Food Hub Feasibility in Oregon’s Mid-Willamette Valley: Interviews with Conventional and Organic Small and Mid-Sized Farmers

Introduction

A food hub is a centralized location, either brick and mortar or online-based, that connects farmers and food buyers. Food hubs are becoming an increasingly common model for producers to sell their products in local markets (Colasanti et al., 2018). Food hubs may be a website where farmers post their products for sale, or a physical location that provides services to growers such as aggregation and distribution management, a commercial kitchen, or a USDA meat-processing facility (Colasanti et al., 2018). Food hubs may also be a vehicle to educate the community on the value of buying products from local producers (Cantrell and Heuer, 2014). Food hubs can be especially beneficial to small growers because they provide infrastructure and services that those growers may not have the means to provide on their farms (Conner et al., 2017). In fact, the 2017 Food Hub Survey showed that over 90% of food hubs had “increasing small and mid-sized producers’ access to markets” included in their mission (Colasanti et al., 2018). A previous study showed that food hubs are most successful in metropolitan areas because of their accessibility to growers, wholesale buyers, and retail consumers (Fischer et al., 2013). For example, in Portland, Oregon the nonprofit Ecotrust organizes a physical location food hub, The Redd on Salmon Street.

Introduction to the Food Hub Feasibility Survey

Salem is the capital of Oregon with a population of 168,000. It is the second-largest city in Oregon, behind Portland. In 2016, the City of Salem proposed a food hub as one option to revitalize a low-income area that was slated for improvement with urban renewal dollars. The city collaborated with ECONorthwest consultants and the local OSU Extension Service Small Farms Program to develop, conduct, analyze, and present the results of a survey of small and mid-sized farmers (both organic and conventional) in the Salem area to assess their interest in a potential food hub.

The survey consisted of two sections with both multiple-choice and open-ended questions. The first section included general questions about the farming operation (location, acreage, what products they sell, when the products are available for sale, and where they currently sell their products). The second section was designed to assess the farmers’ interest in a food hub in Salem, and included questions about farmers’ interest in increasing local sales, whether they thought a food hub was needed in the Mid-Willamette Valley, and their top farming challenges. The second section also asked what services a food hub could provide that would benefit them, as well as whether they would be interested in participating in a food hub, where they would ideally like it to be located, and barriers they see to their participation in a food hub. Since this survey was only an initial inquiry to see whether the farmers were interested in a food hub, more specific questions like what farmers would pay for services provided by the food hub were not included.

A total of 19 small and mid-sized farmers (10.5% of the estimated total in the region) were interviewed for the survey, from September 2016 to March 2017; 18 on-site at their farms and one over the phone. While the survey was being developed, a database of small farmers in Oregon’s Mid-Willamette Valley was compiled from internet searches, extension contact lists, and county tax assessor data. Survey participants were contacted from this database. As in most research that includes interviews or surveys, the data was limited to responses from farmers that chose to participate. Many of the farmers who responded to the request for an interview had been previously involved with the OSU Extension Service (participated in research, answered surveys, hosted workshops, etc.). A breakdown of what crops/products the survey participants grew or produced is shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Number and percentage of participants that farm and sell various products

Seven of the farmers interviewed were certified organic and the remaining 12 were not. The non-organic farmers were a mix of six conventional farms and six farms that were practicing alternative agriculture (no-spray, ecological, etc.) but were not certified organic.

The same interviewer conducted the interviews with producers for consistency of data collection. Data were analyzed in one and two-way tables by breaking the participants into sub-groups based on farm location, years of farming experience, farmed acreage, products farmed and sold, and organic certification status.

Key Findings from the Survey

• Three-quarters of the farmer participants had heard the term food hub before the survey. It was important to ensure that all of the survey participants had a common understanding of a food hub, as that would affect their responses.
• Participants sold their products through a variety of outlets, ranging from farmers’ markets to wholesale (Table 2).

Table 2. Sales outlets that participants use to sell their products

• All but one of the farmers interviewed for the survey were interested in participating in a food hub in Salem, Oregon. The producer that was not interested in participating had a variety of long term wholesale buyers and was not looking to expand farm sales.
• Community education was the most common option chosen by all participants interested in a food hub when asked what services they would like a food hub to provide (Table 3). Value-added processing, direct sales, distribution, and aggregation were of secondary interest to participants (Table 3).

Table 3. Services that farmers said would be helpful as part of a food hub, ranked from highest to lowest percentage of respondents.

• All of the certified organic farmers grew mixed vegetables, which shaped many of their responses from product availability to services they want the food hub to provide. Only 58% of the non-organic farmers grew mixed vegetables.
• All of the meat producers surveyed said processing is their primary farming challenge because of the limited number of USDA meat-processing facilities in the region that will work with small producers. All seven meat producers surveyed said a USDA meat-processing facility was their top priority for a service the food hub could provide. Two of the seven meat producers surveyed were certified organic. For their meats to be sold as organic after processing, the facility would have to be certified organic in addition to being USDA-certified.

Farmer Concerns about a Food Hub

• Three main concerns that emerged from the interviews with both organic and non-organic farmers about participating in the food hub were: 1) they would need to set their prices too low, 2) lack of consumer demand for their products in the geographical area around the food hub, and 3) too much competition from larger farms who would also participate in a food hub.
• Both organic and non-organic farmer

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