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Yahoo
27-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Morrisey's request to change SNAP shows poor West Virginians lose when rich people represent us
Gov. Patrick Morrisey announced last week that the state sent a SNAP waiver request to the federal government asking to remove soda from being an eligible item under the program. (West Virginia Office of Gov. Patrick Morrisey video screenshot) It's honestly like West Virginia's leaders have no idea who West Virginians are, or can't remember where they came from. I guess being rich, coming from a family of politicians or being from New Jersey could be the reason for some of that. West Virginia is one of the 10 poorest states in the nation. We rely heavily on federal funding for our state budget. But instead of working to lift people out of poverty, our state government and our congressional delegation is following the lead of President Donald Trump and making things worse. Last week, Gov. Patrick Morrisey announced that he formally asked the federal government to disallow the state's food assistance program from paying for soda. 'For a long time I've talked about the fact that SNAP — the N should stand for nutrition,' Morrisey said in his video announcement. Well, it does stand for nutrition — the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Indiana and Nebraska became the first states in the nation to ban soda and energy drinks from public grocery aid benefits, such as SNAP. The United States Department of Agriculture approved the states' requests last week, and both will go into effect Jan. 1, 2026. The SNAP program is meant to 'maintain the dignity' of participants by helping them buy groceries, said Eric Savaiano, manager for food and nutrition access for Nebraska Appleseed. He called the latest SNAP ban 'poverty-shaming.' 'With the approval of this waiver, some of that dignity is stripped away,' Savaiano said. Poverty-shaming is the perfect description of this bill, and others the West Virginia Legislature wanted to pass this past session. Lawmakers tried to ban SNAP recipients from using their benefits to buy soft drinks and candy, but that bill never made it out of the House of Delegates. The state Senate tried to pass a bill that would have expanded work and training requirements for SNAP recipients. 'We know from lots of studies, including some of our own, that mandating work reporting requirements disconnects people from access to food, but does not connect them to work,' said Rhonda Rogombé, health and safety policy analyst for the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy. She said the bill, which died in House Finance, would have put pressure on the state's food banks, which would have been tasked with filling in the gaps for people who lost SNAP benefits because of work requirements. Meanwhile the Trump administration is ending the USDA's Local Food Purchase Assistance program that gave states federal funding to stock food pantries from local farms. The Ohio Association of Foodbanks sent out an email to farmers announcing the program is being cut, and attached a notice from the USDA, which said that the Trump administration had 'determined this agreement no longer effectuates agency priorities and that termination of the award is appropriate.' The Local Food Purchase Assistance Program authorized $900 million worth of locally raised produce for food banks. It will end on June 30. On top of that, the U.S. House of Representatives last week approved the Trump administration's 'big, beautiful bill,' which is actually pretty ugly and will be devastating to those who use SNAP or Medicaid. More than 500,000 West Virginians rely on Medicaid or Children's Health Insurance Program, and about 277,000 — or one in six — residents use SNAP benefits to get access to food. Kelly Allen, executive director of the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy, said the bill 'feels like a really bad deal for West Virginians.' The bill — which must still pass the U.S. Senate and be signed by President Donald Trump before becoming law — will shift some of the cost of SNAP to state governments. Keep in mind, Morrisey has said he's expecting a $400 million deficit beginning next fiscal year (something other state lawmakers have denied), and in 2022, more than 45% of the state's total revenue came from federal grants, according to an analysis from Pew Charitable Trusts. The 'big, beautiful bill' will also make deep cuts to Medicaid, reducing the program by $625 billion over 10 years. And what does West Virginia's representation in Washington, D.C. have to say about the passage of this bill? 'This legislation will undoubtedly make the life of the average American better, and I am proud to support it on the House floor and help get it to President Trump's desk,' Rep. Carol Miller said. 'I urge my colleagues to do the same.' Miller is a millionaire. Her husband owns five car dealerships and has a stake in a real estate company. Rich West Virginians aren't living the same lives as the rest of us. When we don't pay our bills, we don't win a seat in the Senate like Sen. Jim Justice. We instead don't eat, have our utilities turned off, go without medicine or lose our homes. Maybe it's not in our best interest to keep electing politicians who don't know how the average West Virginian lives. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Washington is deciding — right now — to allow hunger to grow
