The Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) will enter into cooperative agreements with state governments for the purpose of purchasing local, unprocessed or minimally processed domestic foods from local producers, targeting historically underserved farmers/producers/fishers and small businesses including processors, aggregators, and distributors. Food purchased will be distributed to schools and child care institutions participating in the NSLP or CACFP. In addition to increasing local food consumption, funds are expected to help build and expand economic opportunity for local and historically underserved farmers/producers/fishers and small businesses including processors, aggregators, and distributors.

AMS encourages projects that benefit historically underserved farmers/producers/fishers and small businesses, provide food distribution to schools and child care institutions, and incorporate culturally relevant foods, including kosher and halal, as appropriate based on community preferences. For cooperative agreements intending to serve these entities, recipients should engage and involve those beneficiaries when developing their Project Summary. AMS would like these relationships and purchase and distribution channels to continue past the conclusion of this program. USDA will provide the state government funding for food purchases as well as guidance, technical assistance, instruction, and monitoring throughout the life cycle of the cooperative agreement.

Funding can only be used for food procurement. Recipients may not request direct or indirect costs associated with developing or administering the program. All food purchased must be unprocessed or minimally processed, and must meet the definitions of domestic and local, as defined in section 1.2.1 of the Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO). See section 4.6.2 “Allowable and unallowable costs and activities” of the NOFO for more information.

State governments will submit proposals indicating how they or the participating schools and institutions will use the funds to purchase commodities to meet the specified objectives within their state. These funds will be awarded through a non-competitive process based on a formula derived from enrollment and earnings of schools participating in the NSLP and the School Breakfast Program (SBP), and a formula derived from meal counts of participants of the CACFP. Cooperative Agreements will be awarded based on acceptability of the Project Summary and the ability of the recipient to meet the goals of the program.