Mi’kmaq Farms & Fish Hatchery in Caribou has already spent $10,000 on its spring seeds.
But after the U.S. Department of Agriculture just ended a program that helped schools to buy produce from local farmers, it’s not clear the operation will be able to put all those seeds in the ground this year, then sell the resulting produce, according to farm and hatchery manager Mike Smith.
“You shouldn’t be screwing with anything food-related, especially in our area with low-income people,” Smith said.
Mi’kmaq Farms is one of more than 100 food producers around Maine that has participated in the federal Local Foods for Schools program. More than 160 Maine school districts have also benefited from it, using the funding stream to offset the local costs of buying healthy, locally grown food for their students, according to the Maine Department of Education.
Now, the new cuts are concerning Maine farmers and school officials who have benefited from the federal program. Schools will have to choose between spending more of their own money on healthy, local food, or smaller amounts on cheaper, processed alternatives. And with districts cutting back on their purchases of local food, farms may lose an important income stream.
The end of the program is part of a larger wave of federal cuts and freezes that have affected Maine and other states. As the Trump administration investigates the state’s transgender athlete policies, USDA funding to the University of Maine System was also briefly frozen, then restored Wednesday night. A newborn Social Security registration program was terminated in Maine, then restored. The feds have also cut funding for the Maine Sea Grant program.
The USDA told Maine school officials that it was ending the local food program late last week. Through the program, it has awarded up to $200 million annually to states so schools could be reimbursed for buying food from local farms. The program also emphasized buying food from historically underserved producers and processors such as Mi’kmaq Farms, which is affiliated with the Mi’kmaq Nation.
The USDA has also cut a second initiative, called the Local Food Purchase Assistance Program, that helped programs such as Good Shepherd Food Bank buy from these local farms and distribute the produce to food banks across the state.
Without the school funding program, Mi’kmaq Farms likely won’t plant the extra seeds it has for selling to local schools and will instead leave them for next season, Smith said. The farm can’t afford to spend the resources on growing the food without the reimbursements that come with the Local Food for Schools program. And for every year the seeds are stored, their germination rate decreases, Smith said.
Smith said that even if the USDA does decide to bring the program back, the timing is paramount. If the program is renewed after the spring planting season, the summer and fall harvest will be too small to provide to local schools.
“It was a good thing. It helped a lot of people,” Smith said. “I don’t think they understand the impact of that.”
On the school side, Jennifer Clavette, the food services director for the Hermon School Department, said the program helped cut costs for food so the district could put its own funding into other expenses such as kitchen equipment.
Hermon schools mostly used the program to offset the costs of milk, apples, cheeses and a few other food items, Clavette said. In fact, the school was able to fully recoup the costs of milk with the program. Now, the district will either have to keep spending its own money to buy from local farms — without getting reimbursed — or spend less money on more mass-produced alternatives.
“We could buy chicken from, say, Maine Family Farms, and we would get reimbursement back for that. Now we’re going to be paying for it out of pocket,” Clavette said. “That could be maybe a little bit more expensive, because it is a small farmer, and they’re trying to make their money. And then we go back to buying cheaper processed foods instead, because it’s cheaper, right?”
While Hermon is still able to be reimbursed for some items through the state’s local foods program, Clavette said the USDA’s program cut will be a loss. Clavette is personally worried that, if funding cuts continue, students may eventually lose the ability to get free lunches at school.
“It’ll be the first year we go without it,” she said, referring to the end of the federal program. “So, hard to tell what it’s gonna truly do, but it definitely will impact how much I purchase outside to the farmers.”
Jules Walkup is a Report for America corps member. Additional support for this reporting is provided by BDN readers.
