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The USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service sent out one of the saddest emailed notices I have ever received, announcing the end of relief measures enacted during the COVID-19 emergency.

The FNS says it is working closely with participants, States, retailers, other federal agencies, and the White House to help with the transition.

This will not be easy.  The COVID-induced increases in benefits did much to reduce family and child poverty as well as food insecurity.

What follows is slightly edited, mainly to reduce repetitive statements.

End of the National COVID-19 Public Health Emergency – Impact on FNS Programs. 

The national public health emergency (PHE) put in place at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic is expected to expire on May 11, 2023. The end of the public health emergency…will trigger changes that impact low-income individuals and families.

• SNAP Emergency Allotments: The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023, required that pandemic-related SNAP Emergency Allotments (EA) be terminated after the issuance of February 2023 benefits.  See: The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
• SNAP ABAWD Time Limit: Beginning July 1, 2023, able-bodied adults without dependents (ABAWDs) participating in SNAP will once again be required to meet the ABAWD work requirements or could risk losing benefits as soon as October 2023.
• Temporary Student Exemptions:  Beginning July 1, 2023, the temporary student exemptions – which allowed college students who wouldn’t typically be eligible for SNAP to receive benefits during the public health emergency – will begin to be phased out, impacting students as they are due for recertification.
• SNAP Administrative Adjustments and Waivers:  FNS is working very closely with States to help them successfully transition back to normal operations, including offering four certification-related waivers specifically designed to support the transition to post-pandemic program operations.
• Child Nutrition Programs: FNS offered States and child nutrition program operators extensive flexibilities during COVID to ensure they could continue to serve kids the nutrition they needed. Two of the flexibilities currently offered – CACFP benefits for young adults in shelters and offsite monitoring – are tied to the PHE and, therefore, will be coming to an end. See: Child Nutrition Programs
• Pandemic EBT: Since March 2020, Pandemic EBT, also known as P-EBT, has been helping eligible families cover food costs for kids who typically received free and reduced-priced school meals or were eligible through their child care facilities. These benefits will continue through the end of summer 2023 for school children, but will end when the PHE ends on May 11, 2023, for children in child care. The new nationwide Summer EBT program recently passed into law will be available starting in summer 2024, and will help families in need continue to put food on the table during the summer when children aren’t receiving meals in schools. See: Pandemic Electronic Benefits Transfer (P-EBT)  
• WIC: After the end of the public health emergency, most of the flexibilities FNS provided to WIC participants during the pandemic will continue to be available under a separate authority Congress provided FNS in the American Rescue Plan Act. With this authority, WIC state agencies can continue to offer – and build and improve upon – remote services after the PHE ends. Infant formula waivers, which are not tied to the PHE, will be phased out on a different timeline through the end of June 2023.  See:  Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC)

Additional information is available on the FNS website, here.

Comment: I consider this a national tragedy, and a huge mistake.  If COVID-19 proved anything, it was that these measures were highly effective in reducing child poverty in the United States.  Now what.  We go back to higher levels?  As I said, a national tragedy.

Congress will have much to answer for when the results of this shameful decision become to be apparent.

According to USDA,

Federal Milk Marketing Orders (FMMOs) establish certain provisions under which dairy processors purchase fresh milk from dairy farmers supplying a marketing area. ..A marketing area is generally defined as a geographic area where handlers compete for packaged fluid milk sales…Federal orders serve to maintain stable marketing relationships for all handlers and producers supplying marketing areas, thus facilitating the complex process of marketing fresh milk.

USDA has a brochure on how the program works.

FMMOs establish monthly uniform prices paid to farmers by first classifying milk by its end use. The FMMO then pools the value of that milk and shares that value among the farmers participating on that marketing order. Pooling allows farmers to receive the uniform price of all milk in the pool regardless of what end product their milk was used for. In this way, pooling makes a farmer’s payment independent of how the milk was used.

Got that?

Here are the current milk marketing regions:

I have to confess that Milk Marketing Orders are beyond me, but I am trying .  I understand the basics.  They are supposed to do three things: (1) establish minimum prices paid to dairy farmers, (2) ensure payments are accurate and timely, and (3) provide market information.

To try to understand how this works, I subscribe to AgriPulse News (“Providing balanced coverage of the food, fuel, feed, and fiber industries”).

