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The U.S. Department of Agriculture last week announced that it is eliminating two federal programs that injected more than a million dollars into the Humboldt County economy in recent years to help schools, tribes and Food for People buy meat and produce directly from local farmers, ranchers and fishermen.

With the Trump administration describing the decision as a “return to long-term, fiscally responsible initiatives,” the USDA canceled roughly $660 million that would have gone to schools and child care facilities this year through the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program (LFS), plus about $420 million for a program called the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement (LFPA), which helps food banks, Native American tribes and other groups provide locally cultivated food to their communities. 

Humboldt County residents involved with these programs tell the Outpost that their elimination represents a huge economic blow to farmers and ranchers; meanwhile, many residents, including children, seniors, tribe members and others, will wind up eating less nutritious food that gets shipped here from out of the area.

Carly Robbins, executive director of Food for People, said her organization has been getting about $360,000 per year in funding from the LFPA program, allowing the food bank to buy and distribute more food to low-income residents. 

“Obviously this is a bummer for us,” she said, “and for our clients it means less local produce will get to households.”

One purpose of the USDA’s local food programs was to encourage farmers to increase production, which they could confidently do knowing that their crops would have a buyer.

“Now, farmers may have already planted [this year’s] crop thinking that funding was coming” Robbins said. “It’s a big blow for us … and it’s harmful for the farming community as well.”

In Humboldt and Del Norte counties, most of the federal LFPA funds have flowed through the North Coast Growers’ Association’s Harvest Hub, which connects farmers and ranchers with restaurants, government institutions, food banks and direct sales customers. The USDA also has an LFPA Plus program, which provides funding for tribal governments. It, too, has now been canceled. 

Megan Kenney, the Harvest Hub director for NCGA, explained how the state’s food hubs, like Harvest Hub function.

“So the food hub is that sort of middle entity that has a lot of connections with small scale farmers,” she said. “It [gives purchasers] one point of contact, one delivery that they’re getting, one invoice that they have to track. So it’s a lot more manageable for larger buyers.”

That includes schools. A dozen Humboldt County school districts took advantage of the USDA’s LFS program, collectively receiving $108,400 ahead of the 2022-23 school year to be allocated across multiple years. That represents a small fraction of the $15 million annual budget for school nutrition programs countywide, but the funding played an important role, according to Humboldt County Superintendent of Schools Michael Davies-Hughes.

“One of benefits of locally sourced food, obviously it’s the freshness and quality of food but also that partnership with local farmers,” Davies-Hughes said. “It was a win-win for both farmers and the local community and also for students to receive locally sourced food.”

Free meals are available to public school students countywide, and the LFS funding was distributed based on enrollment numbers, with Eureka City Schools receiving the largest share, $29,800, followed by the McKinleyville Union Elementary School District with $11,400 and 10 other districts receiving less than $10,000 apiece.

“There’s a pretty broad segment of the population that gets affected by these cuts, but it’s disproportionately [impactful] for people living in poverty,” Davies-Hughes said.

In the Hoopa Valley that includes seniors — tribal and non-tribal alike — who have been getting food produced entirely by tribal farmers and ranchers participating in the Hoopa Valley Tribe’s Niwhong-xw K’iwiyul project, financed through the USDA’s LFPA Plus program.

Tribal member Allie Hostler, who works as managing editor of the tribe’s newspaper, the Two Rivers Tribune, and manages the Klamath Trinity Resource Conservation District, was instrumental in developing that project, which used federal funds to purchase thousands of pounds of fruits, vegetables, eggs, pork, beef and poultry from local farmers and ranchers.

One hundred fifty food boxes per week were distributed to participants of the K’ima:w Medical Center’s Senior Nutrition Program. Last week, after Hostler found out that the LFPA Plus program had been axed, she voiced her frustration in a Facebook post:

This program was critical to the development and strengthening of local food economies, creating a resilient supply chain and reducing dependency on food grown on mega farms hundreds of miles away. It was incredibly rewarding to see our food system begin to function as it should — food grown, produced, raised, & gathered here, stayed here. And, small farmers were valued participants in the market.

