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Takeaways from the Second Eastern Shore Food Security Symposium, “Feeding Our Futures, Moving Forward Together”
Recent years have brought unprecedented hurdles in the food security space in Maryland. Defined as the ability of everyone to always have access to nutritious food to support a healthy life, food security has faced challenges in recent years, driven by factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic and reduced access to federal food assistance programs.
Maryland Department of Agriculture (MDA) Secretary Kevin Atticks and Maryland Department of Health (MDH) Secretary Dr. Meena Sheshamani joined food advocates a diverse audience including state qand local health systems, county school food supervisors and staff, farmers, Extension agency and nonprofit organizations at the second annual Eastern Shore Food Security Symposium on Friday, March 20, at Chesapeake College in Wye Mills.
The Eastern Shore Food Security Symposium was started in 2025 to connect organizations and leaders committed to improving food access across the region. Organized by the Eastern Shore Food Coalition, the symposium received funding from the Harry R. Hughes Center for Agro-Ecology, No Kid Hungry, and the Mid-Shore Community Foundation. In-kind support for the coalition is provided by the Mid-Shore Health Improvement Coalition. The coalition that organizes the symposium aims to support all sectors of the food system in building a resilient food system on the Eastern Shore. Breakout sessions during the symposium held on March 20 addressed topics ranging from healthy food choices to strengthening community partnerships, capacity building, and procurement.
Takeaways:
Access Remains Fractured: Vulnerable communities or citizens of lesser means still struggle to access nutritious food close to their homes. Atticks said that at MDA, discussions on improving access points for local foods continue.
“The challenge is you can drop these farmers’ markets places, and you can get farmers to come in and to spend their Saturday or their Sunday or their Wednesday afternoon at that market, but then you still have to get those vulnerable communities to the market,” Atticks said.
“You get the food closer to them. But if that food is not resident, if it's not there every day when it's convenient for them, because the bus might not come in Baltimore City, or it may be raining, or a storm is come in, or there are all these reasons why I might not be able to get there; it is frustrating to me that that's kind of the last frontier. Yet, those of us with means can get on a phone right now, and there's Grubhub, Uber Eats in many areas of the state that can deliver whatever I want immediately,” he said.
But there are also access-point issues on the farming side. Farming isn’t known as an easy business to enter, due to barriers such as limited land and expensive equipment. Atticks said there are “thousands” of young farmers coming to MDA for information on starting a farm, and that the agency is also fine-tuning its programs to ensure that new farmers who want to grow food can.
Collaboration and Outreach Is Key: Food insecurity cannot be addressed by individual agencies or groups in a silo. Rather, we should continue to leverage emerging and existing collaborative efforts that work for communities and scale them where appropriate.
Secretaries Atticks and Sheshamani both said that the Governor Moore Administration has directed state agencies to work more collaboratively. Sheshamani said one example is that MDH and MDA have been working together on projects that address issues of hunger, the importance of healthy eating and opportunities to boost the local agricultural economy.
The MDH recently secured $168 million from the federal government for its Rural Health Transformation Program, and one of the pillars of its work is empowering Marylanders to eat for health and supporting local food producers.
“Importantly, how we are using the money is to do things that will support the local agricultural economy. Because it's important not only to provide outreach and education so that people understand how they can eat healthier, but then how do you actually make healthy food available to them?” Sheshamani said. “Local agriculture is a great way to make healthy food available to them, so investing in cold storage for local Maryland farms, investing in food aggregators and food hubs so that you can distribute that local produce and local meat.”
Another example of collaboration between agencies is a bill currently before the legislature that would make it easier for farmers to provide on-site food services.
“Through the communication that the Department of Agriculture had with local farmers that we've had with local farmers, we realized that there were unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles for farmers to be able to provide food services on site, and so our department worked collaboratively to propose a bill that's currently in this legislative session to streamline food licensing for farmers,” she said. “So I think it's a perfect example of how us being able to work collaboratively, not only with each other, but with the community, really enables some of the pragmatic, practical improvements that can help everyone.”
Rural Areas Have Different Needs: Charlotte Davis, executive director of the Rural Maryland Council, also presented at the symposium and said rural areas like Dorchester and Somerset counties are the poorest in the state, and that rural populations are generally older, poorer and sicker than in urban areas. One in two houses on the Eastern Shore are “asset-limited, income-constrained” households, meaning that the families are living paycheck-to-paycheck, she said.
“We know that healthy outcomes are driven by the social determinants of health, economic stability, food insecurity, housing instability, and impact mental and physical health,” Davis said.
Davis said the Rural Maryland Council will help to distribute the funding for the Rural Health Transformation Program to support local food aggregation, food hubs and purchase strategy, to “help support our local farmers but also ensure that our rural Marylanders have access to local, healthy food.”
Learn more about the Rural Health Transformation Program here.
Past Blogs
Equipping Urban Farms to Harvest Rainwater
At a hands-on training hosted on June 24 at UMD’s Terp Farm in Upper Marlboro, people came together to explore how to safely harvest, treat, and use rainwater in urban agriculture, protecting both crops and consumers.
