Media Coverage

URBANA, OHIO — Oaks and Sprouts, Tonni and Graham Oberly’s family farm, got the email from the Ohio Association of Foodbanks just after five o’clock on the first Friday in March.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, or USDA, had notified the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services that it was ending a program that gave state, tribal and territorial governments federal dollars to stock food pantries from farms within a 400-mile radius. The Ohio Association of Foodbanks, in turn, shared the notice with the more than 150 farms that supplied the state’s food pantries with fresh produce, meat and dairy. One of them was Oaks and Sprouts, whose younger and diverse owners are just the type of growers the USDA’s Local Food Purchase Assistance program aimed to connect to food-insecure Americans.

Last growing season, Oaks and Sprouts had a contract worth up to $25,000 with the program, a significant amount for the small farm. The produce made its way to food pantries in nearby Springfield and Dayton and, from there, to the Ohioans who rely on them to feed themselves and their families. For Tonni Oberly, a trained doula with a background in public health, joining that distribution chain connected her work at the farm to the focus of the city and urban planning doctorate she had recently completed: how place impacts the health of Black mothers and children.

Matt Habash is the president and CEO of Mid-Ohio Food Collective. He has led Ohio’s largest food bank for over four decades.

As our elected lawmakers work out Ohio’s next two-year budget, they are considering cutting funding to pantries and food banks that help our hungry neighbors.

Last year, Mid-Ohio Food Collective distributed more than 85 million pounds of nutritious food across our 20-county service area (including Franklin County). Nearly one quarter of that food, more than 20 million pounds, came from state dollars. A state funding cut would mean millions of meals missing from dinner tables across our region at a time families simply can’t afford it.

The president and CEO of the Akron-Canton Regional Foodbank was named the 2025 John van Hengel Fellow by Feeding America during the organization’s annual conference in Atlanta in April.

Dan Flowers has dedicated nearly 30 years to food banking, beginning his career as an agency relations coordinator and now serving as leader of the Akron-Canton food bank for the past two decades.

Over the past two months, the Akron Beacon Journal has done some exceptional reporting on local food deserts, the high rates of food insecurity evident in the charitable food system over the past two years, and the state and federal funding cuts that threaten the safety net that the Akron-Canton Regional Foodbank and its 600 charitable partners provide. Indeed, 2025 is going to be a defining year regarding the intersections of economic, agricultural and social assistance programs, and this reporting has provided excellent sightlines into the field of debate.