Fighting for Food Access in the Northern ADKs
Everyone should be able to eat nutritious local food, but sometimes, it can be hard to get. Barriers to food access can be geographical, economic, cultural, or a combination of the three. Part of our mission here at The Cook Farm is to “cultivate community through local food”. Doing so requires us to take a hard look at the greatest barriers facing our rural area and do what we can to break through them.
We’ve already tackled the issue of geography by opening our retail location, Cooks’ Country Store. Before we opened, people from our town had to travel at least 11 miles to the nearest grocery store, and even further to reach a store that carried truly local products. Now, we have our own little store right here on the farm, where we sell a selection of local meats, dairy products, eggs, baked goods, seasonal produce, and pantry staples. (Our store is also open 24/7 year round, so we’ve eliminated timing as a barrier as well!)
The next obstacle we are attempting to navigate is possibly the trickiest: the affordability barrier. It’s no secret that buying quality food isn’t cheap, but making it accessible to everyone should be a public health priority. When healthy options are hard to get, diet quality drops, contributing to chronic disease. According to Science Insights, “food-insecure adults [have] a 20% higher risk of hypertension and a 30% higher risk of high cholesterol compared to food-secure adults… The link to diabetes [is] even more pronounced among people experiencing severe food insecurity, who had roughly 2.4 times the risk of showing clinical signs of diabetes.” With that being said, the importance of making healthy food available to low income households is clear. This is why the government and private organizations have created so many different food access programs.
Our farm participates in a number of food access programs, which are listed below. For clarity’s sake, we’ve chosen to list only programs that can be used at our on-farm store. (We also participate in programs at the farmers’ market, which you can learn more about here.) Currently, we don’t have the capacity to process SNAP or DUFBNY benefits through our self-checkout kiosk, so we ask people participating in either of these programs to order in advance by texting or emailing us. We hope that we’ll be able to make these options easier to use in the future.
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program: This federally funded program provides benefits to low income households that can be used to purchase food at most grocery stores. (A lot of people don’t realize that farms can also accept SNAP benefits, but we can!)
Double Up Food Bucks: This state funded program provides matching benefits of up to $50 per day to SNAP recipients to be used to purchase fresh fruits and vegetables.
AdkAction Fair Food Card: This privately funded program supports Adirondack families and Adirondack farmers by providing a monthly benefit in the form of a pre-loaded credit card, which can be used to buy local food items at over 30 locations.
Pay It Forward: This program is our very own, and we’re quite proud of it! Members of our community donate to help cover the cost of gift cards that we distribute to low income households. Recipients can use their cards to shop for local food items at our retail location or on our website.
As farmers, this issue is important to us for multiple reasons. Participating in food access programs creates additional sales for our business, and for others like ours. This may sound a bit selfish, but small farms need all the help that they can get, and if our tax dollars are going to be used to fund some of these programs, then we’d much rather see them benefit American farmers than the shareholders of massive food conglomerates. Further, we believe in the food that we produce, and the way that we produce it. We also believe that everyone should be able to eat the kinds of quality products that we raise, regardless of their socioeconomic status. These beliefs have motivated us to step out as leaders in our community and bring these programs into Franklin County, where participation is low to virtually non-existent.
If you care about the local food movement and expanding food access like we do, please share this post with your friends and neighbors. The best thing we can do is to bring visibility to our cause. The more we talk about it, the more likely it is that food insecure households will hear about the programs that exist to help them, that other farms will begin participating in these programs, and that our leaders will see these issues as priorities.
