On a chilly morning in April, Austin Flamm strode through grassy lanes fringed with delicate peach and apple blossoms. Mr. Flamm, 29, and his cousin Parker, 28, are the sixth generation of their family to produce fruit and vegetables on an Illinois farm that in 2024 gave them the best profits they have had since they joined the operation.
The gains were largely because Flamm Orchards had joined a program, IL-EATS, funded by the Biden-era Agriculture Department, that bought and distributed local produce to the poor. Mr. Flamm’s skepticism of government programs made him wary of IL-EATS at first. But he changed his mind when he saw the prices he was offered for his cauliflower, broccoli and other vegetables.
“It was a win for us on the farm,” Mr. Flamm said. “And the food banks that are constantly looking for donations had something to offer.”
Then the new Trump administration froze more than $1 billion for local food programs, including funding for IL-EATS. Flamm Orchards was suddenly at risk. Mr. Flamm, a farmer from a conservative stronghold, became an unlikely activist fighting to save a Biden-era program that had helped him and his neediest neighbors.
“The left is doing what the left does. These were Covid-era programs,’’ Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, said on Fox News, adding that “from what we are viewing, that program was nonessential.”
Mr. Flamm, who said he believes it is his patriotic duty to support the sitting president, sees it differently.
“When you’re talking about providing nutritional assistance to low-income families, what is more nonpartisan than that?” he said. “There’s poor people on both sides, and everybody needs a meal.”
‘This Program Could Kind of Prop Us Up’
Flamm Orchards is in the village of Cobden, in the rolling southern tip of Illinois. The dryer, warmer hilltop elevations help protect fragile fruit tree blossoms from frost and pests. Orchards are part of the region’s identity: The Cobden High School team is called the Appleknockers, derived from the old practice of knocking down excess apples on a branch with a club so that the remaining fruit grows.
Mr. Flamm’s great-great-great-grandfather, an immigrant from Germany’s Rhine River valley, bought 117 acres here in 1888. Over the years his descendants expanded the farm to 2,000 acres.
Orchards are specialty growers, a small niche in an American farming hierarchy dominated by mammoth global commodities producers. Specialty crops are labor intensive, rely heavily on local buyers and get relatively little government support.
And yet as the region’s family farms have shrunk over the past 50 years, Flamm Orchards has expanded. “The generation ahead of us was very progressive,” said Jeff Flamm, Austin’s father. “And they weren’t afraid to take a chance.”
Beginning in the 1960s, that generation pioneered new tree varieties that produced peaches from the end of June through Labor Day, and Red Delicious apples no other local orchard grew at the time.
In the 1980s, Austin’s and Parker’s parents’ generation began growing a few vegetables, and eventually added squash and cucumbers to the fruit they sold to Kroger and Walmart. By 2010, every Walmart in Illinois carried Flamm Orchards apples.
The family runs a retail farm stand and a bakery whose peach cobbler is “almost world famous,” Austin said. The orchard introduced strawberries around 2000, and sold hundreds of thousands of quarts from its farm stand during the pandemic, when supply chain breakdowns swelled demand for local food.
But in 2022, Walmart began buying more fruit from foreign orchards. “We got cut off,” Mr. Flamm said. “You could drive to the Walmart 10 minutes away, and they had apples from Chile and New Zealand on the shelf. That was painful.”
That same year Austin learned that Illinois would participate in the Agriculture Department’s Local Food Purchase Assistance program, or L.F.P.A. Illinois would receive a total of $43 million; food banks and hunger relief groups would use the money to buy products from local farms at retail prices.
“This program could kind of prop us up, to get into some other markets,” Mr. Flamm said.
Flamm Orchards qualified for it because southern Illinois was among the state’s poorest regions, and because Austin and Parker were new farmers, whom the United States was keen to support. (The average age of an American farmer is 58, and climbing.)
The new food relief effort took two years to get underway, but it proved a success. Last year, Illinois spent $16 million to buy food from 176 farmers in the state, distributing it through nearly 900 community food banks and feeding sites.
The food banks paid Flamm Orchards for its fruit and 10 different kinds of vegetables, including cucumbers, yellow squash, zucchini and peppers, samples of which Austin and Parker used to woo potential grocery store buyers. While Austin declined to say how much they earned, he said they were among the state’s top three suppliers to the program.
Through contacts at the food banks, Flamm Orchards also expanded its produce donations to a separate Illinois relief program.
Most important for the farm’s bottom line, the money from the vegetable sales allowed the family to jump start the building of an industrial kitchen for cobblers, shortcake and strawberry and peach jams, in anticipation of a $100,000 matching infrastructure grant from the Agriculture Department.
