Héktor Calderón-Victoria picks flowers at Three Feathers Farm in Morgan Hill on July 30, 2025, the five-acre organic farm he co-founded in 2022. Calderón-Victoria cultivates culturally significant crops and partners with schools, restaurants, and nonprofits to support and connect underserved communities throughout Northern California. Photo Credit: Beth LaBerge/KQED
Local food banks are about to lose a key source of fresh, local produce after the Department of Agriculture ended the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program or LFPA. The program was a key source of revenue for small, local farms that played a major role in keeping people fed during the pandemic.
“For small farms like Héktor’s, federal funding has played a huge role in ensuring that food banks and schools can actually buy his produce at a fair price. But in March [2025], President Trump’s Department of Agriculture canceled more than a billion dollars worth of funding for programs that help schools and food banks buy local produce. One of them is called the Local Food Purchase Assistance Program, or LFPA. And over the last few years, it made a big difference.”
“The LFPA program was initiated by the Biden administration in 2021 as part of the American Rescue Plan to really support local farms and food systems impacted by the pandemic. The program which ran through the USDA purchased local foods from small and underserved farmers and then distributed them to food banks, schools and other nutritional assistance programs. So this started in 2021, but it went on. A little bit beyond the height of the pandemic to just make sure that the food system is still stable. The Farms Together program, part of the local food purchasing assistance has supported over 500 farms in California, 35 participating food hubs, and have distributed overall over 8 million pounds of fruit and vegetables through food hubs. So we can really see from these numbers how much of an impact the money has had to really support. Our local small farms and also provide fresh produce to communities that really need it. And so now for farmers like Hector who have relied on this funding to really build those relationships with food banks, the absence of this money will be a loss of income and also market opportunity for them.”
News article from KQED