, sustainable farms in North and South Carolina affected by the hurricanes.
‘CFSA will also partner with the Rural Advancement Foundation International-USA to support its work to assist farmers in accessing state and federal disaster relief programs, and to provide financial counselling to farmers receiving NCIFund loans under the Hurricane Relief Partnership program,’ the note said.
McReynolds added that CFSA would use funds that were not expended as part of the 2018-19 NCIFund loan guarantee agreement as a guarantee pool for weather-related farm losses beyond 2019.
The association would solicit also other contributions to this endowment, with a goal of building a larger guarantee fund to support greater availability of low-cost, low-underwriting microloans for this population of small, sustainable farms in future years.