This giant unilateral cut will permanently scar RURAL FARMERS and RURAL FOOD SYSTEMS!

Watermelons grown as part of the Hoopa Tribe’s LFPA Plus-funded Niwhong-xw K’iwiyul project.

She’s concerned not only about the community’s access to affordable and nutritious food but also about the farmers who’ve come to rely on the program’s funding to keep their farms afloat. Reached by phone, Hostler said the USDA strongly promoted its LFPA programs when they were launched a few years ago and specifically encouraged Native American tribes to participate via LFPA Plus. 

“Joe Davis, who was tribal chair at time, was in Washington, D.C. for another purpose,” Hostler said. “He met some officials with the USDA, who strongly encouraged the [Hoopa Valley Tribe] to apply.”

Hostler wrote the grant request, and USDA awarded the tribe approximately $727,000 to be distributed over two years. (The tribal council unanimously agreed to have the program run by the Klamath Trinity Resource Conservation District.) However, it took a lot of time and effort to get off the ground, so when the Trump administration killed the LFPA Plus program last week only a small percentage of those funds had been used. Hostler said the tribe will never get to spend the rest.

“In essence we lost $600,000 in procurement dollars for local food,” she explained. “We just won’t be able to provide the food boxes at all [anymore], none.” 

She’s worried that elders who can’t afford locally grown, nutrient-dense foods will turn to cheaper, low-quality options. The tribe already experiences high rates of diabetes and cardiovascular diseases due to a lack of access to nutritious food, generational trauma and other social determinants of health.

“But I’m also completely at a loss about what our farmers will do,” Hostler said. “This was a program that we promoted to our farmers after it was promoted to us by the USDA.”

With the Biden administration investing in development of local food economies, the tribe could assure farmers (and aspiring farmers) that they’d have a buyer for their produce. Same with ranchers and their livestock. Now, that system has evaporated.

“I have farmers worried because they’ve already started to plant 2025 crops,” Hostler said. The LFPA Plus program allowed farmers in this rural and remote area to earn a good return on their investments while improving the health of the community.

Hostler noted that roughly half of the Trinity River’s water gets diverted to “big ag” producers in the Central Valley, where much of the water simply evaporates “because of wasteful watering methods.” The food grown in the Valley then has to be shipped to the North Coast in emission-spewing trucks. Hostler lamented what’s now seemingly lost.

“We were creating a system that was less dependent on the corporate agriculture that depletes our water source,” she said. “Plus, it just makes sense. The food was grown here and consumed here. We were building a supply chain, a distribution chain; we were were tackling issues like storage, and delivery days and pricing, etc. It’s just a huge disappointment. I just don’t see how [the new administration] doesn’t see the value in local food systems — because our story not unique. This is everyone’s story.”

Other tribes that participated in the LFPA Plus program include the Karuk, Yurok, Tolowa Dee’-ni, Bear River Rancheria and Blue Lake Rancheria, according to Kenney, the Harvest Hub director. 

Last week, after learning of the program’s cancelation, Blue Lake Rancheria Tribal Chairman Jason Ramos issued a statement to community members, farmers and supporters. He thanked the USDA for its funding, which allowed the tribe to provide fresh food boxes to more than 150 households each month. [DISCLOSURE: The Blue Lake Rancheria is a minority owner of the Outpost’s parent company, Lost Coast Communications, Inc.]

Since the Rancheria launched its program in 2022 it has distributed more than 20,000 pounds of locally grown produce and more than 6,000 pounds of local fish, meat and eggs, Ramos said in his announcement.

“Through this program, we have not only provided fresh food to our community but also strengthened our local food system by supporting small farmers and fisherman, prioritizing purchases from socially disadvantaged producers, and increasing economic opportunities for those growing, catching, and raising food in our region,” the statement says.

