Published May 8, 2025
Gina Plata-Nino, JD, Deputy Director of SNAP, FRAC, and John Benedict, CEO, farmer, and co-founder of The Local Co-op in rural Arizona.
This article is part of a series examining the wide-reaching — and often overlooked —consequences of proposed SNAP cuts. Gina Plata-Nino, JD, deputy director of SNAP at FRAC, speaks with John Benedict, CEO, farmer, and co-founder of The Local Co-op in rural Arizona. His story offers a powerful example of how local food systems, entrepreneurship, and SNAP work together to support not only food access — but entire communities.
Tell Us About Your Community — What Are the Challenges People Face With Food Access ?
We’re in Cochise County, rural Arizona. It’s got about 120,000 residents spread out across a landmass bigger than Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. The population is sparse. You’ve got clusters of 5,000 to 10,000 people separated by long drives.
Where I live, in McNeal, the only place to shop two years ago was Family Dollar. If you needed anything beyond that, you were driving 30 minutes to an hour to get to a Walmart. That’s just the reality for a lot of rural folks.
How Did You Respond to That Lack of Food Access?
I’m a farmer — and I realized all of us local producers were growing food, but nobody could buy it. At the same time, our neighbors had no access to fresh, healthy options. So, we created The Local Co-op, now the anchor food hub for Cochise County.
We opened a brick-and-mortar grocery store and built partnerships with local vegetable and protein producers to offer complete nutrition. We launched a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) subscription program, a produce prescription initiative, and even set up produce kiosks inside small businesses.
You Have Essentially Created a Full Food System. What Else Does the Hub Do?
A lot. We use the Local Food Purchase Assistance (LFPA) program to get about $100,000 worth of local food to nearby pantries. Before this, even funded pantries had no way to connect with farmers. Now they do.
We run a farm-to-school program. We’re about to open a restaurant and juice bar that will reinvest 100 percent of profits back into our food access work. One of our producers even donated a house, which we converted into a food bank.
Here’s the bottom line: To survive as a farmer out here, you can’t just sell at the farmers’ market or go direct-to-consumer. You’ve got to work across the entire food system — production, logistics, retail, and policy. And because we’re a co-op, we’re not extracting wealth. We’re recycling it right back into our community.
You Are a Strong Advocate for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Why Is It so Essential to Your Model?
Because it works — plain and simple. SNAP makes up 17 percent of our business. That’s huge when you consider we operate on just a 20 percent margin. From a business standpoint, you’d never ignore 17 percent of your market.
The two biggest barriers to food access we saw were price and proximity. So, we addressed both. We built out logistics so people didn’t have to drive so far, and we leveraged SNAP and the Double Up Food Bucks program to make food affordable. If you’re on SNAP, a $5 bag of pears now costs $2.50.
We’re also running an online EBT and Double Up program. Customers can shop from home, use their SNAP benefits online, and have their orders delivered to a nearby kiosk or local partner site. It’s grocery delivery — rural style.
What Happens if Proposed SNAP Cuts Go Through?
It would devastate us. SNAP currently accounts for 17 percent of our revenue. If that funding gets cut, we lose our ability to keep prices low — and that affects everyone, not just SNAP users. Because we’re a co-op, no one’s getting rich here. We’re just trying to keep the system alive.
We have six employees. Three of them were on SNAP when they joined us. Now they have stable jobs and don’t need it anymore. That’s what I’m most proud of — we’re using SNAP to help people move off SNAP. It’s not about dependency — it’s about creating pathways to stability.
Any Final Thoughts You Want to Share With Policymakers?
Yes — look at rural towns like McNeal. Here, 20 percent of residents rely on SNAP. And it’s not because they don’t want to work — it’s because there are so few opportunities and limited access to healthy food.
SNAP doesn’t just feed people. It keeps local businesses alive. It connects farms to schools and pantries. It lets working families put good food on the table. And in rural America, it may be the only thing holding our food systems together.
If you care about rural communities, you have to care about food access. And that means protecting SNAP.
