With families displaced, jobs lost, and homes and businesses destroyed, food insecurity has been exacerbated in communities impacted by Hurricane Ida. Founded in response to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in spring of 2020, The Farmlink Project recognizes the severe effects that unexpected crises can have on a community’s food security. In an effort to mitigate these effects on areas hit by Hurricane Ida, our Core team, which is responsible for facilitating deliveries, developing relationships with farms, and identifying communities in need, worked hard to deliver products to communities suffering in the wake of the hurricane. On September 4, 2021, the last day of Hurricane Ida’s eight-day run, Coast Tropical Farm in McAllen, Texas donated about 40,000 pounds of mangoes to Extra Table Food Bank, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
Anabel Branly, the Operations Manager at Coast Tropical Farm, oversees the receiving, packing, storage, and shipping of the farm’s produce, and is responsible for complying with food safety regulations. Coast Tropical imports an abundance of mangoes from Mexico to sell in the United States, so it was “the perfect fruit to donate as we always have a large volume in inventory,” as Anabel said.
According to Clayton Elbel, a Hunger and Outreach Team (HOT) Lead at The Farmlink Project and college junior studying agricultural economics at Texas A&M University, the process of moving the mangoes from Texas to Mississippi was tricky, given the circumstances associated with the hurricane.
“Through truck breakdowns, flooded roads, and drop-off logistics, such as limited storage capacity, we were ultimately able to get the mangoes to Extra Table.”
While many Farmlinkers were on a recessional break as our team transitioned from the summer term to the fall term, a part of our team volunteered to work through the break in order to continue moving food to communities in need, particularly in light of the exacerbated food insecurity resulting from Hurricane Ida.
“The biggest challenge in relation to Hurricane Ida was that there were limited resources at our disposal,” Clayton said. “It was during the break, so we had limited access to our Core team members. The heavy rain and flooding that ensued from the hurricane also presented a challenge in delivering the produce.” Though the whole team was not actively involved throughout the two-week break running from the end of August and into September, Clayton credits the Core team as a whole with making these deliveries possible. We are so grateful to all those involved, both within our team and in our greater Farmlink Project community, who worked on this delivery and all other Hurricane Ida-relief efforts.
These changes are great. But how’s it all going to be funded?
During the comment process, Farmlink, as well as other food rescue organizations and coalitions, raised critical questions about how the strategy would be funded and, as a result, which measures are feasible. In particular, we hoped for more clarity beyond the draft’s statement that the USDA would use American Rescue Plan Act and Inflation Reduction Act funds and the EPA would use Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funds. Of the 86 programs or initiatives reviewed in the final strategy, only 15 are completely new programs announced in the strategy.
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The other 71 are existing programs or initiatives that either already have a food loss and waste focus or that the national strategy has repackaged as food loss and waste solutions. While we had hopes of new, innovative programs being included in the strategy, the good news with these 71 programs is that most, if not all, are already funded, meaning that they are not reliant on an increasingly turbulent Congress for implementation. Of the 15 new programs, which included the EPA’s new consumer education campaign and several new cooperative agreements with land-grant universities, only 2 had specific funding mechanisms. It has become increasingly clear that food rescue organizations and other stakeholders in the food and agriculture space should not consider this strategy as a new rollout of FLW solutions, programs, and funding but rather as an evaluation of the current resources and solutions and how each can be most effectively utilized to achieve the strategy’s goals. In particular, the framing of many of USDA’s programs as FLW solutions offers opportunities to utilize existing funding, data, and infrastructure to solve one of the United States’s most pressing problems.
Whats next?
Now that we have the strategy, it’s time to truly take advantage of the opportunities it presents. In the immediate future at Farmlink, we’re excited to continue optimizing Section 32 as a critical on-farm food loss solution as we anticipate significant surplus recoveries in the fall. As we move forward, we continue to advocate for dignity with food distribution, emphasizing cultural appropriateness and quality in every pound of food we rescue. As outlined in our comments, food rescue organizations are critical stakeholders and thought partners for the agencies. Our inclusion in the strategy as such is an opportunity we are taking full advantage of to help guide federal action to support farmers, feed communities, and heal the planet.