‘Everybody Was Up in Arms’
After President Trump took office in January, Mr. Flamm, Parker and their fathers drove the three hours to Springfield, the state capital, for an annual Illinois specialty growers meeting. They had heard there might be an announcement of their infrastructure grant.
Instead, “we find out the money is going to be gone,” Mr. Flamm said. They learned the local produce grant was frozen, too. The state had enough money left to buy produce through June 30. But the 2025 money, nearly $15 million, was likely lost.
“Everybody was up in arms,” Mr. Flamm said. “And the big push was, ‘Stay patient, because they’re going to come back and give this a closer look. They’ll see reason.’”
Mr. Flamm decided that “between now and the end of June, we keep pushing on the decision makers of the world, and hopefully we get that money back.”
“My long-term, more important goal is: We’ve got to see it in the farm bill,” he added, referring to the massive spending bill plagued by delays and bitter policy disputes.
Mr. Flamm has been active in the American Farm Bureau Federation, the nation’s largest farmers’ advocacy group, which is seen as more conservative than the second-largest such group, the National Farmers Union. He enjoys a good rapport with a legislative assistant for Representative Mike Bost, a conservative Republican on the House Agriculture Committee. The orchard is among his district’s biggest employers.
In late March, Mr. Flamm wrote Mr. Bost’s aide an email asking the congressman to support the local food program.
“Although it is always our goal to adapt, evolve, overcome and conquer industry shifts and increasing regulatory and monetary barriers, it seems to be becoming more and more difficult each season,” he wrote.
“During a time that an ‘America First’ agenda is able to take precedence, why would we not want to bolster our economy, our farmers and our food insecure families all in one swoop?” Mr. Flamm added.
There was no reply from Mr. Bost. A few weeks later, the aide apologized to Mr. Flamm, saying the office was overwhelmed with calls.
An Unlikely Alliance
Liz Moran Stelk, the executive director of the Illinois Stewardship Alliance, a grass roots organization that helped shape IL-EATS, said that contrary to Ms. Rollins’s assertions, IL-EATS is not a pandemic relief program. In an effort to save it, she, Mr. Flamm and other farmers tried to persuade Mr. Bost to meet with them during the March congressional recess.
Ms. Stelk and Mr. Flamm were not natural allies, given his doubts about the group’s views on sustainable farming. But in this case, he said, “a common enemy makes a close friend.”
Mr. Bost did not meet with them, although in April an aide convened a virtual meeting with Mr. Flamm and about eight other constituent farmers. Mr. Bost’s office has since said he is booked through August.
“He is one of the few people in a position to be able to tell Secretary Rollins, ‘Look, this is not a pandemic program,’” Ms. Stelk said. “This was lessons learned about the need for a resilient food system.”
In a May 6 hearing before a Senate agriculture subcommittee, senators from both parties grilled Ms. Rollins about the frozen grants for food aid. Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat of New Mexico, asked her what she would say to farmers who made investments in planting for programs now halted.
“Could you send me specific information on that?” Ms. Rollins responded. “I would love to get more details on that and what that looks like.”
In mid-May, Mr. Flamm contacted Mr. Bost’s aide again. He wondered whether the secretary’s request for details meant the administration might reverse the cuts. Mr. Flamm said that she told him it was “over with,” although the aide assured him that the congressman was “looking at providing some kind of assistance to specialty growers.”
At that point Mr. Flamm had already planted 100 acres of vegetables. When the money for the program runs out in a few weeks, he and Parker will try to sell their extra vegetables to grocery distributors as far away as St. Louis, about 100 miles northwest. “I don’t know where we’ll go with all of it,” he said. They will pay for the new kitchen themselves.
In a statement this week, Mr. Bost echoed Ms. Rollins, saying the program was funded with “surplus money intended for pandemic-era emergencies’’ and was not intended to be permanent. He said that he and his staff were in contact with farmers across the 34 counties in his district.
“We fully appreciate the dire situation they’re facing,’’ he said, adding that he was fighting for the farm bill to help them. The Biden administration, he said, “did our farmers a massive disservice by misleading them into believing’’ the local food money would continue.
“I never thought this program was going to be permanent,” Austin Flamm said. “I thought it was going to last two years, and Illinois only got one before it was cut.”
Mr. Flamm estimated that the lost funding had cost him $750,000 this year in labor, seeds, planting, infrastructure and other expenses. He called it “a bump in the road” compared with another, more profound potential loss.
“I’ve got a two-year-old son, and Parker’s got a son due in June,” he said. “If they want to come to the farm, I want it to still be here.”
Elizabeth Williamson is a feature writer for The Times, based in Washington. She has been a journalist for three decades, on three continents.
The post A Peach and Apple Farmer’s Uphill Quest to Feed Poor Families, and His Own appeared first on New York Times.
