By Jennifer Junghans

In Yolo County, families and individuals experiencing food insecurity can show up at one of Yolo Food Bank’s roughly 60 monthly distributions at 21 locations to receive fresh produce, dairy, meat, bread and nonperishable items nearly every day of the year. 

“In our county, we’re feeding one-third of the people that live here,” says Karen Baker, executive director of the Yolo Food Bank, noting another third is probably on the borderline. Beyond distributions, the food bank partners with 62 small nonprofits, such as the UC Davis Pantry, Woodland Food Closet and Meals on Wheels, to distribute food to 30,000 of the county’s nearly 77,000 households. According to the food bank’s Yolo County Food Access Survey Report, just under 30% of households in the county are food insecure.

“The need that we have for fresh produce is pretty intense because anytime you come to a distribution, I’m going to hand you a sack of fresh produce and a sack of shelf stable. … You’re going to get 45 pounds worth of groceries,” Baker says.

To meet the demand, the food bank depended in part on funds from the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, established by the Biden administration during the pandemic in 2021 to strengthen local food supply chains, while investing in small to mid-scale farmers “with a focus on buying from historically underserved producers.” 

But on March 10, the United States Department of Agriculture terminated the LFPA program as well as the Local Food for Schools and Child Care Cooperative Agreement program, stating they no longer aligned with the new priorities of the agency. The programs provided more than $1 billion in federal dollars to tribal governments and state agencies, which trickled down to food banks and schools to purchase fresh produce from small, local farmers.

At the time of the USDA’s announcement, the terminations ended all payments immediately. But an outcry from farmers prompted the federal government to reinstate the programs’ current funding cycle. As of May 20, California still had nearly $57 million to spend of the $88.5 million it was allocated under LFPA and $214,000 of the $23 million under LFS. But the 2025 funding cycle remains canceled. 

Local food stakeholders are left to speculate what the final outcome will be. Will the programs be reinstated with language that better aligns with the agency’s priorities, or will other programs take their place? Will the USDA’s Farmers First: Small Family Farms Policy Agenda announced in late May that aims to address many of the challenges small farmers face be enough? Without a clear way forward, farmers, schools, food banks and distribution hubs — those who focus on feeding people, including the most food insecure — must scramble to develop a plan B. 

Partnering locally

In 2021, Hope Sippola and Shayne Zurilgen, co-owners of Fiery Ginger Farm, a 2-acre regenerative farm in West Sacramento, established the Spork Food Hub in Davis to respond to the challenges local school districts were experiencing with food supply chains in the heart of the pandemic. 

Today, the food hub pools fresh produce from roughly 70 California small farms, working as an intermediary between farmers and large institutions, including school districts, universities, hospitals and food banks that regularly place large orders to feed the people they serve. Most of Spork’s growers are within 50 miles of Davis, with a few located on the coast and in the Central Valley, roughly 200 miles away. That’s well within the Local Food for Schools program’s required radius of 400 miles. That may not feel local, but in the context of produce that often comes from other countries, it is. 

Sporks’ system allows farmers to focus on farming while providing them with ongoing access to these large markets — for a fair price — that they wouldn’t be able to access or supply alone. And institutions receive a reliable supply of fresh, locally grown produce without having to establish direct partnerships with multiple farmers. The streamlined ecosystem puts money in the hands of small farmers, keeping it local and strengthening local food supplies.  

But if schools and food banks are required to work with less or alternate funding, they may have to make difficult choices. Some may have to purchase less. Others may purchase from larger vendors that can provide food sourced from distant farms at a lower cost. And while there are many programs that support food insecurity, not all of them focus on small or local farmers, even though the country quickly learned during the pandemic that staying local is one of the most resilient food chain models we have. 

Jacob Weiss, general manager of Spork Food Hub, anticipates the organization’s revenue gap will be at least $1 million annually if the programs are not reinstated or replaced. In response, the food hub recently hired a salesperson dedicated to finding new customers that could help close the gap they expect to have, he says. “It’s definitely anxiety producing.”

