Food insecurity remains a deeply felt issue among Southwest Colorado’s residents, which is why emerging initiatives like the Pine River Shares Community Food Farm are so important.
Pine River Shares, a nonprofit that works to bring necessary resources including food access to the Bayfield area, is a source of survival for many of the area’s residents, Director Pam Wilhoite said.
The food farm, which was bought last year by the organization, consists of roughly 33,000 square feet of covered grow space. The site, which previously housed the Native Roots Garden Center and Bayfield Gardens, will make it possible for Pine River Shares to grow produce year-round; keep food, money and labor in the community; increase local food security; and reduce dependence on trucked-in produce, she said.
Pine River Shares has also put together a Food Equity Leadership Council made up of people from the region who get their food from the nonprofit, Wilhoite said. Part of building an equitable regional food system is ensuring the people most affected by food insecurity have influence over how their region feeds itself, she said.
“They tell us pretty much how we need to go and where we need to go,” she said.
She said she asked council members who among them solely get their food from Pine River Shares – about 80% of the people in the room raised their hands.
“We are a source of their survival for 80% of the people that we’re feeding,” she said.
Every year, the organization around 30,000 people across the Pine River Valley and Los Piños watershed in eastern La Plata County, including Bayfield, Ignacio, the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, the Forest Lakes subdivision and parts of Archuleta County, Wilhoite said.
About this series
Thousands of La Plata County residents struggle to consistently access enough nutritious food. This series examines the impacts of the growing affordability crisis and looming cuts to many New Deal-era nutrition and social service programs on the county’s fragile food safety net, the widespread impact on the community and the local efforts working to build a more resilient food system. In this series:
June 17: A broad range of people experience food insecurity in a variety of ways.
July 24: A look at how the conditions and circumstances unique to the moment contribute to food insecurity and how communities are bracing for looming challenges.
Today: There are more ways than one to keep people fed and healthy. We examine some of the solutions communities are undertaking, and some areas that still need improvement. Also, learn how Pine River Shares is executing a grassroots approach to address the root of the problem by producing food locally – and keeping it local.
Other regional food equity organizations are also working to address food insecurity through a range of efforts.
The Manna soup kitchen in Durango offers residents daily, ready-to-eat meals and access to a no-cost food market, among other necessities.
“One thing that’s really important for us is to keep our services really low barrier, and understanding that food insecurity can look different for many people,” said Marissa Hunt, Manna director.
Food security can be a temporary, seasonal or long-term challenge, she said. Manna doesn’t have any qualifying factors on its food services because food insecurity can occur abruptly and change rapidly.
In addition to its regular pantry offerings, the Durango Food Bank delivers food through its Home Delivery Program to people who cannot safely or reasonably visit the pantry because of age, illness, disability, limited mobility, lack of transportation or distance from Durango. The food bank also has plans to reserve several acres of the property at its satellite facility for food production, community garden space and hunger-relief gardens.
The Fort Lewis College Grub Hub, which offers students and the broader community access to a no-cost food market, hot lunches Monday to Friday and produce vouchers through a seasonal farm stand, recently received a comprehensive basic needs designation from the state.
The designation recognizes the Grub Hub for providing integrated, data-informed support for students facing food insecurity, housing instability and other basic needs challenges.
“Our belief has always been simple: Students can’t learn if they’re hungry, housing insecure or in crisis,” said Kendra Gallegos Reichle, director of student well-being, in a June news release by the college.
The region’s K-12 schools can opt into the state-funded Healthy School Meals for All program, which provides school children with free breakfast and lunch during the school year. Durango School District’s Summer Food Service Program offers free summer sack lunches to all children 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Monday to Friday. This year’s summer food program ran June 1 to Friday out of Park Elementary.
Indigenous- and community-led organization The Four Corners Food Coalition is involved in a range of initiatives meant to address food insecurity, especially and specifically among Indigenous communities.
