In northern Minnesota, Patra Wise and her husband David Wise sell bison, honey and maple syrup harvested on their ranch, along with Native-harvested wild rice. To build their business, they’ve worked with the North Central Regional Food Business Center, a USDA program developed in 2022 to build resilience in regional food systems and minimize supply chain vulnerability.

Funding for the 12 centers across the country was canceled in mid-July. The loss has left farmers and producers wondering why.

“I could totally get behind cutting excess, but I don’t understand the logic of this being wasteful spending, especially with all the talk about helping small family farms and rural America and farm families,” Patra Wise said. “That’s exactly what Regional Food Business Centers do.”

With kids in the backseat, Patra Wise is headed into town for more fencing pins, which are hard to find this summer. Just this year, the Wises have made about 8,500 linear feet of bison fence, six feet high with seven strands of hot wire and a fencepost every 15 feet.

The Wises are also building a facility to harvest their own animals instead of taking the bison several hours away to a USDA facility. “It’s not what we want to be doing,” Patra Wise said of the stressful transport. “Our personal goal is treating our bison with more respect.”

Through the North Central Regional Food Business Center that serves Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota, the Wises received a Business Builder award to fund a vital part of the infrastructure they’re building. The grant funds a $45,000 freezer/cooler combo that allows Native Wise LLC to sell quarters and halves of bison to their neighbors, as well as store their maple syrup, honey and wild rice.

“We need freezer space, or we’re limited in what we can produce,” Patra Wise said. “That was a necessary part for us to be able to grow our business, and we absolutely could not have afforded that type of infrastructure, because we’re already spending our savings and whatever profit we’re making from the farm on fencing and the building to do the processing in.”

The Wises received most of the grant they were promised, but other producers weren’t so lucky. Plus, with the shuttering of Regional Food Business Centers, this farm family lost a valuable resource. 

“I don’t know who’s going to fill that void that they were operating in,” Patra Wise said. “They were extremely helpful. There’s not really something stepping up to take its place, and that’s pretty sad for small family farms that are trying to grow.”

The Wises have brought back bison and Ojibwe Spirit Horses to the Fond du Lac Indian Reservation and teach Native youth about “good food as good medicine,” as David’s grandmother taught him.

This education nourishes their community, but the Wises also need to make a living. They have three young children: their youngest, Margaret June, is only 5 months old.

For Patra Wise, closing down Regional Food Business Centers doesn’t make sense. She’s seen a center quickly growing local food systems into multi-state regional markets to sustain producers and bolster rural economies.

The North Central Regional Food Business Center gave technical assistance to nearly 600 businesses and advanced an additional 605 new partnerships across three states.

“Until the funding cuts, we were on target to increase those numbers fivefold by the end of the five-year program, transforming services and expanding markets for small to mid-sized producers, aggregators, processors and food access points,” said Cheryal Hills, executive director of the Region Five Development Commission. The commission operated the North Central Regional Food Business Center. 

In two years, the North Central Regional Food Business Center helped spur the creation of 15 new food-serving businesses. Businesses reported that assistance led to the creation of new businesses, higher profits and millions in increased revenue.

“Cutting off funding to the regional food business center threatens to undermine a wave of economic growth,” Hills said.

Completing the five-year Regional Food Business Center program would have helped an estimated 36,000 American businesses across the country. “If your goal is American producers, to buy American first, you need small family farms to be productive and sustainable,” Patra Wise said. “Regional Food Business Centers were helping make that happen.”