[Melony Edwards]

Ohhh, looking forward to reading!

[Project Roots]

Thank you for sharing Jen. This article was most certainly an interesting read. I am hoping and praying that Tennese legislation passes for the $500k or more! I am still scratching my head…if Iowa, Nevada and Tennessee applied for the first round of LFPA funding, why oh why wouldn’t they apply for the second? What a missed opportunity. My heart aches for the producers in Tennessee, Iowa, and Nevada. I wonder if neighboring states would be interested in procuring from them without disrupting their own instate production with local farmers.

[Jacob Clark]

I looked over Nebraska’s LFPA Plus journey. We submitted our application 1 day before the deadline, however it went through 10 months of review, formally being submitted in March of this year. So it seems there is a lot of leeway with amending. Since there are specific allocations for each state, I wonder why the USDA cannot make an emergency amendment for the 4 entities that did not apply for LFPA Plus? It is not like the money is going to go anywhere else since each state had its own allocation.

This further shows the importance of the EAT Local Foods Act.

[Hannah Quigley]

While I definitely agree on the importance of the EAT Local Foods Act – there is high likelihood that the LFPA+ funding that TN passed on did get reallocated to another entity, and probably a Tribal entity. There was an overwhelming amount of requests for LFPA+ funding for the Tribal set aside of funds that exceeded what they had to offer. Depending on when TN realized their mistake (which I didn’t see in the article), the money may have already been reallocated.