“By coming together around food... we can actually take back a little bit of our power, slowly, over time.””

The opening of the Catskills Food Hub bodes well for the Sullivan County food system—producers, consumers and suppliers alike.

 “When I look around Sullivan County, we are all coming up. We are making things happen,” said State Assemblywoman Aileen Gunther at its ribbon cutting April 12. (Click here for a story on the Catskills opening)

Just across the border in Wayne County, PA, the Lackawaxen Food Hub has just closed its virtual doors for good.

The challenges that came with operating a community-supported agriculture share that connected small produce farms in a rural area was just too much, said Sky Ballentine, the former president of the Lackawaxwen Food Hub.

“We’ve been struggling for a long time,” Ballentine said. “It was just like, ‘You know, we can’t pass a budget. So what are we going to do?’”

What is a food hub?

There might not be a better person to ask than Jeff Farbman, senior program associate at the Wallace Center at Winrock International—a not-for-profit that works to create more fair, affordable and green food systems in the United States. He also helped write the official definition of regional food hubs with the U.S. Department of Agriculture:
 

 “A regional food hub is 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.”
 

In simpler terms, a food hub is a centralized organization that helps farmers sell their products.
 

Food hubs can come in the form of something like the newly opened Catskills Regional Food Hub, which will sell farm products to wholesale buyers in big quantities, or operate more like the Lackawaxen Food Hub did, which was largely dependent on a consumer-supported agriculture share and an online bulk store.
 

Food hubs often integrate education and marketing into their programming. A food hub might offer meet-and-greets with farmers. They also do the work that farmers often don’t have the resources for: marketing, packaging and delivering food.

Food Hubs are happening

Nationally, food hubs are a growing enterprise.

From 2013 to 2015, the number of food hubs documented in the National Food Hub Survey jumped by nearly 50. Though that growth seems to have slowed since 2015, researchers are finding that individual food hubs are expanding and becoming more economically stable. In fact, data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture has shown that the survival rate for food hubs as a business venture is significantly higher than for other types of businesses—88% as opposed to 53%.

Hubs older than two years, according to the survey, are scaling up to provide to wholesale customers. Start-ups are getting more outside funding.

The growing relevance of food hubs, along with food co-ops, farm-to-table operations and other similar ventures, may be a push-back against “big-ag” and the outsourcing of the United States’ agricultural production. The USDA’s recent agricultural census shows that large, typically corporate farms, now own nearly 60% of America’s farmland. More than half of the country’s fruit is imported.

Additionally, a smaller share of farms are controlling more and more of the market. It isn’t hard to look around Sullivan and Wayne counties and see the impact of agricultural shifts in the United States over the last 15 years.

“Nothing we’ve tried with rural America has really worked,” said Sue Beckwith, executive director of the Texas Center for Local Food. “Maybe it’s because there’s people in power who are not willing to let go of it, maybe it’s because our rural areas no longer feed our cities.”

In some places, food hubs are changing that.

“The food hub is [often]... the rural-urban connection,” said Jeffrey Farbman, senior program associate at the Wallace Center at Winrock International, and one of the authors of the food hub study.

By connecting small farms with resources, customers and urban clientele, food hubs offer business help to rural farms. If farmers can cut out the time they take marketing, packaging and transporting their product, they can, theoretically, put more energy toward “doing the job they chose to do,” as Majestic Farm owner Brett Budde put it at the Catskills Food Hub ribbon cutting event.

 The food hub survey found that 89% of hubs surveyed sourced mostly or exclusively from small to mid-sized farms and ranches—86% of those farms and ranches were in rural areas.

So, with all this good data, why did the Lackawaxen Food Hub fail?

Up against it

The Lackawaxen Food Hub was spurred from the Lackawaxen Farm Company. What started as an idea between Eusuebius, “Sky” Ballentine and a friend of his, soon blossomed.

In 2017, the Lackawaxen hub applied for nonprofit status, but was turned down by the IRS, which considered the hub a business rather than a charitable activity. From that grew the still-existing Lackawxen Food & Farm Initiative nonprofit.

The obstacles began to pile up, Sky said at The Anthill Farm, which he runs with his wife, Monique Milleson: the operation took a lot of time for a small staff, and the driver was trekking more miles than they were making back because farms were so spread out. But Ballentine also cites another challenge.

“It’s not a super high-income area,” he said, noting that produce from small growers is typically more expensive, and only what’s in season. “What we needed to get out more is [the message] that [locally-grown food] is a completely different product… [it’s] more nutritious and it supports local people,” he said. “But a lot of people can’t afford to do that, they just can’t. So there’s a real issue about how we bring the cost of food down.”

"So there’s a real issue about how we bring the cost of food down.” - Sky Ballentine

Without a large customer base in the communities in which it operates, there’s very little information on whether or not a rural food hub can sustain itself without relying on a city market.

 “You need critical mass when you have a food hub,” said Claudia Schmidt, an assistant professor of agricultural economics at Pennsylvania State University. “And it’s just easier if it’s closer to a city—you don’t have to ignore the rural area around it, but the critical mass is really the most important point.”

It’s complicated

When you start exploring the success of certain food hubs, a paradox opens up.

“Just like any middleman… the job of the middleman is to match supply with a market,” Farbman said. “Let’s put it this way: I don’t know a wildly successful rural food hub that serves a rural market.”

It’s hard to make food grown in rural areas accessible to the people who live there. The cheapest CSA box that Lackawaxen offered was $17.50 per box—pricier and more limited than what the average family, strapped for cash and time, can pick up from Walmart.

“When you have a highly subsidized system where there’s really cheap food... How do you compete with super cheap?” Ballentine said, “Without… you know, cutting off your nose to spite your face?”

The good news is, if a food hub can sustain itself by providing to a solid customer base, it can then use that leverage to the advantage of the community in which it’s located. This is what Farbman and others refer to as meeting the “triple-bottom-line”—not just meeting an economic goal, but also a charitable one and, typically, an environmental or public health directive.

“There’s that economic multiplier effect,” Farbman said. “You spend $1, on food... How hard did that dollar work?” It pays the grocer, he said, and the farmer, and the workers, and the suppliers who supply the farm, and so forth—and wouldn’t it be grand, think people like Ballentine and Beckwith, if all of those recipients of your dollar, were also your neighbors?

“Local food as an economic development strategy for our town. That’s our thing,” said Beckwith. “By coming together around food... we can actually take back a little bit of our power, slowly, over time.”

Read the findings of the 2017 National Food Hub Survey here.