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Today, many contributions to food banks are not rejects from retail but fresh-picked from local farms. The farm-to-food-bank movement is helping fight hunger in Virginia, where 10% of the population is food-insecure.

Lettuce, turnips and beets — oh my! Vegetables and flowers sprout side by side in a bountiful garden in Northside Richmond. But the harvest is not going to a grocery store or market stand. Instead, all of the crops will be donated to local food banks so low-income communities have access to fresh foods.

The Kroger Community Kitchen Garden, situated within Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, is a major contributor to Feed More, the parent organization for food banks and other agencies fighting hunger in 34 counties and cities in Central Virginia.

In the past, food banks relied on nonperishable donations from supermarkets and other businesses. Today, many of the contributions are not rejects from retail but fresh picked from local farms.

Farm-to-food-bank programs bring healthier options to people facing “food insecurity” — living without means or access to nutritious food. Such programs also offer producers an alternative market for the fruit and vegetables they have grown.

A national organization called Feeding America partners with food banks across the state, including Feed More in Richmond and the Blue Ridge Area Food Bank in Charlottesville, to create a network of hunger relief. Annie Andrews, director of operations at Feed More, said the movement has redefined the support food banks can provide for struggling communities.

“Ten, 15 years ago, food banks were reliant on shelf stable product; you looked at it as a pantry. We’ve absolutely converted to fresh and perishable food,” Andrews said.

The need for food is not solved by a corner store that sells chips and hot dogs. Farm-to-food-bank programs aim to supply better quality food that doesn’t just fill hungry bellies but also provides nutrition to prevent health problems.

Last year, Feed More received nearly $45 million in donated food — almost 30 million pounds of groceries. While retailers contributed more than 60%, about 12% came directly from growers. Produce accounted for 29% of all donated food.

Greg Knight, food sourcing manager for the Blue Ridge Area Food Bank, said most people who rely on food banks are not unemployed but rather underemployed. Often, they must choose between which basic needs they can afford, he said.

“We hear from clients that sometimes they have to make decisions between ‘Is it going to be gasoline today, or will it be groceries? Will it be the medication that my son or daughter needs, or will it be groceries or the electric bill?’” Knight said.

“There’s not enough funds to cover the immediate basic needs — so that’s where we step in. At least we can provide a good supplemental box of food that will then be nutritious and alleviate some of the other pressures.”

The state and federal governments have encouraged farmers to help out.

In 2016, Virginia instituted a tax credit as an incentive for farmers to donate crops to regional, nonprofit food banks. In exchange for the donation, farmers receive a 30% tax credit equal to the market value up to $5,000 yearly.

Knight said the tax credit is a great way to support farmers and provide food for those in need.

“What I’m paying for the box is only a portion of what the farmer would get at market. So he can take the difference between the two — market price and what I’m paying — and that difference then becomes a donation for him,” Knight said.

On the national level, Congress passed the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 to allocate $867 billion in subsidies over the next 10 years to support farmers harmed by fluctuating markets or poor harvests. The food purchased by the U.S. Department of Agriculture from farmers is often resold to food banks like Feed More at a reduced cost.

Community plants seeds for change

The USDA reported that since 2012, about 10% of households in Virginia qualified as “food insecure.” Andrews said the definition of that term is constantly evolving and varies by area.

In a densely populated urban area, she said, it means “there are no grocery stores within a mile.” But in a rural area, food insecurity (or a “food desert”) means “there’s not a grocery store within 10 miles,” Andrews added.

“The gentrification of cities coming into play and people moving into the suburbs — that’s where you’re kind of pushing some of that working poor out,” Andrews said. She said Feed More is seeing a rising need for help in the suburbs — “what you wouldn’t think of as a food insecurity area.”

The Kroger Community Kitchen Garden at Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden and Shalom Farms in Midlothian are among the biggest farm donors to Feed More.

Laurel Matthew, senior horticulturist at Lewis Ginter, oversees the community garden and decides what to grow in collaboration with Feed More.

“We have six varieties of summer squash. We have four varieties of eggplant. Lettuce, beans, peas, you name it — we’re trying to get it in the ground,” Matthew said.

The Kroger Community Kitchen Garden is an urban gardening program that has harvested and donated over 50,000 pounds of produce to Feed More since it began in 2009.

The community garden is one-third acre, funded in part by Kroger Mid-Atlantic under the company’s “Zero Hunger | Zero Waste” initiative. A volunteer base of 700 worked last year with on-staff horticulturalists to practice organic management of the garden and sustain a healthy harvest for the food bank.

Food banks tackle food-related health disparities

Feed More’s agency network involves almost 300 nonprofit organizations such as soup kitchens and emergency shelters. Healthy Harvest Food Bank joined the network in 2010 and last year became Feed More’s first Partner Distribution Organization, which aims to distribute food across 24 of Virginia’s rural agencies. The agency network distributed 19.3 million pounds of food during the past fiscal year.

Healthy Harvest Food Bank serves 12,000 people every month through 25 locations across six counties. In 2012, the food bank conducted a survey and found that 32% of its clients had diabetes.

The food bank partnered with Northern Neck-Middlesex Free Health Clinic and Virginia Cooperative Extension to begin a Healthy Food Pharmacy to teach clients with Type 2 diabetes how to prepare flavorful, nutritious meals to combat health issues. Participants in the eight-week class on average lowered their blood pressure by 17% and low-density lipoproteins cholesterol by 26%. (LDL is considered “bad” cholesterol because of its artery-clogging properties.)

Mark Kleinschmidt, president and CEO of Healthy Harvest Food Bank, said the Northern Neck and Upper Middle Peninsula region suffers from a culture of genetics and a lack of resources to escape the health crisis trap.

