URBANA — It’s a cold and overcast day in November, but Sola Gratia farm in Urbana is teeming with life. The last leafy greens of the season are lined up neatly in the field, while delicate herbs and flowers have been moved inside plastic-walled high tunnels to weather the cold winter months.
To arrive on Thanksgiving dinner plates and in food pantry fridges, the produce from the 29-acre farm must be loaded into a refrigerated delivery van and spirited off to distribution sites.
That delivery vehicle was purchased using funds Sola Gratia, which means “by grace alone,” received under Illinois’ Local Food Infrastructure Grant, or LFIG, program. The grant also allowed the farm to purchase much of the equipment used to clean and package produce prior to sale or donation.
Traci Barkley, the farm’s director, told Capitol News Illinois that infrastructure like this is important for farms to grow but can be difficult to fund independently.
“So the grant, all of a sudden, allows dreams to come true,” Barkley said, smiling.
Sola Gratia was one of 19 LFIG recipients that received a collective $1.8 million in funding awarded in 2024 after passage of the Local Food Infrastructure Grant Act.
The law created funding to support small farmers and food distributors — those with fewer than 50 employees — in producing locally grown food for Illinois communities. The General Assembly found that 95% of the food consumed in Illinois is imported from outside the state.
Read more: State awards local food infrastructure grants as advocates seek program’s extension | Illinois scrambles to boost locally produced farm products after Trump’s funding freeze.
Shifting just 10% of that purchasing to local farms could generate billions of dollars in economic growth for Illinois, according to the law. But for Illinois to move toward purchasing more local food, farmers and food processors need adequate infrastructure to ensure the food reaches consumers predictably.
That means refrigerators and freezers to keep fresh produce and meat at peak quality; facilities where fruits and vegetables can be uniformly cleaned, sliced and processed into products like jams and jellies; equipment to package goods for sale and vehicles to transport them.
‘It makes an enormous difference’
The Illinois Stewardship Alliance, a local food and farm advocacy group, administered the program in its first year, 2024. The next year, the state appropriated $2 million in fiscal year 2025 to the Department of Agriculture to administer the grants, though the program faced implementation delays.
Between the unspent funds and an additional $2 million allocated to the program in the fiscal year 2026 budget, there will be $4 million available for the upcoming cycle. While small relative to the $55.1 billion in spending measures in Illinois’ fiscal 2026 budget, farmers said the grants of up to $75,000 for an individual project and up to $250,000 for a collaborative project have a significant impact on the recipients.
The Department of Agriculture will continue to administer the LFIG grant cycle in 2026 and expects the application process to open in early January.
Jeff Hake is a partner at Funks Grove Heritage Fruits and Grains in McLean County, a small family operation growing wheat, corn and fruits. The farm received an LFIG grant to help dry, clean and store grains it processes into flour, cornmeal, pancake mixes, popcorn and more.
Hake summarized the impact of the grant on an overcast winter morning at the farm, where trains frequently pass on the nearby track running along Old Route 66.
“It makes an enormous difference,” he told reporters. “And the impact expands dramatically with these small, thoughtful investments.”
Among the purchases Funks Grove made with the support of the grant were a gravity table and a seed cleaner, or eliminator, affectionately called Ellie. Hake said the first wheat crop to run through both machines was the cleanest the farm had ever produced.
Filtering on density and size, the two machines strain out debris, leaves and dirt. The gravity table even allows farmers to filter out infected grain, which becomes lighter when consumed by disease.
Hake said the family identified a need for the gravity table after they almost lost a crop of corn to a grain-born toxin. The corn tested above the safe threshold for consumption, meaning the entire batch would have been wasted — and revenues lost.
Luckily for the farm, another grain farmer two hours north near Rockford had a gravity table. She ran the Funks Grove corn through, removing enough of the infected crop to effectively save the harvest.
Ripple effect
Hake and other LFIG recipients say the grants have had a ripple effect.
For example, a flower farmer near Lexington to the north cleans her harvested popcorn using the machines at Funks Grove, while a farm-based distillery in Paxton to the west is exploring doing the same for this year’s corn crop. Neither has the infrastructure to clean grain at that level, so collaborating with Funks Grove improves efficiency.
“We’ve learned so much and we’ve acquired all these things. And I very much don’t want to be gatekeeping,” Hake said. “I don’t want anyone else to have to go through this if we have it within an hour of where they’re farming.”
That same collaboration is core to the missions of the LEAF Food Hub in Carbondale and the FarmFED Cooperative in Mount Pulaski, also former LFIG recipients. While they differ in structure, both provide small farmers with post-harvest infrastructure and assist with distribution.
FarmFED provides produce to local food banks and opens its kitchen to a nearby bakery. Tom Martin is the cooperative’s board president and a grain farmer whose family has lived in the area for over 200 years.
Martin outlined the impact of the support from LFIG on a rainy afternoon at FarmFED’s site on the main square in Mount Pulaski. The grant allowed FarmFED to purchase a building and food processing equipment for local farmers.
“We’re not trying to become a great big co-op,” he said. “We’re trying to provide healthy food, support farmers and support our communities.”