I remember the hollow dread the first time I walked up to a food pantry door. The cupboards at home were empty. In the fridge, a single serving of chicken and dumplings sat, carefully rationed into two meals a day for four long days. My last few dollars had gone into the gas tank just to get to work, and I was surviving on pocket change until payday. That feeling — desperation wrapped in shame — is something you don't forget. Fifteen years later, standing in the Tacoma Dome parking lot as an Emergency Food Network staff member, I watched hundreds of cars snake around the block, each waiting for the team from Eloise's Cooking Pot to place a week's worth of food into their trunk. Their faces reflected emotions I knew well: brief relief, quiet embarrassment, sincere gratitude — and beneath it all, deep exhaustion. But it's not just Eloise's. Every day, across Pierce County, Emergency Food Network's 75+ partner programs see the same unrelenting need. Thousands of seniors, families and people experiencing homelessness turn to us — not because they made bad choices but because they've been backed into a corner by rising costs and stagnant wages. Yet while the need grows, the lifelines people depend on are being ripped away. In March, the USDA slashed over $1 billion from programs that kept food flowing to food banks and schools. The Local Food Purchase Assistance program — which strengthened both local farms and hungry families — was wiped out entirely. Then another blow: The Emergency Food Assistance Program — the backbone of the federal emergency food system — was gutted by $500 million. Here in Washington, that means up to $25 million lost in food funding in just three weeks. At EFN, that's not just a statistic — it's 19 food deliveries that won't reach hungry families. It's $500,000 in support for local farmers gone. It's a 40% hole in our Emergency Food Assistance Program allocation, at a time when visits to our network have already topped 800,000 this year — an alarming 17% increase over last year. And the betrayal isn't just federal. While both the House and Senate in Olympia fully funded emergency food programs, Gov. Bob Ferguson's budget proposes a $52 million cut to food bank funding. In the middle of a hunger crisis, that's not just bad policy — that's abandonment. Let's be clear: Hunger is not inevitable. Hunger is a policy choice. We need our state legislators to hold the line. We need our federal lawmakers to remember who they serve. And we need every single one of you to raise your voice. Congress is in recess. Your representatives are home. Find them. Call them. Tell them to protect SNAP. Restore USDA food programs. Fully fund emergency food efforts. Thank the champions — and demand better from the rest. If you've never faced an empty cupboard, I hope you never will. If you have, you know why I'm asking. No one — no child, no senior, no family — should have to survive on hope and spare change. Enough is enough. Lianna Olds is deputy director of the Emergency Food Network.
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Their small farms helped stock food pantries. That program is going away.
URBANA, OHIO — Oaks and Sprouts, Tonni and Graham Oberly's family farm, got the email from the Ohio Association of Foodbanks just after five o'clock on the first Friday in March. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, or USDA, had notified the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services that it was ending a program that gave state, tribal and territorial governments federal dollars to stock food pantries from farms within a 400-mile radius. The Ohio Association of Foodbanks, in turn, shared the notice with the more than 150 farms that supplied the state's food pantries with fresh produce, meat and dairy. One of them was Oaks and Sprouts, whose younger and diverse owners are just the type of growers the USDA's Local Food Purchase Assistance program aimed to connect to food-insecure Americans. Last growing season, Oaks and Sprouts had a contract worth up to $25,000 with the program, a significant amount for the small farm. The produce made its way to food pantries in nearby Springfield and Dayton and, from there, to the Ohioans who rely on them to feed themselves and their families. For Tonni Oberly, a trained doula with a background in public health, joining that distribution chain connected her work at the farm to the focus of the city and urban planning doctorate she had recently completed: how place impacts the health of Black mothers and children. 'Food is such an important part of that — access to food in your neighborhood, access to healthy food, the affordability of food — how food impacts our maternal and child health outcomes is really crucial,' Tonni explained on a crisp April day as she and Graham walked through the hoop house where they were germinating seeds for spring planting. The federal program had also allowed the Oberlys to diversify their farm's revenue stream beyond the traditional sales to restaurants and at farmer's markets. It had given them a measure of predictability as they built a regenerative farm on land previously cultivated by Graham's aunt and uncle and, before that, his grandparents. 