It would have meant the fourth farm move. And for the group of Somali Bantu refugees who farm there, that would have added insult to injury, after years spent facing racism and anti-refugee sentiment. “The myth in town is that people who are from refugee and immigrant populations came here to the Lewiston area just to get welfare benefits,” said SBCA’s co-founder and executive director Muhidin Libah.

Ninety percent of the farmers at SBCA’s Liberty Farm are women; they grow everything from Molokhia (Egyptian spinach), amaranth, African eggplants, cucumbers, and watermelons, and various bean varietals from Africa for their own families and to offer wholesale to institutions in the area. For this mostly low-income and food-insecure community, losing their farmland would have been a significant blow.

“I was worried because I had about 180 farmers trying to farm this land,” recalls Libah.

Now, the farm is hoping to move to a new, 107-acre parcel with a 99-year lease. And it has become one of the founding farms in a larger effort called Agrarian Commons.

The experiences of the Somali Bantu community are a good example of the barriers to land access many farmers and would-be farmers face across the U.S. The average age of the American farmer is nearing 60, and an estimated 400 million acres of farmland are expected to change hands by 2030. Much of that land is in danger of being developed or bought up by a bank, or very large farm, as the price of farmland has reached historic highs in many parts of the U.S. As a result, many young and new farmers can’t find affordable land. Furthermore, most landowners are white and male, while most farmworkers are people of color.

The Agrarian Commons project aims to help retiring farmers and ranchers financially while transferring land to the next generation.

The Agrarian Commons project, from the New Hampshire-based nonprofit Agrarian Trust, is designed to help farmers bridge those difficulties by helping retiring farmers and ranchers financially while transferring land to the next generation. By doing so, it hopes to address land injustice and farmers’ financial insecurity while fostering a system of community supported, environmentally sustainable agriculture. There are currently 12 founding Agrarian Commons farms in 10 states, covering 2,400 total acres.

Community Solutions

SBCA’s new farm is part of the Little Jubba Central Maine Agrarian Commons—named after the Jubba River Valley in Somalia—and is one of 10 founding commons, or community-based farms and ranches, nationwide. Beyond the farming itself, the space will also allow the community to celebrate its heritage, said Libah. “Now we have a space where we can exercise our culture, a space where you can do a lot of programming because it’s outside of town and it has a lot of potential.”

One of the farmers at Little Jubba Farm in central Maine holding a fennel bulb.

Some of the SBCA farms run on a traditional Somali ishkashito model, a cooperative sharing system where small groups of farmers form their own groups and work plots of land together and are accountable to each other. They sell their crops as a group and divide the profits. “It’s a cultural cooperative method that we use back home in Africa,” said Libah. “We are trying to retain our African farming methods.”

The uniqueness of the Agrarian Commons model, said Agrarian Trust director Ian McSweeney, is the local–national legal structure. It’s the only agriculture land trust in the U.S. with its particular ownership and lease model, with the umbrella national land trust. Each commons is comprised of farmers, community stakeholders, and a board. The farmland is acquired by the local commons, financed by private donations from philanthropies and individuals, and then leased to a local farmer for 99 years.

The land is not necessarily designed to be farmed collectively, but that’s certainly an option, as is the case at SBCA. The local commons negotiates with landowners, such as farmers who need to finance their retirement yet want their farms to remain farms and sustainable. It is also designed to relieve new farmers of land-based debt because they don’t have to take on a mortgage or loans to finance the land purchase (for many, getting conventional financing is very difficult anyway).

Agrarian Trust describes the commons model as an adaptation of the community-supported agriculture (CSA) model, wherein customers invest in a farm by pre-paying for produce. “The same needs to be true for farmland,” McSweeney said. “The communities that are connected and depend upon those farms need to give philanthropic and investment money to secure the land base for the farms they count on.” The structure was modeled on the French farming co-operative Terre de Liens, which was founded in 2003.

In California’s Capay Valley, 120 miles north of San Francisco, a group of community stakeholders that comprise the Capay Valley California Agrarian Commons are currently negotiating the valley’s first potential Agrarian Commons farm.

The farm has the support of Full Belly Farm, a pioneer organic farm in the area founded by Paul Miller and Dru Rivers in 1984, and currently run with their children and partners Judith Redmond and Andrew Brait. In the ensuing years, Miller says he has seen land prices in the valley increase due, in part, to demand from city dwellers for second homes and, recently, cannabis growers. Land now costs $15,000 to $35,000 an acre. That makes it difficult for new farmers to both afford land and to start up a farm business.

“To be able to do all of that at the same time is increasingly difficult and it’s a reason why there aren’t a lot of new young farmers around at a time when we need to think about having more farmers who are learning the trade and providing for the regional food economy,” Muller said.

Farmers working with the Agrarian Commons in southeast Minnesota.

A 245-acre farm where a leasehold farmer has worked for 25 years to create an organic system is for sale, but he can’t afford to buy it. (The negotiations are ongoing, so the group preferred to keep the farm anonymous). If the Capay Valley Agrarian Commons acquires the land, it will be leased back to the same farmer, who in return will offer other farmers training and growing opportunities on the land.

In Montana’s Northern Great Plains region, the situation is different. The region is very rural with lots of land and very few takers. Anna Jones-Crabtree and her husband Doug Crabtree own the 9,600-acre organic Vilicus Farms, where they grow small grains, along with broadleaves, legumes, cover crops, and pollinator habitat. They self-financed their farm as a second career, and they realize that most new farmers can’t do that.

As another of Agrarian Commons’ founding organizations, their existing organic farming training program, Vilicus Training Institute, and formal apprenticeship program will expand to train more new farmers, and the local Agrarian Commons will help trainees find land.

“Where we are, we have huge amounts of opportunity for access to additional land,” Jones-Crabtree said. “We want more investors … because we also want to help support a different way of agriculture that we think can be both environmentally and economically better.”

Land Access Builds Communities

While there are several frameworks meant to help provide access to affordable land, the U.S. has a patchwork of solutions to a national problem. According to a recent paper, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has funded land access programs to the tune of $210 million over the last decade. And yet there has been little or no assessment of their effectiveness. The researchers found that one program, the Conservation Reserve Program-Transition Incentive Program, which is ostensibly aimed at helping “socially disadvantaged” farmers, has so far helped the 480 farmers and none fit that criteria.

Planting seedlings in southeast Minnesota.

This echoes the history of New Communities, the first community land trust. Its Black organizers were the victims of racial discrimination by USDA officials, who would not lend the trust money, but later lent a white buyer 95 percent of the purchase price. Racist disparities in land ownership remain, with a severe imbalance in terms of both race and gender.

Neva Hassanein, professor of environmental studies at the University of Montana, and an expert in food democracy, describes the Agrarian Trust and Commons as “a fabulous concept.” But she also thinks that none of the many current land conservation models, including land trusts and the Agrarian Commons model, replace land-use planning, “I see these other strategies as complimentary, but they are not a replacement for governance, and planning for a community’s future and the resources it’s going to need, especially in the face of climate change,” said Hassanein.

