Massachusetts families who receive food assistance also qualify for extra dollars every month they can spend on fresh, locally grown produce. But that benefit will soon be drastically reduced.
Starting Dec. 1, the Healthy Incentives Program, run by the state’s Department of Transitional Assistance, will be cut to $20 per month, regardless of household size. It currently ranges from $40 monthly for one or two people to $80 for a family of six or larger. Purchases at qualified vendors up to that amount are instantly reimbursed on their EBT cards.
Farmers and lawmakers say the benefit gives SNAP recipients more access to healthy food while also boosting the local economy. With the looming reduction, advocates are concerned about the potential health impacts on families, and vendors told GBH News they worry about losing income.
In messages to legislative leaders encouraging them to allocate more funding to the Healthy Incentives Program, some farmers also underscored that they’ve built their business models — from offering farm shares to growing specific, culturally relevant crops that HIP benefit users want — around this benefit.
The urban farming nonprofit Mill City Grows in Lowell, for instance, sells fresh food from their farms and partners through a mobile market and a CSA, a farm share known as Community Supported Agriculture. This summer, half of their CSA shares were purchased with HIP benefits, according to the organization.
“$20 really doesn’t get you that much anyway, especially in local farm produce,” said Enrique Vargas, associate director at Mill City Grows. “I hear a lot … ‘I prefer coming to the market, but I just cannot afford it.’ And if they just start realizing that they don’t get enough, then they’re just not going to come.”
Ali Jacobs, Mill City Grows’s co-executive director, says they started growing and partnering with different farms to sell more culturally relevant foods like lemongrass, amaranth, bok choy and bitter melon.
“We’re purchasing food from people who also represent some of the cultures that we’re selling the food to. They are growing the type of food that the people who are coming to our market want to purchase,” they said.
“We should invest in something that’s this successful,” Jacobs continued. “It’s successful for the SNAP users, it’s successful for the farmers who are growing the food, and it’s going to have long-term health care impacts. So we should treat it like the win that it is.”
Chris Kurth, the owner of Siena Farms in Sudbury, said he’s done the same at his farm by prioritizing different crops like daikon radishes, bok choy, kohlrabi, Napa cabbage and choy sum. He’s also prioritized hiring staff who speak Mandarin and Cantonese, the languages he says a “majority” of his retail customers in Boston speak.
Like Vargas, he’s worried that the decreased HIP benefits will hurt business. He said on an average day last year at one of Siena Farms’ Boston area stands, three-quarters of the retail sales would come from the HIP benefit. He called it a “lifeline” that helped keep the farm afloat during crop losses due to flooding and drought.
State officials say the cut to the Healthy Incentives Program is necessary because of budget constraints.
“We know how critical the Healthy Incentives Program is to families and farmers in Massachusetts,” Jeff McCue, the department’s commissioner, said in a statement. “We are restructuring the program to ensure it can continue to operate year-round within the current funding level, to allow ongoing support for families and farmers to plan.”
Hunger advocates like Rebecca Miller, the policy director for the Massachusetts Food System Collaborative, are frustrated to be in this position again. The program, funded through the state budget, has needed additional funding approved by lawmakers to match demand in recent years.
“We knew that there was going to be money in the budget when the budget was signed ... and I just would like us to come together, as the administration and legislative leaders, to not implement this cut, to work towards a solution so that this program does not have to change — because it’s already causing a lot of stress,” Miller said.
Advocates say it would take an additional $10 million for the rest of the fiscal year, which ends next June, to preserve the HIP benefit at its current funding levels. They’re asking the Legislature and Gov. Maura Healey to invest that money with a supplemental budget.
The program was allocated $15 million in this year’s budget, down from the roughly $19 million it cost last year, according to state projections. It’s already being used at a higher rate this year than last, and the governor had requested $25 million in her version of the budget to fund the program earlier this year.
About 95,000 households used the HIP benefit during the last fiscal year out of roughly 650,000 SNAP households. In Lowell, the benefit was used by just 3% of recipients in 2020 compared to 9% in 2023, according to data provided by Jacobs and shared by the Department of Transitional Assistance. The statewide picture is less clear, but overall spending through the program was up nearly 20% this September compared to last year.
State Sen. Jo Comerford, a Hampshire County Democrat who represents Northampton and several surrounding towns, said her inbox is full of concerned farmers and constituents. Hundreds of farmers live in her district.
“I am not alone in the Legislature in being a person who would support this,” she told GBH News.
She wants to see more funding put toward the program but says she doesn’t know the “perfect number.” The Northampton Democrat also said that some parameters might be appropriate to put on the program.
“I am not in leadership in the Senate, so I don’t make these decisions — nor am I in the [Healey] administration. However, I do think there is a general and growing sense, in both places, that there is a great public outcry of concern and that this will be injurious, in the short term, and have potential longer-term negative consequences.”
Healey’s office referred questions to the Department of Transitional Assistance. Senate President Karen Spilka and House Speaker Ron Mariano’s offices declined to comment on the record for this story.
