“The pandemic has shown us the fragility of our nation’s food supply. The farm bill needs to invest in national food security by supporting small and mid-sized farms, which shorten the supply chain, and create more resilient food systems.”

-Warren Neth

“I am growing healthy, nutrient dense food for food pantries I myself used as a child, my zip code has high poverty, which lowers life expectancy. Your zip code should not determine how long you live. Funding from Friends of the Farm is helping me fix that.”

-Dionne Washington, Friends of the Farm

“The sour cherry producers lobbied for USDA support, since they can’t sell enough of their produce, so federal money is buying their crops, and sending them to food banks. Tragically, these cherries are packed in the most unhealthy stabilizer - corn syrup. Our broken food system ends up sending this high sugar, low nutrition food to hungry people who are at high risk of having diabetes. Our food system is broken and locally sourced hunger relief can heal people.”

-Claire Lane, Anti-Hunger & Nutrition Coalition

“I think of food as medicine, and if you help folks improve their diet, you create a tenfold, ripple effect of better health, social environment, that our community can take credit for, which I think is really beautiful.

I like that you can like hold something up and say this was from my farm 10 miles down the road. People get excited about local produce, when all they have is McDonald's or bodega to get their food.”

-Stacy Dedring, Dutchess Outreach

“Society got a much deeper appreciation for the emergency food work being done.The appreciation for farmers as frontline workers, was something that I found really heartening. It's not just your cops, firefighters, and nurses, it's your farmers who are showing up to work every day, in very stressful environment, moving in close quarters, like not really knowing what's going on with the pandemic, but like, it's food. It's not something that's negotiable. We all need to survive. So I think moving farmers into that frontline worker designation was really heartening for me.” 

-Stacy Dedring, Dutchess Outreach