Helping new farmers find land to run organic, regenerative agriculture is essential to food security, particularly in an event like the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the case of Maine’s Somali Bantu community, the group’s relationship with Agrarian Trust will help make their work known to a larger audience. “[It’s] exposing our name and effort outside the community so that every person will know the cool job we are doing, how we are helping the people, how we stick together, how we are hardworking, donating food to different kinds of churches and mosques,” said Libah.

Helping new farmers find land to run organic, regenerative agriculture is essential to food security, particularly in an event like the COVID-19 pandemic. While the food supply chain experienced interruptions, many local-focused smaller farmers and ranchers were nimble enough to continue producing and selling at local markets and CSAs while abiding by health protocols, said Full Belly Farm’s Muller. “It’s important that we have small, regional farms that supply urban areas,” he said. “They’re not going to supply all, but they provide a level of resilience in the food system.”

The Agrarian Trust has raised an initial $2 million to fund the first commons project, and it hopes to raise another $8 million by 2022 to buy more land, among other goals. Director Ian McSweeney seeks to create a model that can be adapted in communities around the country, and change the culture around land acquisition. “If we shift the priority of communities and people, we can really make a difference,” he said.

All photos courtesy of Agrarian Trust.

The post Could Putting Farmland in the Commons Support Land Justice and Sustainability? appeared first on Civil Eats.

On the other side of the globe, northern Queensland’s seven-year drought was broken by welcome rain—which quickly turned into epic flooding. Rainfall in the region measured 50 inches in 10 days, and with high winds and low temperatures. Across the area, loss estimates have totaled nearly 700,000 cattle, 48,000 sheep, 10,000 kilometers of fence, and 15,500 kilometers of private roads. The financial total is eventually expected to reach AUS$2 billion (about U.S.$1.4 billion).

Patrick Hick, manager of Argyle Pastoral Company, a family-owned cattle station with 16,000 Brahman cattle on 600,000 acres in Julia Creek, Queensland, estimates the farm lost 6,000 head of cattle. “I’ve seen big floods before and big stock losses, but not to the extent of this,” he says.

These are both recent examples of “food shocks”—abrupt disruptions to food production. Food shocks can occur because of political unrest, policy change, and mismanagement, but the biggest factor is extreme weather. As the effects of climate change intensify, extreme weather events like these will likely become more common and more intense, threatening food production around the world. If food shocks continue to increase in occurrence and severity, as a recent study predicts, then we should expect extended disruption along the entire food supply chain, which will affect everyone from big agricultural interests to subsistence farmers—as well as everyone who eats.

Tracing Global Shocks

Food shocks are often seen in isolation, but they can have far-reaching results, says Richard Cottrell, a doctoral candidate at the Centre for Marine Socioecology at the University of Tasmania. Cottrell is the lead author of the new study, which examined the connections between terrestrial and aquatic food shocks. Using 53 years of data, Cottrell and his fellow researchers found that food shocks are occurring more often around the world. Drought is the principal trigger, but flooding is also a concern.

Trends in food production shocks across land and sea, from Nature Sustainability, doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0210-1

In the 1970s, increased tropical storms in the Caribbean seriously damaged farmland, which pushed local inhabitants to fishing. In Dominica, for example, Hurricane David wiped out the island’s bananas, its major crop, in 1979. The following year, there was a significant increase in the amount of fish caught, and three years later there was a local fish stock collapse. In Ecuador, floods in 1998 damaged farmland; by 2000, disease was affecting the country’s aquaculture shrimp farms. Although there is no solid connection between the two, the warming ocean has been linked to the virus that hit the shrimp farms. In West Africa, the local fishery collapse led to an increase in bush meat hunting. Shocks to fish production are also increasing, particularly to aquaculture, according to a different study.

Queensland’s drought–flood combination is a clear example of a food shock, says Cottrell. And while we’ve always had these cycles, he is concerned about their frequency and cumulative impacts, which make recovery very difficult. “You get hit hard once and you get hit hard again, and areas that are suffering often get hit more frequently,” says Cottrell.

Climate Change Creating Multiple and Varied Shocks at Once

The American Meteorological Society recently released a study linking climate change and extreme weather events. Its findings are borne out by the increasing, and increasingly costly, weather and climate disasters in the U.S., according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). An average of 6.3 $1 billion-plus events occurred each year from 1980 to 2018. Between 2014 and 2018, that average rose to 12.6. In 2018 alone, extreme weather led to $91 billion in losses.

As our food supply has become more vulnerable, there is also the increased likelihood that multiple food shocks will happen at the same time, a scenario that has the potential to severely disrupt global trade systems, particularly if major food growing regions are hit.

Farm buildings isolated by flood waters after Arkansas’ Black River flooded following torrential rains. (FEMA photo by Samir Valeja)

Conventional farming wisdom isn’t particularly helpful, says Renata Brillinger, executive director of the California Climate & Agriculture Network (CalCAN). “No amount of experience, even among the most veteran farmers, is providing much of a guidepost for some of these impacts,” she says.

Another problem is that different areas are experiencing different effects—one area might flood while, close by, another is in drought—making statewide responses difficult. California recently experienced a seven-year-long drought, devastating fires, and extreme heat. “Resources for farmers will have to be tailored to specific regions,” says Brillinger.

Bobcat Ranch, a 6,800-acre property in Winters, California, owned by the National Audubon Society, has been burned by wildfire every year for the past five years, says ranch manager Dash Weidhofer, who says 2018’s fire season was “unprecedented.” Fires have reached 70 percent of the ranch, which is just outside of Sacramento in the northern part of the state’s Central Valley. Last year’s County Fire burned almost 3,500 acres of the ranch.

Weidhofer is seeing a range of negative effects on the landscape. There are more grasses and less brush; there has been erosion into several streams that lead to a creek where salmon spawn; and the burnt sections have created a “blank slate” where the airborne seeds of less desirable plants have a chance to take over.

Like many ranchers, Weidhofer is inheriting a relatively modern situation. Most of California’s grasslands are now filled with non-native annual plants that grow quickly, die early in the season, and provide thick fuel for fires. He’s been working on preparing for coming fires by removing vegetation, creating paths that act as firebreaks, and doing prescribed burns.

“A lot of the species here adapt to fire, but in the landscape’s history, it’s unlikely there was a significant wildfire every year,” he says.

Underestimating Food Shocks

The data on global food shocks are enormously underestimated, says Cottrell, for two reasons: A shock in one area might be mitigated by another region that is fairing better, especially in a wealthy economy that is more able to make up for the loss. In the U.S., for example, government assistance helps farmers regroup, and there are many food-producing regions and import agreements that can alleviate food production pressure.

The second reason getting an accurate count is a challenge is a lack of good data from illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing and overfishing and especially from developing and underdeveloped economies with many small-scale and backyard farmers, where production information is not captured in bigger food systems. Cottrell notes that that data needs to be collected household by household, which is a resource-intensive undertaking.

“That might allow us to understand interactions between conventional, commercial food system, the small-scale food system, and also biodiversity,” he says, as wildlife is an important food source for some.

One recent study using household data showed the link between climate shocks and food shocks, and their likely effects on smallholder farmers in developing countries. The study included 5,300 household surveys from 15 countries. Seventy-one percent of households said they’ve had a climate shock, and 54 percent have faced food insecurity for a month or more every year—with some Ethiopian households facing six or more months of food insecurity. Those living in poverty, or on its edge, are the most likely to feel the brunt of shocks.

