Celebrating Awakening Foodsheds
Colorado
THE HUB OF THE REVOLUTION by Stephen Grace
From the Publishers The small publication you hold in your hands is but a preview of the forthcoming Local Food Shift magazine,
which this summer will begin appearing quarterly throughout Colorado. “ In this preview edition, we are
delighted to present the work of Contributing Editor Stephen Grace, a local author whose unexpected passion
for the stories of local food matches our own. In these pages, Steve tells the saga of the birth of the first farmerowned food hub in Colorado, the restoration of an historical local food system in Southern Colorado, and
the garlic farmer at the center of it all. This is journalism you can taste and smell and see and feel, the kind
of storytelling we’re committed to consistently offering in Local Food Shift magazine. “ We ourselves have long been catalysts in the process of food localization, working to ignite, inspire, guide and empower those
who are beginning to face the challenges and opportunities of localizing our food supply and forging a new
and restorative way for humanity to feed itself. Now, we’re focusing all our efforts on a single project: publish-
ing a magazine to be the voice for the local food revolution in Colorado. It’s the biggest and most important
project we’ve ever tackled. More directly than any other strategy, we believe this publication will support all
involved in the local food revolution. “ With this new publication, our primary interest is in how we can
cultivate Colorado’s regional foodshed as a living being, and support the centers of aliveness emerging within
it. While our industrial food system has radically disconnected us from the living earth, from life itself, a living
foodshed is literally life-giving in a way that nothing else can be. It is truly regenerative, and is as subversive and radical an unfolding as anything we can discover happening in the world today. This is very difficult to
express, but it’s not hard to feel. “ Local Food Shift magazine will help to restore food to its rightful place
in our society; to bring it home again, so that it is grown on farms and ranches close to where we live, by
people who we know and trust and love, joyfully prepared in our own kitchens, and gratefully shared with
neighbors, friends and family, received into our lives in ways that nourish body, mind and soul; so that food once again becomes sacred, sacramental, central to our communities.
Michael Brownlee and Lynette Marie Hanthorn — Co-Publishers, Co-Editors
LOCAL FOOD SHIFT
Editors and Publishers Michael Brownlee Lynette Marie Hanthorn Associate Publisher Nanna Meyer, PhD
Contributing Editor Stephen Grace
Business Development Eryn Taylor Advertising Megan Bennett
Creative Director Eugene Malowany IT Director Bill Sutton
Photography Cover: Hal Walter Page 1: Kirsten Boyer Feature: Nanna Meyer
Ambassador-in-Chief Tom Abood
We’d love to hear from you: Post Office Box 871 Arvada, CO 80001
Engage@localFoodShift.com
LocalFoodShift.com
303-622-5644
Say hello on social media: facebook.com/localfoodshift twitter.com/localfoodshift
Local Food Shift is published by Local Food Catalysts, LLC. Membership subscriptions are available for $36 annually at www.LocalFoodShift.com.
© 2015. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used without the express written permission of the Publisher.
THE HUB OF THE REVOLUTION
color
A carnival of
will pass
spreading life
across the farm,
soil.
through the
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CELEBRATING AVAKENING FOODSHEDS
THE HUB OF THE REVOLUTION by Stephen Grace
4
LOCALFOODSHIFT.COM
Feature photography by Nanna Meyer
Coloradans are hungry for nutritious, responsibly
produced food with a story—preferably a story
rooted in the soil of their communities. Farmers
like Dan Hobbs near Avondale, Colorado, on the
plains east of Pueblo, want to provide that food.
But between the appetites of locavores and
the ability of farmers like Dan to satisfy them
lies a troubling infrastructure gap. Dan aims to
fill this gap in the Arkansas River Valley with a
“food hub.” His pioneering efforts could point the way toward a future in which the local
food movement is transformed from a trend to a mainstay of how we eat.
