Across seven acres of farmland in a rural area just north of the Arizona mountain town of Flagstaff, Rylan Morton-Starner and his Forestdale Farm employees produce hundreds of pounds of greens every week. About half of those greens, from lettuce to spinach, chard, kale and beyond, goes to food banks and other organizations addressing food scarcity in the county. 

Those partnerships, built over recent years, provide local, healthy food options and support the development of a reliable, local supply chain and market for Forestdale Farm. The arrangement is an illustration of why the Local Food Purchase Assistance (LFPA) program was developed and how it works.

“We’ve built it up to where it’s half of our business right now. A lot of our sales go down that avenue,” Morton-Starner said of the partnerships they’ve developed through the LFPA program. “And we’ve scaled up our staff. It’s opened jobs on the farm and our production has increased. It’s allowed us to increase our production for our community.” 

Administered by the USDA, the LFPA program is a federal grant program that supports local producers like Forestdale Farm while building resiliency within the local food supply chain. The program focuses on getting locally grown food onto the plates of local residents in need, through food pantries,schools, or other programs.

For Morton-Starner, the benefits of the LFPA program reflect his personal conviction to provide healthy food for his immediate community. He grew up in Flagstaff, and after traveling and working on farms along the East Coast and in Ecuador as a young adult, he’s embraced a strong sense of duty to localism and responsible land stewardship.

But, with the federal administration’s cuts to the LFPA program, things will soon begin to change for Morton-Starner and Forestdale Farm. 

“We’ll have to cut staff down because markets aren’t as reliable,” he said, referring to community farmer’s markets. “We do a CSA, too. But they’re not as reliable. It’s harder to count on those. It’s a pretty big thing. We’ve grown with the program.”

In the absence of the LFPA program, which accounts for 50% of Forestdale Farm’s operational revenue, Morton-Starner is considering what options he has available. Forestdale Farm currently supplies enough greens to feed up to 700 individuals every week. And through the LFPA program, the farm also supplies food banks, restaurants,  with 30 to 50 dozen eggs from its flock weekly.  

“We will have to pivot and scale back,” he said. “Salad mixes and leafy greens are labor intensive. You have to have staff and you have to have the sales. We’ll have to scale down staff. We’re resilient and we’ll be fine, but people we’ll have to let some folks go and we might not have as much produce available to our community.”

Perhaps the biggest loss, beyond the financial loss to the farm and the economic loss to the community at large, is a social and ecological loss for Morton-Starner. The LFPA program created healthy connections between his farm and those in his community who needed nutritious food the most. Families in need will lose access to affordable fresh food. 

“It’s going to be harder to reach that really important audience. We could reach the Flagstaff standard in the markets, but to really reach the low income individuals, it’s harder for a business to do that without programs like this. It’s really important work,” he said. “Food is a big part of life, and when you’re growing it and providing it for the community, it feels a lot healthier, too. You’re taking care of the soil and you’re building a whole ecosystem. The food is more nutritious and the work is rewarding, too.”