“If these huge events start happening every few years and you haven’t been able to accumulate the sorts of assets you need to get through those hard times, then your resiliency and your adaptive capacity is low,” says Cottrell.

Farmer-Level Solutions

Regenerative farming, rotational and mob grazing, reducing tillage, agroforestry, and soil improvements are all means to help mitigate the effects of extreme weather, and the resulting food shocks. These techniques all help create resilience against climate change. Healthier soil, for example, recovers quicker from droughts and floods. Rotational grazing gives pasture areas the opportunity to recuperate while animals are feeding elsewhere, and agroforestry blends the benefits of carbon sequestration with shade cover for crops and animals and nitrogen enrichment.

Charles Alder, CEO of Rural Aid in Sunnybank Hills, Queensland, a nonprofit that supports farmers, has seen firsthand the devastation caused by flooding. In other areas of southern Queensland and in New South Wales that have experienced long-term drought, farmers are selling off their cattle, says Alder. Some of that stock is going to northwest Queensland to replenish stocks killed by the floods.

Australia needs to get better at capturing and storing water, and managing pasture and vegetation, says Alder, to make the landscape more resilient to drought and better provide farmers with water when they need it. “We’re not actually progressing the state of our agricultural land very well, and that’s a challenge for us,” he says.

It’s not that farmers don’t want to make changes to adapt, but they lack the resources, particularly human labor. Attracting and paying workers is tough for farmers, particularly in times of drought. They end up doing most of the work themselves. “They’re just exhausted,” Alder says.

A similar scenario is playing out in California. Ranchers are barely making ends meet as it is, says Bobcat Ranch’s Weidhofer. Creating a shock-resilient farm or ranch takes money. For example, the sturdy, cattle-proof fencing needed to build smaller pastures for rotational grazing is expensive and labor-intensive.

Farmers and ranchers may get more support through policy such as California’s AB 409, which aims to provide $2 million in grants to the state’s agriculture industry to fund climate change tools and training. The bill has solid support from government and industry, says CalCAN’s Brillinger.

While California heads into summer and prepares for another fire season, almost 60 percent of Queensland is back in drought. Argyle’s Hick says if the drought-flood cycle speeds up, that could mean a quicker sales cycle, and they’ll have to completely change how they run their operation. And they’re crossing their fingers they get a break from extreme weather events in the immediate future.

“If it happened again in the next two or three years, it would send us broke,” says Hick.

Top photo: Ron Hook, western district commissioner or Buchanan County, inspects the levee in Elwood, Kansas, March 22, 2019. (U.S. Air National Guard photo by Tech. Sgt. Patrick Evenson)

The post Climate Change Is Intensifying Food Shocks appeared first on Civil Eats.

Amidst the sounds of the city, tall red metal sculptures, once part of a concrete manufacturing facility, mark a thin green oasis known as Concrete Plant Park. Since 2017, a pilot project called the Bronx River Foodway has run a public forage garden out of this small waterfront plot.

The Foodway differs from a community garden in that the plants are part of the decorative landscaping—there are no separate plots with veggies in rows. Instead, visitors can follow the garden’s meandering path through medicinal plants, pollinator-friendly plants, fruit trees, nut trees, and berries—and they can harvest as they go.

Traffic along the expressway next to the Bronx Foodway. (Photo by Danielle Beurteaux)

Integrating gardening into public park design, the experiment offers fresh food to communities that lack it. The neighborhood surrounding the park has one of the highest rates of asthma in the country and is also considered a “food desert,” where fresh and affordable fruits and vegetables are hard to come by. This status is especially ironic, considering that the 113-acre Hunts Point Food Distribution Center, which is the hub for 130,000 truck deliveries throughout the region every year, is nearby.

In addition to feeding the community, the creation of the Foodway aims for the triple goals of encouraging park use, promoting food education, and creating a cleaner environment. “Food is an amazing way to engage the public and address all kinds of issues,” said Mario Yanez of Foodscape Designs and nonprofit inhabit earth, the permaculture designer who played a key role in develop the park’s planting plan.

Foraging isn’t generally permitted in New York City parks, mostly due to concerns about liability and over-harvesting, which can be harmful to the flora and fauna. As a result, the Foodway pilot challenges long-held ideas about how public park space is designed and used.

“It’s a radical concept because parks are not spaces where you’re allowed to forage,” says Nathan Hunter, Foodway coordinator with the Bronx River Alliance and NYC Parks.

Blue Hill Sage grows on the Foodway. (Photo by Nathan Hunter)

Still, foraging a concept that has gained traction in recent years around the world as a beneficial synthesis of farming and public space. While the Bronx River Foodway is the only foraging park in NYC, other cities around the country are starting to strike down their own anti-foraging laws, including Minneapolis and Boston. In fact, those pro-foraging laws actually harken back to pre-Civil War days when foraging was widely protected.

But as food law and policy attorney Baylen J. Linnekin wrote in Food Law Gone Wild: The Law of Foraging, early anti-foraging laws were based on “racism, classism, colonialism, [and] imperialism,” targeting Native Americans, African Americans, and those living in the country.

Ideas Converging

Concrete Plant Park’s history is one of community collaboration. Once the plant stopped functioning in 1987, the property was slated to become part of a highway extension. But local residents fought for the creation of a park—and won.

The seven-acre project was completed in 2009 by the city’s Parks Department and the Bronx River Alliance and it’s now part of a greenway of connected parks that runs along the Bronx River. Growing food was not part of the plan until the floating art and food project Swale docked at the park for two summers in 2016 and 2017 and introduced summer youth workers to the delights of gardening. That’s when community organizers began to talk about growing food in parks, says Dariella Rodriguez, director of community organization and outreach for Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice.

Meanwhile, in a “great minds think alike” moment, Foodscape’s Yanez and NYC Parks were talking about a food project for the park. The parks department wanted to find ways to get more people involved with the land, says Yanez.

The first edible plants were planted in Bronx Foodway’s permaculture garden in 2017. All the plants on the grounds are useful: Bayberry is a vegan source of wax; Blue Mountain mint can be made into a tea and is a favorite of bees; and Lamb’s Ear has antimicrobial properties and can be used as a bandage, says Hunter of the Bronx River Alliance. Gardeners host garden tours and periodic cooking events to demonstrate how to use different plants.

Members of NYC Parks’ 5 Borough crew helps plant demonstration beds at the Bronx Foodway. (Photo by Nathan Hunter)

Though most of the plants are integrated into the landscape, there’s also a community vegetable container garden at the south end of the park, where edibles such as tomatoes, eggplant, basil, a three sisters garden, and onions grow. There’s a row of ADA wheelchair-accessible raised beds as well. All the gardens are maintained by local community groups and the Parks Department.

One downside to the project is the cost. Although the garden is permaculture and designed to be somewhat self-sufficient, it still needs maintenance—like pruning the fruit trees for better yields—and because it’s also next to unmaintained Amtrak land, invasive plants and weeds often appear, as have volunteer goji berries, which came up recently and are flourishing (much to the community’s delight).

