As the pandemic shut down restaurants this spring, California farmers and ranchers saw their markets drop by half, leaving many with fields full of crops but no buyers. And as millions of people lost their jobs, the state's food banks needed to triple their food supply.
Fortunately for California, the state had a long-standing initiative tailor-made to help with these twin crises. The Farm to Family program, run by the California Association of Food Banks and the state's Department of Food and Agriculture, pays farmers to send surplus produce to food banks.
"All the farmers in California that we work with, they rely on us like we rely on them," said Steve Linkhart, who directs the program. "When some sources dry up, we're still there to take the products they have in excess. During this time, the farmers have really leaned on food banks to be an outlet for their product."
More than a dozen states have similar programs, and many have scaled up their efforts this year. Several other states have created or expanded online marketplaces for their farmers and ranchers as many transition to direct-to-customer sales. The programs are a boon as 17 million Americans face food insecurity as a result of the pandemic, according to Feeding America, a hunger-relief organization.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has launched its own $3 billion effort to buy food from farmers and deliver it to food banks. The program delivered 50 million food boxes by the end of July, but has been plagued by controversial contracts, disparities in distribution and difficulties in the supply chain, according to news reports as the program rolled out. The department did not respond to questions.
In the California program, farmers donate their crops but are reimbursed by the food banks for labor and packaging expenses. Those small payments have been just enough to keep some farmers in business, Linkhart said, though he noted that many small farmers don't have the acreage to make participating worthwhile.
The program had been shipping about 12 million pounds a month before COVID-19, providing food banks with produce such as potatoes, onions, apples, oranges and pears. The volume quickly spiked as high as 18 million pounds during the pandemic's early months, but tapered off as federal supplies arrived. Linkhart said some of the USDA crops were shipped from out of state, and California farmers have been hurt by the reduced demand.
"If food banks can't take more product (from the California program), farmers are going to go out of business," Linkhart said. "That's how much they're actually leaning on us right now. We're doing everything in our power to move their product."
Farmers have teamed up with food banks in other ways as well. California dairy farmers saw half of their market collapse overnight as restaurants and food service operators shut down. Overwhelmed processors with miles-long lines of milk trucks told farmers to start dumping milk.
"That is extremely depressing for a dairy farmer," said Anja Raudabaugh, CEO of Western United Dairies, a trade group that represents more than 900 farms in California. "It's a mind-numbing event. Our suicide hotline was tapped 86 times in 48 hours."
Raudabaugh said the state's dairy industry is relying on food banks to be a major customer, in part because they have refrigerated trucks and storage that solve farmers' distribution woes. (She noted that processing costs and perishability concerns don't make dairy a good candidate for the surplus Farm to Family program.)
"We're providing many hundreds of percents more (to food banks) than pre-pandemic," Raudabaugh said. "Some farmers would have lost their whole herd without these (partnerships). It was significant to them to be able to stay in business."
Cannon Michael, CEO of the Bowles Farming Company in the San Joaquin Valley, was sitting on a crop of onions and other produce but had lost many restaurant buyers. He worked with the Farmlink Project, a nonprofit started by college students to connect farmers and food banks.
"The money has to be there to justify the harvest," Michael said, "and this solves some of that problem."
