ECO City Farms has a unique mission – to put nutritious local foods on the plates of their neighbors – and making that fresh food more accessible to their community is a top priority. With food assistance programs under threat and the elimination of nutritional education programs across the country due to the recent passing of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, that mission is now more important than ever.
Intentionally located in Prince George's County due to the food security issues and health disparities affecting that region, which has more than 100,000 people receiving food assistance, ECO City Farms received authorization to accept SNAP benefits in its first years of establishment, and is now also poised to accept the newest benefit program – Maryland SUN Bucks.
SUN Bucks is a form of SNAP, which seeks to assist families during summer months when there is an additional strain on food budgets that rely on free and reduced meals throughout the school year. The program provides $40 per month during the summer for a total of $120 for each qualifying child 5 to 18 years-old. These funds expire if not used within 122 days. ECO City Farms has been working with the University of Maryland Extension SNAP-Ed (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Education) program to connect with the local schools and families that will be able to take advantage of the new program.
“A large portion of our population is on food assistance benefits – not everyone has the room in their food budget to buy the high-quality produce we grow,” said Kayla Agonoy, Deputy Director of ECO City Farms, a nonprofit teaching and learning farm with locations in Edmonston and Bladensburg. “We started accepting SNAP benefits in the beginning years of ECO because it’s a key piece of making food accessible.”
The SUN Bucks program will help keep food accessible during the summer when kids are not getting the nutrition they would normally receive through free and reduced school meals, says Jocelyn Tidwell, SNAP-Ed Healthy Food Access Coordinator. “In its first year [summer of 2024], SUN Bucks provided over $70 million in benefits to over 600,000 children across the state to eat healthy during that summer gap.”
And that money, Tidwell says, can also benefit local farmers and farm markets that become authorized to accept SNAP benefits which includes authorization to SUN Bucks. “SUN Bucks is going to every county in the state, to every school where children receive free or reduced lunch, and even the smallest county had over 1600 kids in the program,” said Tidwell.
SNAP-Ed works with farmers and markets to help them navigate the complexities of accepting food assistance benefits. “SNAP-Ed really came at a time when we were trying to figure out how to make our produce more accessible and we were stumped at how to navigate these systems,” said Agonoy. “That clarity really pushed us forward to be able to have a quality strategy to start accepting benefits and get involved with partnerships through the town and the schools.”
But being able to accept the benefits is only part of the process; farmers must also be able to reach the customers with the message that SNAP benefits can be used at their marketplace.
“Connecting with customers can be one of the trickier parts of the experience,” said Margaret Todd, managing director and senior research associate at the University of Maryland, Baltimore – Francis King Carey School of Law who is a partner on the project to assist farmers in receiving authorization status, funded by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program (SARE). “But farmers who are authorized vendors should be aware that there is a broad network of resources available to help them succeed.”
SNAP-Ed provides practical assistance through marketing materials like signage and stickers, but also helps develop business strategies and models for reaching those consumers through local partnerships. “Working with SNAP-Ed we were able to create a strategy for reaching folks with these benefits,” Agonoy said. “There was a whole overhaul of our social and website presence that included messaging, graphics, and translations that were part of a package deal provided by SNAP-Ed, which was outside of our capacity to create.”
Already, 145 farmers and farmers markets in Maryland are authorized to sell fresh local foods to SNAP customers, with 24 sites within the DMV region signed up in the last year alone, gaining them access to a customer base that receives approximately $80 million per month in federal and state benefits.
“That money can support local businesses, while increasing access to fresh, local foods for Marylanders that would otherwise be spent at grocery stores sourcing non-local products,” Todd said.
Farmers who are already authorized to accept SNAP are poised to take advantage of the SUN Bucks program, which was designed to help families choose to eat healthy and buy local, says Tidwell. “Farmers appreciate the potential to support their businesses, but also to enact their values,” Tidwell said. “No one wants to see a kid go hungry."
To find out if your family qualifies for the SUN Bucks program, apply for the program, or verify your status, go to https://mymdthink.maryland.gov/home/#/sunbucks.
Check out the SNAP Retailer Locator at https://www.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=15e1c457b56c4a729861d015cd626a23 to find local farmers and markets that accept SNAP.
Learn more about the UME SNAP-Ed program and how it helps the state at https://extension.umd.edu/programs/family-consumer-sciences/snap-ed/.