✳️ Why This Is Needed

The food system is killing us.

We’re feeding our kids fake meals designed in boardrooms. We’re filling grocery shelves with synthetic preservatives, seed oils, chemical sprays, and sugar bombs wrapped in patriotism and priced like gold.

And it’s all made possible by a system that subsidizes poison, criminalizes real food, and pushes small farmers off the land to make room for corporate monoculture.

South Dakota—the land of cattle, wheat, corn, and roots—now imports more food than it grows for its own people. Our school lunches are frozen barcodes. Our hospital meals are boxed carbs. And our grocery stores are owned by interests that don’t care if you die, as long as you buy.

This isn’t just a food crisis. It’s a health crisis, a land crisis, and a sovereignty crisis rolled into one.

🌱 What We Could Have

We could feed our people like we love them.

We could rebuild South Dakota’s farms to grow real food, not just commodities. Food that heals, nourishes, energizes—grown by neighbors, not shipped in from anonymous conglomerates.

We could teach every child where food comes from. We could get raw milk, pastured meats, and mineral-rich vegetables into schools, hospitals, and homes. We could turn every empty lot, every backyard, every underused pasture into a source of sovereignty.

We could be the first state to treat food like medicine—and farmers like doctors.

🛠 How We Achieve It

Create a Clean Food Sovereignty Act that:

Defines real food as unprocessed, non-synthetic, minimally altered, nutrient-rich, and locally traceable

Establishes the legal right for every citizen to grow, trade, buy, and eat real food without interference from federal or corporate agents

Redirect state subsidies and ag incentives to:

Regenerative farmers and ranchers

Indigenous and heirloom seed keepers

Food cooperatives, farm-to-school networks, and mobile markets

Young and returning farmers producing clean, ethical staples

Ban state-level contracts with food vendors who serve:

Synthetic preservatives, high-fructose corn syrup, industrial seed oils, or ultra-processed ingredients in schools, prisons, or hospitals

Launch a South Dakota Soil & Nutrition Task Force to:

Rebuild the nutrient profile of state land

Track chemical saturation from decades of industrial farming

Promote rotational grazing, cover cropping, and composting as state-recommended practices

Decriminalize and protect:

Raw milk, backyard livestock, home gardens, and seed exchanges

Small-scale food producers and roadside farm stands

Tribal and cultural foodways from unnecessary regulation

Fund Food Sovereignty Apprenticeships for:

Veterans

Former inmates

Youth aging out of foster care

Citizens transitioning from food insecurity to food leadership

We don’t need fake food made in a lab. We need food made by the land, the sun, and the hands of the people who live here. In South Dakota, the ground will feed us again—and this time, it’ll make us strong.