Specialty Food Magazine is the leading publication for retailers, manufacturers and foodservice professionals in the specialty food trade. It provides news, trends and business-building insights that help readers keep their businesses competitive.
Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/165618
natural selections Potatoes Investment Club—with 20 members investing $5,000 each—has deployed $50,000 in loans so far. "Tasch's ideas took off like wildfire," says Derek Denckla, cofounder and chair of Slow Money NYC. "The model has been that investors invest at the level of agribusiness: $250,000 has been the minimum investment, 1,000 acres the minimum amount of land needed to attract investors. We are trying to change that paradigm. We're hoping we're the head of a spear, that we will eventually change the marketplace." and their three young children to New Paltz, N.Y., after working for eight years as an equity trader. "With hubs, farmers bring their produce in and there's aggregation and a new market to sell into. The value is added here and the distribution starts from here," Hyland explains. The efforts of Hyland and his food hub partner Paul Alward have helped boost the bottom line and provide a more dependable 12-month stream of income for dozens of small producers. By joining together, many small farms are now able to sell to larger institutional clients, like colleges and hospitals, which require a steady high volume of good produce and meat. Banding Together in Food Hubs In 2007, there was a 4 percent increase in the number of smaller farms, marking the frst increase since the Great Depression. 32 PHOTO: JARRED GASTREICH Denckla points to Jim Hyland's work in New York's Hudson Valley as an example of the momentum toward sustainability of new, smaller farms that is developing at the grassroots level. Hyland, owner of Winter Sun Farms, which flash-freezes fresh produce to sell as frozen food and processes other value-added products, formed a partnership with a distributor, Hudson Valley Harvest, that is now growing into a vibrant food hub in the region. The two companies work with more than 60 farms—ranging in size from a 4-acre mixedgreens plot to the 1,200-acre Gill Farms—and 45 private-label food companies. More than 2 million pounds of produce and meat went through its facility in 2012. With the help of the nonprofit Hudson Valley AgriBusiness Development Corporation and the New World Project, the companies were able to secure $775,000 in a state matching grant and additional private investment to increase the hub's freezer and cold storage space, buy additional equipment and retrofit a second location closer to New York City to serve as a satellite cold storage and distribution facility. "There are a lot of spokes in the hub. It's opening up different markets for these farmers," says Hyland, who moved with his wife ❘ SPECIALTY FOOD MAGAZINE Size Is a Factor—Even in Smaller Farms Whether it's a corporate enterprise or a family venture, a farmer's ability to make a living rests on the elements of land, weather, labor and capital. At one end of the scale, American farming includes many large Midwestern farms with several thousand acres of wheat, corn and soybeans, harvested using combines as wide as a house. Potato farms east of the Cascades in the Pacific Northwest can involve concentric circles of potato crops as far as the eye can see that are cultivated with an irrigation/soil-monitoring system managed by computer satellite imaging. Oregon State University has begun researching the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, in what is known as precision agriculture. At the other end are new farmers like Michael Libsch, who grows about 40 types of vegetables, including greens, root crops, tomatoes, peppers, onions, eggplants, okra, squash, sunflowers and zinnias, on 1.5 acres of land in Hillsdale, N.Y. Like many of the newer entrants to farming, this is Libsch's second career; he studied ecology in college and graduate school and, for a number of years, conducted research on the behaviors of rainforest birds in Central Justin Leszcz, owner of YellowTree Farm specialtyfood.com