Editor’s note: This is the second in a three-part series on the “Living Record: A Church News Documentary Series” on BYUtv called “Harvest of Faith.” Part 1 features welfare farms. Part 2 looks at welfare food processing and distribution facilities owned and operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Part 3 focuses on AgReserves, the commercial arm of Farmland Reserve, an investment affiliate of the Church.
Soon after the organization of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1830, the Church established bishops’ storehouses — places where grain and other donated commodities were stored and distributed to help members in need.
Today there are more than 100 bishops’ storehouses. Together with processing plants in the United States and Canada, these facilities package and bottle food for all kinds of communities all over the world.
Presiding Bishop W. Christopher Waddell said the Church has nine production facilities such as mills, canneries, bakeries and dairies.
“In 2023, there were 85 million pounds of products that were produced. When we are blessing someone and reaching out to help someone that’s hungry, it’s as if we were doing it to the Savior Himself,” Bishop Waddell said.
Relief Society General President Camille N. Johnson said the Church’s humanitarian efforts are directed at not just the members “but also our brothers and sisters, our neighbors all around the world.”
“When the Savior fed the 5,000, He didn’t leave those that had come to hear Him preach hungry, but He addressed their temporal needs,” President Johnson said. “He filled their bellies, and then He filled their souls and their hearts. And so we hope to do the same thing.”
Houston Peanut Butter Cannery
Peter Polis, the manager of the Church’s Houston Peanut Butter Cannery in Houston, Texas, says he didn’t even like peanut butter when he started working at the facility, but now he eats it every day.
“I’m not kidding — every day,” he laughed.
Machines throughout the building prepare, process and package the peanut butter. The peanuts come from the Church’s peanut farm in Pearsall, Texas. Volunteers, service missionaries and employees open the bags of nuts, put them into the machines, monitor conveyor belts where the jars are filled and lids screwed on top, place the jars into boxes and get the product ready to leave the cannery.
About one-third of what is made goes to the bishops’ storehouses throughout the country, and the rest is donated to other organizations that also serve people in need, Polis explained.
“We will make 1.8 million jars this year, and we also provide opportunities to serve,” he said. “The first two shifts of each run are provided by community groups. There’s literally a waiting list for volunteer groups to come in and help make peanut butter. Those are the kind of problems I enjoy.”
People are surprised when Polis tells them the Church doesn’t sell the peanut butter. Instead, he explains to them how the Church wants to care for those in need and also provide opportunities to serve – and ultimately the purpose of the work is to bring souls to Christ.
Polis grew up believing in God and Jesus Christ but didn’t know how it applied to him. When he was 19 years old, he enlisted in the Army and was stationed in Germany. There he met two missionaries from the Church, but he said looking back, he didn’t want answers at that time.
By the time he left the Army, he had some addictions — and he realized that these things were not fulfilling; he knew there had to be something more to life.
“Finally, I came to the conclusion that I needed to ask God, and I did,” he said. “I went through a series of miracles. I made the choice to be baptized, and life has never been the same.”
His goals were to serve a mission, go to Brigham Young University and work for the Church.
“And here I am,” he smiled.
Just as he was brought to Jesus Christ, he is now doing the same for others. And, in the process, he has discovered the difference between happiness and joy.
“Happiness is when I learn how to take care of my own wants and needs, and joy comes when I learn how to use everything that I am to help others fulfill their own wants and needs, and in doing so bring them closer to Christ,” Polis said.
President Johnson said “a trajectory of service” happens when people start serving.
“Coming together, enjoying that experience of working side by side is really how we feel the love of God and the love of our Savior, Jesus Christ,” she said.
Bishop Waddell said faith in Christ is the foundation of this work. “He is why we do what we do.”
Harrisville Welfare Cannery
Greg Kiefer used to be a firefighter. Now, he serves at the Harrisville Cannery in northern Utah as the safety manager.
“Here at the cannery, we run 14 hours a day, five days a week. During harvest, we start at 5 in the morning, we run till midnight, and we clean till 4 a.m., and then from 4 to 5 we grease and lubricate all of our equipment. And at 5 we start again,” he said.
The cannery processes 13 products. It has been in service for a little over seven years, Kiefer said. “In our old cannery, the best year we did 1.8 million cans in the entire year. We are scheduled to do 11.6 million here.”
Kiefer walked through the facility, checking with the volunteers and service missionaries, looking for any loose or missing labels on the cans. When it came time for a lunch break, he pulled out an older, red insulated lunch box cooler with the name “Ben K.” written on it in black. This was his son Ben’s lunch box, who died over 10 years ago.
