USDA

Under the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, Congress gave the U.S. Department of Agriculture the authority to provide students with free meals during the COVID-19 pandemic, even if they were learning remotely. This also gave the department the flexibility in distributing the food, allowing them to work with districts and community organizations. The USDA will be stopping these services at the end of the month.

In Michigan, school districts have been providing meals for students who might not have otherwise received them during the statewide lockdown.

Michigan is the first state approved for a federal program to help feed kids who rely on school meals amid COVID-19 pandemic.

The United States Department of Agriculture announced Thursday that Michigan is the first state approved for the Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer - or Pandemic EBT program.  

Michigan is among the states expected to be hardest hit by changes announced on Wednesday in the federal food stamp program.

The Trump administration is tightening work requirements to receive benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP.

About 600 Michigan farms will be getting a survey to fill out in the coming months. The survey comes from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Survey questions will cover things such as farm expenses, income and assets. John Miyares works for the USDA in East Lansing, and leads the survey team.

The federal government will soon begin offering 17,000 Flint households monthly packages of healthy foods.

Working with local food banks and feeding organizations, USDA will provide an additional 14-pound nutrient-targeted food package, containing foods rich in calcium, iron, and Vitamin C. The intent is to limit the absorption of lead from Flint’s tainted drinking water.

Kevin Concannon is with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He says the state has been helping since the city’s water emergency was declared earlier this year.

The state of Michigan is getting nearly $7 million from the federal government to expand a nutrition program for children.

Today, dozens of children in Flint ate breakfast at the Haskell Youth Center, thanks to a federal child nutrition program. But the program hasn’t operated during the summer, until this year.

Kevin Concannon is the undersecretary at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He says a special pilot program is being expanded, that will provide 16,000 Flint children with nutritious meals during the summer months too.

Michigan is getting $5.5 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help feed kids this summer.

The grant will fund a pilot program that lets families use electronic benefits cards to purchase healthy food in their communities.

Kyle Guerrant with the Michigan Department of Education said one in five children in the state  doesn't have enough to eat.

"Approximately 50% of a student's calories are received in the school environment," he said. "We know that need is still there in the summertime for many of  our students and families."

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack believes farmers can do more to combat climate change. 

He spoke to an audience of farmers and agri-business leaders this afternoon at Michigan State University.

Vilsack says farmers are very familiar with the effects of climate change.

The nation’s top agriculture official will be in East Lansing later today to unveil a new plan for dealing with climate change.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack will be on the Michigan State University campus. 

The Fair Food Network says it will use a $5.1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to expand Michigan’s Double Up Food Bucks program.

The program helps residents receiving food assistance benefits purchase more fresh fruits and vegetables through a dollar matching system.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has $25 million in loan guarantees available for qualifying small businesses in Michigan.

The loans can go towards building purchases, new equipment, refinancing, or just about anything a small business needs to run.

With its rocky soil, thick forests and painfully short growing season, the Upper Peninsula is never going to look like Iowa or Kansas – and that's okay. For more than a century, a hardy batch of growers and livestock farmers have managed to survive and prosper in these less-than-ideal conditions. Thanks to new technologies and some decidedly low-tech solutions, the U.P.'s latest generation of ag workers are more productive than ever. Ultimately, the fruits of their labor may be felt – and tasted – far beyond the region's borders.

Age-Old Limitations
If you're a U.P. native, you don't need an advanced degree to understand why agriculture is challenging here. But Alger County MSU Extension Director Jim Isleib has one, so people tend to listen to his thoughts on this issue. "Poor soils and a short growing season – that about sums it up," he says. 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is trying to give honeybees more and better-quality food in the Midwest.

Dan Zay is a biologist with the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service in Michigan. He says the agency hopes a better variety of high-quality flowering plants will help honeybees rebound from major population losses over the last eight years.

“It’s said that one in three mouthfuls of food and drink that we consume involves the efforts of honeybees,” Zay said.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is expanding a pilot program to help children get nutritious meals when their school's free lunch program has shut down for the summer.

For a long time, the agency has funded a program that sets up meal sites at churches and other locations, where children can go to get meals in the summer time.

But many children in rural and inner-city neighborhoods have no site near them, or no safe and reliable way to get there.

According to the 2011 Expenditures on Children by Families annual report released by the USDA today, raising a baby born in 2011 will cost a middle-class family about $234,900 in today's currency.

According to the report,

This represents a 3.5 percent increase from 2010. Expenses for transportation, child care, education, and food saw the largest percentage increases related to child rearing from 2010. There were smaller increases in housing, clothing, health care, and miscellaneous expenses on a child during the same period.

The report states that most of this money will fund the child’s housing, child care, education and food expenses through age 17, representing roughly 64 percent of all costs. As the study only follows children from birth through high school, costs associated with pregnancy and post-high school education are omitted from these numbers.

More than half a million Michigan kids qualified for free and reduced lunches last year. But only about 1 in 6 of them took advantage of the programs offered during the three month summer break.

By the numbers

• The nation: 18.5 million children are eligible – 3.3 million (18%) participated
• In Michigan: 546,000 children are eligible – 92,500 (17%) participated
  

Update 2:38 p.m.:

There are more declarations of natural disaster areas in the state of Michigan. The 21 counties I wrote about below were for "excessive heat" disasters. The USDA has also issued natural disaster declarations for frost (the excessive cold occurred from March 1st through May 16th), AND for storms and rain.

The 32 counties that received the frost declarations can be found this FEMA page.