Serving the Community

In planning the Foodway, organizers solicited the knowledge and desires of the community, rather than creating the garden and hoping people will like and use it. In fact, so many people showed up for the community meetings that the organizers had to find bigger spaces, says Dariella Rodriguez.

The Foodway is also a way of building community in an area with a large multicultural population—“everybody’s here,” as Rodriguez puts it—from Puerto Rico, Southeast Asia, several African countries, the Middle East, and Central America.

“You don’t have to speak the same language if we talk about a plant,” she says. “People can connect on, ‘This is what we do in my country with this plant,’ and, ‘Oh, this is what we call it in my country.’ That is a critical piece of building community and connecting folks.”

Local nonprofits and community members also hold events, such as cooking demonstrations using the Foodway’s produce and workshops on using medicinal plants. There are also non-food activities like yoga and drumming circles. Non-profit Sustainable South Bronx will soon be offering a horticultural job training program using the Foodway as the literal training ground and other similar workshops for community members who want to learn how to maintain the gardens.

Take Mario Rodriguez (no relation to Dariella). He saw the park from the 6 train one day and decided to stop by for a visit. He later helped plant some of the park’s trees and then helped plant the Foodways. As a vegetarian, he says, it’s difficult to find good produce at local markets.

“It was a great opportunity for me to plant some holistic herbal medicines plants,” he says. He’s a particular fan of echinacea, peppermint, and lavender.

Rethinking Public Spaces

We’re told to use public parks very specific certain ways and the Foodway design upends those ideas by introducing a  hands-on approach to nature. Case in point: People at community meetings asked whether the gardens should be fenced in to avoid people taking things, says Yanez, and he reassured them that taking things is actually the point; people should use the gardens, eat from them, and participate.

“It takes a while because we’re so locked into our habits and conceptions of how things have to be,” Yanez says.

A sensory sign encouraging visitors to touch the Lambs Ear at the Bronx Foodway. (Photo by Nathan Hunter)

The Bronx Foodway is one example of a trend of integrating edible plantings into public green spaces, which, by the very act, questions the purpose and use of these spaces.

Fallen Fruit, an arts collective in Los Angeles that created a public fruit-tree park, and Seattle’s Beacon Food Forest, are other types of urban food projects, although neither added food plants to existing city parks. In Philadelphia, the Fair-Amount Food Forest is an initiative to create a community food forest. In addition, Yanez is working on another edible park in Miami’s Coconut Grove neighborhood, and Hunter says he regularly gets inquiries about the Foodway.

Foodway organizers hope to create more foodways in other spaces along the greenway; Yanez is awaiting funding. But even an expansion won’t fill the fresh food needs for the entire neighborhood—there are about 7,000 people living in a single block in this area—nor is that the point.

“My dream is this space will be an opportunity to teach people how to grow in their own spaces,” says Hunter. “Hopefully we can allocate spaces in other public and private lands and residences.”

Top photo: A team of farmers working at the Bronx Foodway as part of a program from Youth Ministries for Peace & Justice and New York City’s Summer Youth Employment Program. (Photo by Nathan Hunter)

The post The Bronx City Park that is Making Public Land Forage-Friendly appeared first on Civil Eats.

Callaloo is an important part of Caribbean cuisine. The green, leafy plant, also called amaranth, is often steamed with onion, tomatoes, and garlic. Easy to grow and full of iron, it’s difficult to find in the United States, even in East New York, where there’s a large Caribbean population.

Marlene Wilks’ solution is to grow her own. She first brought callaloo seeds in the early 1990s from Jamaica, where she grew up and where her mother is a farmer, because growing the plant was the only way she could get it. She calls it “the perfect green.” It’s a prolific plant that will grow anywhere there is sun, and it quickly grows back after it’s been cut. “It’s one marvelous plant,” she says.

The mural at Brooklyn’s East New York Farms! (Photo courtesy of Truelove Seeds)

The community garden where Wilks grows her callaloo is part of East New York Farms! (ENYF), a food justice community project that emphasizes produce that’s important to the community, says project director David Vigil. “We really try to focus on specialty crops: things that would be hard to find locally and organic elsewhere in New York.”

Now the organization is helping more people grow their own callaloo through a new company called Truelove Seeds.

As most of the country’s seeds are now sold by a handful of large agribusinesses, access to varietal seeds has become limited. The challenge of finding produce that is central to culturally important dishes is particularly detrimental for immigrants, adventurous eaters, members of various diasporas, and anyone interested in biodiversity and their own culinary heritage.

Roots in Food Justice & Cultural Heritage

After spending 15 years working in agriculture and food justice, Owen Taylor saw an opportunity to help farmers make some extra money while “deepen[ing] their food justice work through seed keeping and seed sovereignty,” he says. He started Truelove Seeds in 2016, based in Newtown Square, Pennsylanvia, and the company’s first catalog debuted this year with a large selection of difficult-to-find vegetables, herbs, and flowers from 17 partner farms in the Northeast, South, and on the West Coast.

Borlotto Lingua di Fuoco (Tongue of Fire Beans). (Photo courtesy of Truelove Seeds)

The company, named after Taylor’s great-great grandmother Letitia Truelove, focuses on seeds with stories that are dear to the farmers who grow them. He asks them to choose seeds that reflect their cultural identities as a way of helping to promote cultural food preservation. For his own seeds, the focus is on his Italian and Irish heritage, like the Borlotto Lingua di Fuoco (Tongue of Fire Beans), an heirloom Italian bush bean, the Violetta Lunga eggplant, and skirret, a root vegetable that was popular in Tudor England and also grown by Irish Catholic monks.

ENYF was one of the first farms Taylor contacted, says Vigil. Taylor and the organization already had a relationship going back over a decade, when Taylor helped ENYF with farm tasks like setting up their beehives. “He knows that the gardeners are growing crops that are culturally important and really hard to find outside of this neighborhood and outside of the Caribbean,” says Vigil.

Fewer people are saving seeds, which means that many older varieties that aren’t valuable to the big seed companies are being lost. Not only does that shift result in fewer choices for farmers and gardeners, but it also puts food systems at risk from lack of diversity.

“It’s kind of a resistance to this consolidation and takeover of the seed industry and a way of building resilience,” says Taylor. “The more varieties available, the better chance we have as our climate is changing.”

Bear Bottom Farm in Central Virginia is offering seeds that reflect farmer Mason Harkrader’s Syrian and Southwest Virginia ancestry. These include Bronze Syrian Lettuce, Syrian Red Bush Beans, White Velvet Okra, and Turkey Craw Beans. There’s also François Syrian Molokhia, a variety of a green used in staple dishes throughout the Middle East, says Harkrader, whose Syrian grandfather grew his own molokhia (the k is silent) once he’d settled in Virginia in the 1960s. The seeds Bear Bottom offers through Truelove are from that lineage, including White Velvet Okra, which has a long history in Southern cuisine.

Owen Taylor with a Francois Syrian molokhia plant. (Photo courtesy of Truelove Seeds)

Seeds for the catalog’s Turkey Craw Bean are grown in partnership with Chelsea Askew, a farmer in Burkeville, Virginia, who comes from a long line of Appalachian farmers. She focuses on storage crops and varietals that do well in her zone and don’t need too much care. “A lot of my emphasis is on … growing the things that are adapting well to the crazy shifts in weather and things that have been selected for this area for quite some time,” Askew says.

