Media Coverage

Area families have not bounced back from the end to pandemic-era benefits, and the high cost of food is driving more families to engage with local pantries — some for the first time in their lives.

Foodbank Inc. — which serves Montgomery, Greene and Preble Counties — served 374,983 households over the past year. More than 50,000 of these were entirely new clients.

“We saw a notable increase of new families, especially after pandemic-era support ended,” said Amber Wright, the foodbank’s marketing lead.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture will spend $1.7 billion nationwide to support farmers, offer nutrition assistance and boost rural economies.

That includes $1.2 billion for food banks, schools, child care centers and more to buy from local farmers and growers.

The Farm Bill is normally one of the main funders of programs that provide food assistance. But the federal bill has been tied up in political debates. Because of this, Joree Novotny, executive director of the Ohio Association of Food Banks, said farmers and organizations that provide food assistance have faced their own struggles.

"We've been in a state of sort of continued uncertainty with programs that either are permanently authorized through the federal Farm Bill or that have been launched in response to ongoing food supply chain challenges and other pandemic era impacts on people facing food insecurity, as well as the farmers and grocers and food banks that feed them," she said.

According to Novotny, this round of USDA funding has two components that will directly benefit food systems in Ohio.

ATHENS, Ohio (WOUB/Report for America) — Every month, Jody Dearth’s EBT card gets loaded up with the bare minimum of supplementary income to help cover the cost of groceries. This fiscal year, that’s $23.

“I’ve had people say, ‘Why do you even do the paperwork for it?’” Dearth said. “It’s milk and bread.”

That much money — less than a single night out at many restaurants — may seem negligible to some, but Dearth, a part-time service worker at O’Bleness Memorial Hospital, said it can make the difference between whether she has to skip meals that month or not.

“Because you have to pay your electric, your water. Insurance, definitely. You have to. You cannot let that stuff go,” she said.

Continued delays of the U.S. Farm Bill, which expired last month, could have serious consequences for Ohio farmers and food banks.

We’ll talk about how the delays are impacting the farming and food-insecure populations.

Guests:

• Ty Higgins, Sr., Director, Communications & Media Relations, Ohio Farm Bureau
• Joree Novotny, Executive Director, Ohio Association of Food Banks
• John Lowrey, Assistant Professor of Supply Chain and Health Sciences, Northeastern University

COLUMBUS, Ohio — The latest statistics from the United States Department of Agriculture show 13.5% of U.S. households are food insecure.

What You Need To Know

• 18 million households were food insecure at some time during 2023

• Joree Novotny, the executive director of the Ohio Association of Foodbanks, joins this edition of your Ag Report

• Each week, Spectrum News 1 anchor Chuck Ringwalt and agriculture expert Andy Vance discuss an aspect of the state's agricultural landscape

"We've been seeing food insecurity trending in the wrong way for a couple of years now for a variety of reasons," said Joree Novotny.

Novotny is the executive director of the Ohio Association of Foodbanks.

She pointed to the end of pandemic-era responses as a major factor for the increase in need. Those include: expanded emergency SNAP allotments, expanded child tax credit payments and universal school meals.

“We’ve now seen rising household costs outpacing the rate of wage growth over the past couple of years and so that has really put a lot of pressure, especially on our lower resource, lower income households,” she said.

LOGAN, Ohio (WOUB/Report for America) — Although his last name might suggest otherwise, Steven Fowler of Pasture Fowler has not been farming chickens for that long.

“I’ve been on this farm for two years in December, and then prior to that — Pasture Fowler is about four years old, and I leased land before that,” Fowler said. Fowler’s chickens are pasture-raised, meaning they grow up with grass at their feet. They live in covered enclosures, which Fowler moves every day to keep their grass supply fresh. Once they’re fully grown, he takes them in batches of about 500 to a USDA-certified meat processor to have them slaughtered and turned into food products (what Fowler calls their “one bad day”), which he then sells.

Fowler said one of the things that helped him get his business off the ground was the Local Food Purchasing Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, known here as Ohio CAN. The program was established in the 2018 farm bill as a way to get local meat and produce into the hands of people who otherwise couldn’t afford such products.