Farm Fresh Rhode Island will soon have a new executive director: Janet Coit, the former longtime head of the state Department of Environmental Management.
Coit will take over the nonprofit that aims to help local farmers, fishers, and food producers reach more customers on April 13. She replaces Jesse Rye, who has led Farm Fresh RI for the past 14 years.
The organization is facing major financial challenges following a loss of federal funding. Coit says she’s excited to help identify new revenue sources for Farm Fresh RI, while further supporting the availability of local food here in Rhode Island. She joined Ocean State Media’s morning host, Luis Hernandez, to talk about her goals.
On what Farm Fresh RI does
Janet Coit: It’s a wonderful organization, which is what attracted me there in the first place. (It’s) an organization that looks to support local farming, local fishing, local food businesses, and then connect eaters – people of all kinds – with fresh local food. So it’s really a win-win proposition; increasing access and affordability of local food, and then thereby supporting the businesses – the food businesses – that produce and harvest food locally.
On how Farm Fresh RI has been impacted by federal funding cuts
Coit: Farm Fresh Rhode Island lost $3 million abruptly. Like so many nonprofit organizations, when this administration cut back on federal funding, that (was) a devastating, sudden impact on the organization’s budget. So they had to let people go – which is also wrenching – and trim the sales a bit to make sure that the expenses matched the revenue stream.
The need is expanding in Rhode Island, both in regard to families that are food insecure, but also the need to support farmers and fishermen who have expenses rising, including incredibly expensive land in Rhode Island. So what Farm Fresh needs to do, and I’m very excited to be part of this, is diversify the funding streams. (We) can’t really depend as much on federal funds at the moment. So there’s funds from a variety of other sources.
We’d love to see state funding go into some of the programs. Foundations have been generous and I know from talking to people at Farm Fresh that after they lost the federal funding, their phones were ringing with some individual donors saying, “How can we help?” What Farm Fresh does is so positive and I want to be part of making sure they’re viable. And I mean, I like a challenge, too.
On what the state can do to help local farmers
Coit: The state division of agriculture at DEM is fantastic. It’s small and mighty. One of the things about agriculture in Rhode Island is there’s a whole ecosystem of entities, including, prominently, Farm Fresh Rhode Island, that work together.
The state really needs more funding. There’s a Green Bond and there’s an effort to make the Green Bond “greener,” which is being led by (state) Sen. DiPalma and Rep. Cotter, to add money to the bond that would provide more funding for programs like farmland protection.
One of the things that Farm Fresh works closely with the state on is having Farm to School programs, Farm and Sea to School programs. So that’s an example where, again, federal funding has been used to provide local food and options that can go to schools.
On how to increase the consumption of seafood caught in Rhode Island
Coit: Actually, some legislation was enacted to create a seafood marketing collaborative that has fishermen and restaurant owners and a variety of community members on a panel. DEM leads that with an effort to increase people’s knowledge of what’s being landed here and consumption of what’s being landed in Rhode Island.
There is an opportunity; if we want to increase the amount of local food that is consumed locally, seafood is a great place to expand. There’s already some programs to get seafood into the schools. For instance, they just taste-tested monkfish sliders and the kids loved them. Crab cakes is another popular item. I think there’s a huge opportunity.
So much of our seafood is exported and so much of what we consume locally is imported. So if we can alter that balance, we can really increase consumption of seafood. You’ll see it at farmers’ markets. I think we could do more of that, but I think the real win would be more of these institutional consumers, our universities, our hospitals, our schools, having a steady demand for local seafood.
