Other Ag News: How People Power Local Food Systems

Editor’s Note: This blog post is the second in a series highlighting how recent supply chain investments were unique and pivotal in expanding infrastructure to respond to growing farmer demand, reducing costly wait times, and reaching diversified operations. Part Three will move further along the supply chain, taking a deeper look at how federal market opportunities support the success of efficient regional food systems. 

As described in the first part of this series, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) launched a framework and series of investments targeting regional supply chains that would promote a more fair, competitive, and resilient food system. These investments focus in areas of production, processing, aggregation/distribution, market opportunities, and consumer access. 

An often invisible, yet essential element of an efficient regional supply chain that supports a range of producers is business technical assistance and value-chain coordination. Without coordination and assistance, investment dollars may be used ineffectively or not realize their greatest social return on investment. 

There are a handful of existing USDA programs under the Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) that offer funding opportunities to support efforts like regional coordination of grower networks, facilitating farm to school programs, or community food assessments. However, newly established AMS programs have a more explicit focus on business technical assistance, federal funding outreach and application support, and value-chain coordination for mid-tier supply chain businesses. These particular business development activities described below are essential elements for processing, aggregating, and distributing local products through new or growing regional markets. 

Regional Food Business Centers operate under cooperative agreements with twelve unique regional centers serving all states, Tribal nations, and territories. Their core mission is to provide business technical assistance across the supply chain, deploy “business builder” grants, and collaborate with a range of regional partners and stakeholders to leverage existing resources and develop a comprehensive regional strategy. 

Meat and Poultry Processing Capacity Technical Assistance program of the Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) established a nationwide network of support focusing on four key areas for applicants and recipients of meat processing funding: federal grant application management, business development and financial planning, meat, and poultry processing technical and operation support, and supply chain development. 

The Local Food Promotion Program (LFPP) awards competitive grants to organizations, local governments, cooperative businesses, and more to promote the availability of locally and regionally produced agricultural products with an emphasis on developing and coordinating intermediated networks for food aggregation and distribution. 

The Regional Food System Partnership Program (RFSP) awards competitive grants to multi-stakeholder partnerships that broadly support planning and developing regional food economies through a variety of activities, such as developing business plans, feasibility studies, mid-tier value chains, or city and regional planning activities that promote economic opportunities for producers and food businesses. 

Technical Assistance Timing is Everything 

The Flower Hill Institute is a historically Indigenous-led organization and is the overall coordinator of the MPPTA network. It assists on all four scopes of the program and helps coordinate work across all of the other sub-awardees. 

The MPPTA network unites bodies of knowledge from across the value chain, specific regional knowledge of local markets, and the efficiencies of national coordination allowing each specific member to best serve the market of current and hopeful small and very small meat processors. 

“Building a new meat/poultry processing business or expanding an existing enterprise is extremely challenging. The grants and loans initiated by USDA are helping underwrite the cost of construction and equipment acquisition, but these small businesses face counting challenges in developing marketing plans, recruiting a qualified workforce, capturing value for byproducts, and more. The no-cost technical assistance offered through the network of organizations USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service enlisted in 2022 is a valuable service that smaller processors are increasingly utilizing.

More than 1,300 enterprises and individuals have requested technical assistance since the program was launched in March 2022, ranging from a pork producers’ cooperative in Puerto Rico to a cattlemen’s association in the northern Marianas Islands and everything in between. These projects are incredibly diverse and include tribally led processing enterprises nationwide, halal processing enterprises in New England and the southeast, women and veteran-owned initiatives, and more. Yet each is guided by determined, resilient people dedicated to improving food access for their communities.

Several are already making an impact as a score of small processors receiving grants in 2021 to become USDA inspected are now offering local ranchers access to new markets, and are expanding the selection of locally produced and processed meat and poultry in their communities.”  – MPPTA Network

The Niche Meat Processing Assistance Network (NMPAN) of Oregon State University Center for Small Farms is one of the sub-awardees of the MPPTA program and has helped numerous smaller and socially disadvantaged processors apply for the novel expansion grants, aligned with providing more general business technical assistance. (NMPAN is a member of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition) 

The College of Agriculture, Environment, and Nutritional Sciences at Tuskegee University hosts the award of the MPPTA for the southeast and has helped facilitate the application and post-award compliance of many of the grants in that region. 

“I will say this program [MPPTA] provides a lot of hope to our smaller producers and processors. These are people who are really rural, and haven’t always been reached by extension like this before.  It took time to build trust with them, but now they understand – hey if you need help, we are here.  I enjoy working with our processors, helping them navigate the messy world of food safety and processing law, and I think this program is really helping our local processors grow” – Veronica Royal, MPPTA Coordinator at Tuskegee University CAENS

Food Hubs Going Beyond Aggregation and Distribution

Carolina Farm Stewardship Association (CFSA), an NSAC Member, received a Local Food Promotion Program grant in 2021 that sought to increase the organizational capacity of seven partnering food hubs and the farmers they work with. The work had distinct activities for the food hubs and their participating farmers. For the food hubs, a core part of the work was implementing quality management systems, developing standard operating procedures, and implementing food safety plans. CFSA provided farmers with food safety training and supported them in writing, implementing, and obtaining GAP certification. 

