“We are working to double our operation,” said Quick, who owns Quickley Produce Farm in Galena with his wife, Terry.
The farm – which produces over 50,000 pounds of tomatoes per year – sells to about a dozen clients, including MaMa Jean’s Natural Markets, Hy-Vee, The Tower Club, Metropolitan Farmer and Bass Pro Shops’ food services.
But Quick can’t seem to reach institutional customers.
In 2013, Quick met with Mercy Hospital Springfield officials to discuss supplying his farm’s hydroponic and pesticide-free tomatoes. While Mercy had an interest at the time to purchase over 500 pounds of tomatoes per week, he would have had to stop supplying some of his other customers to meet the order. A deal was never struck.
“That’s the reason for an expansion. We cannot take on another venue of that size right now,” Quick said.
Organizers of Farmers Market of the Ozarks are learning Quick’s scenario is common.
Executive Director Lane McConnell said FMO is developing plans for a food hub solution to act as a clearinghouse for Quickley Produce and other farmers’ goods.
According to the National Good Food Network, a food hub is a business or organization that actively manages the aggregation, distribution and marketing of food products for local or regional food producers to satisfy wholesale, retail or institutional demand.
“The big gap we have is in distribution,” McConnell said. “We think we can provide a venue for this market.”
McConnell’s early research estimates FMO’s cost between $2 million and $7 million to develop the food hub concept, likely building a warehouse from the ground up. In the past year, she’s visited Seattle and New York to see how food hubs operate, and this year is coordinating a needs assessment with the aid of the University of Missouri Extension.
McConnell said there are roughly 100 farmers and food producers in southwest Missouri that are potential clients, and she expects about 60 to supply FMO’s food hub.
“We’re very interested in it,” Quick said. “We are still doing a lot of retail, but we are shifting more to the wholesale end right now. The food hub would be a really good avenue for a place like us when we take that jump and have a place to move mass produce.”
McConnell expects FMO’s food hub plans to be in motion by year’s end, but she said there wasn’t a timeline for when it would be operational.
She said the rough business model would involve paying farmers a market rate for their products and likely applying a fee for delivery or storage while charging retail clients, such as school districts, for their purchase of food items. In Kansas City, the KC Food Hub Working Group acts more like an aggregator and distributor, and McConnell expects the FMO hub to emulate a Saint Louis University model that creates food items for its campus cafeterias.
“Let’s say, Springfield Public Schools (said), ‘We want you to make marinara sauce, apple sauce and carrot sticks for us.’ Well, we would take those raw products and turn them into value-added products and charge them a specific price per unit,” McConnell said.
Food hurdles Pam Duitsman, a nutrition and health specialist with the University of Missouri Extension, knows getting the goods of farmers like Quick to a mass market is no easy task.
Duitsman held a daylong workshop in Springfield on Feb. 6, called “Seeds of Prosperity,” that examined the challenges and opportunities in connecting local farmers with large organizations that want to buy local produce and food items.
“It sounds like it might be easy. The producers and farmers want to sell to bigger buyers like grocers, schools, hospitals and restaurants because many farmers would like to be self-sustaining,” Duitsman said, adding Mercy, for example, has committed to sourcing 20 percent of its food locally. “But it’s complicated.”
She said many organizations have non-negotiable standards for their food, which leads them to lean on big companies. That’s because large distributors have liability insurance and certification for good agricultural practices, which pose economic burdens on small operations.
“Overall, we just need to make connections, and that’s what a food hub is all about,” Duitsman said.
Donna Medlin, food service director for Mercy in Springfield, said the hospital has run into obstacles trying to source food locally in recent years.
“We’ve made several attempts now, but it’s hard to get foods in the quantities and consistency we need,” Medlin said.
With 8,000 to 10,000 meals served a day, the hospital works with Houston-based Sysco Corp. (NYSE: SYY), and much of its food is grown south of Kansas City in Rich Hill. At one point, Mercy was receiving leaf and Romaine lettuce from an operation in Hollister, but she said that business has closed. She supports the idea of a local food hub and said Mercy would likely utilize it, assuming FMO would obtain liability insurance covering its products.
“A lot of farmers can’t afford that,” Medlin said. “We understand they have to have a market for that, too.”
Time to farm Aubree Sanders, co-owner of Celestial Spring Herbs west of Ava, said she’s ready to sign on with FMO’s food hub.
“They are definitely the right people to do this,” Sanders said. “There are so many producers that can’t get into these markets that if they were given the opportunity, I think it would give people a chance to step up and be able to produce more, be able to expand their farms and offerings. It would encourage new people to get into the local food industry.”
But not every farm would benefit. Leslie Million of Terrell Creek Farm in Fordland said her operation is nearly maxed out.
“We’re not looking to milk more than 50 goats,” Million said.
Still, she recognizes the value of a food hub.
“I think it is a good way to connect local food producers to schools and hospitals,” she said.
Duitsman said Kansas City- and St. Louis-area hubs have been effectively connecting farmers and large organizations for years, and she’d like to see Springfield catch up.
For Quick, what’s perhaps most important about a hub is the additional attention he could give his plants.
“Right now, we are hitting 10 to 12 stops twice a week, as well as doing the market on Saturdays, so it’s eating up [time for] a couple of us – time that takes us away from actual farming,” he said.[[In-content Ad]]
Springfield event venue Belamour LLC gained new ownership; The Wok on West Bypass opened; and Hawk Barber & Shop closed on a business purchase that expanded its footprint to Ozark.
