Over the past two years, Kristy Allen sent around 3,000 pounds of honey to the St. Croix Valley Food Bank in northwest Wisconsin.
Allen runs The Beez Kneez in Burnett County, where she sells honey and bees and teaches bee-keeping classes. She participated in the Wisconsin Local Food Purchase Assistance Program, which paid Wisconsin farmers to produce food for local pantries and other organizations working to combat hunger. Without the program, she said, she couldn’t have afforded to give that much honey to a food bank. She was paid $25,000 the first year and $15,000 the second year to do so.
It wasn’t just a financial win — it was a gratifying one, too. She got a handwritten note from a woman across the state who had received her honey and wanted to express gratitude for Allen’s hard work.
On March 7, the U.S. Department of Agriculture terminated the program, which was part of a nationwide effort to support local farmers, feed under-resourced communities and increase the resiliency of the food supply chain. In the letter canceling the program, USDA Deputy Administrator Jack Tuckwiller wrote that it “no longer effectuates agency priorities.”
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During the 2023-’24 growing season, 289 Wisconsin farms participated in the program, providing $4.2 million worth of food to more than 250 pantries and schools, according to a news release about the termination from the Wisconsin Farmers Union, which was a program partner.
Using the money from the program, Allen was able to hire a part-time employee to help her with the physically demanding work of beekeeping. With that income now disappearing, she’s unsure if she can keep that person on.
“This idea that there’s waste, fraud and abuse — there was no evidence of that,” Allen said, referring to President Donald Trump’s push to drastically reduce the size and reach of the federal government. “Having a dependable market that supports a healthy society seems like a no-brainer to me.”
Hundreds of pantries got fresh, nutritious food
The program was seen as a win-win by those who used it: visitors to food pantries got fresh, nutritious food, and farmers got a stable source of cash to help meet their bottom line.
Vang Xiong holds a regular beet and a golden beet grown on his and Vang ThaoÕs farm Tuesday, July 9, 2024, at 4615 Pleasant Hill Road in Richfield, Wis. Thao and Xiong are apart of the Wisconsin’s Local Food Purchase Assistance Program which helps small farmers grow their business by contracting them with food pantries to provide fresh local produce. Some of the items they give to the Hunger Task Force are green beans, tomatoes, bell peppers, kale and cabbage.
Some of Wisconsin’s major food banks, like Feeding Wisconsin and Milwaukee’s Hunger Task Force, participated, supplying the fresh food to their own networks of pantries. Jackie Anderson, executive director of Feeding Wisconsin, said in the news release that the elimination of the program was especially disheartening during a time of “significantly increased” need for food bank services. More than 617,000 Wisconsin residents are food-insecure, according to Feeding America.
The food pantry at Stepping Stones of Dunn County used the program to provide about 50,000 pounds of food to its clients, said food pantry manager Angie Wolf, including apples, lettuce, corn, radishes, beets and fresh beef and pork.
Like the statewide hunger statistics, need for its service has increased. The pantry feeds more than 11% of Dunn County, which is one of the poorer counties in Wisconsin and largely rural. The benefits of being able to provide its clients with fresh, healthy food was “enormous,” Wolf said, and being able to pay local farmers for their work was meaningful.
If the pantry can afford to continue that going forward, she said, it will be at a much smaller scale.
“To build (this program) up and then take it away has been pretty devastating,” she said.
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Besides financial support for farmers, the program also taught them about how to expand to bigger markets.
Tenzin Botsford runs Red Door Family Farm in Athens, a small village just north of central Wisconsin. He used the program to scale up his farm’s operations and ensure a steady supply of peppers, tomatoes, cilantro, carrots and other vegetables to United Way of Marathon County’s Hunger Coalition, including culturally important foods for the area’s Hmong and Hispanic populations.
Bell peppers are one of vegetables grown on Vang Xiong and Vang Thao’s farm in Richfield. They were destined for Hunger Task Force.
When Botsford received word that the program had been canceled, he’d already bought seeds and started to plant. The loss will put a significant dent in his income, he said.
Almost 40% of the producers picked to receive funding last year were Black, Indigenous and other people of color, more than half were new or beginning farmers, and 42% of the farms are women-owned. It was in part aimed at giving historically marginalized groups a leg up in the world of agriculture, which remains overwhelmingly white and male.
The money for the program was set to be used up in June, but advocates were hoping it wouldn’t be the end of the road. Responding to its termination, Gov. Tony Evers said the Trump administration was “turning their backs on America’s Dairyland and betraying our farmers.”
USDA has said the program’s current contracts can be finished and that it will be canceled after that.
“It’s unconscionable to me to drop the ball that hard for people who are living on such thin margins,” Botsford said. “It breaks my heart, and really makes me wonder how much pain is going to end up being caused by trying to do politics this way.”
Madeline Heim is a Report for America corps reporter who writes about environmental issues in the Mississippi River watershed and across Wisconsin. Contact her at 920-996-7266 or mheim@gannett.com.
This story was updated to add a video.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Farmers and food banks reel from USDA’s program termination