For instance, the Thompson’s Prolific White Dent Corn she offers comes down from her great grandfather, “Pop,” who grew it for grinding into grits, animal feed, and moonshine (at least before he got married and found religion). Askew’s Sugar Drip sweet sorghum came from another farm in the area, which grew it to make molasses. “My family used to make molasses as well, so that was an important thing for me to pursue and learn more about,” she says.

Sugar was expensive and difficult to get, and molasses was the go-to sweetener in the region, says Askew. Plus, sorghum is a multi-purpose crop—the stalk is used for molasses; the leaves are used for animal feed; and the cane is crushed for livestock bedding. The plant does well in heat and is very drought tolerant, but harvesting and cooking it takes a lot of labor, so communities would traditionally do that work together. “It’s super important for self-sufficiency, general resiliency, and also community—which is crucial for resiliency as well,” says Askew.

Collecting seeds from Violetta Lunga eggplant. (Photo courtesy of Truelove Seeds)

In Brattleboro, Vermont, farmer Jonah Mossberg’s Milkweed Farms offers many varietals that have long histories in New England. His Truelove seeds include five types of peppers, tomatoes, beans, corn, and okra.

His Roy’s Calais Abenaki Flint Corn was originally cultivated by the local Abenaki people, and was later grown by farmers in Calais, Vermont. Seeds for the Buena Mulata Cayenne Pepper sold out this year—they can be traced back to African-American artist Horace Pippin’s seed trove.

Mossberg’s collaboration with Truelove is his first foray into seed selling. There’s been a learning curve, he says, from knowing the right time to gather seeds to how to process and store them. For example, preparing tomato seeds involves picking the best fruit from the best plants when they’re ripe, and squeezing the seeds into a bucket, then fermenting them and stirring twice a day for four days to a week. Then the seeds need to be cleaned properly, dried in the right environment, and stored.

But the extra work brings wonderful benefits, says Mossberg. “Growing things for seed is so cool because you really get to see a whole different part of the plant’s lifecycle,” he says. “It’s just really special.”

Truelove pays the farmers 50 percent of the retail price of each seed packet. For some, seed selling has been a welcome source of extra revenue.

A Lucrative Market for Seed Savers

David Vigil of ENYF says he was pleasantly surprised by the money his Truelove seeds have brought in. His callaloo is the catalog’s third-best seller. “It’s really satisfying to know that people really want this,” he says.

A group of farmers working to preserve traditional foods. (Photo courtesy of Truelove Seeds)

Chelsea Askew had been working on seeds through another company, but switched to Truelove when Taylor approached her. Her main goal is to cover her gardening costs. “I was surprised to be making quite a bit more money with Owen than I was before. When I get a check I’m like, ‘Wow, this is great.’”

Mossberg says his seed selling has yet to be profitable, but his focus is more on maintaining tradition. “I think it’s important to keep the stories going and keep the seeds alive so it’s not really about the money for me, it’s about supporting the work,” he says.

Taylor’s plans for Truelove include offering new seeds and possibly increasing the number of farmers involved.

“We talk about the importance of people having control and a voice in the way that they eat and produce food,” he says. “A huge part of that is being able to eat the food that feels like home to us. That’s our cultural food, our soul food.”

Owen Taylor with broccoli rabe. (Photo courtesy of Truelove Seeds)

The post Truelove Seeds Offers a Connection to Culinary Heritage and Food Justice appeared first on Civil Eats.

After some experimenting, they made an avocado-pit tea by blanching, grating, and then dehydrating the pit. The tea has a mild, slightly fruity taste and a pleasing, natural pink color.

“Everybody throws away their avocado pits—but we can make a tea out of the skins as well,” says Bahirat. “Which is great because this country is in love with avocado.”

Food waste is a hot topic, and startups are eager do something about it. But creating a viable food product company that relies on ingredients considered waste comes with many challenges.

The Food Lab, which is part of Drexel’s Center for Food and Hospitality Management and Department of Nutrition Sciences, has become the go-to R&D resource source for culinary innovators that aim to turn food waste—or “upcycled” food, as they prefer to call it—into consumer products. The lab recently received a two-year grant from the Claniel Foundation to help expand its upcycled food research and development.

Launching a startup food brand is difficult enough, but one that sources waste ingredients faces extra difficulties, says professor Jonathan Deutsch, who founded Food Lab in 2014, which works with major consumer packaged goods companies and entrepreneurs. For instance, food safety is a big concern, he says. It would only take one big health scare involving a food waste-derived product to put consumers off. There are logistics and regulatory challenges as well.

“When you try and do surplus food work in a food system that’s not really designed to do that, you reach additional hurdles,” he says. “What we’re doing is helping our clients through those hurdles.”

The hurdles Deutsch notes are not insignificant: A recent report published by the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard University explores food-safety laws in all 50 states covering food donations—like foods that could be used for upcycled food products instead of becoming food waste. The results suggest that food producers across the country can be hesitant to donate food for fear that they could be liable for any food safety issues that arise.

Ingredients First

Like Bahirat and Kwaw-Yankson, many other upcycled food entrepreneurs first see waste, and then think of a way to use it.

Daniela Uribe grew up amongst the coffee farms of Colombia. She remembers piles of cascara—the husk of the coffee cherry—that would either be used as fertilizer or dumped in the river. Her idea lightbulb went off when she saw Starbucks offering a cascara latte, and together with her co-founders, Erik Ornitz and Drew Fink, started experimenting with cascara tea in her kitchen. Lazy Bear Tea—a translation from ozo perozoso, Spanish for sloth—sells a drink made from dried cascara, which when steeped in hot water tastes not like coffee but like a smooth black tea. Lazy Bear Tea launched in 2017 and is now sold in 30 stores in the greater Boston area, with plans for expansion.

Daniela Uribe and Drew Fink visiting coffee farmers to discuss sourcing cascara. (Photo courtesy of Lazy Bear Tea)

Apart from removing cascara from the waste system, the company offers a potential revenue stream for coffee farmers, most of whom, despite all those expensive coffees crowding store shelves, live in poverty. “That highlights how broken the coffee supply chain is in our agriculture and the system in general,” she says. “We’re using our tea as a vehicle for addressing some of those inconsistencies.”

Similarly, San Francisco’s ReGrained uses flour made from spent brewer’s grain—the used grain that’s left over after brewing—to make snack bars. Spent brewer’s grain is nutritious, and there’s billions of pounds of it produced every year—every 6-pack uses 1 pound of grain. While it can be used as animal feed, much of it is dumped. It spoils quickly, so ReGrained invented and patented a process that deals with the spoilage and transport. They collect the grains from mid-sized brewers, who welcome another source of revenue as well as the associated feel-goods.

“We’re creating economic value out of none and it’s also great story for them to tell to their customers about sustainability,” says co-founder Daniel Kurzrock.

Kurzrock and co-founder Jordan Schwartz launched ReGrained in 2013, and settled on snack bars because they’re a relatively easy entry point into the market. The company plans to launch new products and expand nationally this year. “We want to get to point where we’re the solution for brewing industry to handle this stream,” says Kurzrock.