Efforts out of the FCFC include the ISA program, which provides Indigenous families in the Cortez area with weekly food boxes containing fresh, local and traditional food items; working with food pantries and mutual aid groups across the region to support shared distribution of resources, collective grant writing and communication; and working to develop a Community Food Center in downtown Cortez.
Some efforts to address food insecurity are starting with local farmers.
Josh Bair with food stand Just Peachy said last year the stand donated 11,000 pounds of fresh produce to Manna soup kitchen and 4,000 pounds to Durango Food Bank.
“It’s a great symbiotic relationship because we get to get the stuff out that might go bad in a day or two to them, and they get to feed some people with it,” he said.
Bair isn’t the only farmer in the region lending a helping hand: Mancos farmer of 20-plus years Dave Banga grows food specifically to be distributed by the Good Food Collective.
The Good Food Collective, a Durango-based nonprofit that works to provide connection, resources, policy support and strategic leadership to build a more just and thriving food system in the region, has some initiatives geared specifically toward supporting farmers and distributors.
Its local food purchasing program bridges the gap between local farmers and food banks by paying farmers wholesale value for their stock and getting it to food banks for free.
Mancos farmer and Good Food Collective Rural Access Manager Alix Midgely has firsthand experience with the struggles farmers face when trying to contribute to a thriving local food system.
She said the most prominent barriers she has faced and has seen other small-scale production farmers face are land access, infrastructure and labor costs.
Operating her farm and comfortably living on the land has been challenging logistically and financially, she said, and acquiring land to begin with is often a struggle for the region’s farmers.
Banga said the biggest barriers he has faced to supplying his community as a farmer include challenges with reliably selling produce amid an unstable and unpredictable economy and land access issues.
“(Farming) has something like a 90% failure rate, where you can start (and) rarely make it more than a year or two,” he said.
He said in order for farmers to sustainably support themselves and their communities’ food systems, they need to see more community support through things like the local producer initiative from the Good Food Collective and residents who can afford produce stands putting their money toward local growers and vendors.
Easier access to land and contracts facilitated on a state, federal and local level is also a need, Banga said.
In a region where wages don’t reliably cover basic costs, benefits are shrinking and rural food systems often experience strain less acutely felt by urban communities, food insecurity must be viewed as a structural problem rather than as an individual issue or a personal failing, Wilhoite said.
That means locally controlled food systems need to be bolstered, community-owned farms must be invested in, and Indigenous and community leadership must all have a seat at the table, she said.
Durango Food Bank Director Sarah Smith said addressing food insecurity is about more than emergency food distribution. It depends on sustained investment in local and regional food infrastructure, stronger partnerships among food providers, stable funding for rural food pantries, and efficient systems to move surplus food to where it’s needed.
Maintaining strong federal nutrition programs like SNAP, TEFAP, school meals and senior nutrition assistance are also a necessary part of addressing food insecurity going forward, she said, as broader economic pressures like housing, healthcare, transportation, childcare and food costs – all of which drive hunger – persist.
Good Food Collective Director Rachel Landis said an equitable and successful regional food system is a system where farmers and ranchers can make a dignified living, land is preserved for agriculture, and nourishing, culturally meaningful food is accessible to everyone – not just those who can afford food from farmers markets or high-end stores.
Building that kind of system, she said, means treating food as an ecosystem issue that connects housing, wages, transportation, schools, healthcare, emergency food providers, local grocers and workforce and economic development.
“You don’t just have hunger and food insecurity on this one side, and then, like, food retail on this other side, and then over here workforce development,” she said. “So, I think having all of those folks coming to the table to discuss and identify places to work together to address kind of upstream challenges and see them also as opportunities (is important).”
To Landis, steps forward include tackling the structural and economic pressures that force people to reduce their food intake like high housing costs, low wages, and transportation barriers, and strengthening and destigmatizing safety nets like SNAP and WIC.
“People live here not just because it’s beautiful – they talk about community,” she said. “I think this is one way you nurture that very ethereal concept of community, where we’re not just individuals who live in one place, we are a group of people working to support each other in the same geography.”
epond@durangoherald.com
