America needs an agriculture that supports healthy rural communities, protects the environment, and promotes a safe, diverse, and stable food supply. To achieve these goals, America needs a healthy family farm-based system of agriculture. Targeted, top-notch legal information and advocacy are indispensable in the struggle to defend family-based agriculture and secure social and economic justice for farmers. FLAG exists to provide those legal services.

Focus Areas. When FLAG first opened, its work focused almost exclusively on credit issues. Over the years, the scope of FLAG’s work broadened to include other issues of concern to family farmers. Here you will find descriptions of FLAG's work in each of those focus areas.

Staff & Board. This page provides brief biographical sketches of FLAG's attorneys, support staff, and board of directors.

Methods. Here you will read about FLAG's use of four methods to help its clients: education, backup support, impact litigation, and administrative and legislative technical assistance.

History & Mission. Click here for a brief description of FLAG's work since its inception in 1986.

Accomplishments. Lists some of FLAG's accomplishments since its inception in 1986.

 

History & Mission

Farmers' Legal Action Group, Inc. (FLAG) is a nonprofit law center dedicated to providing legal services to family farmers and their rural communities in order to help keep family farmers on the land. Since its inception, FLAG has provided an extensive array of legal services to financially distressed farmers and their advocates and attorneys nationwide. (See FLAG's Accomplishments.)

During the farm financial crisis of the 1980s, FLAG's work focused on credit issues. FLAG established a strong reputation as a national leader in protecting and preserving family farms. FLAG's work helped thousands of farmers weather that crisis and remain on their farms.

Since that time, FLAG's work has broadened to include other issues of concern to family farmers and ranchers: sustainable agriculture, corporate concentration and vertical integration in the poultry and livestock industries, contract farming, race discrimination in USDA programs, accountability in government support programs, and legal help for farmers seeking to develop value-added enterprises. By providing legal education, backup support, impact litigation, and legislative and administrative technical assistance services to its client organizations, FLAG continues to play a key role in preserving the family farm system of agriculture in this country.

FLAG is a nonprofit organization with 501(c)3 status designated by the IRS. FLAG receives income from public and private foundations, government agencies, and individual donors. Contributions to FLAG are tax-deductible. For information about how you can support FLAG, contact Tony Brown, Development Director, at 651-223-5400 or Email: .

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FLAG's Methods

FLAG uses some combination of the following four methods to help its clients: education, backup support, impact litigation, and administrative and legislative technical assistance.

Education. FLAG conducts seminars around the country on issues facing family farmers. These seminars are attended by farmers and their advocates and lawyers. Seminar topics include credit, contract farming, civil rights, sustainable agriculture, disaster assistance, and accountability in government farm programs. To complement its trainings, FLAG also produces user-friendly books, booklets, articles, charts, and videotapes.

Backup Support. FLAG provides a broad range of support services each year to farm advocates, rural legal services programs, private attorneys, and farm organizations. These services include explaining complex laws, providing timely information regarding changes in the law, providing research on important legal issues, reviewing and analyzing cases, co-counseling cases, and providing tailor-made legal education materials and trainings. FLAG also maintains a toll-free line that Minnesota lawyers, advocates, and farmers can call for brief advice and referrals.

Impact Litigation. FLAG undertakes strategic litigation—usually class action lawsuits—to change important areas of law that will have an effect on a large number of family farmers.

Administrative and Legislative Technical Assistance. FLAG provides administrative and legislative technical assistance to its clients by submitting formal comments on proposed agency regulations, testifying before federal and state legislative bodies, and assisting client organizations in their attempts to draft legislation.

Throughout its history, the direction of FLAG's work has been guided by the legal needs and policy objectives of its client organizations.

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Accomplishments

Some of FLAG's accomplishments since its inception in 1986:

• Conducted more than 505 training events in 38 states, attended by more than 25,500 farmers, lawyers, and farm advocates.
• Written, published, and distributed more than 100,000 copies of numerous user-friendly books, including Farmers' Guide to FmHA, Farmers' Guide to Disaster Assistance , Farmers' Guide to Minnesota Lending Law, and Farmers' Guide to GMOs.
• Published more than 225 in-depth articles about various farm law issues in its quarterly newsletter, Farmers' Legal Action Report .
• Written numerous articles on farm law issues that were published by Clearinghouse Review, the Drake Journal of Agricultural Law, Agricultural Law Update, the American Agricultural Law Association, National Catholic Rural Life Conference , the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, and the Land Stewardship Project.
• Testified on numerous occasions before committees of the United States Congress and submitted hundreds of pages of comments to USDA's proposed rules.
• Represented the Campaign for Family Farms and several independent hog farmers in a lawsuit, Michigan Pork Producers v. Campaign for Family Farms, to terminate the Pork Checkoff Program because it violates hog farmers' First Amendment rights.
• Represented the Minnesota Milk Producers Association in a lawsuit against USDA challenging its discriminatory, nationwide scheme of milk pricing that puts Upper Midwest farmers at a significant disadvantage.
• Represented 230,000 farmers nationwide in Coleman v. Lyng, raising successful challenges to illegal procedures that the Farmers Home Administration used to freeze farmers' income and force them off their land. An order in this lawsuit protected more than 80,000 farmers from FmHA foreclosures for 18 months.

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