Food Lab connected Kriti Sehgal, founder of Philadelphia’s Pure Fare restaurant group, with a provider of rescued sweet potatoes that are dehydrated and powdered. It’s used to make a sweet potato custard, one of their most popular offerings. Upcycling is a founding principal of the company, Sehgal says. But she cautions that there’s no point in using a surplus product just for the sake of it—that could mean more ingredients used to save one. “If I have to add more to that, how pure is that to the upcycling piece?” she asks.

Food Banks as Upcycling Entrepreneurs

Not every food waste entrepreneur is a hopeful experimenting in her kitchen. Drexel’s Food Lab has partnered with Philadelphia’s Philabundance, the largest food bank in the Delaware Valley region, to create products from foods that might otherwise go to waste for both their clients and retail.

This is partly driven by necessity and partly because they’re moving away from the canned goods food pantry model, says Philabundance’s deputy director of sustainability Kait Bowdler. They often receive large shipments of fresh produce requiring quick action before it spoils. Last year, that included 10 million pounds of produce over 4 months from the Port of Philadelphia alone, most of it one or two items; 2017 was a big year for grapes and melons.

As milk sales are decreasing, dairy farms are being left in dire economic straits. To address this issue, one of Philabundance’s first partnerships was with three dairy farmers in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Philabundance and other area food banks partnered with farmers who now make cheese under the group’s Abundantly Good brand. Local gourmet retailer Di Bruno Bros sells several varieties of the cheeses for $5.99 for 8 ounces; they pay a subsidy of one dollar per pound of cheese sold so that the farmers can continue providing free cheese to Philabundance—an arrangement that has supplied the food bank with 3,000 pounds of free cheddar to date. “It sort of uplifts the farmers and uplifts the clients as well,” says Bowdler.

Mennonite farmers prepare cheese for Philabundance (photo courtesy of Philabundance)

The same farmers became upcycle fans and also now use the skim milk left over after butter production to make skim milk yogurt, which Philabundance buys at low cost for its clients. “It lowers his cost of production and allows us to get a product as every time he’s making the butter for sale he can make a skim milk yogurt for us,” Bowdler says.

Food Lab is also helping Philabundance use its own culinary job training program to teach the skills needed to use surplus food. The goal for both Philabundance and Food Lab is to go beyond raising awareness about food waste, says Deutsch. “I hope the students are proficient in this field so that we’ve sort of trained an army of food waste preventers.”

Upcycling to Market

Identifying an ingredient with high upcycle potential doesn’t mean getting it is particularly easy. Bahirat and Kwaw-Yankson say their requests for ingredients usually go unanswered. “We reach out to these companies and say, ‘Hey, we’re doing something with it, so can we collaborate?’ and we never hear back,” says Kwaw-Yankson.

That may be because there’s pervasive myth about liability, says Food Lab founder Deutsch. Restaurants, stores, and the like also don’t often have the resources to keep and package waste.

Uribe, of Lazy Bear Tea, knew that getting sufficient cascara wouldn’t be easy, simply because it’s not considered valuable by farmers. But by creating a product, she hopes they’ll be incentivized to process and sell it. Her company has worked on creating relationships with coffee farmers in the hopes of encouraging them to become suppliers.

Uribe says she and her co-founders also benefited from mentorships. They were accepted to entrepreneurship programs at the Harvard Innovation Lab and the Rock Accelerator at the Harvard Business School. They also joined Commonwealth Kitchen, a Boston organization that helps food entrepreneurs start and run their businesses.

ReGrained bars and their ingredients (photo courtesy of ReGrained)

ReGrained partnered with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to get outside assurance that ReGrained’s process was operating safely and efficiently (the USDA co-invented the company’s grain-stabilization technology). Co-founder Kurzrock also advises asking for help. “Everyone in this industry was helped at some point and they’re willing to pay it forward.”

The Semantics of Waste

But simply labeling a product as upcycled isn’t enough to win long-term customers. ReGrained focuses on taste and nutritional benefits over waste messaging. “Some consumers will buy our products because they’re upcycled, but they’ll only come back if it tastes great,” Kurzrock says. “The mass market is not necessarily seeking something that’s upcycled.”

Lazy Bear Tea’s Uribe agrees—taste first, messaging second. “If you have something that tastes really good with a really compelling story, people will become really loyal,” she says. “Especially if the upcycled waste-to-food story is something that resonates with them.”

While all these food innovators champion using otherwise-unwanted ingredients, one thing you won’t find on their labels is the term “food waste.” Consumers want to feel that they’re helping solve a problem, but framing is important. “If you put ‘food waste’ on package they’ll feel like they’re getting trash,” says Kurzrock.

Philabundance’s Fresh For All program – A free farmers’ market-style program that delivers fresh produce and products including the upcycled cheese directly to people in need. (Photo courtesy of Philabundance)

Research published in The Journal of Consumer Behavior found that study subjects were receptive to a new category of food—they call it Value-Added Surplus Products—if it’s framed as upcycled. And the assumption that food surplus is equivalent to trash is something that all these upcycling champions are eager to dispel.

For one thing, much of it is hardly trash. Some food is rejected because of a market glut, or because of small things like strict weight specs—Philabundance has received bags of grapes that were only 2 ounces short of store requirements.

Upcycling isn’t about foisting off garbage to low-income populations, says Deutsch, but about closing the holes in food supply chains and using what we have. “We have one planet, we have all this beautiful abundance of food, let’s celebrate it both for people who need good nutrition and need food and people who want to enjoy a quality food experience,” he says. “And those are all the same people.”

Top photo: Daniela Uribe with a mountain of cascara (photo courtesy of Lazy Bear Tea).

The post Don’t Call it Food Waste: Entrepreneurs Turn Surplus Food into Gold appeared first on Civil Eats.

The day will include seminars on growing techniques, dealing with pests, and drying and storing—the detailed intel these saffron enthusiasts need to produce a good crop. One of those farmers is Sarah Salatino, owner of Full Circle Gardens in Essex Junction, Vermont. On a sunny day last fall, Full Circle Gardens’ outside raised beds boasted a post-season pop of purple—the petals of the saffron crocus, Salatino’s first crop. Her plants are part of an experiment to discover the best system for producing saffron in New England.

She harvests the plants by pinching the flower off its stem, separates the petals, and then uses a pair of tweezers to separate the yellow stamens from the red-orange stigmas from which the spice originates. Once she lays each part on a paper towel in a tray, she will leave them to dry for a day or two. Figuring out saffron, she said, has come with a steep learning curve.

She sees it as an opportunity to grow something unusual. “People are developing niche [products] like crazy,” she said.

Salatino will send her results to the University of Vermont, home of the North American Center for Saffron Research and Development, which was established in 2015 and hosted its first saffron workshop in March 2017. The goal is to discover the best cultivation method that results in a good crop of high-quality saffron.

The results from this year’s experimental crop hints at the potential for domestically grown U.S. saffron. As a niche, “shoulder-season” crop that can be grown after the fall harvest, and with a high resale value—saffron fetches as much as $29,000 per kilogram (roughly $13,000 per pound)—it could be a boon for small farmers looking for another source of revenue. But all that would require the establishment of a market for premium, locally grown saffron.