“When I come here, I think about Ben. He would love to be here. So I use Ben’s lunch box. I suppose in a way, Ben comes with me,” Kiefer noted.
Kiefer said Ben was profoundly autistic. But with all the challenges he had, he was happiest when he was helping someone else. Ben would wake up his father in the morning to shovel snow, and they would go shovel for their neighbors for hours.
“Ben taught me how to give service, and he’d do it gladly,” Kiefer said.
The cannery has had volunteers on the autism spectrum, and Kiefer has mentored them. “It’s like being a proud dad.”
He has seen other people come in for a shift feeling downtrodden, but after four hours of serving, they feel better. “That’s kind of the joy of service.”
Bishop Waddell said, “There is a joy that comes from reaching out and helping others — of getting beyond yourself.”
President Johnson quoted from Mosiah 18:9, where Alma declared that members have a sacred responsibility “to mourn with those that mourn … and comfort those that stand in need of comfort.”
She said: “This is really an outward reflection of our covenant keeping, and that’s really gratifying to see my brothers and sisters with the hairnets on and their sleeves rolled up, getting the work done. They’re very joyful.”
Kaysville Deseret Mill and Pasta
About 37 commodities are produced at the Kaysville Deseret Mill and Pasta in Kaysville, Utah, — such as rice, beans, flour, cake mixes — and none are sold on the open market.
“Everything is given away,” said Jason Haacke, the plant manager.
The large silos on the property have the ability to store 16 million pounds of grain. For the past few years, the mill has produced just over a million cases of food a year, Haacke said.
When he was younger, the furthest thing from his mind was doing anything related to agriculture. “But it has become a passion.”
When Haacke was newly married, his wife worked at Deseret Mill and Pasta, so he applied to be a truck driver. Since then, he has done many responsibilities, from floor sweep to grain elevator and now manager.
A challenge is training all the volunteers needed for each shift. “That’s why we have our senior missionaries,” Haacke said.
Elder Kevin Armatage is one of those senior service missionaries.
“We go home and we can say, ‘Well, we did some good in the world today,’” he said.
When he was a bishop, he would help people with both their spiritual needs and their temporal needs.
“Watching people as they would come in and visit and say they needed food items from the bishops’ storehouse, it helped me to understand that their physical needs need to be met. They need to be fed first,” Elder Armatage said.
Haacke said he sees miracles every day at the mill. Once, when ordering sugar, he accidentally typed an extra zero — instead of 50,000 pounds he ordered 500,000 pounds.
“We were wondering what we were going to do with all of it, and the dairy called up and was searching for sugar,” Haacke said. “Unbeknownst to me, there was a sugar shortage in the world, and it just so happened that they needed the exact amount that I had over-ordered. That’s a miracle to me.”
President Johnson said sometimes miracles are large, and sometimes they are quiet and personal. “But I know that they happen, all in connection with this very important work.”
Bishop Waddell said that when helping someone who is hungry, “in that moment, we are being as Christlike as in any other time of our lives, because we’re doing what the Savior did.”
Every package that leaves the pasta mill and any other Church processing plant says: “Lovingly distributed by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” Haacke pointed out.
“Everything that we produce has the Savior’s name on it. And because of that, this is His work,” he said.
Salt Lake City Welfare Square
Large towers are visible from I-15 in Salt Lake City marking the Church’s Welfare Square.
“Everybody knows where they are when they see Welfare Square,” said Pete Nielsen, the general manager.
This landmark location has “just about every portion of the welfare system,” Nielsen said, with a bishops’ storehouse, Deseret Industries store, employment center, cannery, dairy and bakery.
Each spot is constantly busy. For example, at Deseret Bakery, making bread starts every day at 5 a.m.
The manager, James Quiroz, said: “We are making about 2,500 loaves of bread every day; 12,500 a week. Last year, we did more than 500,000 loaves of bread.”
Huge fans cool the volunteers and employees in the warm building as they take loaves from the shelves, run them through slicers and place them into bread bags then into boxes for distribution.
Next door at Deseret Dairy, the temperature in the room where cheese is packaged is much colder. Lead production supervisor Christian Anderson gave some of its statistics: “We’re easily going to hit over 1 million [pounds] by the end of the year.”
These products go to several places to help people in need, including to the shelves of the bishops’ storehouse on site.
“When someone in need comes to the bishop and says, ‘Hey, I need some help,’ they’ll fill out a form, and they basically just go grocery shopping, and they’ll pick out the things that they need, whether that’s our cheese or the bakery’s bread or the cannery’s cans,” Anderson said.
