Kansas and Missouri are distributing more than $13 million to strengthen local food systems.
Projects that touch processing, transportation and distribution between harvest and final sale to consumers are eligible for funding under the Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure (RFSI) program.
“It’s not the sexy part,” said Rebecca McMahon, administrator of the Local Food System Program at Kansas State University. “It’s not the growing and the making Instagram-worthy food at the end of the food chain. It’s the entirely non-sexy (part), putting things on a refrigerated truck and putting them in a cooler.”
But these connecting pieces are vital to a strong food system.
The program, which is a partnership between state departments and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), taps funding from the American Rescue Plan Act.
Brittney Grother, grants coordinator at the Kansas Department of Agriculture, said there is a lot of excitement in the state because the program addresses oft-overlooked links in the food chain.
“In order to see more resilience, there’s a need to focus on our local supply chain,” Grother said.
The department, which was awarded more than $6.4 million in RFSI funding, hosted outreach sessions to identify needs for funding in Kansas and used this information to build its proposal to the USDA.
Grother said the department focused on three priorities for the funding: aggregation points, food processing infrastructure and storage.
Focus on Food Hubs
Food hubs and farmer cooperatives are important aggregation points that help individual producers sell and distribute their food. Grother said right now the state only has five food hubs, and they can’t serve all the state’s rural areas.
A food hub and farmer cooperative works with local producers to aggregate products and help sell them to larger institutions or individual buyers. It takes organization, refrigerated trucks/storage and enforced quality control.
“This type of work can be very expensive,” Grother said. “That’s why aggregation points is one of our top priorities.”
Increased capacity of aggregation points can also help producers sell to bigger institutions, like hospitals and schools.
In a Cornell University case study evaluating the economic impact of food hubs, 60% of farmers said they were able to expand their businesses because of their relationship with a food hub. And it concluded that “food hubs support the expanded availability of local farm products.”
Currently, many producers work from their home kitchens or facilities, which is why Grother said food processing infrastructure is another identified priority in Kansas.
To grow their businesses and to best adhere to food safety regulations, producers need access to commercial kitchens and other such facilities.
“We’re excited to get some applications for commercial kitchen spaces — whether that’s individual producers or communities,” Grother said.
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Categories: Missouri, Harvesting, Rural Lifestyle