'We can plant seeds and know that they're sold, versus with the farmer's markets, you plant and you hope people buy it — or even selling to restaurants, they don't preorder months ahead of time,' Graham explained as he and Tonni stood on the acre of land where they grow garlic, tomatoes, patty pan squash and lettuce varietals that include romaine, butterhead and salanova. The Oberlys estimate that they were able to hire two of their four seasonal employees last year because of their contract with the Local Food Purchase Assistance program, known as LFPA. They try to pay a good wage for the work — $17 an hour. That's a decent amount for a place like rural Champaign County, where the median household income is about $20,000 less than nationally and the poverty rate is just over 10 percent. The farm's goal, they explained, was to grow food in a way that is good for the land, their employees and their customers. Tonni named Oaks and Sprouts for a passage of scripture in Isaiah: 'They will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the Lord for the display of his splendor.' It is a metaphor for living a righteous life. The email from the Ohio Association of Foodbanks landed as Oaks and Sprouts was in the thick of planning for its fifth growing season — the third in which the Oberlys planned on participating in the LFPA program. It attached a USDA notice saying that the Trump administration had 'determined this agreement no longer effectuates agency priorities and that termination of the award is appropriate.' After the current contract year closes on June 30, the LFPA program, which authorized $900 million worth of locally raised healthy foods for anti-hunger organizations, would end. Created by the Biden administration in 2021, the Local Food Purchase Assistance program was at once an attempt to support small local farms and an acknowledgement that one of the most direct ways to bring healthy food to hunger-vulnerable populations is to buy it from underserved farmers nearby. But a USDA press release announcing its creation featured words like 'equity' and 'climate,' targets of President Donald Trump and his Department of Government Efficiency in their efforts to root out so-called 'woke' federal programs. Even before Trump took office, the Oberlys' program coordinator with Ohio CAN (Community + Agriculture + Nutrition), as LFPA is branded in this midwestern state, had warned them that its renewal could be in jeopardy. Still, Oaks and Sprouts, like the vast majority of the farms participating in Ohio CAN, began planning for the 2025 growing season. There were reasons to be hopeful. For starters, while the Local Food Purchase Assistance program was part of the Biden administration's broader COVID-19 relief effort, its funding stream was first used for direct food purchases during Trump's first term. Ohio CAN, like many state-level local food purchase programs, is also widely popular. Independent experts who analyzed its first year in the Republican-led state concluded that it was a 'success by any measure.' Trump's picks to lead key federal agencies in his current term also seemed to be working in the program's favor. Take Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins. One of the first things she did upon confirmation was to send state, local and tribal governments a letter that outlined her 'vision for the Department's 16 nutrition programs,' including a commitment to 'create new opportunities to connect America's farmers to nutrition assistance programs.' Then there's Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a former environmental lawyer, the figurehead of the 'Make America Healthy Again' movement and an outspoken critic of processed foods. One of his top priorities is encouraging states to prohibit the more than 40 million low-income Americans participating in the USDA's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, from using benefits to purchase soda and candy; so far this year, more than a dozen states have been considering such legislation. Many experts say a more effective way to encourage healthier eating is to improve access to fresh foods, exactly the type that LFPA farms were producing and selling to food pantries. More than 1.3 million Ohioans participated in SNAP during fiscal year 2024, or about 12 percent of the state's population, according to a Center of Budget and Policy Priorities analysis of USDA data. While the majority of SNAP recipients are White, Black Ohioans are overrepresented when compared to the overall state population. An anonymous survey by the Ohio Association of Foodbanks showed that more than 40 percent of people who visited emergency food distribution centers in 2023 had at least one household member under the age of 18 and nearly as many reported living in a household with someone who is disabled. The country's safety net to prevent hunger is a complicated web of federal programs. Most are housed within the USDA and many are jointly administered by federal and state governments. These include SNAP, previously known as food