“Treating food access as a basic human right and not a privilege will provide measurable benefit to Ulster County residents.”
— Chelsea Villalba, 2022
May the memory grow old and despised from that time when surrounded by farmland and with no shortage of people of conscience food security was ever a concern in Ulster County.
Census of Agriculture data gleaned over a five-year period records a land of plenty, with 421 farms in the county and 58,932 acres spread over four agricultural districts. Ulster is third place in New York State in the production of fruits, tree-nuts, berries, apples and sweet corn. Members of the brassica family are also plentiful. Broccoli. Cauliflower. Bok choy. Cabbage is king.
And beans. Lots of beans.
Yet the US Census estimates that 21,954 people in Ulster County existed in a condition of food insecurity at the end of 2021. Sixteen percent of that number were children under the age of 18. Some 3512 children in the county know what it is to yawn with hunger.
This is not a new problem. The hungry, like the poor, have always been with us. The two travel together as companions.
There is a segment of society that detests this reality. Without these people, the hunger numbers in Ulster County would be much worse.
How it all started
“All right. Let’s talk about the beginning of the collaboration,” says Michael Berg, executive director of Family of Woodstock. “I was there along with Beth McLendon of Ulster Corps — I believe she’s using her married name Albright now — and Deborah DeWan, who was at that time the executive director of the Rondout Valley Growers Association (RVGA).”
The year was 2009. Mohonk Consultations had put together a forum at the Mohonk Mountain House called “Hunger in the Hudson Valley, How can we help?”
“It was a real mix of farmers,” Albright remembers, “and speakers from all over the region. We had a table with a sign that said ‘gleaning,’ and0 a bunch of folks from Ulster Corps sat at that table.”
The farmers said they had produce to donate. But it wasn’t that simple.
“We would love to, they said,” Albright says, “but we don’t have the time to send it to food pantries. And the food pantries all have different limited hours. So we don’t want to drive there and find that they’re closed. And one of the people from Mohonk Consultation said it be so great if we had a map.”
That need resulted in the first of many maps Albright put together showing the locations of food pantries in relation to Ulster County Area Transit (UCAT) routes.
“So we built a collaborative with Family,” says Albright, “and the Rondout Valley Growers Association. RVGA represents the network of growers that contribute to the cause. Family represents the network of agencies, food pantries and community meal programs. And then Ulster Corps tries to recruit volunteers to fill in the gaps and make the connections.”
Currently the Ulster Corps map lists 49 food pantries in areas accessible by UCAT buses. They’re not only in the population centers like Kingston, New Paltz and Ellenville but also in places like Accord, Wallkill, Pine Bush and Modena. The map’s widely distributed
“From that time to the present,” says Berg, “it’s expanded. In addition to the Rondout Valley Growers, we’re getting a huge amount of produce from the Hudson Valley Farm Hub, and we have as partners the Bruderhof. We’ve been averaging around 150,000 pounds of produce that gets distributed throughout the food pantries and feeding programs in the county annually.”
In Ulster County, non-profits rather than municipal governments currently function as the most effective organizations for coordinating the constantly moving parts necessary to distribute food to the food-insecure.
The glean team
“So we call it a glean team,” says Albright. “We actually were just doing that a couple of days ago down in Gardiner at the Wood Thrush Farm.”
Gleaning used to be the act of staying behind the reapers’ swinging blades in the field and collecting leftover crops. Now it also means harvesting untouched crops that for whatever reason the farmer has decided would take more effort to harvest than selling it would be worth.
“You can’t control the weather,” says Kevin Caplicki, co-owner of Wood Thrush Farms, “and in this instance, we ended up having a really, really great crop of lettuce heads. Because we do one market a week we knew that there was a surplus. There was just so much that we knew we wouldn’t be able to sell it.”
Caplicki sells his bounty at an Upper West Side farmers’ market just outside the Museum of Natural History. At the beginning of the season he had leased about an acre of the rotational vegetable production beds from Four Wind Farms to grow mostly salad greens.
“It’s fantastic to be able to call Beth and tell her you can come out in the next couple days or whatever the timeframe is and glean them,” says Caplicki. “So they’ll come harvest it, and they will distribute it to the different food pantries. They have the distribution network, and they can pull together the people to do it.”
Wood Thrush Farms doesn’t get any money from this transaction. Neither does Ulster Corps.
Word on the street
Outside People’s Place at 17 Saint James Street, the largest food pantry in Kingston, Selena Gomez expresses dismay at the rising price of groceries over the last couple of years.
“Oh, my gosh, it’s so bad,” says Gomez. “I go into Walmart, and I’ve been there talking out loud like, ‘you people trip me out because the prices are so high’ and then somebody says the prices are high because people are stealing! I said ‘they’re stealing because they can’t afford to eat! That’s why they’re stealing! They’re stealing because they’re starving!’ You know what I mean?”
Blame greed. Blame price-gouging. Blame inflation. Blame supply-chain issues. Blame higher pay for farm workers. Blame the other political party. Whoever gets blamed, the price must still be paid.
“Add the price of heating oil and the price of gasoline,” says 66-year-old Greg Keys, who went off disability last year. “Altogether it took me from getting by with a little extra to not getting by at all.”
Keys gets monthly Social Security checks now that he’s aged out of disability. “They said I’m no longer disabled,” he jokes.
Heavily arthritic and fitted with seven stents, a bemused Keys says he receives just an additional $25 a month now that the level of pandemic SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] benefits were curtailed back in March.
“I’ve still got $800 on that card, from the original benefits,” he explains, “but I’ve been using it as a safety net.”
A regular patron of Boice’s Dairy, Sandra Robinson measures inflation by the price of her ice cream. “It was so cheap at $1.80 for 16 ounces, I used to want to give them a tip on top of the price of a pint,” she says, shaking her head. “And now it’s $5 for twelve ounces. It’s gone stratospheric.”
