Abundance: The Farmlink Story

- Funding for this program was provided by the Laluyaux Foundation.

Carhartt and Optimist.

- You know, for, for most of human history we've been trying to figure out how to grow enough food to feed the world's population.

Literally we've been living in a food scarce world.

And when you talk to people, most people don't believe that even hunger in America is a solvable problem.

Because for most of human history it wasn't until now - Members of the National Guard are being deployed across the country.

17 million more Americans could - now face hunger because of the Coronavirus pandemic, more families are struggling to afford basic necessities.

- There are these students making a big impact.

Could they be the ones to tackle this crisis.

Tonight young people across this country answering the call.

- I think basically we had a one or two month window that we had to, to start this project.

And if we missed that window, I think this would be a different story.

Every college student across the country was feeling the same thing.

And it wasn't just hopelessness, it was feeling completely powerless.

- A lot of college kids were in a similar situation of wanting to find a way to go out and help, but then not being able to leave our houses.

And I almost think that this, like, this sense of not knowing like enabled people to do things that they wouldn't have otherwise.

- I, I distinctly remember there's one image that really was the launching of this.

I think it was the Pittsburgh Food Bank.

- Hundreds of cars lining up for the Greater Pittsburgh Food Bank before it opened yesterday.

- And it was this drone shot going over a freeway pass with a miles long lines for cars and more than half the people were turned away that day.

- You know, I had a lady here yesterday with four little kids in the car and she says, I'm a waitress and I don't have any food.

- Millions of children rely on their school lunches and all of our schools closed.

Those lunches don't get replaced for those students.

- One of our little 12-year-old girls, it was about 10 o'clock in the morning and this little girl fell out of her desk, passed out, scared me to death.

I ran down there to the room and we called an ambulance.

And when we revived her we found out that she hadn't eaten in six days and her last lunch was the school lunch on Tuesday.

This is Monday morning at 10.

- The guidance was what can we do?

It's like you just gotta stay home and that's the most you can do.

And you honestly felt like pretty powerless and and kind of helpless.

And when we then saw that that crisis was happening at our local food bank and they were gonna have to close their doors if they couldn't get more food, that's when this thing became really real for us.

- My mom was sewing masks for people 'cause there was a mask shortage.

There was this PPO shortage.

And so the goal at the beginning was to just help in some way.

- The most amazing thing that like sort of confused us and it's almost didn't know how to make sense of it, was at the same time that we were reading about these mile long lines at food banks and these food shortages, grocery stores being out of food.

We were simultaneously reading articles about farmers being forced to throw away millions and millions of pounds of food every single day.

There's footage of millions of bananas going to waste hundreds of thousands of watermelons being smashed, millions of gallons of milk being poured down the drain.

At some point we were like, you know what?

We need to do something.

We can't just sit here.

We just said let's connect one farm to one food bank.

I am James, I'm a college student.

I get hung up on.

How did you get my number?

Who gave you this like delete me from this list.

I just called a school bus company and was like, - Can we move food on the buses?

They said, no.

No, no surplus not here.

And I hopped on Google and for four and a half hours wrote down every farm that I could find that had been written about.

How is - this possible.

75 farmers and not a single one of them has had surplus we're talking to all these farmers.

They don't have anything.

And yet I'm reading like of this a massive surplus.

- Oh no, it's not just that this is hard, but we are actually totally wrong about this whole thing.

- I mean it just wasn't even close.

Just when we were losing hope on this idea, that was when the problem started to get worse.

One third - of college students are food insecure.

I guarantee you, people, people don't know that.

- So I'm a sophomore at UC Berkeley and I'm studying like the super niche major, honestly like I've never seen anywhere else.

It's called Society and Environment.

My background is the reason I am trying to pursue anything in this environmental field.

Growing up my mom worked in the fields.

You go in before sunrise and you come out after sunset.

You know, they worked hard and then, and then there wasn't that on the table.

We would walk in the neighborhood of like where, where there was apartments and all the apartments had like giant dumpsters.

So we would go like look through the dumpster and like, 'cause I was small, she'd be like, you go in there.

I would like if there was like unopened stuff we'd just take it or like close or whatever.

So it was always like, what is the system?

Like what the heck?

You know, - I mean food is right the most basic element for for life.

And the reality is that in this country, 37 million Americans don't have access to sufficient and consistent nutritious food.

And I think that is like a root of a lot of our problems.

We saw this article in the New York Times and it focused in on one farmer specifically.

- When you close all the restaurants, you change the whole supply chain.

- He literally had to take tractors and dig a giant ditch and bury 6 million pounds of onions.

- The supply chain is broken guys, nobody wants those onions.

- If there's any chance that this idea has has any hope of working, you know, we're two days into this.

No one has replied.

It is this guy.

This is do or die.

Picked up the phone, dialed them and I think he just picks it up the phone.

Shay Meyers here.

- That was a really scary moment actually.

Very frustrating, very scary.

And we usually know how to pivot.

