Over the Moon Farm, home to pasture-raised livestock in the rural Iowa town of Coggin, looks and feels different than it did a few years ago. Like the flowers that sway in the pasture, the farm has blossomed. 

 That growth is due in large part to the farm’s involvement in the Local Food Purchase Assistance (LFPA) program, a cooperative initiative administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The program allowed for Over The Moon Farm’s Anna and Shae Pesek to forge partnerships with community organizations like food banks, where they could sell their fresh protein — be it turkeys for Thanksgiving, chicken, duck, lamb or beef. 

The partnerships not only created access to fresh, local food for the most vulnerable in the community, it also offered Over the Moon Farm a guaranteed market for their humanely raised poultry and beef. In November of 2022, the first year the farm participated in the LFPA program, it sold 40 turkeys to a food bank. 

They continued monthly, direct distributions of their poultry until March of 2025, when funding for the program was abruptly suspended. “We’ve been a community-oriented farm from the get-go,” Anna Pesek said. “The bulk of our business we built during the time of LFPA. It’s a little jarring at this point.”

The business model the Peseks have come to know now looks quite different than it did during their robust period of growth. They’ve managed to secure a couple wholesale orders here and there, but nothing that offers stability and consistency in the same way the LFPA arrangement did. The farm will now return to relying heavily on direct-to-consumer business and individual orders. 

“The impact of the program is so vast and so complex, it’s hard for me to even articulate one thing,” Anna Pesek said, when recalling the most profound benefits of the LFPA program. “It gave us cash flow we didn’t have. It allowed us to have more substantial market access which helped us secure an operating line of credit with the bank. That’s hard to do.”

The LFPA income allowed Anna to scale back her farmers market participation when she became pregnant with her son. The labor savings was substantial, she said, since working the markets requires her to arise before dawn and physically muscle through set up. 

“When we talk about building resilient supply chains, there’s a human aspect to that,” she said. “It’s hard to run a small business and we’re already up against a lot, so if there is any way we can have supply chains that actually support the humans involved, to do this work long term by making things a little less cumbersome, it makes it easier to stay in business.”

Now, the supply chain is no more resilient than it was when the program began, Pesek said. Pulling the program halts any progress that was made.

One of Pesek’s favorite features of the LFPA program, besides its ability to provide local food to the community, was its pricing model. In Iowa, the pricing guidelines were developed by farmers, which kept pricing fair and allowed farmers like Pesek to achieve reasonable profits in the competitive wholesale market.  

“It gave us room to say, ‘That’s my break even point.’ It was a really unique and important part of the program,” Pesek said, thinking ahead to how her farm has now been reshaped again. “I feel much more stressed out than I did a year ago. It’s the difference of having even a few wholesale deliveries on the calendar versus not knowing that, and everything has to be moved to individuals. That’s stressful.

And the loss of funding ripples throughout the community Over the Moon serves. The Pesek’s once patronized a small grain mill for feed, and they utilized a local butcher to process their hogs — at $500 a piece. They were recirculating a fair amount of cash in the community as they grew.

“We invested in building domestic markets through this program,” she said. “I know the impact of that number that was put into our farm with LFPA multiplied exponentially and would have continued to do so if the funding continued. I saw the program as a win-win. Ending it was a lose-lose all around.”