Fishermen Team up With Food Banks to Lend a Hand

The Ajo Center for Sustainable Agriculture has helped the town of Ajo in Arizona distribute affordable and nutrient-dense food to the community after the coronavirus pandemic created a significant financial strain on many families. Additional support has come from the town's participation in the Environmental Protection Agency's program Local Food, Local Places which "provides technical support and expertise to help towns leverage food systems to boost economic development."

A no-cost meal program allows high-poverty schools to offer all enrolled students free lunch, which consequently addresses child nutrition problems and meal debt. The program, however, has pivoted and expanded during the coronavirus pandemic to ensure that schools can still act as a food distribution hub.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, small farmers in Michigan are coming up with different business models in order to get their produce into consumers’ hands. Fisheye Farms in Detroit created a community-supported agriculture, or CSA, subscription program. However, the program is only meeting approximately one-third of its necessary finances, and they hope to find a balance with other offerings. Argus Farm Stop in Ann Arbor quickly turned their online store into a popular digital farmers market, increasing its customers from eight to 2,500.

To help small farmers stay afloat during the COVID-19 pandemic, some organizations in California are aiding in their transition to community supported agriculture, or CSA, models that directly connect farmers to consumers. Since converting to a CSA, one restaurant supply business went from selling 90 boxes of food to 450. This collaborative effort, along with new digital marketplaces and local grassroots networks, could become a longterm business model for farmers.

Chicago-based Closed Loop Farms, dependent on farmers markets, had to pivot to online sales with the closure of many public spaces as a response to COVID-19. Running a virtual farmers market, the local grower also sells sustainable, local products from other Chicago businesses. People are able to order their fresh produce, honey, and kombucha online and have it delivered to their door.

Community networks acted to keep people in Kashmir fed throughout COVID-19 restrictions and lockdowns. The Bonamsar mosque provides donation-funded monthly meal kits and small cash payments to people in need, including cooked food for those in immediate need. Tiffin Aaw provided meals to residents during political turmoil and shifted to serving warm meals to COVID-19 patients and their medical and family caregivers that couldn’t afford food. Both services included the culturally traditional food that has led the region to have the country’s highest nutritional health.

Instead of simply handing out its federal CARES funding to food banks, the city of Phoenix used the cash to produce meals by connecting hard-hit farmers with struggling restaurants. Meals were provided free of cost to those who in need. The program was executed by Feed Phoenix, which aimed to employ those who had lost their jobs, as well as provide much-needed economic help to both the farming and restaurant industries in a successful attempt to “create a program to touch as many businesses as possible.”

The coronavirus pandemic highlighted the ways in which the food system is broken, but governments, NGOs, and philanthropists are working to address the discrepancies by connecting small-scale farmers of color with businesses that can purchase their produce at fair rates. “For the first time, they felt connected with a real community. For the first time, they felt they were getting paid what’s right for what they’re growing,” a business advisor for one of the operations explains.

When the coronavirus pandemic forced a restaurant in Vermont to close its doors and lay off hundreds of employees, the owner worked with investors to shift his business model so that he could provide meals for those now without work using the backlog of perishable foods. His initiative has now expanded with donations and contributions from community corporations and has even received funding from the state as it has grown to include “collective community gardening.”

Seattle’s urban agriculture community saw a boom during the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests. BIPOC-led urban farms — like YES Farm and Black Star Farmers — had an increase in volunteers and people wanting to help provide food security, agricultural education, and land access to communities who don’t have their basic needs met. In the first half of 2020, the city of Seattle assigned plots of land to 439 new gardeners to pursue urban farming, with nearly half of them going to underrepresented populations.