The USDA is giving free food to hundreds of families in Georgetown.
Beginning in the middle of May, officials at the Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) came up with a plan to kill two birds with one stone.
Food producers around the country saw their demand cut out from under them when restaurants, hotels, caterers, and other business closed due to the Coronavirus. For some operations, this sudden shock left more than 50 percent of food products without buyers.
Storage is hardly feasible for fresh produce, dairy, or meat especially when companies don’t have that infrastructure because they’ve scarcely relied on it before. Some food was unfortunately dumped before solutions became apparent.
Meanwhile, residents who were laid off, or were eating more of their meals at home, were simultaneously facing higher food prices and, in some cases, less selection. Supply and demand both existed, but no service channel had been established between them until the Farmers to Families Food Box program.
The Farmers to Families program accepts applications from any 501(c)(3) in good standing, like ABCAP, to distribute food to communities.
Just for this program, ABCAP in Georgetown is renting additional cold storage containers for diary and protein, and much of the produce comes on Wednesdays just before it is distributed. While the menu changes every week, farm fresh items are given to families without requiring income verification or criteria of any kind.
As part of their distribution process, ABCAP simply asks each recipient how many members are in their family, to report demographic data back to the USDA. In Georgetown, recipients can show up to the ABCAP facility at 406 W Plum St. at 10:30am on Wednesdays.
From 11am-1pm, ABCAP employees, seasonal workers, and volunteers will bring family-sized servings of food to the vehicles so beneficiaries never have to park or get out.
According to Kim Brown, one of the Program Directors at ABCAP, they have served nearly 300 families in a week through this program, and the word is out.
On Wednesday, June 24th, a grid of vehicles had been directed into the parking lot by 10:45 while ABCAP workers awaited their weekly delivery. A flyer directs residents to please be patient and respectful as the workers are distributing food as fast as they can. “Sometimes, we were averaging 30 seconds per car,” said Brown.
After noticing many families traveling from out of town, ABCAP began asking each family for a zip code as well. This was prompted by distributers’ own curiosity, but now they are using this information to map out Georgetown’s service area, and potentially to aid in coordinating future programs.
Kim Brown told the Brown County Press that they expect this program to continue weekly until August.
On June 4th, the USDA communicated that they were reaching the end of the $1.2 billion worth of food contracts they could buy, but they are exploring options for authorizing additional contracts.
A list of local, regional, and national suppliers being aided by this program can be found at ams.usda.gov .
For more information on the Food Box program in Brown County, follow the ABCAP Facebook page.
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