From AgriPulse, I learned:

After more than two years of discussion and more than 130 meetings, the National Milk Producers Federation Board of Directors unanimously endorsed a comprehensive plan to correct shortcomings exacerbated during the pandemic regarding pricing regulations for milk.

Among the proposed changes, NMPF called for a return to the “higher of” Class 1 mover that was changed in the last farm bill.
NMPF also recommended that USDA update make allowances and review them every two years. Make allowances are based on estimates of what it costs to convert a hundredweight of raw milk into commodity dairy products such as cheese, butter, whey and nonfat dry milk.

NMPF plans to submit its proposal to USDA for a hearing and a potential producer referendum on the order’s modernization yet this year. The International Dairy Foods Association previously said it would request a hearing only on the make allowances request.

I looked at the comprehensive plan.  Here are NMPF’s requested changes to the Federal Milk Marketing Order System:

• Returning to the “higher of” Class I mover;
• Discontinuing the use of barrel cheese in the protein component price formula;
• Extending the current 30-day reporting limit to 45 days on forward priced sales on nonfat dry milk and dry whey to capture more exports sales in the USDA product price reporting;
• Updating milk component factors for protein, other solids and nonfat solids in the Class III and Class IV skim milk price formulas;
• Developing a process to ensure make-allowances are reviewed more frequently through legislation directing USDA to conduct mandatory plant-cost studies every two years;
• Updating dairy product manufacturing allowances contained in the USDA milk price formulas; and
• Updating the Class I differential price system to reflect changes in the cost of delivering bulk milk to fluid processing plants.

For starters, what is a “Class I mover?”  For this, I need help.

The USDA classifies milk into four categories:

CLASS I – Milk used for beverages including eggnog and ultra-high temperature (UHT) milk.

CLASS II – Milk used for soft products. This includes cottage cheese, ricotta cheese, pot cheese, Creole cheese, milk shake and ice milk mixes, frozen desserts, aerated cream, frozen cream, sour cream, half-n-half, yogurt, custards, puddings, pancake mixes, batter, buttermilk biscuit mixes, infant or dietary formulas packaged in hermetically sealed containers, candy, soup and bakery products for general distribution to the public including sweetened condensed milk used for manufacture of aforesaid products, and fluid cream or any product containing artificial fat or fat substitutes that resemble fluid cream.

CLASS III – Milk used in the manufacture of cream cheese and other spreadable cheeses, and hard cheese of types that may be shredded, grated, or crumbled. It also includes plastic cream, anhydrous milkfat, and butteroil.

CLASS IV – Milk used to produce butter, any milk product in dry form and evaporated or sweetened condensed milk in a consumer-type package.

But a Class I mover?  I cannot find a definition, although I can easily find examples of how it’s used.

The Federal Milk Marketing Order (FMMO) advanced Class I base price hit another eight-year high in March, but the change in the Class I mover formula implemented in 2019 reduced what might have been an even higher price paid to producers.

Announced by the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service on Feb. 16, the March I base price is $22.88 per hundredweight (cwt), up $1.24 from February 2022 and $7.68 more than March 2021. It’s also the highest since November 2014.

At $3.12 per cwt, the difference between the advanced Class III skim milk pricing factor ($10.59 per cwt) and the advanced Class IV skim milk pricing factor ($13.71 per cwt) grew substantially. That means producers will see a negative impact using the “average-of plus 74 cents” Class I mover compared to the old “higher-of” formula.

Based on Progressive Dairy calculations, the Class I mover calculated under the higher-of formula would have resulted in a Class I base price of $23.67 per cwt, 79 cents more than the price determined using the average-of plus 74 cents formula. That difference is up from 51 cents per cwt in February.

I give up.  If anyone can explain this to me, please do.

This is what you are up against if you want to understand why milk prices are rising at grocery stores.

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Try as hard as I can, I will never understand why everyone—rich or poor, democrat or republican—isn’t doing everything possibly to make sure that all kids in schools are offered healthy breakfasts and lunches, every day, at no cost.

Children are the future of our country.  We need them to be healthy.

That is why I will never understand how anyone could oppose universal school meals and the strongest nutrition standards possible, let alone the people who produce those meals as represented by the School Nutrition Association (SNA).

OK, the SNA strongly encourages partnerships with food and beverage companies.  The SNA does not list its donors on iany obvious place on its website, but does list the ones that contribute to its annual meeting.   A few years ago, reporters said food companies accounted for half the organization’s revenues.

