When Stacey Jensen was a little boy, he remembers looking up into a cornstalk and thinking he could definitely get lost in a cornfield. Agriculture, for Jensen, has always loomed large throughout his life.

Decades later, he’s leading a family farm on the Navajo Nation that operates as a co-op in a rural part of northern Arizona. He’s using federal grant funding to find ways to cultivate community, create jobs, promote nutrition, and improve the economic outlook for his neighbors. 

On the reservation, farmers face obstacles ranging from water shortages to poor soil to deficient infrastructure. But Jensen, through his nonprofit North Leupp Family Farms, is focusing on what he can control to address food scarcity in his community. It’s a mission inspired by his late brother. The two of them wanted to  “address a lot of health issues and some of the insecurities with food,” Jensen said. “There’s a need for people to step forward and address this. Now, it’s growing into a community thing, which I really like.”

North Leupp Family Farms encompasses about 100 acres in a sparsely populated region of Arizona that is loved by tourists for Grand Falls, its impressive, chocolate-colored seasonal waterfall. Just a small portion of that farmland is actively farmed, tended to by community members who participate in a co-op that provides water and uses a solar system to power the irrigation system.  

Collectively, those farmers market their produce at roadside stands, doing away with whatever spoils before selling by composting it or just tossing it in the trash. A $100,000 grant through the is helping the co-op reduce spoilage and provide fresh, healthy produce to larger portions of the community. 

HFFI is a public-private partnership between the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Reinvestment Fund, a nonprofit community development financial institution that provides financial and analytical tools to underserved communities around the country  known as Reinvestment Fund. HFFI offers resources, including grants, loans and technical assistance directly to organizations developing food retail and food supply chain business models. Additionally, HFFI provides capacity building and credit enhancement funding for local and regional Healthy Food Financing Partnerships. 

For Jensen, the grant funding covered the costs of acquiring a refrigerated mobile truck, adding a staff member to the farm’s Sunrise Market, and introducing a new form of payment to community members. 

That electronic payment system allows Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participants to pay for produce using their benefits. “So now, people can use their EBT cards to buy vegetables from Sunrise Market,” Jensen said.

Jensen also allocated some of the grant funding towards marketing both that EBT system and the Sunrise Market. The mobile market, made possible by the refrigerated truck, helps the co-op make sales on the road. 

“It brought a lot of farmers together, since now we could collectively build some type of revenue to support each other, so some day we won’t have to depend on receiving grants,” Jensen said of the funding. “It trickles down all right. We sure covered a lot of ground with this grant and I can say it was money well spent.”

The American Rescue Plan Act was a stimulus package passed by the 117th U.S. Congress in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was signed into law in March of 2021 by President Biden to aid in the country’s economic recovery.