stamps; the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, known as WIC; school meal programs; Meals on Wheels, focused on seniors; commodities purchases for food banks; and the Local Food Purchase Assistance program that Tonni and Graham Oberly's farm participated in. Pulling on the thread of one program puts tension on the others. For example, once a family exhausts their SNAP benefits for the month, they may rely on one of the country's more than 60,000 food pantries and emergency meal centers to feed themselves. As the USDA is ending programs like the LFPA, Congress is looking at other food assistance programs to find the $1.7 trillion in savings over the next decade needed to renew Trump's 2017 tax package, which primarily benefited corporations and the wealthy. The confluence of cuts and changes, coming as more Americans than ever rely on government help for food, has hunger-relief advocates worried the safety net will unravel. Congress has proposed changes to SNAP that include recalibrating the formula used to calculate benefits, adding work requirements for some parents and forcing states to take on a larger portion of the funding. Rollins, for her part, sent a letter to states in April reminding them that it is ultimately the USDA that has the authority to grant their requests to waive the time limit on able-bodied adults receiving SNAP benefits unless they meet work requirements. Earlier this month, the Trump administration also ordered states to hand over SNAP recipients' personal data, including their Social Security numbers, addresses and, in at least one state, citizenship status, National Public Radio reported. The directive came amid the administration's broader push to amass Americans' personal data and target immigrants. Though people in the country illegally are not eligible for SNAP benefits, their U.S. citizen children might be. Last month, USDA directed states to enhance identity and immigration status verification as part of Trump's broader immigration crackdown, even though there is no evidence that immigrants are improperly participating in the program at significant levels. Advocates worry that in the current climate, using the SNAP program to collect participants' data could have a chilling effect on seeking food assistance. The USDA also recently paused $500 million from a separate program that buys large quantities of food from farmers for food pantries, with food banks in Ohio, Wisconsin, Massachusetts and elsewhere losing millions of dollars worth of shipments as a result. When the administration ended the LFPA, it also terminated a $660 million program that linked local farms to schools and child care centers. The changes and uncertainty are coming at what Vince Hall, the head of government relations for Feeding America, the nationwide foodbank network, called an already 'very precarious moment for food banks because there's no resiliency left in the system.' 'They're stretched to the breaking point. They are serving unprecedented high demand, the highest in over a decade. They are dealing with a decline in donation revenue from the pandemic highs that has been quite steep. The decline of financial donations from the pandemic highs, combined with some of the highest — in fact, record — levels of demand at food distributions has just stretched them to the breaking point,' Hall said. 'If we have policy adjustments that disqualify people from the SNAP program, or if we have a recession and unemployment goes up, or if we have a series of natural disasters, there are any number of things that can work to increase demand, and the food banks just aren't ready,' he added. In an emailed statement, a USDA spokesperson noted that as of mid-May, states still had $246 million in unspent LFPA funds. 'The secretary encourages states to utilize these dollars for schools, charitable feeding organizations, and other programs that serve those in need,' the statement said. Alabama has exhausted its funds; Ohio had about $435,000 left from $26.6 million allocated; just $1,500 remained in Tennessee's coffers, according to an official tally. The spokesperson added: 'On any given day, the Department issues more than $405 million worth of nutrition benefits across its 16 nutrition programs. There is no need for new programs, but perhaps more efficient and effective use of current.' These are not reassuring words to many of the program's participating farmers and food pantry operators, whose best-case-scenario path forward is for the program to be revived under the administration's own branding. Graham and Tonni Oberly had to pivot quickly. After they received the email from the Ohio Association of Foodbanks, they secured a spot for this season in a farmer's market in Dayton that is larger than the one where they used to sell their produce nearby. They are adding cut flowers to their lineup and growing Chinese Cabbage for the first time, while also trying to expand the number of local restaurants to which they sell what they grow. But the modicum of predictability that the Local Food Purchase Assistance program gave this new farm for the past two seasons — the USDA considers farmers and ranchers 'beginning' for their first decade and eligible for special assistance — will be gone this