From Iran to Vermont

Saffron is a legendary spice that can be traced back to at least ancient Minoan-era Crete (2600BCE to 1100BCE). Some research predicts the global saffron industry will be worth $2 billion by 2025. About 90 percent of the world’s saffron—including most of the 20 tons imported to the U.S. each year—comes from Iran; Spain and Italy are other significant producers.

Its most familiar usage is as a culinary spice; its distinctive aroma, flavor, and bright yellow color are often used in recipes for Spanish paella and Italian risotto and it’s also a classic ingredient in the French fish soup, Bouillabaisse. And saffron is also used as a fabric dye and is reputed to have nutritional and medicinal benefits for ailments including heart disease and depression. But it’s probably best known for its prices: as much as $29,000 per kilogram. Hence its nickname, “red gold.”

Although there’s a history of saffron-growing in the U.S.—the Pennsylvania Dutch have grown it since the 17th century— the practice is not as widespread in this country as it once was.

To bring it back, Arash Ghalehgolabbehbahani, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Vermont, decided to launch an experimental saffron project. Originally from Iran, Ghalehgolabbehbahani worked in the saffron industry in his home country, and thought saffron could do well in Vermont, given the similarity of its climate to Iran.

At the University of Vermont lab, researchers are growing saffron in outdoor raised beds and in milk crates in a small hoop house. The milk crates are deep enough for the plant’s root system to develop, and also portable, so that farmers can store the crates out of the way once the brief growing season is finished.

University researchers plant saffron corms in late summer or early fall, which take about a month to flower and are ready for harvest in about six weeks. The plants are relatively pest- and disease-free, although voles love the corms. (Researchers found that lining the bottom of the beds with hardware cloth helps keep them out.)

The Center’s crop yield was five to six times higher in the milk crates, said Margaret Skinner, head of the Saffron Center. That’s better, on average, than the yields in Iran or Spain. Since quality dictates price, they also had chemical analyses done and found the quality of their crop on par with both countries.

Margaret Skinner and Arash Ghalehgolabbehbahani. (Photo courtesy of Sally McCay, University of Vermont)

Skinner sees saffron as an appealing crop because the initial investment is low; saffron is relatively easy to grow and a perennial, and it’s scalable, although she encourages farmers to start small. The most laborious task is harvesting. “I think it has potential for a broad array of people,” said Skinner. “It’s not physically taxing and also not that complicated.”

Because the idea is seen as so novel, however, Skinner and Ghalehgolabbehbahani have faced difficulties getting funding for their project. Even so, the University hasn’t had to try hard to convince farmers to participate.

Enthusiastic Farmers Go for the Red Gold

The first saffron-growing workshop that Skinner and team held in March 2017 was at capacity, with 100 attendees, and organizers had to turn 50-plus people away. They came from all over New England, and as far away as California and Louisiana.

“We couldn’t get them to stop talking,” said Skinner. “There was so much enthusiasm in the room it blew me away.”

In 2017, there were at least 30 new growers just in Vermont, and about 300 members on the research center’s listserv, where growers trade info and tips.

Although Full Circle Gardens’ typically grows ornamental plants, Salatino decided to give saffron a try because she was looking for ways to extend her growing season and keep her staff employed. She started with 300 corms in two outdoor raised beds and another 300 in milk crates inside her greenhouse.

At Red Thread Farmstead in Swanton, Vermont, owner Steve Leach took part in the experiment by planting 10,000 corms—manually—in containers for his inaugural saffron crop. They’re in a 21-by-96 foot backyard greenhouse, which he built himself.

Red Thread Farmstead’s saffron beds.

Leach, who works in the plastics industry, chose saffron as part of a second business. He’s also experimenting with growing microgreens in his basement, and sees the two niche crops as complementary.

“I’m focusing on food that is in the top nutritional grade,” he said.

Leach said he underestimated how much work prepping the soil and planting the corms would take—in all, about three and a half weeks. He also quickly realized he’d need to tweak his growing arrangement for the next crop. He planted this year’s corms too close together and in containers too shallow for the their root systems. Next year, he’ll be digging them up and giving them more room.

“I went a bit overboard with my first crocus order,” he said.

At last year’s Saffron Workshop, Ghalehgolabbehbahani detailed how each part of the plant–corms, threads, stamens, and petals—have a market value, and he estimated a possible $28,000 in net revenue per year from a 30-by-90-foot high tunnel. But it will take some work to get there.

Full Circle Farms’ Salatino is a bit disappointed with this year’s harvest—only 54 percent of the inside and less than 50 percent of the outside corms bloomed. Of Red Thread’s 10,000 corms, 3,000 to 4,000 bloomed, yielding about 22 grams of saffron—which has a potential resale value of only a few hundred dollars, depending on quality. Although Skinner and Ghalehgolabbehbahani are still awaiting samples and analyzing the results from other farmers’ samples, Salatino’s yield seems to be around average.

Creating a Market

Even with all those difficulties, growing saffron might be the easier part of the project—creating a market for locally grown saffron could be a bit tougher.

It’s the classic catch-22 of marketing: There has to be enough product for a market, and enough of a market to justify growing the product and supporting local production.

Saffron’s reputation as exotic and expensive is something of a barrier for consumers, though there is small but steady demand for it.

Leach of Red Thread Farm is trying to make his own market with a product line of spices and teas, including a tea that blends saffron with high-grade matcha, and other inexpensive, entry-level products. “I’m pushing people to think out of the box and not just [see saffron] as a spice for rice,” he said.

Despite the low yield of her planting, Salatino of Full Circle Farms thinks there’s potential for a local market because Vermont already has a strong farm-to-table tradition.

Farmworkers collecting saffron in Razavi Khorasan province, Iran. (Photo by Safa Daneshvar)

Chefs and consumers, “like to know that what they’re eating and planting is coming from down the road or up the state,” she said.

That may be a good approach because, as with many valuable products, there have been incidences of counterfeit, mislabeling, and tainted saffron and a locally grown product could offer a measure of reassurance.

Owing to differences in quality and costs of production, one kilogram of Italian saffron costs approximately $29,000, compared with $15,000 for Iranian saffron, making passing off lower-quality saffron for high quality a temptation.

“There’s a lot of monkey business going on,” said Hans Rotteveel, president of Roco Saffron, a wholesaler based in the Netherlands. “A lot of saffron in supermarkets is not really quality saffron or sometimes [it’s] even fake.”

At the University of Vermont’s lab, Ghalehgolabbehbahani shows the saffron samples from around the world that he and his colleagues have gathered. In Iran, he said, saffron threads are bought whole instead of powdered (which is also a good way to gauge quality), and then ground into a powder with a mortar and pestle. For cooking, the powder is steeped in hot water and then added to a recipe. The Mexican safflower the professor keeps on hand to demonstrate the difference between the two has a distinctly different smell.

U.S. producers have an opportunity to offer a premium, safe product and provide buyers with the reassurance that they’re getting the real deal. Iran will likely remain the biggest saffron producer for the global market, said Rotteveel. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for saffron from farmers like Salatino and Leach.

“Knowing the market in America is this big, American growers can ask a big premium, and maybe ask for Italian prices for locally grown saffron,” he said.

The post American-Grown Saffron Could Change the Spice Trade appeared first on Civil Eats.