The project, headed by Rachel Rosenberg Goldstein, Assistant Professor at the UMD School of Public Health, explores how to integrate rainwater harvesting into urban agriculture safely. Rachel and the project’s research partners gathered people in the farming, nonprofit and academic community for a training session on incorporating urban rainwater harvesting and water treatment on their farms.
Urban agriculture is expanding across Maryland, but climate change makes rainfall less predictable. Farmers are facing longer stretches of drought punctuated by heavy downpours, making water access both limited and costly, especially in cities.
This project partly seeks to answer how small urban farms can create their own rainwater collection systems so excess rainfall can be stored and used in times of drought. Rainwater collection can result in possible biohazards – water flowing from roofs can bring contaminants like bird droppings, debris and other unwanted substances into the collected water.
Concerns arise regarding the quality of the collected water when left untreated and used to water edible plants like vegetables and herbs and whether bacteria within untreated water could lead to foodborne illnesses. To offset this potential threat, Goldstein and her team are actively testing the success of different treatment and filtering methods versus using untreated water.
The training participants got a hands-on view of the existing rainwater collection systems and irrigation systems on the Terp Farm that were used in the project, as well as information on what was used in their water treatment and filtering processes. They also got to practice installing drip irrigation and watch a demonstration of a collection system from a rooftop.
Trainings like these help because “farmers like to build their own stuff and there are only so many contractors that work with small urban farms,” said Neith Little, a UMD Extension Agent specializing in urban agriculture who is partnering in the research on this project. This event marked a step in equipping Maryland’s urban farmers with practical tools and science-backed knowledge to manage and use rainwater sustainably.
Partners on this project include the University of Maryland School of Public Health, UMD Center for Food Safety and Security Systems, UMD Environmental Finance Center, UMD Extension, the Maryland Agricultural Experiment Station Upper Marlboro Facility, and Plantation Park Heights Urban Farm. The Hughes Center partially funds this study.
New Research Helps Remote Setters Produce Oysters More Efficiently
Every year, billions of oysters are planted in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay. Most begin their lives in a hatchery and go through a remote setting process where microscopic oyster larvae attach to cleaned oyster shells before the spat on shell are placed on Bay bottom to grow.
Spat on shell producers have long known that the process is unpredictable. Some shells end up with more than 50 oysters attached, while others get none. In addition, larvae settle heavier on shells at the bottom of tanks compared to shells in the top and middle. Because producing one million spat on shell costs $3,500–$5,000 in materials and labor, that variability can become expensive and it can also affect oyster survival once planted in the Bay.
A recent applied research project set out to answer a deceptively basic question: where do oyster larvae settle when conducting remote setting — and can we improve it?
A closer look inside the tank
Funded by the Hughes Center for Agro-Ecology, research was conducted by Alex Golding with Ferry Cove Shellfish and Dr. Jill Bible with Washington College.
Researchers studied large “remote setting” tanks at the Ferry Cove Oyster Hatchery. Each tank holds containers filled with oyster shell. Mature oyster larvae are introduced and given several days to settle, distribute around the tank and transform into juvenile oyster spat.
To understand settlement patterns, scientists placed labeled sample shells throughout the tanks — at the top, middle, and bottom — and tracked how many oyster spat attached in each location.
They also tested two factors that remote setters can easily control: light (covered tanks vs. uncovered tanks) and aeration (high air flow vs. low air flow).
What they found
First, researchers confirmed something that hatchery staff and spat-on-shell producers had suspected for years: oyster larvae strongly prefer the bottom of the tank.
Researchers found that there are more oysters attached to shells at the bottom than to shells in the middle or top. Larvae naturally sink before setting, which helps explain the pattern — but the team wanted to know if traditional setting practices were making it worse, and what could be done to distribute it more evenly.
Light did not matter
Covering tanks with tarps — to simulate complete darkness, experienced at the bottom of the Bay — did not change where oysters settled. Larvae still concentrated at the bottom.
That finding is still useful. Covered tanks dramatically reduced biofouling (organisms growing inside the tank), meaning less cleaning was required between sets resulting in lower labor costs for growers.
Aeration did matter
Air flow, however, made a difference. In a high aeration environment, oysters still clustered at the bottom. However, in a low aeration environment, oyster larvae distributed much more evenly throughout the tank. The result was a more uniform vertical settlement of larvae across shells, on the top, middle, and bottom.
Why this matters
When too many oysters grow on the same shell, they compete for space and resources, reducing survival and harvest potential. Meanwhile, empty shells represent wasted resources.
By simply adjusting aeration levels, growers or producers may be able to:
- improve survival rates.
- increase harvest production.
- reduce material costs.
- enhance nutrient removal benefits from oysters in the Bay.
Even a modest improvement could save growers up to 20% in production costs.
What comes next?
This is the first time scientists have studied spat distribution in full-scale remote setting tanks, not just laboratory systems. The next step is repeating the trials and testing at other remote setting locations to confirm the results across different tank designs. The researchers will also continue to test other factors that impact oyster spat distribution with funding from the Hughes Center for Agro-Ecology.
Read the project’s final report here.