year. As will the direct line for Oaks and Sprouts to help address food insecurity in their own community. Graham Oberly grew up on the Ohio-West Virginia border in a family that fought mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia, earned a degree in natural resources management and worked as a sustainability coordinator for The Ohio State University before moving into farming. Oaks and Sprouts is a marriage of the Oberlys' passions. The regenerative farm is a way for Graham to tend the land of his ancestors and preserve it for future generations. With the Local Food Purchase Assistance program, the farm was also a way that Tonni could expand her work caring for Black mothers and children. More than 47 million Americans — including one in five children — are considered food insecure, meaning they do not have enough food to eat or access to healthy foods. Rural Americans are more likely to face hunger due to lack of transportation, lower wages and racial discrimination. The highest rates of food insecurity are among Indigenous and Black Americans, according to a Feeding America analysis, with Black children twice as likely as White children to face hunger. USDA research also shows that households with children headed by a single mother are more likely to be food insecure. And food-insecure women are more likely to be obese than food-insecure men or children, with all of the related health issues, in part because they prioritize providing healthy foods for their children instead of themselves, according to the Food Research & Action Center. In Ohio, the food insecurity rate is slightly higher than the national average. In 2023, Ohioans visited the state's food banks 14.7 million times, up more than a third over the year before. Ohioans are eligible for food bank use if their household is at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty level — and more than a quarter in the state qualify, or about 3.4 million people. Of the 43 percent who were also receiving SNAP benefits, nearly all of them — 93.4 percent — reported exhausting those benefits within the first three weeks of the month, according to the Ohio Association of Foodbanks. Biden's $1.9 trillion COVID-era stimulus package provided direct assistance to taxpayers, $350 billion for state and local governments, and $130 billion to help safely reopen schools, among other provisions. The plan also earmarked $1 billion for USDA programs to build capacity in the country's food-banking system amid unprecedented need and global supply chain disruptions. Half of that money went to additional purchases via The Emergency Food Assistance Program — and that is the $500 million canceled by Trump's USDA in March. Another $400 million was slated for what became the Local Food Purchase Assistance program. Biden's USDA renewed both pandemic-era programs due to their popularity. While more than 90 percent of all U.S. farms qualify as 'small,' with gross cash annual farm incomes of $250,000 or less, they account for just 17 percent of the total value of food produced in the country, according to USDA statistics. Still, they play a critical role in diversifying the overall food ecosystem by supplying produce, dairy and meat that are not available from large-scale agribusiness. Many grow a variety of crops instead of focusing on one or two. Since they are often serving their own communities, they are less vulnerable to disruptions to complex global supply chains. In 1973, as global demand for U.S. farm exports exploded, Earl Butz, the agriculture secretary under Republican President Richard Nixon, told American farmers to 'get big or get out.' Farmers mostly listened. In the years since, while the number of farm acres has remained roughly constant, the number of farms has continued to decline. When Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary under Biden, released data from the 2022 Census of Agriculture, he noted that in over five years, the country had lost 142,000 farms — a roughly 7 percent decline. 'As a country, are we okay with losing that many farms? … Or is there a better way?' Vilsack asked. The Local Food Purchase Assistance program was an acknowledgement that one of the most direct ways to bring healthy food to hunger-vulnerable populations was to buy it from underserved farmers nearby. More than 95 percent of American farmers are White. They are also older — the average age of a U.S. farmer is just over 58, according to USDA statistics — and predominantly male; women make up only 36 percent of farm operators. Under Vilsack, who also served for the entirety of Democratic President Barack Obama's two terms, agriculture policy aimed to address the decline in small farms by extending credit and other types of support to people historically less likely to farm — namely women and people of color. White men's dominance over U.S. farming is not happenstance. It's the result of more than 200 years of official government policy that reflects the fraught relationships the country has with race and land. In the 1830s, the U.S. government forcibly relocated thousands of Indigenous Americans from their ancestral lands in the east, where they had cultivated for generations, to a different climate in the west. Thousands of them