In Georgia’s most SNAP-dependent county, local pantries brace for program’s cut-off

EDISON –  The only food pantry in Calhoun County is a mobile one that reaches residents on the third Saturday and third Thursday of each month. 

Shawanda Brown, a pantry organizer with Refuge Temple Apostolic Church Outreach Ministries, said the line of people waiting to get food stretches several blocks before volunteers even start to hand boxes out. The pantry, supported by Feeding the Valley food bank, first opened during the COVID-19 pandemic. Brown said she hands out food to 150 to 200 families each weekend in a town of about 1,160 people. 

“It’s been about four or five years now,” Brown said. “I thought the number would decrease for a little bit after the pandemic, but it didn’t. It actually increased.” 

Brown was born and raised in Calhoun County, and she said food scarcity is a major issue for the mostly rural county, along with transportation, day care services and job opportunities. The county, which has about 5,441 residents, has the highest share of households in Georgia that receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, according to data from the Georgia Department of Human Services and the U.S. Census Bureau. About 45% of its 1,508 households use SNAP. 

On Saturday, these households will lose these SNAP benefits along with about 42 million other Americans. The USDA Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) is suspending all November 2025 benefits amid the ongoing federal government shutdown “until such time as sufficient federal funding is provided, or until FNS directs state agencies otherwise.” 

“If it’s cut off, that would be very detrimental to an area that already doesn’t have much at all,” Brown said. “I’m pretty sure our pantry line may grow from the 150 we already see each month.” 

This expected demand in food needs comes as food banks like Feeding the Valley face a food shortage, trying to meet the needs of food insecurity rates that are still 35% above pre-pandemic levels. 

Feeding the Valley, a Columbus-based food bank, partners with more than 300 agencies across south Georgia, including Refuge Outreach Ministries in Calhoun County. In response to SNAP cuts proposed by President Trump’s spending package – $300 billion in cuts through 2034 – Feeding the Valley began raising money for a Community Hunger Relief Fund. The fund has a goal of raising $500,000 by the end of 2025 for food sourcing, expanding a meal delivery program for children and seniors and to launch a neighborhood market. 

Frank Sheppard, the president and CEO at Feeding the Valley, said the organization has reached $200,000 of its goal.

Brown said the Calhoun County pantry has seen its food boxes from Feeding the Valley impacted by food shortages. Boxes are filled with more non-perishable items like canned goods and beans. Meats or other perishable goods have become rare. 

She said the pantry turns nobody away, even sending people out to make deliveries to about 20 households with homebound residents. She said she hopes the state can get involved to provide relief for Georgia residents who will lose SNAP benefits and to the local pantries that will likely see an influx of people in need. 

Georgia has a record surplus of $14.6 billion, and state Democrats are urging Gov. Brian Kemp to tap into it to support those who will lose SNAP. 

However, Georgia Rep. Gerald Greene, R-Cuthbert, said the state’s hands are tied.

“We did not budget for anything like this,” Greene said. “We’ve reached out and tried to do something to help, but when they won’t include you in the conversation and the government is shut down, it’s quite an impossible situation we’re facing.” 

Greene said he is concerned for southwest Georgia communities, especially in Early County, where the closure of its largest employer, the Georgia-Pacific Cedar Springs mill, led to mass layoffs. 

“It’s up to the feds to work on and get this resolved, but they need to realize people are suffering,” he said. 

Georgia Sen. Freddie Powell Sims, D-Dawson, said the loss of SNAP is unprecedented, but the state operates on a balanced budget, making it difficult to take from those funds.

“We have rainy day funds, but suppose we were Jamaica or Cuba, and we had all these floods and damage … and you don’t have any money in the budget. What are you going to do?” she said. “You can’t just go into a budget and pull money out to put a band-aid on something that Congress can take care of. It doesn’t take long to spend the kind of money that we have in our reserves because everything is so expensive.”

She urged Congress to put politics aside and vote according to the needs of Americans. 

“They’re not negotiating with each other because there’s such a large partisan divide … they’re almost useless as a governing body for this country,” Sims said. “There has to be compromise. You have to take care of your constituents.”

Sims said SNAP was founded on the premise of temporary use and was never meant to be a sustainable life force. 

“But we always want to blame those individuals that are underpaid, overworked, underserved, and these are working poor people. All of them are not just deadbeats,” Sims said. 

Sims called poverty a big business. 

“Underserved populations generate business for storekeepers,” she said. “They receive subsidized food, which most of it is not nutritional. It’s just enough to barely last a family … for a couple of weeks. But those individuals that profit most from EBT circulations are the storekeepers, and nobody mentions that. That money never rests in those communities. It continues to circulate every day, every night. It’s just a band-aid.”

Sims said rural communities tend to take care of each other.

“But if you’re in an area where the majority of the people are receiving these subsidies, there’s not a whole lot that they can do to help each other because they’re all in the same boat,” she said. 

Sims said she knows food banks and churches are gearing up to meet the need. 

Amanda Farley with Calhoun Family Connections pointed residents to four lending libraries around the county that all house non-perishable food items. Items are free to anyone in the community and individuals can just go by and grab items as needed. 

Locations:

• Edison — the side of the Napa store building 
• Arlington — beside the City Hall building
• Morgan — beside the gazebo at the playground 
• Leary — beside the Leary Library 

Feeding the Valley’s mobile pantries are in Edison on the third Saturday of each month and Leary and Arlington on the third Thursdays. 

“We’ll just have to buckle down and make it happen,” Brown said. “There’s one thing about Calhoun County: We may be a small community and very spread out, but when it comes time, we work together to help each other. That’s how it happened during COVID and that’s how it’s happening now.”