< BackWith families displaced, jobs lost, and homes and businesses destroyed, food insecurity has been exacerbated in communities impacted by Hurricane Ida. Founded in response to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in spring of 2020, The Farmlink Project recognizes the severe effects that unexpected crises can have on a community’s food security. In an effort to mitigate these effects on areas hit by Hurricane Ida, our Core team, which is responsible for facilitating deliveries, developing relationships with farms, and identifying communities in need, worked hard to deliver products to communities suffering in the wake of the hurricane. On September 4, 2021, the last day of Hurricane Ida’s eight-day run, Coast Tropical Farm in McAllen, Texas donated about 40,000 pounds of mangoes to Extra Table Food Bank, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
Anabel Branly, the Operations Manager at Coast Tropical Farm, oversees the receiving, packing, storage, and shipping of the farm’s produce, and is responsible for complying with food safety regulations. Coast Tropical imports an abundance of mangoes from Mexico to sell in the United States, so it was “the perfect fruit to donate as we always have a large volume in inventory,” as Anabel said.
According to Clayton Elbel, a Hunger and Outreach Team (HOT) Lead at The Farmlink Project and college junior studying agricultural economics at Texas A&M University, the process of moving the mangoes from Texas to Mississippi was tricky, given the circumstances associated with the hurricane.
“Through truck breakdowns, flooded roads, and drop-off logistics, such as limited storage capacity, we were ultimately able to get the mangoes to Extra Table.”
While many Farmlinkers were on a recessional break as our team transitioned from the summer term to the fall term, a part of our team volunteered to work through the break in order to continue moving food to communities in need, particularly in light of the exacerbated food insecurity resulting from Hurricane Ida.
“The biggest challenge in relation to Hurricane Ida was that there were limited resources at our disposal,” Clayton said. “It was during the break, so we had limited access to our Core team members. The heavy rain and flooding that ensued from the hurricane also presented a challenge in delivering the produce.” Though the whole team was not actively involved throughout the two-week break running from the end of August and into September, Clayton credits the Core team as a whole with making these deliveries possible. We are so grateful to all those involved, both within our team and in our greater Farmlink Project community, who worked on this delivery and all other Hurricane Ida-relief efforts.
Hurricane Ida Relief with Coast Tropical Farm
McAllen, Texas, to Hattiesburg, Mississippi
With families displaced, jobs lost, and homes and businesses destroyed, food insecurity has been exacerbated in communities impacted by Hurricane Ida. Founded in response to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in spring of 2020, The Farmlink Project recognizes the severe effects that unexpected crises can have on a community’s food security. In an effort to mitigate these effects on areas hit by Hurricane Ida, our Core team, which is responsible for facilitating deliveries, developing relationships with farms, and identifying communities in need, worked hard to deliver products to communities suffering in the wake of the hurricane. On September 4, 2021, the last day of Hurricane Ida’s eight-day run, Coast Tropical Farm in McAllen, Texas donated about 40,000 pounds of mangoes to Extra Table Food Bank, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
Anabel Branly, the Operations Manager at Coast Tropical Farm, oversees the receiving, packing, storage, and shipping of the farm’s produce, and is responsible for complying with food safety regulations. Coast Tropical imports an abundance of mangoes from Mexico to sell in the United States, so it was “the perfect fruit to donate as we always have a large volume in inventory,” as Anabel said.
According to Clayton Elbel, a Hunger and Outreach Team (HOT) Lead at The Farmlink Project and college junior studying agricultural economics at Texas A&M University, the process of moving the mangoes from Texas to Mississippi was tricky, given the circumstances associated with the hurricane.
“Through truck breakdowns, flooded roads, and drop-off logistics, such as limited storage capacity, we were ultimately able to get the mangoes to Extra Table.”
While many Farmlinkers were on a recessional break as our team transitioned from the summer term to the fall term, a part of our team volunteered to work through the break in order to continue moving food to communities in need, particularly in light of the exacerbated food insecurity resulting from Hurricane Ida.
“The biggest challenge in relation to Hurricane Ida was that there were limited resources at our disposal,” Clayton said. “It was during the break, so we had limited access to our Core team members. The heavy rain and flooding that ensued from the hurricane also presented a challenge in delivering the produce.” Though the whole team was not actively involved throughout the two-week break running from the end of August and into September, Clayton credits the Core team as a whole with making these deliveries possible. We are so grateful to all those involved, both within our team and in our greater Farmlink Project community, who worked on this delivery and all other Hurricane Ida-relief efforts.
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