died from disease, starvation, exhaustion and exposure to the elements during a brutal journey that came to be known as the Trail of Tears. In the 1860s, in the waning months of the U.S. Civil War, General William Sherman pledged that when the Union won, formerly enslaved Black people, who had farmed for White enslavers, would be eligible to receive 40 acres and a mule to farm their own land. President Andrew Johnson reversed course after he took office, returning the land to White people. People of color — and women — struggled to access credit, including via the USDA, to buy the land and equipment needed to start even a small farm in the decades of Reconstruction that followed the Civil War, throughout the Civil Rights and feminist movements, and into the 1990s. Between 1999 and 2010, the USDA paid settlements in three class actions brought on behalf of Black, Latinx and Indigenous peoples — Pigford v. Glickman, Garcia v. Vilsack and Keepseagle v. Vilsack — arguing that the agency had discriminated against them when they sought loans and other assistance. In 2022, Biden's Inflation Reduction Act created a $2.2 billion fund to compensate farmers and ranchers who experienced past discrimination, including women. The federal judge in the Pigford case, Paul L. Friedman, noted that '[a]s the Department of Agriculture has grown, the number of African American farmers has declined dramatically,' and the USDA and 'the county commissioners to whom it has delegated so much power bear much of the responsibility for this dramatic decline.' 'The Department itself has recognized that there has always been a disconnect between what President Lincoln envisioned as 'the people's department,' serving all of the people, and the widespread belief that the Department is 'the last plantation,' a department 'perceived as playing a key role in what some see as a conspiracy to force minority and disadvantaged farmers off their land through discriminatory loan practices,'' Friedman wrote. This history — and a tacit recognition of the role USDA played via its discriminatory practices — underpinned the ethos of the Local Food Purchase Assistance program. In its first year in Ohio, the program bought from 164 growers. A majority of them were classified as 'socially disadvantaged,' which for the LFPA, the USDA defined as women; Black, Indigenous and other people of color; LGBTQ+ people; veterans; and small, emerging and disabled farmers. That year, nearly 12,000 pounds of grains, 223,000 pounds of dairy and milk, 39,000 pounds of eggs and more than 2.5 million pounds of produce that these farmers produced went into the state's food pantries. The more than $9 million worth of food was distributed via five hubs and 12 regional food banks, according to a report independent researchers produced for the Ohio Association of Foodbanks. The researchers noted: 'Overall, producers were drawn to participate in the Ohio CAN program because sharing high quality products with communities in need was often central to their core mission and personal values.' A farmer called the program a 'godsend' and said they felt like they were on the 'front lines of food insecurity and food instability.' One foodbank representative in a historically redlined area, where banks discriminated against residents of certain neighborhoods because of their race and ethnicity, said it was the first time a farmer had offered them okra and they hoped 'we'll be able to work more closely with her to get larger, larger quantities in next year.' The USDA's decisions to end the Local Food Purchase Assistance program and to cancel planned commodities purchases for food banks have not been popular. The Iowa Farmers Union helped small farms facing lost contracts send press releases about the impact. Singer-songwriter Willie Nelson, a founder of the annual Farm Aid concert, penned an open letter to farmers encouraging them to protest the cuts. Food bank administrators from Oregon to Maryland to Florida have warned it will stress their ability to meet still-historic demand that has not diminished since the pandemic. There have also been public spats between Trump's USDA and Democratic governors like Pennsylvania's Josh Shapiro, who accused the agency of reneging on a three-year deal; Rollins said he didn't have his facts right and was 'trying to make this a political issue.' For the Oberlys in Ohio, the politics are personal. Their five-year-old farm was just starting to be woven into the constellation of state and federal programs that fed food-insecure neighbors while giving Oaks and Sprouts a toehold in a precarious industry that employs one in eight Ohioans, either directly or indirectly, and generates billions in the state each year. The end of the Local Food Purchase Assistance program severed the Oberlys' direct path to care for the people in their community, along with their land. Or as Tonni Oberly put it: 'Supporting the local food system is one of the best ways to support the local economy, it supports farmers and community members — it's a win-win.' The post Their small farms helped stock food pantries. That program is going away. appeared first on The 19th. News that represents you, in your inbox every weekday. Subscribe to our free, daily newsletter.
