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Kansas Ag News Headlines |
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A Lawrence Farmer’s Innovative Approach to Food Security
Kansas Ag Connection - 06/09/2023
Pantaleon Florez III looks at food security as an issue to be solved.
He asks those working in local food systems (and himself) what they would do if their community didn’t have a hunger issue.
“That’s my new narrative: ‘What would you do if you didn’t have to do this work?’” Florez asked. “Get yourself there, while also solving things instead of just band-aiding constantly.”
Florez is tired of old food assistance programs such as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and food pantries.
In 2018 he started the Unsuspended Food Program in Douglas County. The idea was to raise money on the back end to support the work he put in on his farm and in the kitchen to feed people.
“That did not work at all,” Florez said.
He donated thousands of dollars’ worth of organically grown produce, and prepared food, without nearly as much fundraising to compensate.
“I obviously don’t regret it. It helped feed a lot of people. But it also just wasn’t sustainable,” Florez said.
The outcome led Florez to look at food subsidy programs in a different way. Most programs subsidize consumption — participants get money to buy food, or food banks are funded to recover and distribute food.
But what would happen if that funding went, instead, to pay the salaries of farmers who grew fresh food and gave it away at no cost?
Florez, who runs Maseualkualli Farms on the north end of Lawrence, started to research and plan.
He developed a proposal that treats “food as a public work” and creates a system of localized food and employment.
“We currently subsidize the consumption of food to try and eliminate hunger,” Florez explained.
According to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), food insecurity rates nationwide have hovered between 10% and 14% of households since 1998. Within this data, Black and Hispanic households are more than twice as likely to struggle with food security than white households.
To Florez, this means the food assistance programs in place haven’t made significant progress increasing food security.
“It’s not solving an issue … It’s really just maintaining a level of hardship, which is just really hard to think about,” Florez said. “Thirty years of longitudinal evidence means that we have to do something different.”
Source: flatlandkc.org
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