And in that setting we didn't know what to do.

It was just scary.

- So what was interesting at the beginning when we were calling people is that we were talking to the wrong, we were talking to really small farms who might have been actually more successful 'cause there was more local buying at that time.

And Shay Meyers was the the one who told us, yes, at commercial farms, at large farms, we are struggling.

- We had 2 million pounds of onions.

We didn't know if we were gonna be able to find a home.

James and Farmlink called and I said, come get 'em.

We've got 2 million pounds - And we go pick up that U-Haul, we'd strap this bed sheet, you know, duct taped onto the back of the side of the car.

It says Farmlink.

We pick up those eggs.

We drive to the farm, we deliver them to the food bank.

- After we got in touch with Shay, the things happened very quickly.

I mean the first two deliveries, both with us driving U-Haul with the eggs and the delivery from Shay came back to back.

- My name is Martha Barajas.

I'm a, I'm a long time resident of Compton for 50 years.

This is how I feed my family and not only my family, I feed my neighbors and thousands of cars.

- And now the produce is high in the grocery stores.

You know, so to be able to come here and to receive this food is wonderful.

- We had so much to learn so quickly.

So I remember we got connected with another charitable food organization and we said we, hey, we see this problem that's happening across the country.

We know demand has doubled.

This is our organization.

We're moving all this food.

Is there anything that we can do to help?

'cause we know you guys understand this space.

And I remember them kind of like looking at us, you know, like almost - like laughing.

And they said, you guys can't help.

Like just, just keep, you know, just keep hanging outta your house, worry about your families.

We got this covered, I'm sorry, but you don't have it all handled.

So if there's any small way we can help even, you know, just locally, just let us know.

But we were totally kind of brushed off.

- I mean it was a national organization with serious resources.

You know, if they wanted to they could snap their fingers and move all of this food.

But they were slow to responding to it.

And it wasn't just one, it was multiple organizations.

Good for you guys for doing something, but you know, we'll take it from here.

It really pissed me off.

I remember leaving that call angry but motivated as ever that we had something to prove.

- And I don't think anybody had any idea of what was gonna happen next.

This - is World News Tonight - with David Muir.

Finally tonight here the children teaching us what it means to be America Strong.

- So someone just texted, you guys are on the world news.

Immediately, everything just blew up.

- ABC World News Tonight is the most watched newscast in the entire world.

- Tonight young people across this country answering the call.

College students starting Farmlink, connecting farmers with food banks, - Students from all around the country started responding to our little website.

- Hi Farmlink, my name is Jane, I'm Alex.

I am Aanika Patel.

I'm a sophomore at Bates College.

I grew up food insecure and wanted to make sure other people didn't go food insecure.

Suddenly we had a team of a hundred, 150 people calling thousands of farmers a day.

We're sending food from Oregon to California all the way out to Florida.

We're getting food from the east coast.

- All the adults in the world haven't figured out how to end world hunger, but these college students aren't willing to take no for an answer.

Like that gets people's attention.

- I remember we, we had this one goal, let's move a million pounds of food.

And if we could do that, I mean that would be amazing.

And within three weeks we'd moved a million pounds of food.

- In a day and a half.

We had $150,000 in our friend's bank account.

Like, holy **** - This is something much bigger than any of us realized.

- We love it.

- Goodnight.

- Now this is the crew I've got to work for me and you talk about pains in the rear, we got 'em.

And that man right there, I hadn't seen him do a day's work in six months, so I'd like to get him on camera for sure.

How you doing JR?

I'm doing good right now.

We're in Northeastern part of Oklahoma.

Yeah, we're probably 70 or 80 miles from Tulsa, but we're basically a rural area.

Now that the groceries have gotten higher, our crowd's getting bigger and it's gaining every day.

We're getting more now than we were two months ago just because of the price of food.

- Millions of families were still flooding a charitable food system that was never designed for a crisis.

You know, at that time we'd moved a million pounds of food.

But the, the thing was, you know, to, to really change things, we'd have to move a hundred million pounds of food.

And it was like, how are we gonna do that?

Because our whole team, we're in school right now, half our team is in finals.

Hey, you know, it's been a week.

We haven't moved any food.

Hey, it's been two weeks, we haven't moved any food.

Is this really gonna kind of work?

It definitely settles in, hey we, we have an important role to play here and we need to step it up and we sort of need to put, you know, school and life and all those other things on hold and this is what we need to be focused on right now.

And it was like, yeah, just a cascade of people who all of a sudden jumped ship and said they're all in.

- The biggest thing that became interesting to me was the logistical processes that broke down as the agricultural supply chain became untethered.

Whether it's gonna go to waste in the field in transition while it's being moved to a grocery store, when it's at the grocery store, we want to make sure that Farmlink can capture any of that waste.

- Jordan and Caroline were like superheroes.

They were flying making, remember I described that potato deal that took like 30, you know, 30 hours for us to coordinate.

They were coordinating like 40 of those every week.

