Food Hubs Initiative Grows
Tool to strengthen and coordinate Hudson Valley agriculture
by Philip Ehrensaft
American consumers are increasingly inclined to buy food
from local, identifiable sources, produced with environmentally sustainable
practices, and preferably from family farms as opposed to large-scale
agribusiness. There are many farmers who would be all too glad to oblige them.
But there's a frequent disconnect that prevents those mutual
desires from being realized. That disconnect is the lack of an agricultural
transportation, warehousing, processing and distribution infrastructure that
can cost-effectively move local, source-identified farm products to the buyers who
want them. Our food system is predominantly organized by large-scale
agribusinesses that run a fine-honed network for collecting, processing and
distributing farm products to supermarket chains, large institutional
purchasers like cafeterias in public institutions, or major private companies.
In effect, farmers can build the baseball fields, and many
consumers want to sit in the stands, but the infrastructure for getting the two
parties together is weak. One rapidly growing organizational tool for merging
the two parties is a “food hub,” a combination farm marketing, farm family
support, and often community-building tool that is being actively analyzed and
encouraged by the United States Department of Agriculture.
The Hudson
Valley Food Hubs Initiative, a policy research project sponsored by the
New World Foundation's Local
Economies Project, is one of the most ambitious and thorough investigations to
date of this new way of linking farmers and consumers. The lead researcher, Sarah Brannen, from Upstream Advisers in Poughkeepsie,
has produced a must-read analysis not only for Hudson Valley citizens focusing
on agriculture, and economic development in general, but for a national
audience as well. localeconomies-hv.org/food-system/food-hub
That's by virtue of Brannen's combing the experiences of
food hubs nationally, choosing 12 for looking at best practices, and seeing how
these lessons might or might not apply in Hudson Valley circumstances. The
Hudson Valley is a region with one of the highest potentials for food hubs to
link local producers and consumers, and thus bears national attention.
The Valley still has plenty of good agricultural land that
hasn't been paved over; much of the land is suitable for high value per acre,
sustainably produced fruits and vegetables, or craft dairy and meat production;
the Valley is one of the only regions of New York with substantial population
growth, and a relatively high proportion of its consumers are inclined to buy
local, source-identified food; it is next door to the country's largest single
food market, where there's also high enthusiasm for sustainably produced local food,
not to mention copious vitamin pills and herbal supplements to counter the
lousy air and sheer stress of the place.
So precisely what is this “food hub” beast? And how
effective can it be in building up effective transportation, storage,
processing and marketing links between local farmers who want to produce
source-identified food rather than anonymous commodities shipped into the
agribusiness system, and regional consumers who would like to buy what farmers
want to produce?
A new national USDA research report—The Role of Food Hubs
in Local Food Marketing by James Matson, Martha
Sullins and Chris Cook—first cites a working definition of a farm hub:
“a business or organization that actively manages the aggregation, distribution
and marketing of source-identified food products primarily from local and
regional producers to strengthen their ability to satisfy wholesale, retail and
institutional demand.”
Then Matson, Sullins and Cook immediately nuance the
definition on two counts: 1) Community-building and environmentalism. Many hubs
evolved from educational or social missions to bring consumers and producers
together. Besides selling local foods, they educate buyers about the importance
of retaining food dollars in the local economy, and conserving farmland; 2)
Virtual organizations. In this Internet era, very functional hubs exist that do
not consist of brick and mortar facilities; rather, they “live” primarily in a
virtual context and are thus able to transmit information quickly among local
buyers and sellers.
So food hubs assume diverse organizational forms in pursuing
a core mandate of linking local producers and consumers, ranging from private
for-profit companies delivering to wholesalers and large institutions, and on
to community nonprofits facilitating direct contact, both economic and social
between farmers and local consumers, and a strong emphasis on helping small and
medium-sized family farms survive and thrive in a food system tilted towards
big farms.
Among the 168 food hubs that were studied by the USDA
researchers, there were 67 private companies, 54 nonprofit organizations, 36
cooperatives, 8 publicly held companies, and 3 informal arrangement. Criss-crossing
these ownership forms, there was also diverse targeting of clientele: 70 focused
on farm sales to businesses or institutions; 60 focused on sales to consumers; and
38 did both.
Foods hubs are an experiment in progress. Sixty percent of
hubs inventoried by the USDA have existed for less than five years, another
nine percent for six to ten years, and only nine percent for 29 years or more.
Brannen's mandate was to take a systematic look at how each
of these diverse approaches to organizing food hubs might or might not work
well to advance farming in the Hudson Valley. The report pulls together a very
large body of information on the 3,100 farms working 474,00 acres, and
generating $322 million gross farm sales in the nine counties along the Hudson
River from Westchester and Rockland through Columbia, Greene, and Sullivan counties—in
addition to the New York City food market's potential for Hudson Valley farming.
Brannen also interviewed 117 farmers and food business people; organized seven
food hub listening sessions involving 200+ people, and assembled an impressive
expert advisory board to give her advice and feedback as she proceeded. One
also has the distinct impression that she read every study, major and minor, of
the food hub experience in the US.
One surprise in the Hudson Valley Food Hubs Initiative
report, a well-founded surprise, is its conclusion that projects for creating a
big, central regional food hub for the Valley would not be an optimal move. Given
the diverse nature of farming here, sales and distribution networks are equally
diverse. One size does not fit all, as it might, for example, if Illinois and
Iowa organic corn and soybean farmers wanted to band together to reach adjacent
urban markets. In the Hudson Valley, farmers and merchants in the fruit,
vegetable, dairy, meat and poultry sub-sectors are already performing some
typical farm hub functions appropriate for their quite different respective
sectors. This ranges from direct farm sales and farmers' markets to Community
Supported Agriculture, and on to farmer co-ops and farmers using their own
trucks for delivery to local retailers.
With respect to existing food-hub-equivalent arrangements
for reaching individual consumers and small retailers, Brannen advocates
solidifying and extending what has already started.
In contrast, a new effort is needed for building
organizations that overcome predominantly weak links between the Valley's
farmers and the large-scale purchasers who are the big sluggers in our current
food system. That includes big supermarkets and food wholesalers, food services
in the Valley's large private firms, and big public institutions like hospitals
or schools. This will require building new capacities, like on-farm quality
controlled packing of produce, and especially recruiting management and sales
people who know how deal with the big purchasers. Given increasing consumer
preferences for local source-identified food, and the desire of the big
purchasers to make money delivering what consumers want, that can be done.
Above all, Hudson Valley citizens' organizations must make
it very clear to their governments, nonprofits, and large private firms that
they want firm commitments to buy local, source-identified food.
Posted by Chris Hewitt
on 12:48 PM.
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