JONESBORO — Arkansas State University joined Arkansas Hunters Feeding the Hungry and Arkansas Farm Bureau on Wednesday to unveil the latest addition to its College of Agriculture Meat Market and Lab: a $750,000 improvement project designed to fight food insecurity with the help of deer hunters and processors statewide.
The expansion, funded through a grant from the Arkansas Office of Skills Development, focuses on producing shelf-stable venison snack sticks that AHFH uses to feed children from food-insecure families. The small packages of protein are much more than a convenient treat; in some cases, they are the only meat children receive on weekends when school meal programs are unavailable.
Ronnie Ritter, executive director of AHFH, said the organization distributes hundreds of thousands of servings of donated ground venison to food pantries across the state each year, and its new snack stick program has seen far greater demand than organizers originally anticipated. The snack sticks are placed into weekend backpack programs so students living in food-insecure homes have the nutrition they need on weekends and school holidays.
“I get a call nearly every week from a new school asking for these sticks to add to their backpack programs,” Ritter said. “They can get cereals and canned goods, but shelf-stable meat is an extremely hard need to fill.”…