This LFPP project equipped CFSA and these seven food hubs with the appropriate knowledge, networks, and procedures to quickly implement the NC FarmsSHARE program in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, when North Carolina signed their cooperative agreement for LFPA, they quickly scaled the number of food hubs participating in order to meet increasing demand. However, some of the newly added food hubs, such as Operation Spring Plant (OSP), expressed the need for expansion in the same kinds of support that the LFPP enabled. NSAC staff recently reached out to Dorathy Barker of OSP to learn more about the food hub’s need for additional funding for technical assistance. 

Dorathy Barker has been working to create a better future for agriculture since 1987, when she co-founded OSP in Oxford, North Carolina with her husband, Phillip J Barker. The organization offers training, financial support, and technical assistance to Black, Indigenous, socially disadvantaged, and small farmers in North Carolina. OSP also advocates for economic development in agriculture programs as a member of the HEAL Food Alliance, the National Black Food & Justice Alliance, and the Rural Coalition. Additionally, last year, the Barkers were featured speakers during NSAC’s Farmers for Climate Action: Rally for Resilience. 

The organization’s work was highlighted in 2020, when the Barkers received a Leadership Award from the James Beard Foundation. Dorathy Barker dedicated the award to expanding OSP’s mission. Finding new markets for small, Black, and socially disadvantaged farmers is a key part of that work, as is ensuring that farmers have the correct food safety infrastructure to participate in those markets. 

Dorathy Barker encountered many farmers who wanted to participate in LFPA, but who did not know where or how to get the technical assistance they needed. Specifically, many of these farmers needed to be certified in Good Agricultural Practices, which is commonly referred to as GAP. Barker specifically highlighted this kind of technical assistance as a key need for the farmers she works with, particularly since GAP is key to accessing many institutional markets. OSP received a Food Safety Outreach Competitive Grant to support their efforts to reduce, help manage, and minimize food safety risks on farms.

“I want to make sure that TA and fair prices are going to Black, socially disadvantaged, and BIPOC farmers however that can happen,” she said in a recent conversation with NSAC. “Information needs to get to these communities quickly, otherwise they will miss out on a lot.”

She also described the positive impact that additional infrastructure support could have on these farmers’ ability to grow their businesses. “Buyers wanted the farmers to guarantee a 5 day shelf life; they couldn’t do that because they didn’t have the proper storage,” she said. She heard from farmers who needed help creating a cooling system to extend the shelf life of their produce. 

Dorathy Barker heavily emphasized the value of practical technical assistance in enabling farmers to participate in LFPA, noting: “Having the TA would feel like winning a million dollars. Having the infrastructure would mean that they could grow more. They wouldn’t have to limit themselves in terms of what they could handle due to their capacity.”

Many of these new opportunities have been funded through cooperative agreements with project timelines that extend into 2027. However, without program authorization or an additional funding source, there will be limited resources for the network of technical assistance providers across the nation. The upcoming farm bill reauthorization offers an opportunity to embed some of these essential activities into existing programs as well as codify novel and impactful programs. 

The Local Farms and Food Act (S. 1205, H.R. 2723) offers improvements to existing, popular local food and farmer programs, the Local Food Promotion Program (LFPP), and the Regional Food System Partnership Program (RFSP), among others. LFPP and RFSP awards have been inadequately utilized to fund essential local food system technical assistance and value-chain coordination described above. The bill explicitly outlines that the program is intended to support partnerships that develop and implement regional food chain coordination projects or regional outreach and technical assistance projects. Further, it directs USDA to conduct outreach and technical assistance to prospective applicants, either directly or through cooperative agreements with community organizations. The outlined increases of funding in the bill are essential to address the current and anticipated increase in program demand. 

By design, the Regional Food Business Centers (RFBCs) and the Meat & Poultry Processing Technical Assistance Program (MPPTA) have capacity to conduct outreach to growers, small and very small meat processors, and other middle of the supply chain businesses to support them in accessing federal funding opportunities and ensure they are in compliance with all required food safety standards. Existing efforts, such as the Dairy Business Innovation Centers, have proven how specialized regional efforts can expand USDA’s outreach. The farm bill must support producers and ranchers beyond dairy initiatives. The RFBC and MPPTA programs provide a pathway to ensure meat, poultry, and specialty crop growers and businesses have adequate business support.

The Strengthening Local Processing Act (H.R. 945 and S. 354) also contains provisions to increase the ability of the Food Safety and Inspection Service of USDA to provide materials that would make this technical assistance easier to implement in the field by providing a more comprehensive publicly available set of HACCP models and validation studies for small and very small processors. 

These farm bill priorities will ensure existing and anticipated regional supply chain investments will be matched with sufficient technical assistance and training to producers and businesses to ensure ready access to retail and wholesale markets. However, there are numerous barriers for small and mid-sized farms and businesses to access public markets, such as USDA’s commodity procurement programs. Part three of this blog post series will dig deeper into how USDA’s federal food purchases can create an impact beyond providing safe and healthy commodities. 

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