If Spork’s orders decrease, it’ll directly affect the small farmers the food hub purchases from, like Guillermo Lázaro, founder and owner of Ald&Y Organic Farm, an 11-acre farm in Salinas, who sells his strawberries to the Spork Food Hub. Those sales in the last year have contributed roughly 50% of his farm’s income, with the remainder coming from farmers’ markets. 

Lázaro grew up farming with his family in Mexico and came to the U.S. to work. Now he owns his certified organic farm, doing what he loves. But marketing his produce is hard, and he doesn’t know how he’ll find new markets if the program terminations decrease orders for his strawberries from Spork Food Hub. 

“I’m a farmer. I just have control about what I’m growing, what I want to do, what I love. … I want to sell a product, but I don’t know: Where do I have to go?” he says. 

Before he connected with Spork, Lázaro knocked on his neighbors’ doors trying to sell his fresh produce. But people didn’t want his product, he says, because it didn’t look perfect. “That’s sad because what I do is natural. I don’t apply pesticides. We certify organic, we follow the rules,” he says. 

But aesthetic standards for fruits and vegetables are deeply ingrained in American culture. Grocery stores reject seconds — produce that’s misshaped, oddly sized or colored, or blemished — so consumers don’t often see what naturally produced food can really look like, or the love that goes into growing it. 

Children grow up with these standards too, so Spork typically doesn’t accept seconds for orders that’ll be served directly in school salad bars. But some school districts will accept them (at a discounted price) if the appearance isn’t too irregular or damaged or they’ll use them as ingredients for making sauces and soups, for example. Spork also works with a local processor who can cut and chop seconds, if farmers have them. 

And if he has to, Lázaro will knock on people’s doors again, but “I don’t want to do that anymore,” he says. 

“The real challenge is that there just aren’t a lot of easy markets that pay farmers fair prices for what they’re producing,” says Paul Towers, executive director of Community Alliance with Family Farmers, based in Davis. That’s what was unique about the LFPA program, he adds. 

California’s LFPA funds are managed by a partnership between the California Association of Food Banks, Fresh Approach and Community Alliance with Family Farmers under the Farms Together program. The partnership actively seeks out and connects some of the most struggling farmers with market opportunities that feed some of the most vulnerable and food-insecure families, says Towers. The program has supported 533 California farms, 35 food hubs, and 55 food banks and community food distribution partners.

A need for new markets

Yolo Food Bank spent a little more than half of its first LFPA payment of $750,000 to procure seasonal produce, such as broccoli, lettuce, cauliflower, red cabbage and tomatillos from Spork Food Hub, says Baker. Those funds made up roughly 15% of the food bank’s annual operating budget of $5.1 million.

The food bank was expecting another $750,000 payment from LFPA that it will no longer receive. Simultaneously, it’s dealing with the loss or reduction of other funding streams, including American Rescue Plan dollars, proposed cuts to California’s CalFood program, donated food from the USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation and fluctuation in food donations from grocery recovery under Senate Bill 1383, as grocers better track and adjust what they order, reducing the amount of food they discard and donate to food recovery organizations, such as food banks. The food bank expects to receive roughly 6 million pounds of food this year and purchase another 3 million with federal Emergency Food Assistance Program funds.

To offset the losses, the food bank is expanding into new programs. In 2024, it received funding from River City Bank’s Kelly Foundation to launch its Harvest Program to pay local farmers to plant additional rows of crops that food bank volunteers will harvest at an affordable price. The food bank plans to expand the program by 5-10 new farmers each month. 

And recently, it secured $1 million in funding from the Sacramento Region Community Foundation. Of this amount, roughly half will go to expand the food bank’s Harvest Program over the next three years, and the remaining funds will provide food boxes to families in Esparto and Winters every month for two years, in addition to funding a study on culturally appropriate food. 

But Baker says that still won’t be enough to make ends meet. The food bank will still have an annual deficit of about $2 million, she says. 

“We will not have enough resources. It’s that simple. Now we are doing all we can to educate the community about the fact that this food bank has now become completely dependent on our neighbors to figure out how we’re going to be able to meet the need,” she says. 

