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Call it Craigslist, farmer style.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture launched an online resource to support the nationwide development of food hubs — resources to help small and mid-sized producers work together to gain access to larger buyers and more business.
It centers around two popular trends: locally produced food, and eating food from small farms. Food hubs help producers, buyers and transporters find each other in a region, and several small businesses working together can tap into larger opportunities they can’t earn alone.
Jim Barham, agricultural economist for the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service, used the example of a hospital.
Hospitals need a large supply of food, regularly. It is the kind of customer that usually can only afford to deal with large, corporate suppliers. It can’t afford to send people to inspect and buy carrots from one farm and apples at another, Barham said.
Enter the food hub. If the local carrot grower and apple grower have already made produce available at a hub, and the hub has some truck companies on board, they can guarantee customers a large, regular supply of food with variety. They can start selling to larger customers like hospitals, Barham said.
Barham said food hubs need not not exclude large companies. In fact, he said, they can help where smaller suppliers cannot.
“Food hubs are geared to support local growers, but not exclusively,” he said. “They often use larger producers as a stopgap to ensure that they will always have the volume to meet buyers’ needs.”
The process can have appeal for the larger produce buyers too.
“Produce buyers are elated to work with regional food hubs,” Barham said. “It gives them access to product that they’re having difficulty getting from regular distributors.”
Barham said Sysco, Houston, works with some food hubs across the nation as aggregation hubs. It doesn’t need to do the on-farm pickups from smaller growers when they already have their produce pooled together.
The online resource is provided by the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service, as part of its food hub partnership with the Wallace Center at Winrock International, National Good Food Network, National Association of Produce Market Managers and Project for Public Spaces. It’s also tied into the USDA’s wider efforts with its local-driven Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food campaign.
The resource site hosts information from USDA agencies and other research organizations, and a directory of identified food hubs and financial resources. Beyond buyers and sellers, the website has potential use for entrepreneurs, advocates, researchers, media and even policymakers. As the department expands its understanding of the food hub business model, the website’s contents will evolve.
Barham said the AMS is preparing a more comprehensive resource guide for food hubs, to be released later this year. That guide will feature more non-government resources and research, provided by research institutions and the other food hub partner associations.
It will also offer advice for new food hubs, like what is working well for other hubs and what isn’t. Barham said he is inundated by people asking about food hubs — their startup costs, the warehouse space, the leasing space, what insurance is needed, or what food safety protocol they should expect from producers.
Barham said he expected that wider resource to be on the USDA secretary’s desk by September or early October.
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