Food hubs can provide small farms with large markets Selling food to a large institution, such as a school, hospital or prison, can give farmers a stable, reliable source of income. Yet small farmers can lack access to these markets. Distributors that supply food to these large facilities find it far more efficient to work with farms that can sell them large quantities. But through food hubs, farms of all sizes can pool their harvests and distribute them in bulk. “Even if a small, beginning, 1-acre farm has four cases of something, we can add it to an order with the giant farms or the mid-sized farms,” says Hope Sippola, who co-owns Spork Food Hub in Davis. “It’s a very valuable market for those smaller farms as an entry into wholesale. It creates consistency in orders for the farmers, larger orders and (depending on what they grow) year-round sales.” Sippola speaks from experience. She and Shayne Zurilgen co- own Fiery Ginger Farm, which sits on a small plot behind a retail shop in suburban West Sacramento. “For our first eight years of operation, our farm sold mainly to school districts,” she says. “But we’re one tiny little 5-acre farm, so we’re not going to be able to supply everything the schools need.” Then, during the COVID-19 pandemic when the local schools had taken on a food-distribution role in impoverished communities and food-desert areas, they faced supply chain problems. “They couldn’t get the things they needed. They were facing lots of substitutions. Things were having to travel really great distances to get to them,” Sippola says.
with Impact Justice’s Food in Prison Project, which aims to improve the quality and nutritional value of food in the nation’s prisons. Other key contributors include the Nutrition Policy Institute, a University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources organization
that studies the impact of nutrition and physical activity on public health, and ChangeLab Solutions, a nonprofit that shares research, policy and planning expertise to advance health equity. In the end, the team effort came up with a program that “is really a win-win-win situation,” Gantan says, noting the CDCR can more easily comply with recently passed legislation, the inmates have more access to tasty and nutritious produce, and California’s small farms have access to a new, stable market. “We look at our small farmers here in California, and there’s such a need to help uplift them and empower them,” she says. “This program can help do that.” She adds that even people with no connection to the state prison system should be interested in Harvest of the Month’s physical and psychological benefits to inmates. “It’s a public health concern. The more people who come home healthier, the less stress and burden on our public systems, our health care system and insurance,” Gantan says. “We also hope that once they come home from incarceration, they’re able to make healthier, more informed choices once they can purchase food on their own. “If we look out for the holistic health of individuals while they’re incarcerated, then when they’re released, they’ll come home a lot more ready to contribute positively to society.”
Then one of the schools pitched an idea to Sippola and Zurilgen. “They said, ‘You should start a food hub and just source from all your local farm friends and your own farm.’ And we said, ‘No. That seems like a lot of work,’” she says, laughing. But they reconsidered. They wrote a California Department of Food and Agriculture grant and used a portion of that money to start the food hub in 2021.
Linda DuBois ldubois@californiabountiful.com
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Spring 2024
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