The message from the people carrying their rations in their arms or wheeling them away in the rolling-wire laundry carts in the parking lot outside People’s Place is unanimous.
“Everything is just completely over the top,” says Robinson. “I can’t imagine how people can feed their families. Without a resource like this, I don’t know what I’d do?”
The dime-store tour
“Come along here. At ten o’clock this morning, these were completely full. Not anymore.”
Mary Netter leads the way down the aisle pointing out the food as we go. Rows of grains like cereal, rice bread and pasta. Fresh fruits and vegetables. Protein like canned chicken, tuna and fish. Almonds. Walnuts. Beans. Eggs and meat. Cheese and butter. Desserts. Even pet food. Stock of available supplies can vary widely depending on the days.
“We don’t always have milk,” notes Netter.
A volunteer at People’s Place for the last 13 years. Netter shows off how the operation works. The person in need shows up with an ID to prove they live in Ulster County and, signs in. A volunteer escorts them alongside a row of food shelves. Clipboards with color-coded sheets hanging on a wall provide guidelines from the regional food bank on how much food consumers can take.
“It averages like a three-day supply of food that we’ll give them each time,” says Netter, “depending on your family size.”
In operation for 51 years, People’s Place operates the largest food pantry in Ulster County. It’s one of the largest in the food-bank system of the Northeastern New York region. Last year, it handed out just shy of 1.4 million meals.
Maximizing donations
“We’ve been slammed the last two months,” says executive director Christine Hein. “Between 650 and 750 people on average every week. [Government] reduced the SNAP benefits, which has really hurt people.”
Federal or state funding, which applies only to the food bank itself, defrays some of the costs. Because People’s Place is an independent not-for-profit unaffiliated with a church, school or governmental group, it depends solely on donations to pay for its own utilities, garbage pickup, and everything else that comes with running a food pantry.
“One of the big misconceptions with food pantries is that everything we get is free,” explains Hein. “Some of the foods we have to purchase from the food bank. We also do get food from other stores locally, a couple of times a week, what they pull off their shelves.”
The walk-in cooler and the freezer at People’s Place add to the electricity bill. Thanks to Family of Woodstock’s know-how, both are now in productive operation.
Family has recently been on a bit of a food-freezer-and-refrigerator tear.
“Family built a network of what we call food hubs,” says director Berg, “places where we built walk in-coolers and walk-in freezers. So there’s a food hub behind the town hall in Rosendale. There’s a food hub in a garage that Family owns in Ellenville. There’s a food hub in New Paltz that’s run out of the recycling center. There’s a food hub in Woodstock that we put behind our walk-in center. We’ve also put a food hub at the Darmstadt Shelter in Kingston, and we put a walk-in cooler at the Hodge Center.
“The purpose of these is to be able to maximize the use of donated produce. Produce has a shelf life. Any meat we get or dairy we get has shelf life. If we can keep it cool or keep it frozen, the shelf life is much longer and we can maximize the utilization of the donations.”
The county chips in
The county government also plays a role in addressing Ulster County’s problem of food insecurity. A comprehensive study assembled by legislative employee Chelsea Villalba, at the time a legislative intern, and championed by legislator Eve Walter resulted last August in a $350,000 allocation of state and local fiscal recovery funds to food-security initiatives.
Presently administered by Family of Woodstock, the Ulster County Food Security and Access Network (UCFSAN) was created to discuss the most practical collaborations through which various agencies could work together to address the issues.
“Because the issues are bigger than any one agency can accomplish, this includes all of the food pantries, the feeding programs, and the agencies,” says Berg.
Family should receive $75,000 over three years for the administration of the program.
A grant program to support Ulster County emergency food-service providers is also in the works. The county executive’s office relates is working to get the draft submitted this month for August legislative approval.
A resolution by legislator Megan Sperry to get Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs involved in providing healthy food to the food pantries passed in June.
“I used to manage the Rosendale farmers’ market,” explains Sperry. “I worked pretty closely with local small farmers, and we did try to do food-security advocacy. We were offering fundraising initiatives where people could make donations, and if somebody was going to use their SNAP benefits we would supplement that with the donations made by community members. Only problem was there’s not a lot of people going to farmers’ market with SNAP. It’s just not part of where they’re tapping into resources.”
That experience led Sperry to advocate for county purchase of $100,000 of CSA food shares to be distributed directly to the food pantries for consumption by those in need.
“Ideally, what we would like is to see that the people that are benefiting from this program are made aware of the farms,” she explains, “and to go out to the farms so that they could learn more about food security, healthy food, and growing that food.”
By getting food to those adults that need it, inch by inch the door closes on child food insecurity in Ulster County.
A bill sponsored by state senator Michelle Hinchey provided for an expansion of the program providing free meals for schoolchildren has recently been signed into law. Thousands of Ulster County children will no longer be worried about breakfast or lunch for 180 days a year.
Blueberry gleaning time
For those with the time and inclination, it’s not too late to glean.
“We’re gonna be starting on blueberry season next week in Hurley,” says Albright. “Monday and Wednesday mornings going through early August. And then it’s apple season after that.”
Anyone interested in helping out anywhere along the chain from farm to food pantry can send an email to glean@ulstercorps.org, or text it at 845-481-0331.
With the idea of destigmatizing level of need and creating community regardless of income level, People’s Place also runs a community café. Meals are served free daily, for all.
For a map of local farm and food pantries, visit www.ulstercorps.org/farms-food-pantries-map/. To volunteer, visit www.ulstercorps.org/volunteer-opportunities/map-of-current-volunteer-opportunities/.
Join the family! 