For years, Whole Foods has heavily marketed itself as a place to buy local food, and many small food businesses have landed their products on its shelves thanks to the retailer’s local buying policy. The store allows small producers to approach local and regional buying managers to get their products into stores; the buyers also recruit many indie food companies. Whole Foods also maintains an online portal where companies can sign up and connect with a category buyer.

Despite being smaller than many other national supermarket chains—Whole Foods claims 473 stores in North America and the U.K. compared to Kroger’s more than 2,790—it is a powerful force in the local food economy. Landing a Whole Foods account offer can offer exposure to an educated, consumer who might be willing to spend money on a new item. For producers, the relationship offers the Whole Foods stamp of approval—a sign that they comply with the company’s stricter-than-average sourcing policies.

Most customers seem to like it, too. “Whole Foods understands local stuff is what keeps them really interesting and fun and makes it more of an experience shopping there than going to Safeway or another bigger retailer,” Huntsberger said.

Whisked! goods on display in a Pennsylvania Whole Foods. (Photo courtesy Whisked!)

Since Amazon acquired Whole Foods for $13.7 billion in August, however, Huntsberger and other small, regional producers have been asking questions about how the online retail giant will incorporate the supermarket chain into its business. Recent moves to centralize the decisions about product assortment—as well as changes to producer participation in in-store promotions—have raised concerns about how local businesses will fit into the next-generation Whole Foods.

Whole Foods has yet to make public any concrete changes to their local buying program, and company representatives declined interview requests for this article. Instead it supplied this statement: “All Whole Foods Market stores will continue to sell local products, and our buyers remain committed to discovering and incubating local and innovative brands. Local suppliers and products are crucial to the success of the company.”

[Update: On January 5, The Washington Post reported that Whole Foods has begun requiring food producers to pay for in-store demo opportunities, and require some producers to discount their products sold in Whole Foods stores.]

Though the grocer has not made any explicit announcements about its plans, learning about Whole Foods’ work with local producers on its website has gotten increasingly difficult. As some sharp-eyed observers have noticed, “local” is now hard to find on the site—but “savings” and “new lower prices” are featured. And locating the retailer’s local program takes dedicated search or a visit to the site map.

Changes like these have some small producers worried about the future. “We’re just hoping, because we have strong sales, we will be fine,” said Huntsberger, who relies on the company for a significant portion of her sales. “It’s very much up in the air right now.”

While some worry that the “Amazonification” of Whole Foods could require local producers to compete against larger food companies with lower prices—potentially resulting in a dilution of authentic local products—others see opportunity for independent grocers to step up their efforts.

Distribution, Prices, and the Trouble with Scaling Up

While Amazon’s e-commerce model revolutionized shopping and logistics, it also fostered an expectation of low prices—and that doesn’t usually work well for small food producers. That’s according to Daniel Max, of Asheville, North Carolina-based Lightswitch Foods, which owns Kombucha Capital and Buchi Kombucha, and has products in 70 Whole Foods stores in the mid-Atlantic and Southeast regions. Small producers often don’t have the resources to move products around the country and can’t offer prices comparable to bigger brands.

Max and co-owner Zane Adams think that Whole Foods will likely move to a model that resembles that of other large grocery retailers—meaning larger scale, better margins, and lower prices, achieved by either choosing lesser-quality ingredients or centralizing operations. “It feels like that’s where it’s going to go,” said Adams.

John Lee, a co-founder of Capital Kombucha. (Photo courtesy Capital Kombucha)

Both owners are wondering what this could mean for their company. “Will Whole Foods only want to work with companies that are [selling] $50 million and up, to the exclusion of craft brewers?” wondered Max.

Many small producers don’t have the capacity to expand outside their region, said Huntsberger, whose products are now in 13 Whole Foods stores. “There’s no way we could have gone from being in one store to 40-whatever stores in the mid-Atlantic region,” when hers was a new company, she said. “We would be struggling with that now, and we have a lot more room and resources.”

Small producers often see getting a purchase order from a big retailer as the holy grail, said Danielle Vogel, founder of Glen’s Garden Market, a grocer with two stores in D.C. that focuses on local foods. But they often don’t anticipate the stress that will put on their business in terms of production capabilities, delivery schedules, margins, and less-than-optimal plotting. They’ll also likely be amongst the most expensive product in their category.

“It’s a really rude awakening because oftentimes they’ve gone from a really productive, excited response at farmers’ markets to a very different scenario at a big grocery store that’s not a good advocate for their craft,” she said.

Which is why starting small—at Whole Foods or elsewhere—with the ability to scale up slowly, creates an on-ramp for local producers.

The Small Producer–Whole Foods Relationship

Yet even before the Amazon purchase, maintaining a product line at Whole Foods had its challenges for startups.

John and Angela Fout started Sohha Savory Yogurt in 2013. They began selling at farmers’ markets, were later scouted by Whole Foods, and began with 20 Whole Foods stores in Boston in 2015, followed by five in New York City. While they were approved for a handful of additional stores, they were still responsible for approaching individual buyers to get their product ordered. The experience differed with each location, with some welcoming them with open arms and others never ordering.

For a small company like theirs, said Angela, that process was difficult. “It’s all in the hands of the people stocking shelves. As a small business, we do everything, and we can’t waste so much time going begging [to] them,” she said.

John Fout at the Park Slope farmers’ market in Brooklyn. (Photo courtesy Sohha.)

John Fout calls the Whole Foods system “a weird fiefdom,” wherein each store within a region operates somewhat independently. Even before the Amazon deal, he thinks pricing pressure often caused the company to hire less-experienced (i.e., less expensive) buyers who weren’t always knowledgeable about products. “The local forager for the region knew her job, but the in-store buyers were clueless,” he said. The Fouts are optimistic that the new ownership could present an opportunity to smooth out some of those kinks.

The bigger looming disruption is Amazon’s delivery model. “That could potentially crush the local model because fewer and fewer people [will] walk into a local store,” said John. That means fewer opportunities for producers to interact with and educate shoppers, he said. The Fouts said offering samples and talking with potential customers, in Whole Foods and elsewhere, has been a big factor in their brand’s growth.

In areas like the Northeast, where there’s a growing market for online shopping, however, the Amazon system could work in their favor—with caveats, John said. “If they can figure out a way to properly integrate things so [customers] have a great in-store experience, it could be good,” he said. “But that’s a hard to nut to crack.”

A recent poll by Reuters and Ipsos shows just how hard that nut is—as even the most dedicated digital shoppers have been found not to like buying groceries online. (Amazon recently ended its Amazon Fresh grocery delivery service in parts of nine states.)

Traditional Grocery Competition

As a public company, Amazon will be under some pressure to show that its acquisition was fiscally sound. Its 2017 third-quarter net sales included $1.3 billion from Whole Foods, according to the company’s recent sales report, but that didn’t stop its stock from taking a tumble. And its grocery competition includes behemoths Costco and Wal-Mart, plus German chain Aldi, which plans to open another 900 U.S. stores in the next five years, putting its total at 2,500 (assuming none close).

Additionally, Kroger announced an expansion of its local producer program in September. The company has a blended centralized and decentralized buying and merchandizing system, said company representative Kristal Howard. “Our customers love local,” she said.