Farmers, food banks decry program loss
Raul Rodriguez from S&J Farms in El Guique, is part of New Mexico Grown and participated in the , part of New Mexico Grown, who has participated in he Regional Farm to Food Bank recently canceled by the USDA. (Photo by 4Birds Photography)
The executive director of Northern New Mexico's food bank, The Food Depot, says the recent U.S. Department of Agriculture's elimination of a program that connected food banks to local food producers is 'devastating.'
The Regional Farm to Food Bank program, created under the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act, is currently funded through the USDA Local Food Purchase Assistance, one of two federal programs the USDA recently canceled.
According to a news release from The Food Depot and the New Mexico Farmers Marketing Association, last year, the RF2FB program accounted for 34% of all institutional purchases from small and midsize producers in the New Mexico Grown program.
Under the program, officials say, more than 200 farmers, ranchers and other food producers have sold close to 900,000 pounds of locally grown food since January 2023, providing 749,502 healthy meals distributed across all 33 of the state's counties.
The USDA announced in October of last year a $500 million extension of the LFPA plan, with $2.8 million designated for New Mexico. Then, on March 7, the USDA informed the New Mexico Department of Agriculture the program that agreement would be terminated, the news release said, and the program will end when the current program ends at the end of June.
'These are relationships for New Mexicans,' The Food Depot Executive Director Jill Dixon told Source. 'We believe in community and food banks helping people access food, and producers who care about beautiful, local, nutritious food being in the hands of their community members. That's who was at the table here: people who all have the same passion for feeding people good food.'
And the program worked, she said. 'There were definite gains happening. We saw producers growing. We saw them scaling, buying additional land, buying machinery, buying additional [cattle] head, planting new rows. It's just really devastating.'
Make no mistake: The current funding cycle had its challenges, she said, because it had eliminated money for administrative costs. 'We were just working on figuring out how we were going to run a program that didn't have any administrative fund associated with it.'
Now that program will simply end.
Organizers say 94% of last year's RF2FB purchases came from socially disadvantaged and historically underserved producers.
'Without this support, we risk losing more than income; we risk losing the ability to sustain our land, our families, and our way of life,' Manny Encinias, owner of Trilogy Beef and Buffalo Creek Ranch in Moriarty, New Mexico said in a statement. 'This decision doesn't just impact ranchers. It threatens the entire rural economy, including locally owned businesses like our USDA meat processing facility, which depends on ranching families like us to stay in operation. Perhaps most concerning, it makes it even harder to bring the next generation back to the ranch.'
New Mexico Farmers Marketing Association Executive Director Denise Miller told Source her members are 'super disappointed,' and noted that rapid changes hit the agriculture sector particularly hard.
'It's not like turning water on from a sink,' she said. 'It takes time for farmers to put crops in the ground, for ranchers to…get their operations adjusted to new market opportunities. And so when something like this is really an abrupt end to a program, it just puts the brakes on everything that had been building beautifully for the last few years.'
U.S. Sen Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), who was scheduled to have a roundtable discussion with local food banks on Monday, called RF2FB 'an essential program that was agreed to in a bipartisan way over the last few years, understanding the need across America when it came to access to food and the problem with hunger. When these programs are severed or eliminated, it just makes it harder for everyone.'
Luján told Source the approach Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency has taken with these programs has eliminated certain tools typically available to address program losses.
'What I have been trying to do in the area of food programs, this included, is work with Republican colleagues that are also going through something similar in their states with their constituents, saying, 'This is bipartisan, this is nonpartisan. We need to be able to help those that need access to these programs, so how can we work together with you to be able to change the switch on this?''
Dixon said the loss of the program 'really hurts small scale producers, small and mid scale producers in our area. These are people that we've developed relationships with and friendships with, where food banks became a huge part of the market share.'
But it's 'also the elimination of a food source for food banks.' While the food banks typically 'procure food at scale in much bigger quantity' than they did within the RF2FB program, 'there's something deeply important about having folks who are accessing food security services seeing fresh local food at those distributions.'
The food banks, she said, 'are going to have to get really creative to try to figure out how we can continue to have local food have a presence.'
Danielle Prokop contributed reporting to this story.
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