Yahoo
18-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
USDA Canceled Funding to Help Source Produce for Schools
This article was originally published in The Beacon. In 2020 and 2021, the COVID pandemic exposed weaknesses in the United States' supply chain for key items in American households. The Biden administration spent millions of dollars through the U.S. Department of Agriculture on new programs that helped farmers sell their produce to local schools, create produce boxes for households and provide more direct food access to their communities. The Local Food Purchase Assistance (LFPA) and Local Food for Schools (LFS) programs provided incentives for schools and community organizations to buy food from local farmers. They allowed states to create contracts with farmers so schools could purchase their foods and gave farmers the promise of a guaranteed sale when harvest time arrived. Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter Now, with rocky trade partnerships and tariffs looming, President Donald Trump's administration has slashed the remaining money for the programs, leaving farmers across the country heading into their growing season unsure who will buy their produce. 'We really figured out how to get local farm product into community spaces under LFS and LFPA,' said Thomas Smith, the chief business officer at the Kansas City Food Hub, a cooperative of farmers near the Kansas City area. 'We were making our whole organization around meeting those new needs, because we believe in the government's promise that they believe in local food.' The Trump administration canceled about $660 million in funding for the programs that was to be paid out over the next few years. Through the programs so far, USDA has paid out more than $900 million to states and other recipients. KC Food Hub took on the challenge of helping farmers, school districts and the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education work together to streamline the processes under the Biden-era programs. It was almost an instant success. In 2024, the cooperative brokered more than $500,000 in sales for small farmers in the Kansas City region — more than the group had seen in its first five years of operation. KC Food Hub hoped that the new partnerships would continue putting money back into farmers' pockets and was aiming for over $1 million in sales for the farmers they represent. Now, they're huddling with school districts across Kansas and Missouri to try and keep some of the contracts alive in the absence of the federal money. The local food programs were an extra pillar of support for small farmers across the country. USDA data show that since 1980, the number of farms across the U.S. has decreased from about 2.5 million to 1.88 million in 2024. Part of that struggle, Smith said, is like many small-business owners, farmers are forced to take on many different roles. 'What they really want to be doing is farming, knowing their soil, knowing their land,' Smith said. 'But because there is no distributor like the Food Hub in most communities, they have to be business people, too. They have to be in the board meetings, meetings with school administrators. And that just puts so much stress onto the food system.' Over the years, as small farms have dwindled and larger operations have consolidated agricultural production in the United States, the middle market and distributors like the Food Hub have phased out. When it comes to large-scale distributors, there are plenty of places a farmer could turn to sell their products. But the return for that farmer when selling to a large distributor is much lower. 'You get pennies on the dollar,' Smith said. 'No respect to your work, no respect for your worth.' There are other USDA programs that dedicate money to states through their nutrition assistance programs and set aside funds for seniors and low-income families to buy produce from local farmers. Studies show ripple effects through local economies when higher quantities of local food are purchased. A 2010 study found that for every dollar spent on local food products, there is between 32 cents and 90 cents in additional local economic activity. For Mike Pearl, a legacy farmer in Parkville, the programs pushed him to expand faster than he'd planned. Now, without the guarantee of those contracts, he's scaling back his production plan for the year. 'If you think about it, it was an early game changer,' Pearl said. 'We were able to, for the first time … grow on a contracted basis for a fair price for the farmer, in a way that we never would have been able to do before.' That encouraged Pearl to increase production and begin making upgrades before he felt completely ready to do so, he told The Beacon. New equipment, growing more produce and hiring more staff were all side effects of the local food purchasing agreements. 'I'm not sure that a lot of vegetable farmers were actually ready for it,' Pearl said. 'I wasn't prepared for it. But we made some changes to grow a bit more and do as much as we can on a short runway. We were set up for a perfect storm.' Anything extra Pearl produces will be donated, as his farm is one of the largest donors of food in the Kansas City area. But other farmers are left with questions about what will happen with their crops — and their revenue. It raises a question of trust that Maile Auterson has encountered throughout her life as a fourth-generation farmer in the Ozarks and the founder of Springfield Community Gardens, which facilitates local produce boxes and the LFS programs in the Springfield, Joplin and Rolla areas. 