“We got a Food Lion and a Walmart, and there’s not that healthy options to eat at whatsoever,” Kleinschmidt said.

He said people want to eat healthy foods but often can’t.

“For one, it’s not available. And two, it’s a cost issue,” Kleinschmidt said. “I think there is always going to be this issue. The Northern Neck will never be big enough to have a Kroger or a Harris Teeter or a Wegman that does have healthier options.”

Legislation to create the Virginia Grocery Investment Program and Fund was introduced to the General Assembly this session. It aimed to provide financial incentives for grocery stores to expand in food deserts.

After passing unanimously in the Senate, the bill died in the House of Delegates. A similar House bill was killed in a House subcommittee early in the session.

Food banks rescue food from waste

According to the USDA, 30-40% of food is wasted in the U.S. annually. Grocery chains such as Lidl have joined the movement against food waste by selling 10-pound crates of “ugly” produce for $2. Food banks are incorporating the “ugly food” movement into their means of sourcing quality food for people living in food insecure areas.

The Mid-Atlantic Regional Cooperative was created by Feeding America and stretches from New England to Virginia, providing nearly 1.5 million pounds of produce to food banks each month. The cooperative works to minimize food waste by purchasing “ugly,” rejected food at a large produce market. That produce is then sold back to a network of 23 food banks, including Feed More, for a reduced price.

Andrews said the rescued, unsold produce purchased from large companies along the East Coast saves the stores money, reduces food waste and increases food bank access to resources.

“We offer the opportunity for [grocery stores] not to have an increased trash bill and to be able to do something good with the things that they aren’t able to use and sell,” Andrews said.

By Kathleen Shaw and Corrine Fizer, Capital News Service. Top photo: Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden’s Kroger Community Garden, by Kathleen Shaw

With another potential shutdown looming, concerns over tax refunds, food stamps, and adequate housing for the state’s low-income residents are still significant.

The federal government’s 34-day partial shutdown – the longest in US history – impacted more than 64,000 federal workers in Virginia, the sixth most affected state. Wage loss totaled about $381 million just three weeks into the shutdown. Local agencies who work to house and feed low income communities saw the effects on these individuals firsthand.

Housing Families First works to provide shelter, safety and stability to those displaced by homelessness. The agency’s services include emergency shelters for families with children, a permanent housing program called “Rapid Rehousing,” and a hotline designed to connect people in need with a network of organizations.

“At the end of the day, it’s all about helping families get to stay in a permanent home,” said Beth Vann-Turnbull, executive director of Housing Families First.

Vann-Turnbull says that although most of their clients are not federal workers, the shutdown has sparked an increased insecurity surrounding the continued benefits of food stamps.

“Because of the shutdown, the February assistance was issued in January, and they asked people to stretch that through February,” she said.

The government could potentially resume its shutdown status on February 15, leaving people’s ability to access food stamps uncertain.

“In early February, the food stamp issue is ‘will be getting them?’” Vann-Turnbull said. “[Their absence] truly would create a crisis. People were already accessing food banks at a much higher rate.”

Doug Pick, CEO of the local food assistance agency Feed More, confirmed.

“Quantitatively, we have seen a 58 percent increase in hunger hotline calls in the last week,” he said in an interview conducted in the last days of the shutdown.

Feed More also hosted a pop-up food distribution for federal workers who were furloughed or working without pay.

“With only two days notice and one paycheck missed, we helped out 83 households,” Pick said. “We intend to do another one on Friday [January 25]. My guess is the same folks will come back, and word of mouth and a second missed paycheck will swell those numbers.”

Vann-Turnbull also worried that a prolonged shutdown would affect the processing of applications for new recipients of food stamps.

“That creates a great deal of stress for our families trying to budget food stamps, not knowing if they’re going to get them or when,” she said. “So that’s a very direct impact on many of the families we work with right now, trying to help them stabilize.”

Clients of Housing Families First are also concerned about the prospect of a delayed issuance of the earned income tax credit as part of their federal tax returns for this year. The IRS has made assurances that the government shutdown would not delay income tax processing for 2019, but the first weeks of tax season have seen the government processing refunds more slowly than usual.

Meanwhile, with the impending threat of another shutdown on February 15, experts are warning taxpayers to file as quickly as possible in order to avoid returns potentially being even further delayed.

“A lot of our families are looking forward to and depending on getting that refund to sustain them for several months going forward,” Vann-Turnbull said. “That supplemental income is a lot of concern to our families. If they don’t get that income tax refund, how will they make ends meet? It ends up being that little boost that really helps people make it through the rest of the year.”

Housing Families First is largely dependent – more than half of their million dollar budget – on the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The department was closed during the shutdown.

“Our grant [from HUD] for this year was already open and running, and that’s how we’ve been able to access it, through an electronic system,” said Vann-Turnbull. “However, if at some point over time HUD’s electronic system gets shut down, or can’t be fixed if it has a bug and there’s nobody there to to fix it, that would cause immense stress and a cash flow crunch to us. We would have to choose between not paying rent that we’ve committed to… or continuing to lay out money and not have it reimbursed promptly.”

The threat of the government shutting down again in February continues to leave Virginia’s most vulnerable populations in a lull of uncertainty and financial anxiety.

“For our families who are trying to get back on their feet, they have budgets that don’t have room for error, and don’t have room for food stamps or tax refunds to really be delayed,” said Vann-Turnbull. “That’s where it’s really been stressful in trying to plan for the unknown. It’s hard.”

Photo via Feed More

Farms Feed Food Banks to Fight Hunger

The Government Shutdown Is Over (For Now), But Its Effects On Virginia Remain