There’s a network of players involved in delivering food to communities in need. During the COVID pandemic, a federally-funded program strengthened this network.
The program enabled states and tribes to purchase locally-produced food, improving regional food systems. It supported disadvantaged farmers and brought fresh food to underserved communities. But the program ended in 2025.
Now, the Wisconsin Food Hub is collaborating with other hubs in the region. Their goal is to create a reliable model to safeguard against funding cuts.
Responding to funding cuts
When food goes from farm to table, it takes a journey. And it starts at farms like GreenGold Gardens in Wisconsin's Marathon County. Farmer Ying Lo says providing fresh produce to communities is a rewarding way to give back.
"I just feel so abundant," Lo says. "I can pick a vegetable on Monday and I'll have so much more again on Wednesday to pick. That just makes me feel so good to be able to do that and give to our community."
Lo started farming about six years ago. During that time, a major source of federal funding was introduced to help bring local, healthy food to communities in need. It was called the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, or LFPA.
The program provided $900 million nationwide to connect local farms, like GreenGold Gardens, with food-insecure communities like Milwaukee, through food hubs, like the Wisconsin Food Hub Cooperative.
By 2023, LFPA funds generated $4 million in Wisconsin-grown food, supported over 100 farmers and brought food to all 72 counties in the state, according the Wisconsin Food Hub. Food from farmers throughout the state went to people who get emergency food from local programs like Hunger Task Force and Feeding America Eastern Wisconsin.
But the Trump administration ended the program in March last year. So now, a newly-formed food hub network in the Midwest is working together to fill the LFPA funding gap.
Tara Roberts-Turner is the general manager at the Wisconsin Food Hub. It's a farmer-led initiative that markets, transports and sells food to customers, including hunger-relief organizations. Roberts-Turner says the LFPA improved the food hub’s efforts.
"The positives were that we formed a lot of statewide partnerships that we didn't previously have," says Roberts-Turner. "It pushed us into really working on a solution from a statewide level, but also a community-to-community-wide solution."
When LFPA funding was cut, Roberts-Turner says there was financial fallout for everyone involved.
"We had farmers that had already purchased all of their supplies," she says. "Some of them had already started producing. For food hub, we had already entered into leases, hired employees. We actually lost well over $400,000 when that was cut at the last minute."
Roberts-Turner says some collaborators didn't want to come back into a government program after that. But while the impact of losing LFPA funding was immediate, so was the response. Earlier this year, the Wisconsin Food Hub launched the Regional Transport Cooperative. It’s designed to create a sustainable food hub network that bolsters local farm-to-school and farm-to-pantry programs.
The program is a collaboration with other food hubs in the Midwest. The cooperative works using a hub-and-spoke model. So, instead of long, individual trips to deliver food to customers, the transport cooperative trucks it from farm to sub-hub. Then, food gets distributed to schools or food access organizations based on proximity. It's projected to save on transportation costs by 25% and reduce food waste and labor fees.
Food hubs in Minnesota, Illinois and Iowa play a part. That’s something Peter Kraus is especially excited about. Kraus is the general manager at the Iowa Food Hub. It temporarily closed in 2018 after losing funding. Kraus says farmers and communities in need felt that loss the most.
"There were a lot of relationships that dissolved that we were never able to get back," Kraus says. "It took a while for some farmers to get paid when it got closed and we took that very seriously. We eventually got everyone paid back."
The Iowa Food Hub reopened in 2022, in large part due to the COVID-era federal LFPA funds. Kraus says now, it’s collaboration and networking that have kept Iowa’s food hub in service. Iowa has its own network of food hubs.
"When we wove our logistics and our routes together that we're buying and selling product between each other, we immediately doubled and then tripled the amount of sales that we could do," says Kraus. "So, by interconnecting our food hubs, you're going to see a multiplier effect that I don't even know what the scale will be at this point. I think it's going to have huge impacts across the board."
Investing in food
Food hub networking is becoming more common for strengthening local food systems. A big takeaway from the 2025 National Food Hub Survey is that food hubs need investment. Jude Barry helped work on the survey. Barry serves as the associate director of Michigan State University for Regional Food Systems.
"Three quarters of the food hubs that we surveyed are really reliant on federal, state, capital lenders, donors and philanthropic funding," she says.
Barry says she’s noticed an increased nationwide interest in food hub collaborations since the university’s studies began in 2013.
"We call it social infrastructure-building and it really helps to expand our local and regional food system and to strengthen it so that in times of food shock, these networks come together," Barry says. "I think food hub networks are definitely a form of social infrastructure that could really support these businesses as they encounter challenges and opportunities as well."
What Barry calls “social infrastructure building” has helped food hubs in North Carolina continue their mission amid funding uncertainties with programs like SNAP and the LFPA.
Megan Martel is the co-executive director of the Western North Carolina Food Coalition, or WNC. The WNC was founded in 2020, so they have more experience in how regional-scale collaboration works compared to the new networking that’s happening in Wisconsin. Today, the WNC has partnerships with over 10 food hubs.
Martel says losing LFPA funds caused some farms to close. But collaboration has already created change.
"So the more farms that come to hubs, and then hubs come to the table as advocates and are communicating with institutional buyers, with funders, the more collective power the whole local food system has to advocate for sharing the risk," she says.
Martel says collaboration also led to a fundraiser that food hubs held this spring in Asheville. She says almost half of the attendees didn’t know how the local food system works.
"They got to meet farmers, meet food hub directors, share drink together, have a deeper understanding of who is in our local food system and what our local food system really logistically means," says Martel.
Food psychology
While food hub collaboration has already made impacts, it doesn’t solve the issue of food psychology, according to Kari Brayman, sales and marketing director at Tractor Food & Farms in North Carolina.
Brayman says some of the rural farmers they work with buy the produce they eat from Walmart or Dollar General.
"That's what we're competing against," she says. "How crazy is that? The very people that we're trying to help can't afford to buy local food. So that's one problem. Then, we have this industrialized idea of cheaper is better and, I'm doing OK if I can buy this bread for a dollar."
Brayman says another issue is the ebb and flow of federal funding, which causes disruptions in programs like SNAP, or FoodShare.
"You’ve got a cast of characters in funding that are called different things at the federal level," says Brayman. "But in the end, the person receiving that food doesn't care what it's called. They just need to eat, you know, and they don't understand when you're giving them food in some way or they're using SNAP benefits and then they just abruptly end, they look to the food hub as the person that stopped that when it's actually like further up the stream."
Back at the Wisconsin Food Hub, Tara Roberts-Turner says her hope is that state government provides future funding to ensure long-term sustainability. Currently, funding is coming from a $10 million state investment in Wisconsin's Food Security Initiative.
In August, the Wisconsin Food Hub opened its new cold storage facility funded by a federal USDA Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure grant and philanthropic investments.
"If we don't get that government funding to keep building this until we are sustainable, then we'll be in another situation like last year where we're going to have to pull the plug," Roberts-Turner says.
The Wisconsin Food Hub has plans to turn the Regional Transport Cooperative into its own nonprofit organization. For Roberts-Turner, that’s the next step in creating sustainable and equitable food access.
Support for Seeking Solutions: Food Access in Milwaukee is provided by Jon E. Sorenson, Christine Symchych and Jim McNulty, Forage Kitchen, Capuchin Community Services and Antonia Foundation.