Perhaps that accounts for the SNA’s long-standing opposition to improving nutrition standards for school meals and the USDA’s latest efforts to do so.

The SNA’s 2023 position paper calls for some useful things: higher reimbursement rates for school meals, universal school meals, reductions in administrative burdens.

But, it also wants: the USDA to drop its new “additional, unachievable rules.”

In February, USDA proposed stricter, long-term nutrition rules. However, 88.8% of school nutrition directors reported challenges
obtaining sufficient menu items (e.g. whole-grain, low-sodium, low-fat options) to meet current standards. Additionally, 97.8% are concerned about the availability of foods to meet the July 2023 transitional sodium limits. To keep students eating healthy school meals, USDA must support school nutrition professionals as they work to maintain current standards.

Briget Huber, writing for FERN, quotes the SNA’s director of media relations.

Additional rules are just not feasible for schools right now…Interim rules cutting sodium more modestly than in the USDA’s new proposal take effect in July, and in a recent survey, SNA members “overwhelmingly” said they were not prepared to meet even those standards…They are very concerned about the availability of foods that meet the targets and are acceptable to students… schools are struggling to staff their kitchens,…They have to compete with local fast-food restaurants and food service establishments that, quite frankly, have a better budget for increasing salaries.

In my experience, schools where personnel believe that healthy meals are important somehow manage to achieve the standards and get the kids to eat the foods.  I think the SNA should be supporting them, not undermining them.

As for evidence contrary to the SNA’s position:

• Center for Science in the Public Interest keeps a scorecard on school meals.  Its data show much compliance with standards.
• Tufts University researchers  find that school meals are healthier than those eaten at home or anywhere else.
• The USDA’s School Nutrition and Meal Cost Study finds most school able to meet the standards and that meals are getting more nutritious.
• Researchers have shown: following passage of the law that improved USDA’s school nutrition standards, its “implementation was associated with a significant decrease in [Body Mass Index] among school-aged youths in the US. The findings suggest that school meal programs represent a key opportunity for interventions to combat the childhood obesity epidemic given the high rates of program participation and the proportion of total calories consumed through school-based meals.

Yes there are financial and logistical difficulties.  And yes, kids in school won’t be eating food that is as junky.  That’s the point!

The SNA should be leading the country on encouraging schools to serve the healthiest meals possible.  That it is not doing so is a disgrace.

Here are the USDA’s infographics (other resources are also available at the USDA’s site):

• Updated Nutrition Standards Posed Challenges but Achieved Underlying Goals
• School Meals Are More Nutritious After Updated Nutrition Standards
• Progress Toward Implementing Updated Nutrition Standards
• The Cost of Producing School Meals Has Increased
• Lunches Consumed From School Are the Most Nutritious

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I got sent a mailing from USDA: “FACT SHEET: Biden-Harris Administration Delivers on its Promises to Invest in Rural Communities, Nutrition Security, Climate-Smart Agriculture, More and Better Markets and Lower Costs for Families.”

This is a summary of an extraordinarily long list of actions taken by the administration, many of them having to do with food production and consumption.

Food System Transformation: USDA is transforming the food system and improving the resilience and security of the food supply chain through more than 60 programs so that today’s markets work better for family farmers and the families they support. This multi-billion dollar effort …touches all parts of the food supply chain – from food production, food processing, food aggregation and distribution, to consumers.

A great many other sections also deal with food issues.  Here are a few examples of the range.

Food System Transformation: USDA is transforming the food system and improving the resilience and security of the food supply chain through more than 60 programs so that today’s markets work better for family farmers and the families they support. This multi-billion dollar effort is funded largely by ARP with some additional investments from the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 (CAA), the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, and the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC). It touches all parts of the food supply chain – from food production, food processing, food aggregation and distribution, to consumers. Select programs include:

