How One Lawyer’s Helping Farmers Navigate Trump’s Policy Landscape

Dãnia Davy is all smiles and bubbling laughter as she welcomes attendees to her weekly “WTF?! Office Hours.” She greets each guest speaker who logs onto the webinar like a close friend, though this is in fact a webinar that’s open to the public. Scheduled weekly, the office hours are just one of the many educational resources she’s offering to help farmers cope with the quickly evolving policy landscape under the Trump administration.

Just over two months into its second term, the Trump administration has slashed funding, cut back on food aid programs, destabilized trade relationships and targeted immigrants —- all actions that on their own could significantly hurt the food system, and collectively, are likely to spike food insecurity and have already sent producers reeling.

Davy is the one-woman team behind Land and Liberation LLC, a company she started last year to support farmers with funder relations, PR, policy and risk mitigation — skills she’s gained through her legal education, and the years of experience she’s had in the field since then. As a lawyer, she tells Sentient that running the organization the way that she does is “an opportunity for me to get to work in support of being as close in relationship to the land as possible, and being inspired everyday.”

A large part of her focus is on supporting Black, brown and Indigenous farmers, many of whom have either been directly or indirectly impacted by at least one of the Trump Administration’s executive orders curtailing funding toward climate change, DEI and many agricultural programs.

An Anti-Capitalist Operating Model

Since Trump took office again in January, Davy’s day-to-day work has shifted. More of her time is now dedicated to providing free educational information and pro-bono legal services, instead of working directly with her institutional clients. “In this particular moment, I would say that the vast majority of my actual time is for the farmers,” she says. t “The work that I do supporting the farmers also supports [my institutional clients’] missions.” Due to attorney-client privacy, she’s unable to share who her clients are, but they are all either nonprofits, or nonprofits’ fiscally sponsored projects.

Her operating model — which includes only charging institutions for her services and providing them to farmers pro-bono — is unique and one for which she’s received ample feedback — especially from her mother. “At end-stage capitalism, [I] recognize that if we were to actually sell our skills at the quote, unquote market rate, it would be unaffordable,” Davy says.

For her, that means taking on institutional clients who align with her work, and are willing and able to pay rates that subsidize her pro-bono work with farmers. Still, her business model does limit the amount of farmer clients she’s able to take on, a factor she seeks to overcome by providing ample free educational materials.

Preparing Early to Support Farmers

Many of Davy’s educational sessions are open to the public. During one of her recent events, this one a training for farmers titled “What to Expect When You’re Expecting Facism,” she shared that she had started preparing for the shift toward fascism months ago — well before Trump was sworn in. “Our plans have to be proactive and they have to include our physical, emotional, financial and digital safety,” she advised the training’s attendees.

One way that she prepared early was by creating a framework for keeping track of executive orders as they came out. The framework includes a plain language explanation of what an executive order is, as well as a list of all of President Trump’s executive orders that are likely to impact federal funding for a range of topics relevant to farmers, including climate, agriculture and immigration.

Among them are the orders “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing” — which included termination of environmental justice programs — and “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit Based Opportunity,” which Davy notes in the framework could be used to “rescind equity focused cooperative agreements and grant awards.” Currently, 19 orders are broken down in the framework, bringing together information about the status of the order and its influence, along with a link to the original order.

One of the most beneficial aspects of Davy’s work is her fast turnaround time, says Sarah Sohn, who runs Soul Fire Farms’ Braiding Seeds Fellowship, a program that supports new farmers. “[Davy’s work is] much more rapid-response and emergent because of the unprecedented times that we’re living through,” she tells Sentient. “That seems to me very much what is needed right now.”

Keeping the framework and the other aspects of her emergency response website up-to-date takes up a significant chunk of Davy’s day. She starts every morning reading the news, in order to make sure the information she’s providing to her clients and via her educational materials is accurate.

“It has just been very stunning for all of us to have a person who is keeping tabs on all of the chaotic developments moment-by-moment, and to know that we can tap into that, tap into her knowledge and network as these things unfold,” says Sohn.

