The purpose of the Washington State Local Food Purchase Assistance Pilot Program is to strengthen local food supply chains by facilitating and funding the purchase of Washington-grown and processed food for distribution to people in rural and/or underserved communities. Through this pilot, funding will be spent on purchasing food directly from local and regional farmers and producers, with 63% of the resources prioritized for procurement from socially disadvantaged producers.

In Washington, D.C. food insecurity disproportionately affects Black and Latinx households with low-income. Through the Local Food Purchasing Agreement, the District of Columbia seeks to expand partnerships between socially disadvantaged farmers/producers and community-based organizations that provide free, direct food distribution to underserved residents facing food insecurity in Wards 7 and 8.

Using the LFPA funds, the Virginia Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services will continue to work with agencies that have the capacity to procure foods from local sources, focusing on socially disadvantaged farmers/vendors. VDACS will award subgrants with the LFPA plus funding. The foods will be distributed to food insecure individuals, focusing on serving socially disadvantaged communities.

The Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets (VAAFM) will maintain and improve food and agricultural supply chain resiliency by partnering with organizations to purchase and distribute local food to underserved communities. VAAFM has active projects with five nonprofit partners—Abenaki Helping Abenaki, the Center for an Agricultural Economy, Capstone Community Action, the Vermont Foodbank, and the Intervale Center. We additionally have selected nine organizations through a competitive grant process that have started projects in March 2023.

The Utah Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) proposes to use Local Food Purchase Assistance (LFPA) and LFPA Plus funds to establish a program that enables the purchase of local food products from disadvantaged farmers across the state and distribution of those products to underserved communities. This program will support Utah organizations to foster relationships with local producers and build capacity for sustaining purchases and distribution.

The Texas Department of Agriculture (TDA) is proposing to administer $37,800,000 through a noncompetitive cooperative agreement for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Marketing Service’s (AMS) Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program (LFPA).

The South Dakota Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources (DANR) will partner with Feeding South Dakota and other local and regional food system stakeholders to procure and deliver locally grown foods from local producers to underserved communities statewide. This project will connect South Dakota’s farmers and ranchers, including disadvantaged producers, to more opportunities to deliver their products to local markets through South Dakota’s extensive network of food assistance partners.

The South Carolina Department of Agriculture (SCDA) is requesting funding through a Cooperative Agreement with United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) under the Local Food Purchase Assistance Plus (LFPA Plus) program to facilitate the continued purchase and distribution of local foods within the state. SCDA is working with a network of aggregators, distributors, and farmers to purchase local foods from rural and socially disadvantaged farmers, as well as to distribute local foods to underserved areas.

The RI Department of Environmental Management will subcontract with Farm Fresh Rhode Island, who will in turn partner with Southside Community Land Trust, the African Alliance of RI, Commercial Fisheries Center of RI and the RI Food Policy Council to meet the following objectives, in alignment with the goals of the LFPA Program.

The Department of Agriculture of Puerto Rico, together with its attached agencies, focuses its efforts on the full development of our Puerto Rican farmers. Our initial program experiences some difficulties with the Hurricane Fiona due our farmers lost their produce. Around thousands of boxes of food harvested by local farmers where bought. Non-profit organizations received this box of food and they delivered to help the most disadvantaged populations and in turn, help farmers with the sale of the crops that survived.