In the wake of the COVID pandemic in 2021, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced the Local Food Purchase Assistance program.
“The intent of the program initially was to insert money into the local food economy," said Natalie Loots, the community food security program manager with the Utah Department of Health and Human Services.
According to Loots, the program provided money to farmers from disadvantaged groups, including farmers of color, new farmers, young farmers, veterans, and low income farmers. The farmers used the money to grow fresh produce for local food pantries and people in need.
Statistics from the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service show that the program disbursed over $700 million across all 50 states, including 2.7 million to Utah.
Jessica Miller is the chief impact officer at Community Action Services and Food Bank, an organization that used about $1 million from the Local Food Purchase Assistance program to distribute food to 130,000 hungry Utahns. She said that it’s almost unheard of for food pantries to distribute fresh, local produce.
"We’ll get grocery rescue that will provide produce," Miller said, "but it's often on its last leg, and so it's not the fresh straight-from-the-farm produce that we were getting through the LFPA program."
The LFPA program was a radical departure from most food aid initiatives, which tend to distribute processed, shelf-stable food items rather than fresh produce.
"To my knowledge," Miller continued, "this is the first program, definitely that we've been a part of, that has allowed us to do that.”
In Utah, the DHHS partnered with various community organizations and small farmers around the state to serve Utahns in need. According to official data, the program has helped to deliver almost half a million pounds of food to 234,000 food-insecure Utahns.
The program was instrumental in helping many food security nonprofits find their feet. One such organization is the Village Cooperative. Darin Mann, the cooperative's founder, started growing food in his own garden in 2019 and distributing to people in his community suffering from food insecurity.
Mann said that the LFPA program provided funds for the Village Cooperative to expand its services for communities and people on a much larger scale.
“Three years ago, I applied for the LFPA program," Mann said. "We started to coordinate with all these different farms, including our own gardens and Wasatch Community Gardens, and then we would distribute that to our own network of people who signed up for our program. We had a partnership with the Khadeeja Islamic Center; they were one of our biggest partners, where we would show up every Friday at the mosque and give out food to people who signed up for that program."
Without the LFPA program, the Village Cooperative would not have been able to support a dedicated team necessary for this sort of community enrichment.
“The LFPA program really allowed us to grow and start to pay staff and make sure we had somebody on retainer that could maintain the gardens, maintain the quality of the product,” explained Mann.
Despite its early success, the federally-funded program was brought to a sudden halt by the incoming Trump administration in early 2025.
Andy Ollove is the food access program director at Fresh Approach, a California nonprofit dedicated to fostering connections between farmers and communities. He said that in February 2025, “the Trump administration froze all currently running LFPA programs, essentially not paying out already contracted money.”
Ollove explained that while major grassroots advocacy from farmers unfroze the contracted funds, the next wave of food purchase assistance programming, which would have distributed $500 million through 2028, was cancelled.
“That means the majority of states have already gone through all of their funding and they're done," Ollove said. "In California, we have a couple more months, but certainly in the coming months, there will be no more LFPA dollars flowing through.”
Ollove said that the loss of this program will be a huge blow to local farms around the nation.
“For the last few years, it meant so much to the farmers participating, not because it was a handout, but because it was a promised, contracted sale that farmers could look forward to for months at a time or a whole season, and with that insurance of a contract, the farmers we know in the food hubs were reinvesting it into their business," he explained.
This reinvestment into local business meant that the money paid out by the program had a major lasting effect.
“We know through studies that $1 into this program was actually closer to $2 of public investment in the way the dollar circulated through small local economies," Ollove said. "So, this program was economic stimulus.”
Here in Utah, the program's cancellation will force some nonprofits and farmers to reduce the scope of their operations.
“We at the Village Cooperative are hit very hard," Mann said. "I don't know if we're going to be able to survive. If we don't get the support we need, we'll probably have to close our doors. Because we're not big industrial producers.”
Mann said that local farmers are not supported by subsidies, bailouts, and trade promotion mechanisms the government uses to prop up larger, industrial operations.
“They have huge amounts of infrastructure and grants they receive from the federal government, whereas your local organic farmers don't really have those apparatuses available to them," he said. "That's why this local food production grant was so revolutionary and helpful to local Utah farmers.”
Local Food Purchase Assistance funds were crucial for some new farmers. The program’s cancellation means those farms will likely go under, right as they approached economic viability.
Jacob Kjenstad started farming in backyards and vacant lots around Ogden in 2022. His farm, Backyard Harvest Co., was awarded $97,000 to distribute produce to food-insecure folks around Ogden. The money provided stability for the farm, but now the LFPA cancellation means Backyard Harvest Co. will be forced to close.
“I mean, this is kind of the end of it for us,” Kjenstad said. He said that one more year of grant funding may have been enough for the farm to build the momentum needed to stay viable.
“The first two years, we were trying to build the gardens and working other jobs to pay our bills," he explained. "With the grant, we were able to focus fully on the farms and then they flourished for the first time, really the best they had done in three years, because we were able to spend the time on them that they needed. That's kind of the worst part about it.”
A recent appropriation sponsored by Utah State Sen. Kirk Cullimore has provided about $630,000 to keep the program afloat at the state level for now. There is also some hope that the program will be supported through the federal Farm Bill.
Regardless of whether the program continues to receive state or federal support further into the future, Natalie Loots said that the success of the program and massive hole left by its cancellation both point towards the need for supporting community agriculture.
“To me, it attests to the need that there is in our state for supporting local, small producers and also getting access to fresh, local, culturally appropriate foods to low income, food-insecure communities," Loots said. "I think it just became glaringly obvious that the need exists.”