2 weeks Ago By Joshua Irvine
GRAND FORKS — Emergency nutrition providers say cuts to federal food assistance programs could prove disastrous for families on both sides of the Red River. Halted and canceled food deliveries to food banks serving North Dakota and northern Minnesota are set to test those agencies and the several hundred food pantries they serve, according to food bank and pantry operators. ADVERTISEMENT The hold on deliveries, which could begin affecting North Dakota as soon as May, comes with donations down and demand for pantry services at their highest levels in years amid widespread cost-of-living issues.
“We’re already at a crisis with the availability of food, but we’re looking at a catastrophe,” said Susie Novak Boelter, executive director of North Country Food Bank in East Grand Forks. “People just can’t afford their lives right now.” 420,000 pounds Millions of dollars worth of food deliveries to North Dakota and Minnesota are expected to be interrupted after a series of U.
S. Department of Agriculture cuts to nutrition programs. The latest of those cuts is to the approximately $500 million that USDA allocated this fiscal year from the Commodity Credit Corporation to The Emergency Food Assistance Program.
TEFAP supplements low-income Americans’ diets with emergency food and nutrition assistance. The CCC is a New Deal program that funds income and price support programs for farmers as well as overseas food programs including those run by the U.S.
Agency for International Development. Great Plains Food Bank in Fargo, which serves an estimated 151,000 people through 196 food pantries in North Dakota and Clay County, Minnesota, expects to lose out on around $294,000 worth of TEFAP deliveries, according to communications director Darby Njos. Seven deliveries of USDA commodities to the food bank have been canceled, Njos said, totaling around 300,000 pounds of food.
ADVERTISEMENT Njos described the commodities as “nutritious, sought-after food” including meat, dairy products, produce and some 11,250 cartons of eggs. Those deliveries were scheduled to begin in May and carry through July. Several of the deliveries were initially placed on an indefinite hold before the food bank was notified that all seven had been canceled.
Njos said Great Plains was working to figure out its next steps and talking with its partners about how this would impact them. Novak Boelter says that all of North Country’s orders from the USDA paid for by Commodity Credit Corporation funds have been canceled, though TEFAP’s other funding sources remain intact. She says the food bank was about halfway through its contract and expects it will not receive the remainder of its scheduled food deliveries — equal to around 120,000 pounds of food.
The food bank, based in East Grand Forks, serves 220 food pantries in the state’s northeast corner. Novak Boelter said North Country has been advised that TEFAP is receiving another $261 million in funding through another USDA program, Section 32, but said those are national numbers and she is unsure how that funding will reach Minnesota or North Country. ADVERTISEMENT In addition to the TEFAP cuts, Great Plains has also been affected by USDA's decision to ax the Local Food Purchase Assistance program, which allowed the food bank to purchase food from local farmers, growers and ranchers.
The nonprofit learned last month it would not be receiving a $1 million grant for local food purchases through TEFAP. “We’ve had to have some really hard conversations with some farmers that we were in agreements with,” Njos said. All told, the USDA cuts come out to around $1.
3 million in lost revenue, or roughly 12% of Great Plains’ 2025 operating budget of $10.8 million. Demand up, supply down The USDA cuts come as area food banks have seen the highest demand for their services since the COVID-19 pandemic put millions out of work in 2020.
Great Plains gave out 15.9 million pounds of food in 2024, according to Njos, up 19% from 2023 and its largest annual distribution since 2020. North Country actually surpassed its 2020 distribution figures back in 2023.
Last year, it gave out a record-breaking 7.4 million pounds of food — a 17% increase from 2023. ADVERTISEMENT Distribution this year for the Minnesota food bank is already up 13%, Novak Boelter said.
Local food pantries’ client numbers reflect that growing demand. In Grand Forks, Red River Valley Community Action’s food pantry served 71 households in January, compared to 62 households a year before. Its Michigan, North Dakota, food pantry has seen similar increases in client demand this year.
Novak Boelter says North Country’s pantries have reported a 20% to 30% increase in clients over the last year. The lost USDA funding means that food banks and food pantries will have to lean more on their donations, at a time when several providers are reporting a slump in support. “As funds dry up or are reduced, this will mean less for food banks who will have to rely more on donations.
And the fact is that donations are down,” Jacqueline Hassett, director of Red River Valley Community Action, wrote in an email. Hassett said the agency has reduced its pantry hours over the last year due to a shortage of available donations. ADVERTISEMENT North Country has seen strong donor support for the past several years, but that support has started to soften in the last five to six months, according to Novak Boelter.
Njos of Great Plains Food Bank was more optimistic, saying its donation figures remained strong and pointing out some 61% of its food comes via donations, versus the 11% it purchases and the 28% it receives through government programs. “Food banks by nature have always responded to crises and disasters,” Njos said. “It’s not going to make us jump.
” Who gets hurt Debbie Narum has volunteered at the Michigan, North Dakota, food pantry for six years. As long as she’s been there, the pantry has been supplementing the diets of Nelson County’s retirees and Social Security recipients. Prices can be high at the largely rural county’s three grocery stores, and Grand Forks’ retail options are a 45-minute drive east from Michigan.
In recent years, she says, the pantry has seen an increasing number of younger clients, mostly new families with kids at home, some unemployed. Those families now make up around a quarter of the pantry’s clients, Narum estimated. ADVERTISEMENT Narum hadn’t been following news of the USDA cuts when the Grand Forks Herald called, but the cuts perturbed her.
“That’s going to hurt,” she said, noting that 60% to 70% of the pantry’s food comes from Great Plains Food Bank. (Nelson County also chips in to help the pantry buy groceries.) “It’s a scary time for everyone right now, with the cost of stuff,” she added.
The experts the Herald spoke to agreed it was people like the Michigan pantry’s clients — rural, with lower incomes — that would feel the USDA cuts most. Suzy Thorson, a registered dietician and nutritionist with Grand Forks County’s NSDU Extension office, said the cuts come at a deeply uncertain time for many of the families she sees at county food pantries, pointing to economic instability and the threat of Medicaid cuts pushed by Republicans in Congress. “These really are our most fragile folks.
They’re really faced with difficult decisions on how to feed their families and they really rely on food pantries to get by,” Thorson said. Novak Boelter also expressed concerns about language in a Republican budget resolution she says would lead to a $230 million reduction in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, also known as food stamps. Minnesota distributed $800 million in SNAP benefits last year.
The impact to low-income families will likely be magnified in rural areas like Nelson County, with its already-limited grocery options. “The more rural you are, the more limited access people have to food in the first place,” Novak Boelter noted. Thorson, who teaches a class on nutrition and food resource management at Hope Church in Grand Forks’ food pantry, said late last month that the USDA cuts had not yet impacted her clients but she expected to see their impact in the “near future.
” Njos said the effect will likely be felt for Great Plains’ pantries in May, when the organization has to shift its supply model to accommodate for the lost TEFAP dollars. Hassett wrote she is “confident” that Red River Valley Community Action and its local partners will do their best to reduce the impact of the lost funding, and pointed to positive local indicators like the establishment of a food insecurity coalition organized by Grand Forks Public Health. However, she also noted, “For some of our families, they may find themselves choosing between nutritious food for their children and paying rent.
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