• The Farm and Food Workers Relief Grant Program will make beneficiary payments to reach at least 1 million farmworkers, meatpacking workers, and front-line grocery workers who incurred pandemic-related health and safety costs.
• Organic Transition Initiative: USDA launched a $300 million Organic Transition Initiative including establishing the Transition to Organic Partnership Program (TOPP) in six regions across the U.S. as part of USDA’s Organic Transition Initiative to help transitioning and recently transitioned producers who face technical, cultural, and market shifts during the transition period and the first few years of organic certification.
• A new online tool called FarmerFairness.gov allows farmers and ranchers to report potentially unfair and anticompetitive practices in the livestock and poultry sectors.
• Assistance for Distressed Producers: USDA provided nearly $800 million in financial assistance to more than 13,000 distressed farmers and plans to provide assistance to thousands more in 2023. This work accompanies an ongoing effort to transform USDA’s farm lending programs with a focus on proactive loan service and support to keep farmers farming, rather than requiring farmers to become distressed before assistance is provided.
• In August, USDA announced up to $550 million in funding to support projects that enable underserved producers to access land, capital, and markets, and train the next, diverse generation of agricultural professionals.
• More than 41 million Americans participated in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and 2022 marked the first full calendar year that participants received a 21% average increase in monthly SNAP benefits due to USDA’s reevaluation of the Thrifty Food Plan – the first permanent increase to the purchasing power of SNAP benefits since the Thrifty Food Plan was introduced 45 years ago.
• USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) launched a new initiative to reduce Salmonella illness linked to poultry through a strong, comprehensive framework to address Salmonella in poultry that is responsive to evolving food safety hazards and embraces the latest science and technology.
• USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service is advancing tribal self-determination and awarded $5.7 million to eight tribes for demonstration projects that gave them more options to directly select and purchase foods for their Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR). This is an important step to increasing tribal food sovereignty in the program and support tribal economies, vendors, and producers.

As seems always the case with USDA, there are so many small programs (“trees”) under discussion that the big picture (“forest”) gets lost.

The forest is the need to support food system transformation to focus agricultural policy on the health of humans and the planet.  Will trees get us there one by one?

Only if there are enough of them.

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Here’s what’s going on.

SNAP costs are high

• SNAP data table, participation and costs: In 2022, 41 million SNAP participants received an average benefit of $230 per month for a total yearly cost of $119.2 billion ($113.7 billion in benefits plus $5.5 billion in administrative costs).
• Congressional Budget Office (DBO) Budget and Economic Outlook: 2023 to 2033: This projects a drop in SNAP costs by $21 billion in 2023 but only because the additional benefits awarded during the pandemic have now been reduced (CBO Baseline projections for USDA farm programs do not cover SNAP).

Even with the reduction, this is an expensive program and it’s no surprise that Republicans want to cut it.

SNAP is under constant criticism and not only because of cost.  Advocates want it to do a better job of promoting nutrition and health, as shown in two recent reports.

Advocacy Report #1.  Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program as a health intervention (by Jerry Mande and Grace Flaherty)

After reviewing the evidence on SNAP’s impacts on food insecurity, dietary quality, and health as well as research on the health impacts of other more successful federal food assistance programs, we provide three policy recommendations to strengthen SNAP’s effectiveness as a health intervention for children and families.

These are:

• Make diet quality a core SNAP objective.
• Srengthen requirements for SNAP-authorized retailers to promote healthier retail food environments.
• Pair incentives for purchasing fruits, vegetables, and other healthy foods with restrictions on unhealthy foods and sweetened 2beverages.

Advocacy Report #2.  Making Food and Nutrition Security a SNAP: Recommendations for the 2023 Farm Bill (from the  Bipartisan Policy Center’s Food and Nutrition Security Task Force.

Some of its major recommendations:

• Make sure benefit levels are adequate to achieve healthy diets.
• Make sure eligibility and work requirements do not preent undue barriers to participation.
• Encourage consumption of nutritious foods through existing and demonstration projects.

If I read this right, “demonstration projects” is a euphemism for not permitting sugar-sweetened beverages to be purchased with SNAP benefits.

The USDA is trying to improve nutrition standards for school meals.  I wish it the best of luck.

It is proposing over the next several years to:

• Limit added sugars in certain high-sugar products and, later, across the weekly menu;
• Allow flavored milk in certain circumstances and with reasonable limits on added sugars;
• Incrementally reduce weekly sodium limits over many school years; and
• Emphasize products that are primarily whole grain, with the option for occasional non-whole grain products.

This does not make it sound as if USDA is in much of a hurry.  Or that it is doing anything particularly radical.