Ultimately, Baker says the food bank may have to reduce the amount of food it gives to people, shrinking what each family receives from 45 to 35 pounds, followed by closing some of its distributions. 

Local food in schools

Natomas Unified School District received $101,000 in Local Food for Schools funding for the 2023-2024 school year and quickly spent it in the first reporting period. The district — which focuses on scratch cooking and buying local food for the roughly 10,000 meals it serves students a day — purchased $567,000 of produce from Spork Food Hub. That represents 65% of its budget allocated for produce. And for the 2024-2025 school year — with no funding from LFS — the district purchased $1.2 million in produce from Spork. 

Jennifer Orosco, executive director of Nutrition Services & Warehouse for Natomas Unified says, regardless of funding, they’ll continue to move toward purchasing local food, and notes funds from LFS didn’t have a giant effect on their program. But she acknowledges additional funding definitely helps and allows them to justify purchases and offset costs of additional local produce or higher quality products, such as local regenerative beef. 

When Weiss, of Spork Food Hub, was growing up, he recalls school food was thought of as really bad and says there wasn’t a lot of dignity in those types of jobs. 

“What we have tried to do at Spork in collaboration with a lot of these organizations is turn that on its head,” he says. “This is an incredibly important space to be feeding people … and there’s a lot of opportunity to do things differently and I think LFS helps catalyze some of that.” 

It gives districts funds to try out new foods, says Weiss, and he’s found that when schools purchase in large volumes or plan ahead with Spork, the food hub can be competitive on price because farmers can be more flexible with consistent markets. 

And serving children healthy food is an investment in their futures, he says. “It’s getting at health care costs that are just a downstream cost. And you have kids who are doing better in school, they’re getting in trouble less,” noting many children get most of their calories for the day at school. “If you can give them healthy calories and not frozen pizza … and soda, train them to eat healthy food at a young age, you’re solving a lot of problems that arise later in life,” says Weiss.

Soil Born Farms in Rancho Cordova, which empowers youth and adults to participate in local food systems through its urban agriculture curriculums, echoes that philosophy. “Feeding our kids is about as important as it gets,” says Shawn Harrison, Soil Born’s founder and co-director. 

Through a California Department of Food and Agriculture grant, Soil Born sells 800 to 1,000 heads of lettuce every week during the school year directly to Sacramento City Unified School District’s Central Kitchen. Its mix of red, green, butter and romaine lettuce replaced what the district was purchasing from Yuma, Arizona. While the district received funding from the Local Food for Schools program, it was less than 1% of its $40 million annual budget. 

The termination of the LFS program hasn’t affected Soil Born yet, but Harrison says it could if schools need to adjust their budgets or purchases. Soil Born has generated between $54,000 and $68,000 in annual revenue from the partnership, about a third of its food production revenue, says Harrison, who envisions this partnership as the first of many. 

But partnerships like these require a tremendous investment of time and resources for farms and institutions, and there’s lots of trial and error to develop a product and a system that serves the target market, explains Harrison, who emphasizes how critical reliable funding is to these endeavors. It’s not a simple pivot if it doesn’t pan out.  

Harrison says Soil Born is prepared to subsidize the partnership further to keep it going, but also notes that if the market changes, they’d have to change their business model. “That’s a big commitment on our part as a farm and we’d have to find other opportunities,” he says. “These are big moves for small farmers,” who can’t survive as agendas change from administration to administration, he says. 

“It’s a really tough landscape to be starting a new farm, but programs like LFS and LFPA, they help increase our ability. They help increase schools’ and food banks’ willingness to buy things from local farms … And in turn, that’s where the money’s going … to this next generation of folks, who, some of them came here as farm workers. They worked on farms, figured out how to do it themselves, and they started their own farm. It’s like an original American dream story that some of these funds are supporting,” Weiss says. “That’s real benefits for real people.”’

This story is part of the Solving Sacramento journalism collaborative. Our partners include California Groundbreakers, Capital Public Radio, Hmong Daily News, Outword, Russian America Media, Sacramento Business Journal, Sacramento News & Review and Sacramento Observer. Support stories like these here, and sign up for our monthly newsletter.