Rural Schools Struggle to Rebuild Fresh Food Programs Cut by Trump

For the farmers, schools, community organizations and tribal nations involved, the programs were a win-win situation. Small farmers earned reliable income through government contracts. Schools could provide children with fresh, local and oftentimes organic produce that would usually be out of budget for a school cafeteria.

In the spring, when news of the canceled programs hit at the end of the school year, food service directors were left wondering how they’d continue to afford locally grown produce and meat. Now as the school year begins anew, school districts that participated in the LFS program in previous years are feeling the squeeze.

Nicholas Alessandri, a food service director for the River Forest Community School Corporation in New Chicago, Indiana, says the LFS program gave his school district the ability to purchase fresh produce and meat from local farmers. Before the LFS program, the produce he procured came from big box vendors like Gordon Food Service, a nationwide food distributor that brought in $21 billion in 2024, according to Forbes.

The switch was an instant hit with his students. “The kids just noticed a huge difference in it. They can really taste it,” says Alessandri. “The quality is night and day compared to what I would get from a big box place.” At the River Forest High School, Alessandri says 70% of the vegetables at the salad bar came from local farms when he had access to LFS funds.

Without LFS funding, purchasing local, higher quality produce will be harder. Alessandri says he has tried to cut costs elsewhere to continue to afford buying some products from local farms, but he can’t make up the whole difference. The River Forest District participated in the program during the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years. In the 24-25 school year, Alessandri says his school district was awarded nearly $70,000 from the LFS program.

About 70% of students in the River Forest district are eligible for free and reduced lunches, says Alessandri.

“In Indiana, to be eligible for LFS distributions, schools had to be serving 50% or more free and reduced lunch at those schools. For many of those students, that may be the only meal that they’re getting in a day,” says Virginia Pleasant, co-executive director of the Northwest Indiana Food Council. “Those students are going to be feeling the impact in multiple places that are adjacent to or hurting in much the same way that the LFS cuts have.”

With LFS funding, students in the River Forest district received fresh fruit from local farms, including peaches, apples, watermelon and grapes. That was a big upgrade from the packaged fare. “ I can get that from the [local] farm versus putting out applesauce cups or tropical fruit salad in a can. There’s a huge difference,” says Alessandri. “Why would I get produce that comes from California, goes to a warehouse in Clay, Michigan, and then gets delivered to my door here in Indiana when I can get it 20 or 40 miles away?”

LFS was a new and popular program. The program first received funding in 2021 through the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan Act. In late 2024, the program received a renewed round of funding through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Commodity Credit Corporation. “ It was a really lean program that truly was making a huge impact on farmers and on nutritional outcomes for schools and was cut right as we were getting a whole lot of traction,” says Pleasant.

Alessandri says the Northwest Indiana Food Council served as the middleman to help connect him with local farmers who participated in the LFS program.

Nineteen states operate farm to school food purchase programs similar to LFS. After the federal program was cut in March, states, including Vermont, Connecticut, Alabama, Oklahoma and Minnesota stepped in to increase their funding.

Oklahoma established a statewide Local Food for Schools program in 2023. The state is thoroughly red—the Oklahoma State Legislature is 81% Republican across both chambers—yet Oklahoma adopted a farm to school program modeled after the popular nationwide program. The Oklahoma program proved popular, high demand in 2024 led officials to allocate $3.2 million to the program for 2025.

“We are very thankful that our legislators took the initiative to implement this statewide program, and we are excited to continue to expand upon these efforts to further benefit Oklahoma farmers and communities,” Jenna Moore, director of the OKC Food Hub, tells Barn Raiser via email. However, Moore says the statewide program has a few kinks to work out to help deliver more fruits and vegetables to schools. “A lot of the new LFS dollars are going to just purchase beef, which is great, but still does not always increase the fruit and vegetable intake of our school children, which sorely needs to be addressed,” she says.

In May, Minnesota increased its farm to school funding budget by $550,000 and created a brand-new state level Local Food Purchase Assistance program that provided $700,000 for food banks to purchase directly from farms. A state level farm to school program doesn’t exist in Indiana, although a bill to establish one was introduced by Democratic State Senator Shelli Yoder earlier this year.

