Food banks in Kitsap County may have a lifeline, despite decimating federal cuts to food assistance programs.
In April, the Trump administration slashed $500 million from two programs within the federal Department of Agriculture that allowed food banks and public schools across the nation to purchase fresh local produce, meats, eggs and dairy. In Washington, that meant state food banks — and the farmers they partner with — lost $22.3 million overnight.
There was no explanation from the Trump administration for the cuts, and there has been little communication from program administrators since — but hunger is not a wait-and-see issue. Some communities around Kitsap are taking matters into their own hands, but there’s certain holes that can’t be filled.
“It’s a drop in the bucket. I mean, I look at all of it, and I think, ‘This is so much food.’ It’s just a huge amount of people,” said Heather Burger, director of Friends of the Farms. “We think of Bainbridge Island as being this place of abundance, and yet, there is this crisis right now in our own backyard that’s just going to get worse.”
Food programs
The Local Food Purchasing Assistance Program and The Emergency Food Assistance Program, or commodities, were among the most efficient strategies the federal government had to fight food insecurity and reduce waste in the food system.
The idea was to provide funding to food banks, soup kitchens and counties to purchase fresh produce, dairy, eggs, animal proteins and vegetable starts directly from nearby farms, or from individuals like fishermen; that way, the funding would circulate in the local economy, both strengthening supply chains and supporting communities without consistent access to fresh food.
LFPA focused on local farms and growers — the only restriction on LFPA funding being that all purchased items be grown or produced in Washington and minimally processed — whereas TEFAP was a national program, and commodities could come from anywhere in the country.
Where once food banks had to prioritize shelf-stable foods, the LFPA suddenly opened the door to fresh foods, and the program gained traction almost instantly.
“Over the past five years, food banks have been able to provide much more fresh produce to patrons, which in turn has gotten the patrons using more fresh ingredients, requesting vegetables to use in recipes; people are trying new things. All-in-all, it has really shifted the perceptions of patrons about food banks, provided a much more dignified shopping experience and meant our community received much-needed and appreciated healthy food choices,” said Diane Fish, LFPA coordinator for Kitsap County and resource planner for the Kitsap Conservation District.
Between its inception in July 2022 and June 2024, hunger relief organizations in all 39 counties and 32 tribes in Washington participated in LFPA, with enrollment more than quadrupling in the program’s second year. Over half of the 255 farms that sold produce to hunger relief organizations through LFPA were run by people from underrepresented backgrounds in the industry, the state Department of Agriculture reported.
Last year in Kitsap, LFPA and TEFAP delivered over half a million pounds of farm-fresh products to local food banks through purchases by both the county and hunger relief groups. Most of the funding spent stayed in the local economy, per the USDA food system multiplier: between 2023-25, the county’s investment alone — about $150,000 — added $240,000 in new money to Kitsap’s economy.
Dollars from programs like LFPA quickly became integral to the success of many small and mid-sized farms, said Fish. An incubator farming program for Black and Indigenous People of Color farmers in Skagit and King Counties thrived with the funding; LFPA purchases made up nearly 30% of some Kitsap farms’ income.
“The cancellation of the LFPA funding is a real gut punch, because it was one of the few USDA programs that really helped the diversified small and mid-sized operations which traditional USDA commodity support programs fail to help,” Fish said. “It provided access to wholesale markets for small acreage farmers, created a guaranteed market for produce ‘seconds,’ reduced food waste, and provided profits necessary for farms to invest in needed infrastructure, which in turn improved farm and food safety and provided employee stability.”
Fish noted that without LFPA, growers will likely scale back their operations, but demand at food banks is higher than ever before — and organizations are already struggling to keep up with hunger.
“Rising client numbers are squeezing the food banks, and they are dreading the impact of the impending SNAP-EBT cuts from the recently passed federal legislation,” Fish said. “Today I dropped off carrots and salad mix from Farmhouse Organics in Poulsbo at Bremerton Foodline, and the warehouse manager was excited, because she told me they had no fresh produce to distribute.”
