Hey, good morning, Patricia Murphy here. It's Saturday. This is Seattle now. Today we're bringing

you the best from the KUOW Newsroom. We'll start with a story about federal cuts to Washington's

farms. As students return to school cafeterias this month, there's a good chance they'll be eating

locally grown berries, thanks to a federally funded program.

It also helps small local farms stay in business.

That is until March when the program abruptly ended.

Ruby DeLuna has that story.

Summer might be winding down, but the berries are still plentiful at Sedu farms.

So we basically start at this corner and we go all the way back to the end of the river.

On a recent visit to the farm, co-owner Kamal Sedu plucks a few plump blackberries from one of the bushes, their best seller.

Triple crown blackberry.

It's one of the sweetest.

Sedu's family has been growing berries in Puyallup since 2000.

Farming was not part of the plan when his father moved to the U.S. in the 1980s, even though

he came from a farming background in Punjab, India.

But after retiring from the restaurant business, he had planned to split his

time between the U.S. and India. The family bought a piece of property in Puyallup that was an old

blueberry farm with plans to turn it into a residential development. One year, my grandma and my mom

and my brothers, while he was gone gone they picked some berries and they took

them to the peyallup farmers market and when he came back he was like something just clicked so ever since

then we've just been like full swing into farming over time they started growing raspberries, Marion berries, Tayberries, and Loganberries.

In 2015, they bought another farm. Today, the farms produce 40 varieties. During the pandemic,

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