With the program’s cancellation, more than $105,000 in anticipated funding to the Rancheria was eliminated. Blue Lake’s food distribution initiative will end after September.

One of the main suppliers of vegetables and beans to the Harvest Hub is Earthly Edibles, a certified organic family farm on 28 acres near Korbel. Owned and operated by Ed Cohen, the farm provided veggies to the local schools that participated in the USDA’s LSA program and to tribes and Food For People via the LFPA and LFPA Plus programs. Earthly Edibles received between $60,000 and $70,000 via those programs last year alone.

“As you might imagine, this is a huge game changer,” Cohen said regarding the end of those initiatives. The funding helped him afford employees raises, which he considers integral to honoring and retaining workers. The cut in funding will be painful.

Broccoli from Earthly Edibles. | Photo courtesy Ed Cohen.

“We’ll weather it, but it’s gonna be a huge blow,” Cohen said.

He’s more worried about the smaller farmers who, like those in Hoopa, have come to rely on USDA programs to finance the Harvest Hub’s wholesale purchases for their crops. Some of those farmers recently bought or leased new land to increase production.

“It will be devastating for them,” Cohen said.

For his own part, Cohen opted to plant fewer specialized crops in favor of increased broccoli and lettuce production because those items were popular staples in USDA-funded programs. He also increased Earthly Edibles’ acreage for growing heirloom beans, which he believes is the only plant-based protein being grown in wholesale volumes within a 150- or 200-mile radius. His farm was in the process of scaling up bean production because of the demand at the Harvest Hub. He’ll now have to rethink some things.

“But for me, the biggest loss is the connection [between] local farmers and those underserved communities — the tribes, the elderly, the senior resource center and our local kids who for years were just getting the kind of commodity, terrible food that I grew up on,” Cohen said. The younger of his two kids is still a student in the local public school system. “They were switching over to locally grown, fresh food. To me, more than my [financial] loss, that affects me the most. That’s hardest for me.”

Kenney said the North Coast Growers’ Alliance does a lot of collective production planning via a nonprofit endeavor called Farms Together, which helps participating wholesale farmers collectively produce crops that align with regional demand. The surprise announcement that these USDA programs are ending will certainly throw some farmers for a loop.

“Like, one of our farms, Green Spiral Farm [in Arcata], just planted an entire greenhouse full of bok choy because of this [LFPA] opportunity,” Kenney said. Now that the program is dead, the farm may struggle to find a buyer.

North Coast Growers’ Alliance initially received notice that all current contracts were frozen, but that directive was later rescinded, with the agency saying only future contracts will be canceled. 

“So we still have about $160,000 in our contract with Food for People,” Kenney said. “Basically, what that means now is that instead of being able to bring them $10,000 [worth] of produce every single week, and really have their clients being able to access this huge variety of whatever they want, we’re probably going to need to significantly reduce our weekly amounts so we can extend the funding for longer.”

The North Coast Growers’ Association worked hard to ramp up local food production with the funding it received through the LFPA and LSA programs. That volume of food production can’t simply be shut off at the drop of a hat — or the whims of a new administration.

“The funding did what it was supposed to do: It really increased the production of all of our smaller scale farms, which are most regenerative farms,” Kenney said. “But they’re also the most vulnerable farms because they don’t have the money to be able to just pay for the seeds and the labor to plant all of these crops [only] to have them not get a return on their dollar.”

That unfortunate outcome may now be inevitable, though.

“I imagine there being probably millions of pounds of produce that are being cultivated right now for this program that aren’t going to have a buyer … ,” Kenney said. “That’s what I see happening to our farmers here on the North Coast as well as across the entire state — well, and entire country, really.”

While the USDA’s local food programs weren’t around for very long — the initiatives began during the pandemic — they brought more than $1 million in federal funding into Humboldt County, where it was reinvested to support local farmers, ranchers and fishermen while improving the diets of children, seniors, low-income residents and other vulnerable populations. 

Nationwide, these programs accounted for about 0.016 percent of the  federal budget.