Cream of the crop
For hunger relief groups, it wasn’t just the access to fresh food that made LFPA so useful — it was also about freedom of choice and the volume of food it provided.
Fresh produce is not an unheard-of sight at food banks, explained Lianne Ristow, Helpline House food bank manager; often, organizations will have partnerships with nearby grocery stores to receive off-the-shelf produce and other items in a process called “gleaning.”
However, it’s not always a reliable source of food, added ShareNet director Mark Ince. As grocery stores gain better food-preservation technology and foods become more shelf-stable, grocers have more control over their inventory, and the volume of these donations has declined some 50% over the past decade for ShareNet, Ince estimated.
What was unique about commodities and LFPA was that they gave food banks the ability to select the produce they needed, and to acquire much-prized fresh animal proteins and products like milk, cheese and yogurt.
There are strict regulations that determine how and when a food bank can accept donated meats, Ristow explained. The product must be inspected by a USDA official during processing in order to be considered safe for distribution — an expensive step for many individuals and small farms, especially operations that rely on product sales and have yet to establish themselves.
That creates a terrible irony — food banks, desperate for healthy, fresh animal protein options, often have to turn away people eager to donate their surplus, Ristow said.
“It’s really unfortunate; I understand why, but we would have so many eggs if we could accept those, because so many people on the island have chickens,” Ristow said. “And also, people love backyard eggs — they’re really good, right? They’re way better than the ones from the store anyway, so it would be a win-win situation, but we can’t take them.”
Ristow estimated that about 40% of the commodities contracts that had been cancelled by mid-June were with farmers selling eggs, fresh milk and frozen animal proteins. Helpline House may have to start buying these products at market-rate, which may leave less funding for other services the nonprofit offers, she said.
“Butter, coffee and laundry detergent — those are the three things I always get from Costco. We used to buy eggs, but because of the bird flu, I’ve been unable to purchase eggs and we’ve relied solely on donations from the grocery stores and commodities, but now commodities have gone away,” said Ristow. “If we are really low on meat, I will buy chicken from Costco — but we pay market-rate; there’s not a special discounted ‘food bank’ Costco membership — and we have to buy a pallet of it. So it’s a big expense, and you end up with a lot, and then you have to have some place to store it.”
Empty plates
Fishline in Poulsbo, Helpline House on Bainbridge, ShareNet in Kingston and Central Kitsap Food Bank have all seen food insecurity balloon over the last five years.
Fishline distributed almost 1 million pounds of food in 2024 valued at about $2.1 million, executive director Charlie Thompson said. Commodities made up about 7% of that, or about $149,000, and the food bank purchased about $110,000 of food at market-rate. But less than a year later, Fishline has already purchased more food in 2025 than all of last year, and anticipates spending an additional $200,000 more before the year is over.
Similarly, client traffic at ShareNet is up by about 25%, added Ince, and up by about 50% in CK, said CK Food Bank executive director Chris Benson.
“During COVID, 40 households would be a busy day — now we are seeing 115 households a day. What is also interesting is that traditionally our demographics skewed older; now we are seeing more young people with families, so not only are the households increasing, so are the number of individuals in each household,” said Thompson. “We are witnessing a 20% year-over-year increase in need, and we are seeing folks come from farther away. We have people who live in Jefferson and Clallam County visit us weekly.”
With additional cuts to SNAP as of July 4, Kitsap residents on low- and fixed-incomes may require more support from food banks — in come cases, creating a growth in bandwidth beyond what hunger relief groups have ever seen.
“If cuts to safety net programs are made anywhere near what is being reported, it will have a devastating impact on people throughout Kitsap,” said Thompson, and “food banks will see an incredible surge in need,” added Ince.
Farm to fork
On the other side of the channel, farms that had come to depend on the funding and demand from LFPA have begun reckoning with a future without the program.
