Indianz.Com > News > Cronkite News: Organization battles food insecurity in O’odham territory
Ajo group bands together to fight food insecurity during COVID-19
Monday, January 4, 2021
Cronkite News
AJO – On an early autumn morning, the whitewashed churches of Ajo are quiet, and the town square is still. The only sounds are dump trucks rumbling by, headed for border wall construction sites to the south. But inside the Ajo Farmers Market & Cafe, the atmosphere is buzzing.
It’s just after 8 a.m. and the space already is filled with nearly a dozen workers and volunteers. The cafe used to house food incubator businesses, but those left early in the pandemic. Now, every spare surface is covered in food, ready to be given to families in need.
In one corner, a trio of helpers count and bag fruit: four bananas, four oranges, four apples per sack.
“I have a very important job,” volunteer Brenda Mojica says jokingly as she opens plastic bags like an assembly-line worker.
When COVID-19 arrived in Arizona in January, this tiny community was insulated. But by the end of March, the disease had found Ajo.


‘A lot of windshield time’
As the day wears on, a yellow Penske truck pulls in behind the cafe. Loaded on pallets inside are 2,000 pounds of mayocoba beans and crates of green, yellow and orange heirloom squash.
The man unloading all this food is Joe Hobson, a former chef who now works with Crooked Sky Farms in Phoenix and helps deliver produce for the Ajo Center for Sustainable Agriculture to distribute.
“There’s a disproportionate availability of nutritious food pretty much everywhere in the United States,” Hobson said, “some communities more than others.”
According to the federal
government, there have been no nationwide food shortages during the pandemic. But individual grocery stores have experienced low inventory and, in many cases, food
went to waste
when some distributors had to quickly shift away from supplying restaurants and school cafeterias that were shuttered because of the coronavirus.
And just because there’s enough food doesn’t mean that everyone has adequate access to it.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture tracks food access in low-income urban and rural census tracts, using measures such as distance to the nearest supermarket and access to a vehicle.




‘Aha’ moment’
Down the road from the market, tucked behind a small church, is the Center for Sustainable Agriculture’s incubator farm.
Sterling Johnson, a center board member who is Tohono O’odham, tills the dirt with three teenage boys as they prepare to install an irrigation hose. The group works quietly as jets roar overhead, practicing maneuvers from a nearby Air Force training area.
Through its many programs, the center encourages farmers and gardeners to grow foods well-adapted to the desert climate, such as white pomegranates, tepary beans, pumpkins, lettuce, broccoli and kale.
This year has been particularly hard for Johnson and other farmers in southern Arizona. The rain didn’t come as it usually does, and so even the drought-resistant tepary beans didn’t grow.
Still, Johnson hopes the pandemic has made people pay a little more attention to what they eat and where it comes from.
“Regardless if you microwave it or you buy it from a chain restaurant or a mom-and-pop store, someone had to grow that food, someone had to make that food,” he said. “If you don’t have farmers that grow the food and you don’t have people to make the food for you … we’re all going to suffer.”


‘Everybody was pulling together’
At 3 p.m., a long line forms behind the Ajo Farmers Market & Cafe, trailing up the street as people gather – 6 feet apart – to collect food.
In addition to its distribution efforts, the Center for Sustainable Agriculture started making prepared meals available for pickup or delivery.
“People were losing jobs, everything was closing down,” Sajovec said. “So we were seeing people in line who you would never think they might need food.”
At the end of the day, she said, “people just needed to eat.”
Among those helping to fund these efforts are Pima County, United Way of Tucson and Southern Arizona, Arizona Food Bank Network, local businesses large and small, and private donors.
To date, demand hasn’t slowed. Since early April, the group has distributed more than 20,000 food boxes serving about 2,000 families. In total, they’ve given away over 700,000 pounds of food.
“This is where I think maybe a small community had a different response than bigger cities,” Sajovec said, “because everybody was pulling together.”
In the past few weeks, the Center for Sustainable Agriculture was able to reopen the market’s cafe and shop, so Sajovec and the group’s board members are looking for a permanent location for the food pantry. It will continue operating, she said, as long as there’s need. The organization also hopes to restart its other agricultural programs, including a youth program and a training program for new farmers. The center is promoting a bill in the Legislature that would provide funding for farming and ranching internships. “It’s going to be a busy winter,” Sajovec said. “But we’ll keep on growing food and keep on sharing food.” The way she sees it: “Food means being taken care of.” After a brief late-afternoon lull, the food line picks up again about 5 p.m., as the people of Ajo get off of work and head home. The center’s volunteers make trips back inside the market to grab more bags of food. Sajovec stands in the doorway for a moment before heading inside, too. The day is almost over, but it’s not finished yet – because these days, there’s always more work to do. For more stories from Cronkite News, visit cronkitenews.azpbs.org.
Note: This story originally appeared on Cronkite News. It is published via a Creative Commons license. Cronkite News is produced by the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.
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