According to an economic impact report authored by the Northwest Indiana Food Council, the LFS program injected $1.4 million into the local farm economy from 2023 to spring 2025.

The program also helped small farmers who wouldn’t be able to compete with larger farms for such contracts, says Cassandra Bull, a policy analyst at the National Farm to School Network. Without the programs, these small farmers have been left scrambling, out of tens of thousands of dollars in promised contracts and with seeds already in the ground.

“Most of these farmers, because they’re not commodity farmers, have never had access to subsidies, and so this was kind of the first time that they could grow and know that they had a guaranteed market,” says Anne Massie, co-executive director of the Northwest Indiana Food Council.

Bull says some school districts will continue to buy from local farmers they purchased from with LFS funds, but only well-funded school districts will have that luxury.  “It will probably be the districts that have additional resources to spend on higher price and higher quality ingredients,” says Bull. “Those that really benefited from the additional funding, maybe in low-income communities, won’t have that opportunity.”

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly denounced ultraprocessed foods and encourages Americans to eat more fresh, organic produce in his Make America Healthy Again messaging. But decisions to slash programs that deliver fresh produce straight from farms to schools bring into question the administration’s commitment to making America healthy. “With the rhetoric of making America healthy again being so strong, it feels a bit hypocritical to then take funding away from a program that was really successfully doing this,” says Bull.

This will lead to greater disparity between those children who receive healthy and fresh foods at school and those who don’t. In addition, the cuts come at a time when low-income households across the country are losing critical support for food aid.

The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” signed into law on July 4 by President Trump, introduced $186 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the nation’s largest food benefit program, in order to offset the cost of trillions of dollars in tax cuts that primarily benefit the wealthy. According to the Congressional Budget Office, changes to SNAP eligibility, benefits and expanded work requirements could eliminate about 2.4 million people from the program.

Most of the 42 million people that currently receive SNAP benefits would likely see their benefits shrink at a time when those benefits have increasingly failed to cover rising grocery costs. What’s more, on September 20, the Trump administration scrapped the USDA’s annual survey that measured food insecurity, which could undercut broader efforts to counteract food insecurity at a time when households and children face growing rates of hunger. Meanwhile, as with LFS funding, states will either increasingly step in to bear the costs, or choose not to.

Two bills introduced to Congress—one in the House and one in the Senate—have proposed making LFS and LFPA style programming permanent. Both bills have bipartisan support. The House bill was introduced on July 29 as the Local Farmers Feeding Our Communities Act by Rep. Robert Bresnahan (R-Pa.-8). The bill proposes a yearly budget of $200 million and calls for at least 25% of funds to go towards “small-size producers, mid-size producers, beginning farmers or ranchers, or veteran farmers or ranchers.”

In the Senate, Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I) introduced the Strengthening Local Food Security Act of 2025 alongside Sen. Jim Justice (R-W.V.). Like the House bill, the Senate bill also proposes $200 million in annual funding. The House bill calls for funding to be spent on fresh and minimally processed foods, whereas the Senate bill offers no restrictions on which foods the funding can be used for. “What excited us the most when we heard there was going to be an LFS 2.0,” says Pleasant, “was that we could take all of those lessons learned at a national scale and really lean into developing something or strengthening something that would serve producers in schools around the country.”

Bull says she anticipates a version of one of these bills to appear in the next farm bill. While the “One Big Beautiful Act” included significant farm bill provisions, such as the cuts to SNAP, along with expanded funding for commodity programs like crop insurance and subsidy programs and increased reference prices (government payments that compensate commodity crop farmers when a row crop falls below a benchmark price), other provisions of the 2018 farm bill have been extended through the end of 2025. Legislators have delayed taking up negotiations for the remaining farm bill provisions, or what has been termed the “skinny” farm bill.

Food service directors, says Pleasant, “know that the produce is better, it’s fresher, it connects to local community, but they are having to balance that with purchases that are happening through their other supply channels in order to just make the budgets work.”

“It definitely helped us, it helped our local economy,” says Alessandri. “I just don’t know why they took away such a good program that’s for kids, especially at that age.”

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Miles MacClure is a writer based in Chicago. Most of his writing revolves around culture, politics, and technology.