Take the sugar proposals, for example.  Currently, the re are no limits on sugars in school meals, which means that any limits ought to be an improvement.  The USDA proposal sugar limits in two phases:

1. Product-based limits: Beginning in school year (SY) 2025-26, the rule proposes limits on products that are the leading sources of added sugars in school meals:
   1. Grain-based desserts (cereal bars, doughnuts, sweet rolls, toaster pastries, coffee cakes, and fruit turnovers) would be limited to no more than 2 ounce equivalents per week in school breakfast, consistent with the current limit for school lunch.
   2. Breakfast cereals would be limited to no more than 6 grams of added sugars per dry ounce. This would apply to CACFP [Child and Adult Care Food Program] as well, replacing the current total sugars limit.
   3. Yogurts would be limited to no more than 12 grams of added sugars per 6 ounces.
   4. Flavored milks would be limited to no more than 10 grams of added sugars per 8 fluid ounces for milk served with school lunch or breakfast. For flavored milk sold outside of the meal (as a competitive beverage for middle and high school students), the limit would be 15 grams of added sugars per 12 fluid ounces.
2. Overall weekly limit: Beginning in SY 2027-28, this rule proposes limiting added sugars to an average of less than 10% of calories per meal, for both school breakfasts and lunches. This weekly limit would be in addition to the product-based limits described above.

Sugary products will still be allowed.  And schools have 4-5 years to comply (by that time, today’s elementary school children will be in high school).

Why the pussy-footing?  The USDA must be expecting ferocious pushback, and for good reason.  Anything, no matter how small, that threatens sales of foods commonly sold in schools will incite fights to the death.

• The dairy industry is gearing up to complain about restrictions on chocolate milk, which accounts for substantial revenues.
• The industry-funded School Nutrition Association, which represents school food serrvice personnel, strongly opposes the proposals, deeming them “unachievable.”

This, of course, was  precisely the reaction to Obama Administration immprovements to school meals, most of which were implemented with little difficulty.  Even so, Congress yielded to lobbying pressure and caved in on rules about potatoes, ketchup (a vegetable!), and whole grains.

I will never understand why everyone isn’t behind healthier foods for kids, but I’m not trying to get them to eat junk food.

As for why school meals matter so much to kids’ health, see Healthy Eating Research: Rapid Health Impact Assessment on Changes to School Nutrition Standards to Align with 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

• Download the full report here.
• Download the executive summary here.
• Read the Press Release.

As for the gory details of the USDA’s proposals, see:

• Details of the proposed standards
• Comparison Chart: Current Standards vs. Proposed Standards
• Infographic: Proposed Rule for School Meal Standards
• Infographic: Proposed Timeline for Implementation
• Infographic: The Road Ahead – Building Back Better with School Meals
• Media Toolkit

Care to say something about this? FNS encourages all interested parties to comment on the proposed school meal standards rule during the 60-day comment period that begins February 7, 2023.

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One of the great tragedies of the Trump Administration was its attempt to thoroughly destroy the Economic Research Service by moving it out of Washington DC to Kansas City, Kansas.

I wrote about this repeatedly a few years ago (see links at end)) as did—and does–AgriPulse.

USDA should have planned better for staff attrition when it moved the Economic Research Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture to Kansas City,  in 2019, the Government Accountability Office says in a new report that notes the department “minimally involved employees, Congress, and other key stakeholders in relocating the agencies.”  The controversial moves during the Trump administration were vocally opposed by many employees and outside groups that said USDA had not adequately justified its decision.

The GAO has now documented exactly what critics predicted.

Coinciding with the loss of staff in fiscal years 2019 and 2020, ERS produced fewer key reports, and NIFA took longer to process grants…Two years after the relocation, the agencies’ workforce was composed mostly of new employees with less experience at ERS and NIFA than the prior workforce.

In addition, a decline in the number of employees in certain protected groups persisted. For example, the proportion of Black or African American staff at NIFA declined from 47 percent to 19 percent (see fig.).

The report says ERS has recovered.  I disagree.  As far as I can tell, ERS still produces basic reports on farming but is no longer producing the kind of hard-hitting critical analyses of food and farming issues that it used to.  I miss it.  A lot.

Some (not all) previous comments on the ERS move

• We now have a chance to repair the damage done to the Economic Research Service
• One more time: the Economic Research Service tragedy
• The tragic destruction of the Economic Research Service, Continued
• USDA’s destruction of the Economic Research Service: A National Tragedy

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I’m indebted to Politico for this one: Federal government won’t stop buying food from meatpacker tied to bribery case.

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