Before LFPA was created in 2022, Renee Ziemann of Full Tilth Farms in Poulsbo had already been donating excess produce after farmer’s markets and the growing season ended. Usually someone would come by from Fishline to pick up produce, Ziemann said, but it was a haphazard process and farmers didn’t receive payment for the goods.
But when Full Tilth joined LFPA, the program suddenly opened up a new avenue of early-season income, Ziemann said, and was able to provide high-value products that otherwise would not be financially feasible to donate, like local berries.
“We do vegetable starts for the Farm to Food Pantry and the LFPA, and that’s been a real joy. We already do starts that we sell at the market, but expanding that has been super beneficial,” said Ziemann. “It’s also just been a joy to drop them off at the food banks, because they’re happy to get food, but I think people starting their own garden — there’s a special joy to that.”
But running a small farm is a balancing act when it comes to time, money and effort expended on production. LFPA funding represented a relatively small portion of Full Tilth’s income — about 8% — but some nonprofit farms around Kitsap County that grow food exclusively for food banks, like Peaceful Morning Farm on Bainbridge, may see a very large hit.
Full Tilth won’t stop donating food, Ziemann said, but without the incentive and convenience of the program, there’s not as much the farm will be able to offer.
“The trick is, a piece that’s really nice about these programs is that there’s a way set up for us to donate, and so it gives us motivation to do it, whereas we’re sort of strapped for time and money, so we don’t want to waste food, but also without support — either of picking up and getting food to food banks, or being paid for our food — we’re making decisions that are harder to make about how, if we harvest that extra crop, to get it to the food banks,” said Ziemann.
Sowing new seeds
In the vacuum left by LFPA, growers and food banks are reaching back out to each other through community organizations.
Share the Harvest, a pilot program coordinated by Burger at BI Friends of the Farms, has begun purchasing produce from farms on Bainbridge to deliver to Helpline House in lieu of the infrastructure provided by LFPA. Burger coordinates with Ristow at Helpline to acquire goods that the food bank needs, then picks some up from nearby farmers.
In three weeks, the program has raised $16,000 and delivered 762 pounds of fresh produce. “We’re a small community, and you see the people around you, and you care very much. For us, it’s a moral imperative to do this to help people,” Burger said.
Consistent deliveries of proteins, dairy and eggs are still off the table due to food regulation restrictions, but Burger plans to purchase a whole pig from Winney Farm soon, which will yield about 200-250 pounds of organic pork for Helpline.
“The problem is that it’s expensive for farmers to raise pigs and chickens and cows — so it’s just not a thing [on BI],” said Burger. “I am still looking for more of that, and I hope I’ll be able to find it. But it comes down to, I’m taking another piece of [Ristow’s] budget that she doesn’t have to spend, and she can spend more money in a place where it makes more sense for her to go and buy a whole bunch of chickens.”
Burger has not yet planned to expand Share the Harvest to the rest of Kitsap County, but it may be a possibility once the program is more established on the island, she said.
Kevin Block of Sol Farm was among the first farmers to partner with Share the Harvest. The direct channel that LFPA and Share the Harvest provide between food banks and farms means that more nutritious food could get to people faster, he said.
“It’s really important with such products as leafy greens, heads of lettuce, mixed greens especially, because up to 80% of the nutrients is gone within the first 24 hours,” said Block in a podcast interview. “We picked over 140 heads of lettuce this morning, and it was here at Helpline within three hours. Knowing that’s going to help feed people here, and they’re going to gain the benefits from it, makes everyone at the farm very happy.”
Ristow agreed; it meant a lot specifically to Helpline House’s clients, she explained, many of whom are seniors or dealing with chronic illnesses.
“To have the gift of really fresh, delicious, high-quality food, whether that’s from somebody that went on a fishing charter and then is sharing their salmon or their halibut, or from someone who has put a lot of work into growing something and then sharing it with you — it’s just so nice for [clients] to have this,” said Ristow. “We have a lot of seniors who shop with us, and they a lot of them have dietary restrictions because of health issues; we have people who shop with us who are cancer survivors, and they strive really hard to just eat organic food.”
