Cuts to SNAP benefits have ripple effect on Minnesota’s immigrant farmers

For more than three decades at the Minneapolis Farmers Market, Mai Yang, 66, has sold everything from blueberries and tomatoes to food prized in Hmong cuisine including bitter melon, Malabar spinach and sweet potato leaves.

Her family-run farm, based in Hastings, spans three generations, with her daughter Stacy and granddaughter joining her at the market on the weekends.

Stacy Yang jokes that she doesn’t have a green thumb, but says farming is at the center of her mother’s life.

“My mother takes a lot of pride in her work, even when it comes to presenting the vegetables a certain way for the farmers market,” Stacy said. “We’re trying to keep the business as long as possible because this is her only source of income.”

Cuts in July to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funds, however, mean that Mai Yang might have to rethink what she plants next year. SNAP customers, many of whom seek produce specific to Hmong cuisine, contribute 25% to 30% of their income every month.

The cuts to SNAP, which allows 440,000 Minnesotans to buy food at grocery stores and farmers markets, were part of President Donald Trump’s budget bill.

A second program, cut this spring, is also affecting small family farms in Minnesota. In March, the USDA cancelled $18 million in funding for food assistance programs: Local Food Purchase Assistance (LFPA) and Local Food for Schools (LFS), which are used by food banks and schools to buy fresh produce from local farmers.

“One of the coolest things about our local food movement is how intertwined it is with the hard work and the success of our immigrants and BIPOC community,” said Ella Daniels, executive director of Mill City Farmers Market.

Funwi Tita is a Cameroonian farmer who immigrated to Minnesota 23 years ago, but he never stopped craving home food. So, he started farming.

What started as a backyard kitchen garden to feed his family and friends grew into a 15-acre farm called Better Greens divided between Otsego and Monticello. Tita grows African vegetables like njama njama or garden huckleberry, okra, cassava, pumpkin and taro leaves, among others, that can’t be found in grocery stores.

“The farm grew slowly but surely because of demand from our African brothers and sisters,” he said. “It transports them back home, to their grandma’s house, in a village somewhere in Africa.”

Tita, who partners with the Good Acre, Second Harvest Heartland and the Food Group to sell his produce, said the fund cuts came as a “shock wave” to his business and to farms of similar scale run by immigrant African farmers.

Theresa McCormick, executive director of the nonprofit the Good Acre, which works with 150 farm partners, said that without the funds from LFPA, food banks will have less buying power to purchase from local farmers, straining an already complex food economy.

Food banks like the Food Group and Second Harvest Heartland are two of the Good Acre’s biggest buyers of fresh produce. Ethan Neal, director of partner operations at Second Harvest Heartland says that programs like LFS and LFPA were started to make sure that farmers had the demand and the resources to harvest their product.

“Now we’re starting to see farmers looking at the product being like, ‘I don’t even have a government market, so it actually is going to be beneficial for me to till this under.’ That’s when you start to get into trouble,” he said.

The Food Group’s executive director, Sophia Lenarz-Coy, sees these cuts as yet another hurdle for people who want to get into farming. “The policy changes that are coming fast and furious are making what was already really tough way harder,” she said.

In 2024, the 100 vendors who sell at the Minneapolis Farmers Market, received revenue of $235,000 from SNAP, which includes the farmers market tokens and produce bucks. Transaction numbers were slightly lower this May and June, said Sophia Zimmerman, marketing manager and food access coordinator at the market.

The mid-season SNAP cuts mean that people will lose some of their purchasing power from incentive programs.

One of these programs, GusNIP, a federally funded grant program that helps low-income consumers, especially SNAP participants, is due to be cancelled at the end of August, leaving a statewide gap of $140,000 to $150,000, Daniels said.

“SNAP customers are spending about $300,000 annually at farmers markets,” Daniels said. “Now, they’ll have less to spend, which is going to have a direct impact on our farmers.”

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