We received news that the USDA abruptly cancelled the Local Food Funding that helped local farms like us provide high quality food to local schools and food banks. This program has been highly successful and funding had been approved until 2028. This abrupt cancellation is devastating to us as we have already planned our production year around providing pasture raised chicken to our local school system. It’s also devastating to the school system as they are no longer able to provide high quality local food to their students. This decision does not impact us alone, it impacts our meat processor, our feed supplier and any other vendors we deal with in purchasing supplies for our operation. This decision hurts American farmers and students across the board and we don’t understand the rationale behind this.
We loved being able to provide high quality food for students in our schools and to see it gone is heartbreaking. We are doing something about it though, here is what we have planned:
- Get our local community involved by asking for donations that will go towards covering the cost of the chicken we were planning to produce for the school system. We only want to cover our costs, we do not want to make a profit on these.
- Donate the chicken we were planning on producing for the schools to the Oldham County School system to keep our children fed with high quality proteins.
This initiative will ensure that we can cover the costs of production for these chickens and continue delivering high quality proteins to our students.
A certain saying comes to mind through all of this, "Be the Change you want to see in the world". We wont let this irresponsible decision by the USDA stop us from doing something good for our community. We hope you can help us is in achieving this goal!