- We worked with the Navajo Nation and we worked in Bakersfield in Brooklyn, we did a deal in Hawaii, we were all over.

- Yeah, I got this one guy on the line, I don't remember exactly where the farm goes from, but I think it was around 3,000 pounds of potatoes.

This food's gonna go off and literally help thousands of people.

And that was kind of like that, oh shoot, like this is the impact that this - organization can have.

The missing link is just the transportation, it's the logistics to get it there.

And that's what we can do.

I mean, I think what we started to realize is, well, like all of Farmlink, all the students, we were united by one mission.

People were there for a lot of different reasons.

I remember one, one student Joe, and he's like literally the most lively like kid you've ever met.

Like just, and I remember, you know, we've known him now for like four months and we're at our end of ceremony thing and you know, everyone's sharing.

And I remember like, mark, you know, he's, you know, starts speaking, he's so positive, Hey everyone.

And he explained to us that just a few months before that his, his dad passed away from from Covid and he explains like this was the only thing that kept him going was Farmlink.

Like instantly like just bawling, crying.

- My dad was a believer in helping people.

He came from a very rough background himself and he always believed in paying it forward in any way he could.

And you know, it's something he instilled in me and it was a way feeling closer to my dad and also fighting back against what took him from me.

- Even the people in the most pain right now were willing to do something to help others.

And I think for a lot of people, myself included, like Joe sharing that with us was just proof of how strong the bonds are.

- One by one, as the world seemed to return to normal, we were seeing all these organizations that had popped up during the last two years start to go away.

A - Lot of people came together to support healthcare workers and first responders.

So my line of questioning was, is this it?

Or you gonna go the distance?

- People kept asking us, oh the pandemic's over there won't be any more surplus food, right?

And it's like, no, that's completely wrong.

This is literally just the beginning.

- It feels like we have one of the biggest opportunities to solve a major issue that I, I could possibly imagine.

And it's right in front of us.

Every single year, 30 to 40% of the food that's grown, that's quality, nutritious food goes to waste, doesn't even make it to the grocery store, doesn't even make it to your table.

- These seven grains of rice represent the average amount of food someone eats in a lifetime.

And then this is how much food goes to waste in America each year.

- This was not a problem caused by the pandemic.

These were systemic issues that were exacerbated by those conditions and people are really starting to talk about it.

- This is a tomato I bought from the grocery store and here are three tomatoes that would've been thrown away on a farm.

Can you spot the difference?

This one here is a little too mushy.

This one has a small dent in it.

And this one, well suppliers cut the contract last minute, so it has nowhere to go.

And it's not just one tomato here and there, it's a whole system designed to throw away 30% of all food.

- We're growing enough food to feed every person on this planet.

We're we're growing enough food to feed the population nearly two times over.

And I think when we started to realize, wow, this is much bigger than just the pandemic, than just responding to the crisis, we needed to bring in the big guns.

- My name is Luis Fernando Yepiz.

And where - are you from?

- I was born in gon Sonora, Mexico.

I decided to join Farmlink because I believe with my whole heart that we can create a system which will allow everyone to have access to food, to make sure that we give aid to communities that have been neglected for decades.

I grew up with a lot of people that even working all day every day, they couldn't make enough to eat.

I grew up with kids that their idea of lunch was to go to the, to the fruit trees.

And you know, taking a mango to eat, I see food recovery as an arrow that is breaking new ground as it hits space.

And in the Farmlink project I saw the future, I saw the Farmlink project being the tip of that arrow.

- There are people who are experts in their domain who are choosing to join Farmlink because they view it as this movement for change.

We have Mike Meyer, this Texas farmer who knows us agriculture like the back of his hand, and Luis Yepiz, who has spent his entire life thinking about how we can rescue food throughout the supply chain.

And what unites everyone is still what united us at the start.

It's this feeling that we are doing something really special and something new and urgent and important.

- Mike sent us this memo and you know, you start to go through it and you know, it shows this one county in Texas and population this many people percent food insecure.

You know this many percent.

All of a sudden you finish, you finish this math, you follow it.

And for $75,000 we can solve hunger in that county.

And I remember Mike just going, we're gonna do this block by block.

We're gonna do this county by county and state by state, and we actually can't bring an end to this.

- This was just a project to help our local food bank and now it's grown into something that has the capacity to feed millions of people every single day with dignity.

But we can - only do it if we can all work together.

It's gonna take a movement of people.

Farmlink - Farmlink.

I wanna give the Farmlink project a check for $15,000?

Oh my god, - I've seen food waste in my entire career and this group is tapping into something really special.

- Just this week, more than 600,000 avocados distributed at FDR Park, - 1 million pounds of food farmers and food banks telling them they are grateful - People don't think students are really capable of anything.

Oh, oh, leave this to the adults.

As of yesterday, we've saved 60 million pounds of food.

And I think what we really believed was that in times of crisis, it's young people who step up to lead.

- Funding for this program was provided by the Laluyaux Foundation.

Carhartt and Optimist.