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,” said Stacy. “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 access food of their choice at grocery stores and farmers markets, were part of President Donald Trump’s exhaustive budget bill.
A second program, cut this spring, is also affecting small family farms in Minnesota. In March, USDA cancelled $18 million in funding for essential food assistance programs: Local Food Purchase Assistance (LFPA) and Local Food for Schools (LFS) that are used by food banks and schools to buy fresh produce from local farmers.
Cutting off a ‘lifeline’ to immigrant farmers
Minnesota is home to over 65,000 farms that are responsible for the fresh produce consumed in the state. Of those, less than 1% are BIPOC-run farms (as of 2022). That number, even though small, is significant to the state’s food system.
“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 to be able to “eat vegetables and the diet that I had growing up,” he said.
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. 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.
“Programs like LFPA are the lifeline for a business like Better Greens,” said Tita, adding that his commercial market access has been through organizations that depend on these funds. “It’s what has actually propelled us to where we are right now.”
Theresa McCormick, executive director of the nonprofit food hub The Good Acre, which works with 150 local farm partners to connect them with food banks, health organizations, and schools said, “The impact of programs like LFPA will be felt the deepest in our immigrant communities, our new farmers, our Black, Indigenous and farmers of color who are a backbone in growing food that we eat in this state.”
She added 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 and LFPA were started to make sure that farmers had the demand and the resources to harvest their product instead of it being a financial decision to till it under.
“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 to get into farming. “There are so many ways that the odds are stacked against success for farmers. The policy changes that are coming fast and furious are making what was already really tough way harder,” she said.
That’s exactly how Tita feels. “It is challenging for the African immigrant farmers to be able to navigate this system,” he said, referring to literacy, cultural and language barriers. “Now, we’re competing in the same pool of grants and are disadvantaged right at the door.”
Tita had planned to expand his business, but now, he says he will have to proceed with more caution. “There was a lot of excitement and optimism. Now, we can’t really project where things are going to fall.”
Low-income customers lose purchasing power
In 2024, the 100 vendors who sell at the Minneapolis Farmers Market, received a revenue of $235,000 from SNAP, which includes the farmers market tokens and produce bucks.
“Compared to data from the 2024 season, transaction numbers are slightly lower among customers for May and June 2025,” said Sophia Zimmerman, marketing manager and food access coordinator at the market.
“This could be due to lower amounts distributed in benefits, a lack of some seniors who used to spend their EBT cash at the market, etc.,” she added, referring to the new changes to SNAP eligibility.
The mid-season SNAP cuts mean that people will lose some of their purchasing power from incentive programs that help stretch every dollar at these markets.
One of these programs, GusNIP, a federally funded grant program that helps low-income consumers, especially SNAP participants, boost their purchasing power for fresh fruits and vegetables, is due to be cancelled at the end of August, leaving a state-wide gap of $140,000 to $150,000, Mill City Farmers Market’s Daniels pointed out.
“SNAP customers are spending about $300,000 annually at farmers markets. Now, they’ll have less to spend, which is going to have a direct impact on our farmers,” said Daniels.
A moment to localize the food system
Friendly Vang-Johnson, who runs Friendly Hmong Farms and is the government affairs director at the Minnesota Farmers Market Association, was brought up in a Hmong farming family. A lot of the work Vang-Johnson does is in the intersection of food sovereignty and racial justice for farmers of color.
Vang-Johnson believes that even though these fund cuts are going to manifest in ways that will unsettle the food system, sees it as an opportunity to localize the food supply even further, change who people buy food from, and organize mutual aid for the infrastructure farmers need to keep growing.
“What the administration really wants is to control us by controlling our food sources; I don’t think it even cares if small scale farmers exist. But, it is the farmer growing that local produce that is going to preserve our ability to have any sort of food sovereignty,” said Vang-Johnson.