The bishops’ storehouse has five employees, and the rest of the workers are either volunteers or young service missionaries 18 to 22 years old.
Sister Rebecca Clark, a young service missionary, was originally assigned to a teaching mission, but after talking with her mom, bishop and stake president, she was transferred to a service mission “because I still wanted to serve. I wanted to do something meaningful to help people.”
She meets people who come in with their food orders and goes through the aisles with them with a grocery cart.
Serving at the bishops’ storehouse was not what she expected her mission to look like, but it is exactly what she needed.
“To see somebody come in and they’re having kind of a rough day and throughout 15 minutes of working on an order with them, it’s wonderful seeing them leaving with a smile,” Sister Clark said.
Nielsen — who has been working with the bishops’ storehouse system for 24 years — said volunteers who come to Welfare Square find a great fulfillment in being able to serve other people.
“If somebody can leave here and they feel like they are worth something to somebody, and especially to the Lord, then that’s a success,” he said.
So much of the work cannot be done without the valuable and important contribution of service missionaries and volunteers, President Johnson said.
“Charity, of course, is the pure love of Christ,” she said. “And so as we exercise that pure love of Christ, we say to ourselves: ‘What would He do? How can we be His hands and His feet?’”
Utah Bishops’ Central Storehouse and Deseret Transportation
The Bishops’ Central Storehouse in Salt Lake City covers more than 500,000 square feet, and “11 acres under roof,” said Neal Peterson, the manager of logistics for the facility and for Deseret Transportation.
Rows and columns of food and supplies fill the storehouse, which includes a bulk storage area, rack storage and freezer and cooler space.
Peterson pointed to dozens of loaves of bread in boxes as a picture of that “farm-to-fork” process.
“We grow the wheat on the farm, take it to our mill, mill it into flour, take it to our bakery, make it into bread, and then bread goes out to everyone in need.”
On a busy week, 40 truckloads will ship daily. “That’s 11 million to 13 million pounds a month,” Peterson said.
Deseret Transportation is the Church’s own transportation system, and the trucks crisscross the country, hauling tens of millions of pounds of food to bishops’ storehouses and local food pantries.
“We do have the capability of shipping to over 160 nations worldwide if needed,” Peterson said. “We’ve been able to grow it, we process it, we store it, and then we’re able to ship it out to anyone in need.”
Employees, young service missionaries and volunteers spend part of their day packing food boxes along an assembly line — each box is a week’s worth of food for a family of four. Food boxes that day were heading to the Midwest U.S. after tornadoes and storms. Elder Dallin Curtis was one of the young service missionaries helping.
“Knowing that something as simple as putting this in a box can be that much of a blessing to someone, I would say that’s definitely worth your time,” Elder Curtis said.
Peterson said 20 to 30 loads a week go to other agencies. He pointed to several pallets that were bound for the Utah Food Bank. Other agencies receiving food include Catholic Relief Charities, Convoy of Hope, Islamic Relief, Jewish Community Services and Red Cross.
“As everybody works together, we’re finding those resources go further,” Peterson said.
Bishop Waddell said working with other organizations expands the Church’s reach into areas where there is a huge need but where the Church by itself might not have the infrastructure to get there.
“We have that responsibility to reach out to everyone, not just members of the Church, and we strive to do that,” Bishop Waddell said.
Peterson said the warehouse feels like a sacred space because of the work being done inside and the miracles that happen. For example, during Hurricane Katrina, 250 semitruck loads of food went out of the Bishops’ Central Storehouse in six weeks.
“You’d think the shelves would be empty. but at the same time this great harvest was coming in. We planted for 50,000 cases of corn. We harvested almost 80,000 cases of corn. How does that happen?” he said. “We’re seeing that parable. Those loaves and fishes, it’s real. We’re all bringing what we have, and the Lord just multiplies it.”
Bishop Waddell said: “It’s remarkable to see the resources the Lord has provided which allow us to bless so many of God’s children. It’s something that has strengthened my faith and testimony of the truthfulness of the gospel and how blessing others is what it’s all about.”
Anywhere on earth there are people who are hungry, President Johnson explained. She has had the opportunity to go to Africa and feed starving children. This was life-changing and humbling for her, she said.
“But I don’t have to go to Africa. There are needs here — right here — very close to me. I have felt the Savior’s relief. I have felt the relief of Jesus Christ for myself when I have had the opportunity to minister as He would to address the needs of those that are most vulnerable.”