It’s a service that Sohn finds especially helpful. “Dãnia takes a certain kind of, like, intellectual and energetic load off of us,” says Sohn. “Because farmers are able to rely on Davy to track policy changes and keep them informed, they’re able to focus on producing food. The farmers are really kind of overwhelmed,” she says, pointing out that most of them don’t have the legal or policy experience necessary to independently navigate Trump’s policy changes.

Another complicating factor: many farmers are moving into one of the busiest times of year. “They’re recognizing this as a time they need to try to grow as much food as possible for communities,” Sohn says, “knowing that we’re in precarious times, food security wise, that are likely to only get worse.” Economists have flagged that tariffs are likely to spike food prices at a time when groceries are already expensive. Though some farmers — primarily larger operations — received massive bailouts to help them survive the trade wars during Trump’s first term, it’s unclear whether a similar bailout will come to fruition this time around. Trump has indicated that farmers should expect “a little bit of an adjustment period.”

The Consequences of Meaningful Work

Davy says she feels driven to dedicate an unsustainable number of hours to her work. When I ask for a number, she laughs and says only that she knows it’s unsustainable, and doesn’t want to be a bad model for others. In a previous role, her dedication to her work led to a visit to the emergency room. “My body was communicating to me that I was at my physical exhaustion limit, and I was just ignoring those cues,” she tells me of the harrowing experience.

Another facet of her drive is her experience as a Jamaican immigrant. “When you’re an immigrant and you’ve experienced so much xenophobia and racism for a really long time,” she says, “overperformance and overproduction becomes a coping mechanism.”

Her work ethic, while admirable, also leads to concerns. “She’s just one person,” Sohn remarks, “adding that funders should step up to fund more emergent work like the kind Davy provides.

Mutual aid is already one such solution, says Mina Seck, who runs community programs for the nonprofit Sprout NOLA, a group focused on supporting Black, brown and Indigenous farmers in Louisiana. Mutual aid is just that “we feed each other. We care for each other. Come take what you need, leave some for others,” Seck tells Sentient. There are already many producers who participate in mutual aid, but she would love to see the community-based efforts continue to ramp up around the country to combat the uncertainty of federal policy.

Challenges Facing Farmers — and Those Helping Them

The morning she spoke to me, Davy had woken up in a cold sweat, haunted by a nightmare of her loved ones being persecuted for their shared heritage and race. Just a few short hours later on Zoom, her upbeat and welcoming personality betrayed none of this.

“One limitation I’m facing right now is just the psychological toll of the polycrisis and being an immigrant in this country,” she tells me. “And there’s so many people, just in my personal world, that are in crisis around the ways in which immigrants are being mistreated by this government.” She points specifically to the “illegal arrest” of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil by ICE as making it hard for her to not be constantly scared, especially given that she is an immigrant herself.

She’s candid with me, telling me that her fear is part of what drives her work. Already, some of the farmers with whom she works are receiving threats based upon their racial identities, she tells me. These intimidation tactics are being perpetuated by the USDA itself. As she points out, “Black” and “Indigenous” are the only specific protected racial groups identified in a recent leaked memo of the department’s banned words. So she feels the need to act.

It’s not just fear driving Davy’s work. It’s also a healthy dose of optimism and admiration for the farmers she serves. “I think that everything is possible,” she tells me. “I know that the farmers do that every day by being engineers, alchemists and soil experts. I mean, there’s just so much wisdom in stewarding our land and producing food for our communities. And so I’m very inspired when farmers present to me challenges that they’re encountering, climate access, climate change, issues that are impacting their operations.” At the end of the day, she’s always excited to help them find and take steps toward a solution.

Though her hands-on experience with land stewardship has thus far been limited to raising a tomato plant, supporting farmers has long been a passion of hers — one she discovered in law school. “My entire career has been committed to the service of primarily Black farmers,” Davy says. Now she encourages her fellow altruistically minded lawyers to stay true to their goals. “I just want to affirm any folks thinking about law school, in law school or attorneys that just want to do the work that speaks to their heart, that you will chart your own course, and there’s unlimited possibility if you’re in service of your community.”