October is National Farm to School Month, and the Department of Agriculture has announced new efforts to improve students’ access to high-quality food in Maryland and across the country.
While the typical approach to school food procurement focuses on cost, USDA will partner with the nonprofit Urban School Food Alliance to provide training and technology to school districts to help improve the quality of school food. The partnership aims to bring regional farmers into the mix.
Katie Wilson, the alliance’s executive director, said this would require some new approaches.
“There are a lot of rules and regulations from the federal, state and local level,” Wilson pointed out. “But in many cases, these rules and regulations are not conducive to buying local, buying fresher food. And so we really want to look at what are the best practices in school food supply that we can take up and share with people across the country. “
Wilson explained that the project will last three years with an option for a fourth. After an initial stage looking at different practices in the country, they will develop pilot programs to test new methods. The program will ultimately identify necessary regulatory reforms around the food supply.
The program seeks to shorten supply chains by bringing produce from local farms into school cafeterias. Farm-to-school programs sometimes include such arrangements, but also focus on nutrition education, nature exploration, and engagement with food production systems.
The Baltimore City School District owns and operates Great Kids Farm, a 33-acre urban farm with a stream, woods, beds and greenhouses, and provides hands-on learning for students.
Wilson noted that Baltimore Public Schools is an alliance partner and their farm-to-school program is a model for other districts.
“They have a fantastic program,” Wilson emphasized. “They’ve done a really great job with the Farm to School program and expanded it themselves. Because they knew it was in the best interest of their community and their children. They compost a little at the farm for cool kids. They are an excellent model that shows what can be done.”
The Great Children’s Farm hosts thousands of Baltimore City students on field trips each year and engages thousands more with outreach programs where farm educators visit classrooms. They also run summer camps and have a small paid summer internship program for students.
get more stories like this by email
The still-looming threat of a federal government shutdown and chaos in Congress have sidelined negotiations on the farm bill.
Ohio food banks said uncertainty surrounding federal funding for food banks and nutrition programs is compounding struggles to meet demand. The deadline to reauthorize the nation’s largest food and agriculture legislative package was last month.
Jessica Semachko, director of advocacy and public education for the Greater Cleveland Food Bank, said this past year her organization served nearly 350,000 Northeast Ohioans in six counties, a significant increase from 2021. She stressed that in order to works with a large volume of food banks need reliable financing.
“We cannot afford the cost of uncertainty from the threat of another shutdown and the lack of a bipartisan agreement to fund critical federal government programs and services to be borne by vulnerable Americans,” Semachko said.
Rising fuel prices and higher food prices are further straining food banks’ ability to meet demand. According to the Ohio Association of Food Banks, in a three-month period in 2022, the state’s pantries served more than 2 million people.
The farm bill also covers the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, and other critical nutrition programs. Although food banks were asked to fill the gap when emergency SNAP distributions ended earlier this year, Semachko noted that pantries are not meant to replace a strong food safety net, adding that food banks only provide one meal for every nine meals that SNAP provides.
“Our concern is really about the affordability of food,” Semachko explained. “And it’s really a partnership between food banks and other federal food programs so that we can persevere when families, seniors, people with disabilities are facing hunger.”
According to the nonprofit Feeding America, the federal emergency food assistance program funded through the Farm Bill will provide 1 billion meals to low-income households nationwide in 2022.
Disclosure: The Ohio Food Bank Association contributes to our reporting fund on budget policy and priorities, hunger/food/nutrition, living wages/working families and poverty issues. If you want to help support public interest news, click here.
get more stories like this by email
Anti-hunger groups are calling for a fair shake in the upcoming farm bill, which provides federal matching funds for programs that help low-income families afford fresh produce.
The Market Match program gives Cal Fresh people about $15 per market per day to spend at 270 sites across the state.
Minnie Foreman is the program director for food and agriculture at the nonprofit Berkeley Environmental Center, which runs Market Match.
“In 2022, there were 500,000 transactions,” Foreman said. “Almost $20 million in CalFresh and Market Match spending, primarily to small and medium-sized farmers. So this program has a huge impact on CalFresh shoppers, on farmers and on market operators.”
The current farm bill expired on September 30, and negotiations are underway for a new bill to cover the next five years.
Groups like the Farmers Market for All coalition and the Alliance for California Farmers Markets are asking Congress to fund programs like Market Match across the country.
Andy Naja-Riese is CEO of the nonprofit Agricultural Institute of Marin (AIM), which operates farmers markets.
He said the feds should prioritize programs with proven results, not make them compete for funds with newer programs.
“We are advocating that our elected officials support this step-by-step approach,” Naja-Riese said, “so that programs like those in California and across the country can continue to operate successful innovative programs like Market Match.”
On Sunday, anti-hunger groups gathered at AIM’s Clement Street Market in San Francisco for its tenth anniversary to honor Rep. Phil Ting — D-San Francisco — who wrote the bill in 2015 that created the Market program Match.
Ting said he has enough money to keep going — for now.
“With the Market Match program,” Ting said, “we did $35 million this last year’s budget to hopefully see us through another year or two before we have to ask for more money.”
get more stories like this by email
This year’s Food to Power Harvest Festival marks 10 years since Colorado Springs residents launched a food rescue project to bring fruits and vegetables to areas of the city without accessible grocery stores.
Patience Kabwasa, executive director of Food to Power, said the fun and fundraising event slated for September 23 will help fuel a new decade of capacity building for services that are still in high demand. She noted that before the pandemic, one in six Coloradans didn’t know where their next meal would come from. Now the numbers are worse.
“It’s about one in three in Colorado today,” Kabwasa reported. “The need for fresh food is at an all-time high and it just keeps growing.”
This year’s Harvest Festival will be held at the Hillside Community Food Hub, which opened last year. The center is the culmination of six years of working with community residents to envision and create a facility that now includes horticultural education, a production farm, a demonstration kitchen, an event space and a free grocery store.
The grocery program saw a surge in demand after pandemic-related supply chain disruptions, along with claims of price gouging, sent food prices soaring. Kabwasa explained that volunteers collect food from various community partners “just in time” and families receive fresh produce, dairy and meat within 72 hours.
“We partner with various grocery stores and farms and take the surplus that cannot be sold until the expiration date,” Kabwasa emphasized. “We can redistribute that into the community.”
As food insecurity affects families in Colorado, Food to Power’s grassroots organizing model may offer a blueprint for other communities. Kabwasa emphasized that it all starts with identifying what people actually need and then building relationships with food manufacturers, grocery stores and other stakeholders to remove the barriers that separate healthy food from families.
“You can’t do it without the participation of this community,” emphasized Kabwasa. “Being able to hear what the needs are specifically from those community members and mobilize resources based on what you’ve heard.”
get more stories like this by email