Senate candidate Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester will release a four-page agriculture proposal Tuesday afternoon, which is designed to address issues including discrimination against Black farmers and purchases of U.S. farmland by foreign entities.
Blunt Rochester is the odds-on favorite to win her Senate race in Delaware, where she’s highlighted her ag policy experience in the House of Representatives, and her proposal, first obtained by NOTUS, is geared toward rural development.
“Our focus really is not on these big corporations, but really focusing on our Delaware farmers, producers, our ranchers. That’s important to make sure, and that’s what this plan tries to really uplift,” Blunt Rochester said in an interview with NOTUS.
The campaign document includes proposals with broad bipartisan support in Congress, like expanding rural broadband and supporting family farms, while others, like funding farms’ transitions to clean energy, are likely to face more opposition on the Hill.
Blunt Rochester served her first term on the House Agriculture Committee in 2017 and 2018 alongside vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, who was a member of the House at the time. She worked on the 2018 Farm Bill, whose long-anticipated follow-up is slowly crawling its way through Congress — Senate Democrats have yet to release bill text but have an outline, and House Republicans have passed a bill out of committee.
The committee has historically handled a broad range of issues that interest members across the political spectrum — from farming to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and the National School Lunch Program.
Blunt Rochester said part of the reason she wanted to serve on the committee was its history of bipartisanship.
Working on the 2018 Farm Bill showed her “the connection between our farming community, the connection between people being able to eat healthy, the connection between groceries not being so expensive,” Blunt Rochester said.
Democrats like Blunt Rochester have also made strides in recent years to make agriculture a more inclusive sector. The Inflation Reduction Act, for example, included funding for a Discrimination Financial Assistance Program, a grant program that ultimately distributed aid to over 43,000 farmers, ranchers and forest landowners “who experienced discrimination prior to January 2021,” according to the Biden administration.
One of the bullets in her plan states a goal of recognizing and addressing “historic discrimination against Black farmers and ranchers” and would seek to “end the systematic disparities in their treatment.”
The plan would also expand agriculture education with a focus on HBCUs and land grant institutions.
“As a person who has made it my mission to make sure that everybody sees themselves in the work that we do, it was important to work with our farmers, our Black farmers,” Blunt Rochester said. “We look at the historic injustices. We also look at ways to enhance and support the growth of farming in both the Black community as well as throughout Delaware.”
While funding like the Discrimination Financial Assistance Program was passed in the IRA, similar initiatives could prove more difficult to pass in a Republican-controlled House or Senate.
Her proposal would also try to “prevent foreign entities from buying up American farmland and threatening grocery supply chains.”
But there’s stand-alone bipartisan legislation in Congress she hasn’t signed onto that tries to address the issue. In 2023, Sens. Tammy Baldwin and Chuck Grassley made a bipartisan legislative push that would increase filing requirements for foreign investors who enter into leasing agreements or hold 1% in land. The companion House bill was introduced by a Democrat and has six Republican co-sponsors.
There’s also a bipartisan bill that establishes more stringent reporting requirements for foreign land ownership and a Republican bill that would prevent some businesses and people associated with the Chinese government from purchasing agricultural land. Blunt Rochester hasn’t supported those either, though if any of these are ultimately folded into the next farm bill she may end up voting for them then.
Blunt Rochester is also among a predominantly Republican group of lawmakers who have accepted donations from a Chinese-owned agritech company that faced legal trouble in the U.S. for not declaring land purchases.
Blunt Rochester told NOTUS she would “definitely consider” supporting or voting for legislation on tracking or limiting foreign agricultural land ownership in the Senate, however. “I always say, if we can make it in America, we should make it in America.”
Michael Scuse, Delaware’s secretary of agriculture, praised Blunt Rochester’s plan.
“[The plan shows] that she’s actually been here listening to producers and to our rural communities about what they see, what they think should change and what needs to happen,” Scuse said.
In addition to her race, Blunt Rochester said her priority is getting the farm bill out of Congress this year.
“Time is running out. We understand that,” Blunt Rochester said. “The reality is in getting some of these major bills to the floor, even if the committee does its work, it’s leadership. The speaker’s got to bring it to the floor. And the same is true in the Senate.”
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Nuha Dolby is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.