Funds from the American Rescue Plan’s Build Back Better initiative are trickling down to South Carolina through a new U.S. Department of Agriculture’s program.
The goal of the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program is simple: Improve the nations’ agriculture supply chain by partnering with state and tribal governments to fund the purchase of local food products earmarked for underserved communities.
After starting the process this spring, the S.C. Department of Agriculture signed a cooperative agreement with USDA, meaning $6.1 million will be distributed to the state’s organization over the next two years.
But where exactly will this money go and how will it impact underserved communities?
According to Kyle Player, executive director of the SCDA’s Agribusiness Center for Research and Entrepreneurship, the organization will work with a network of distributors that will purchase food from South Carolina farmers. The program has a goal of purchasing food from at least 120 farmers that will be distributed to at least 24 counties in need.
The Catawba Indian Nation — one of less than 600 federally recognized tribal nations in the country and the only one in South Carolina — will receive $1.4 million of the $6.1 million grant after it entered into a partnership with the SCDA.
“This cooperative agreement is focused on basically distributors working with socially disadvantaged farmers and purchasing food,” Player said. “This will really help open up new markets for some of these socially disadvantaged farmers that weren’t there before.”
The federal program was announced at the start of 2021, and state and tribal governments had to apply by April 5. Before applying, Player said the SCDA consulted statewide groups like the SC Black Farmers Coalition and Growing Local SC. The program will award up to $400 million in emergency food assistance to states and territories across the country. Colorado, Washington state, West Virginia, Guam and Puerto Rico are among the several states and territories that also signed agreements.
Farmers interested in participating will have to submit an application and agree to share their information with distributors; those distributors will be asked to do the same and provide documentation that a percentage of their purchases are from socially disadvantaged farmers.
Once the purchase is made, the distributors will be reimbursed through the grant. A portion of the $6.1 million will also fund the hiring of a new SCDA employee to lead the program.
GrowFood Carolina General Manager Anthony Mirisciotta participated in Zoom calls regarding the LFPA in March before the application was submitted. If well executed, he said the money will provide more production opportunities for farmers, helping rural and minority producers open new market channels in the process.
“It’s a pretty significant amount of money, and the USDA kind of had these top priorities of what they wanted it to go to,” Mirisciotta said. “The USDA has really identified the strength and the power and the resilience of the local food system.”
GrowFood Carolina, under the Coastal Conservation League’s umbrella, has been engaging in the work the LFPA grant will support on a smaller scale for two years through its Soil to Sustenance program, which relies on private donations to fill and distribute food boxes to 10 communities up and down the South Carolina coast. Since its inception, GrowFood has distributed about 40,000 food boxes, amounting to nearly 1 million pounds of South Carolina food. By participating in LFPA, Mirisciotta hopes to build on this work.
Both Mirisciotta and Player stressed the importance of continuing these relationships between farmers, distributors and communities after the two-year funding period ends. After signing the agreement, the SCDA forged ahead with its planning process, with the goal of launching fund distribution in the next five months.
