LOCALadk Magazine

26 Summer 2017 LOCALadk Magazine LOCALadk It seems there's always a steady stream of new foods rolling out of the market. Just in time for this summer season, the Hub will be selling frozen juice and yogurt pops. Other new Hub products include a variety of spiced kale seasonings, perfect for sprinkling on salads, soups, and more. As the weather warms, the Hub will begin hosting farm-to-table events, and a number of food trucks. One of those is the Poco Mas Taco truck. Owners Sarah and Josh Kingzack cook their fragrant, slow-cooked beef and beans in the kitchen—and also ferment their cumin-kraut in the Hub's new temperature-controlled fermentation room. For Wekin, this endeavor has always been about finding ways to support the farming community. She, her husband, and two young sons moved to the area in 2010, after living in a cooperative community situation in Vermont. The funny thing, she says, is that "we would often drive by [the hub building] and think it would make a great community space." She and her team have reached out to more than 20 regional farms, trying to assess their needs and find ways to help them grow. These farms range in size from small, recent upstart farms such as Tangleroot Farm, with its 20 acres of diversified vegetables, herbs, and flowers, to 1300-acre Essex Farm offering a full diet of veggies, fruits, meats, and dairy year round. The farms also range in employee numbers: 1,300-acre Essex Farm employs about 20; Juniper Hill hires 14 employees to help grow food for 325 CSA members and seven markets. The market channel for this food includes CSA members, farmers markets, wholesale, retail, and food trucks. "This is money going back to the farmer," says Wekin. But this is just a small fraction of what the farms, together with the Hub, could be getting if market channels and distribution increased. That is their greatest limiting factor. The potential to grow food is great. Yet these large areas of low populations—great for providing farmers with inexpensive, abundant farmland—are not ideal for getting produce to viable markets. Local food consumption is complicated by the challenge of linking producers to consumers. Demand by chefs, markets, and schools to buy local foods exists, notes Wekin. But the cumbersome nature of ordering and knowing what's available from local farms makes it next to impossible. Buyers don't have time to buy food from separate farms with different invoice systems and delivery dates. And fulfillment, either by pick up or delivery, is not easy to coordinate, especially across long-distance rural routes. "Once you scale the view to an area that includes several dozen farmers and thousands of customers, the complexity is overwhelming. So how can we remove the friction from this supply chain so we can make customers happy and farmers more successful?" Solar Power Soon to be Fueling Deliveries The answer, at least the first step, is to offer a delivery truck for farmers. When harvests are in full swing—in the heat of summer and early fall—a refrigerated truck is an absolute necessity. However, refrigerated trucks are also enormous energy hogs, requiring huge amounts of (in this case) diesel to keep the truck cool and prevent veggies from wilting or meats from spoiling. Building a delivery truck that has a refrigeration system that runs on solar energy is the innovative solution. With a grant negotiated by the Adirondack North Country Association, the Hub recently received a $10,000 Transporting Healthy Food Grant from the Conservation Fund and the freight transportation company CSX. "The solar-powered refrigeration in the vehicle is the icing on the cake and fully in keeping with ANCA's mission to increase the use of clean, renewable energy in the region," notes Joshua Bakelaar, Director of Local Economies and Agriculture for the Adirondack North Country Association. This truck "will take the products of Champlain Valley farmers quite a bit further up the road—directly to the consumers who are buying their products in increasing numbers," says Bakelaar.

• Cover