Similarly, Sola Gratia reported that several other farms and organizations benefitted from being able to transport produce in the van they purchased with the LFIG support.
“The state invested in us and that’s shared with others,” Barkley said at Sola Gratia. “There’s a huge camaraderie that we try to contribute to.”
Sola Gratia also regularly hosts gardening workshops, farm yoga sessions and educational events with local schools and community groups.
Global networks
Part of the challenge of increasing Illinois’ share of locally produced food, regional farmers say, is the barriers to competing with larger businesses that sell food cheaply and in large quantities.
Blayne Harris is the operations manager and an owner of the Carbondale-based LEAF Food Hub, also known as the Little Egypt Alliance of Farmers. LEAF received an LFIG grant to help reduce waste for their network of farmers and food processors, who distribute food through an online marketplace to a dozen local sites.
Working together allows LEAF farmers to focus less on making money and more on farming, according to Harris.
“The core issue to all of this is just like the economy of scale, and it’s really difficult to compete with the global economy at a regional food level,” Harris said. “The hope behind this is that if we have collective marketing, aggregation, processing and distribution, then farmers can farm.”
However, Harris said, collective distribution models face limitations when there’s no avenue for selling food to larger institutions, such as schools, hospitals and correctional facilities, which serve hundreds of thousands of meals daily.
“Something that I would have as an input towards future infrastructure grants is that they should be paired with some sort of a grant that enables purchasing,” Harris said.
Illinois law mandates that state public institutions must purchase food from the lowest bidder, often larger companies from out of state. The Department of Corrections, the state’s largest purchaser of food, awards nearly 70% of its contracts to just two distributors, according to Investigate Midwest.
A bill proposed in the General Assembly’s spring session would have changed that, allowing public universities to award contracts to local farmers using criteria for sustainability and ethical growing practices. It stalled in committee.
Farmers also face barriers getting local food to underserved communities, according to a 2024 report on food access commissioned by the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity.
Larger corporations are not incentivized to open chain grocery stores in low-income or rural areas where profit potentials are low, and small, independent grocery stores that fill the gap struggle to meet the low-price expectations set by large competitors.
When grocery stores close, people lose access to healthy foods, creating food insecurity. The Illinois Department of Public Health reported in 2021 that nearly 3.3 million Illinoisians, about 1-in-4, lived in communities that lacked access to fresh, nutritious food.
Growing local
Countering that food insecurity is core to the mission of many of the LFIG recipients interviewed, with multiple farms donating large shares of their produce to local food pantries.
Just Roots, a half-acre urban farm nestled beside the Green Line on Chicago’s South Side, donates up to 50% of its fruits, vegetables and herbs to local food pantries and mutual aid organizations. The rest they sell at an affordable price on a sliding scale to local residents.
The community farm received an LFIG grant to purchase a refrigerated van and expand on-site refrigeration capacity.
Standing in deep snow earlier this month, Sean Ruane, director of operations and development at Just Roots, discussed the role of local farms, especially in urban areas where green spaces are less common.
“Everything that we’re growing here is being distributed within a five-mile radius of the farm,” Ruane said. “That’s very intentional on our part. And part of that is we’re distributing all the food that we grow within 48 hours of harvesting it, so it’s as fresh and nutritionally dense, really, as food can be.”
Just Roots also hosts educational events, inviting local residents and children to come see where their food is grown. A teacher by training, Ruane said exposing kids to fruits and vegetables when they are growing up will make them more willing to eat those foods later.
“Our hope is that we can try to kind of help bring people back to, you know, much simpler times in terms of how food is produced and distributed and consumed,” Ruane said.
Upcoming grant cycle
Before applying for a 2026 LFIG grant, applicants will need to complete three pre-registration steps, standard for all grants administered under the Ag Department. The department also recommends preparing documents including payroll logs and tax forms to show proof of eligibility. A full checklist of the necessary forms can be found on the LFIG website.
“We don’t want anybody to get held up this time of year trying to get paperwork from their bank or from their payroll departments or anything like that,” grant administrator Heather Wilkins said. “So always continue to look at the Department of Ag website for those updates as we begin to launch this program.”
Recipients will be expected to match 25% of their award with a comparable investment unless the project is classified as “high need,” meaning that it fills a critical infrastructure gap or serves underserved farmers and communities.
Points will be awarded to proposals that have community support, are led by historically underserved farmers and owners, increase affordability in underserved communities and more.
A list of allowable expenses and other information about the application are detailed in the LFIG administrative rules.
The farms and food processors who were awarded LFIG funding when it was administered under the Illinois Stewardship Alliance will be eligible to reapply this year, but future projects under the Department of Agriculture will be ineligible for the grant in the subsequent funding cycle.
In the first year of the program, 247 project proposals were submitted, from which 19 were selected. The applicants collectively requested over $23 million in funding. The Stewardship Alliance said this indicates that LFIG fills a major gap.
“There’s still a very, very high need for local food infrastructure in Illinois,” Alliance Policy Director Molly Pickering said. “We’re still trying to move the needle on Illinois farmers being able to feed Illinois, and that is only possible when they have access to infrastructure.”