'We promised the farmers,' Auterson said. 'The biggest insult to us is that we cannot follow through on the promises we made to the farmers that we had made with that money.' The area her group serves was set to get $3 million in federal funds over the next three years. While Auterson is trying to fulfill some of those contracts, the trust that small farmers were building with the government through the program has been severed, she said. 'We talked the farmers into participating and scaling up specifically for this program,' Auterson said. 'Then when we can't follow through, the government has done what they were afraid the government would do, which would be to not look out for the small farmer. It's a terrible moral injury to all of us.' Smith said the Food Hub is in talks with its participating school districts — including Lee's Summit, Blue Springs and Shawnee Mission — to continue their purchasing agreements even without the federal funds. So far, even with the funding cancellation, 95% of 2024's produce sales are set to be maintained through this year, Smith said. 'As small farmers, they can't meet the streamlined industrial agriculture price points, but we can come close,' said Katie Nixon, a farmer and the co-director of New Growth Food Systems, which is affiliated with the West Central Missouri Community Action Agency. 'Our quality is usually a lot higher,' Nixon said. 'Lettuce, for example, will last three weeks in the cooler, whereas lettuce coming from greenhouses in God knows where will last a week before they turn to mush.' The Blue Springs School District saw a 40% increase in the use of its cafeteria salad bars after switching to local produce, Smith said. And school districts often find less waste and more savings, despite the slightly higher price when purchasing the produce, Nixon said. Research shows that farm-to-school programs, like sourcing local produce and teaching kids about farming, resulted in students choosing healthier options in the cafeteria and eating more fruits and vegetables. Schools also saw an average 9% increase in students eating their meals from the school cafeteria when they participated in farm-to-school programming. During Trump's most recent Cabinet meeting at the White House, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kenendy Jr. said the administration is planning a massive overhaul of the federal school meals program. 'It's going to be simple, it's going to be user friendly. It is going to stress the simplicity of local foods, of whole foods and of healthy foods,' Kennedy said. 'We're going to make it easy for everyone to read and understand.' Auterson and Nixon feel that the cancellation of the program is retribution for those who benefited from policies and funds initiated during the Biden administration. 'They're hurting everyone,' Auterson said. 'Everyone is suffering from them being retributional.' This article first appeared on Beacon: Missouri and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Yahoo
12-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
USDA funding cuts have harsh impact on Connecticut food pantries
NEW LONDON, Conn. (WTNH) — The food choices at the New London Community Meal Center have included more local produce and meats during the past few years. That's because of the federal funding it received from the Local Food Purchase Assistance (LFPA) program, which allowed it to buy directly from local farmers like Stone Acres Farm in Stonington and Long Table Farm in Lyme. IRIS food pantry to keep doors open thanks to new partnership 'We believe that all people should have access to high quality food,' Baylee Drown of the Long Table Farm said. 'The LFPA program has been one the best things that we ever did,' Pete Higgins of Stone Acres Farm added. 'Especially working with the New London Community Meal Center very quickly became one of our largest wholesalers.' But now that federal funding is ending, and so is the $450,000 the New London Community Meal Center had received to help feed the food insecure. '$337,000 of it went for food. The rest was salary to hire a food access coordinator who I've now had to let go,' Maryann Martinez who is the Executive Director of the New London Community Meal Center said. 'We had to cancel our pop-up markets.' 'The rationale that the Trump administration gave is that this money is just unsustainable in the federal budget,' Congressman Joe Courtney, (D-CT 2) noted. News8 reached out to the White House for comment as well. 'Congress is going to be working on a reconciliation budget. The farm bill is overdue for passage so there might be an opportunity for congress to put money back in the budget or work with USDA to reauthorize those dollars,' Commissioner of the CT Department of Agriculture Brian Hurlburt said. Hurlburt, along with those who grow the food and eat it, would like to see the program continue. The meal center serves up more than 300 meals a day, which is about 90,000 a year. 'With the fresh produce I see it come in there all the time so who knows you know,' New London resident Joel Stinson said. 'But I think they figure out ways to handle it. So I'm hoping.' Meals will still be served even if funding cuts mean the menu will look a little different. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