s Dan and I drive from his fields to Excelsior Farmers Exchange, the
A
regional food hub Dan recently helped launch, he skids his
van to a stop on a gravel road so he can show me a surprising
development. We step over an irrigation ditch and walk through the soft furrows of a four-acre field. Parallel lines of plowed earth converge in
the distance. Dan explains that some 1,200 pounds of garlic cloves now lie beneath the
surface on which we’re standing; the cloves will yield about 6,000 pounds of garlic after the plants are harvested and cured in the summer. It’s only February 3rd, but green sprouts
are already poking through the brown earth. As we squat down to take a look, the sharp,
clean scent of garlic perfumes the air. “I tried planting a little shallower this year,” Dan tells me. This could explain why the garlic is growing so early. Or it could be triggered by the temperature, which at 11:00 a.m. has already reached the mid-fifties. “It’s something I’m
keeping an eye on,” says Dan. His eyes are as strikingly blue as the Colorado sky, which on
this clear winter’s day forms a cobalt dome over Hobbs Family Farm. Beneath the vast sky
Dan Hobbs and partner Jamie Dunston, proprietors of the 30-acre Hobbs Family Farm, show off highlights from the day’s harvest.
lies an unbroken expanse of agricultural lands—an increasingly rare sight in southeastern Colorado as cities sprawl across the plains.
In a neighboring field that shows the green stubble of winter wheat, blackbirds
gather in countless numbers, yet they move as a single organism, a black amoeba shifting through the air. A kestrel perches on a fencepost. A circling hawk pulls its shadow across Dan’s scuffed work boots. He adjusts his baseball cap and explains that in July his fennel
and carrot seed patches will flower, attracting pollinators such as black swallowtail butter-
flies. A carnival of color will pass across the farm, spreading life through the soil.
5
The deep human connections to this land mirror the eco-
logical connections. Dan points out a nearby flint-knapping site,
evidence of some 12,000 years of human presence in this river valley
—roughly the span of time since our species first invented agricul-
ture. Hobbs Family Farm is also near a major stop on the Santa Fe
Trail, which helped pave the way for westward expansion. This area
was home to some of the first commercial farms in the state that fed
Dr.Bartolo developed a strain of the Pueblo Chilé known as “Mosco,”
one of the region’s defining crops. He confirms that he is currently
researching sweet yellow Spanish-type onions, including Colorado
Number 6. Preliminary studies indicate that these onions could
contain antioxidants or other compounds that inhibit breast cancer.
He tells me,“Throughout history, societies have attributed medicinal
properties to food. Science has given us the tools to start to under-
miners during the great mineral rushes in the Pikes Peak region,
stand some of these properties.”
the state of Colorado in 1876 from a wilderness where hunters and
focus of research related to its natural resistance to thrips, a tiny
which started the transformation of the territory that would become gatherers roamed to a managed garden. The historic Bessemer
Ditch, which supplies Hobbs Family Farm with irrigation water, is
one of the oldest irrigation ditches in the state. Shelterbelts of cottonwoods and mulberries that slow the prairie wind and stabilize
the soil were planted during the New Deal era of the 1930s. I feel as though I’ve stepped into a pastoral idyll connected to an unbroken past. But on this bluebird day, as Dan and I stand amid fields
stretching to faraway horizons, there is trouble in what seems an agricultural paradise.
Dan gestures toward the near
Dr. Bartolo points out that Colorado Number 6 is also the
insect that sucks the life from commercial crops and has developed
tolerance to pesticides. We tend to think of distant rainforests as
troves of biodiversity that could yield substances to improve human
civilization, but our own backyards hold rich repositories of biology
yet to be probed. This Colorado Number 6 onion variety, bred in
Rocky Ford specifically for the region’s growing conditions, safe-
guards a storehouse of genetic information that could hold keys to
pest resistance and cancer prevention. It is preserved by farmers
like Dan who plant it in the local soil.
Dan picks up a cob of Concho corn, rolls it in his hand,
distance between his farm and the snow-
and says, “This represents four hundred years of germplasm.” He
streams. He says, “Some of these fields have
region of northern Mexico and is used for roasting and for flour to
covered Wet Mountains, birthplace of
been dried up.” They’ve been taken out of
production because Pueblo bought water
rights to the Bessemer Ditch in anticipa-
tion of future metropolitan growth. A
explains that this “landrace” crop originated in the Conchos River
make tortillas. A landrace is a traditional variety that has been
isolated from other populations of its species over a long span of
time as it adapts to the local environment. Across four centuries,
keepers of seeds in the Southwest have worked tirelessly to develop
portion of this area’s food production has
and preserve these porcelain kernels I now hold in my hand.
The conundrum, of course, is that people
possibly contain the value of the information conveyed in the stories
locally grown food, but water to grow both
Arkansas Valley, and throughout Colorado. What metric quantifies
already been traded for urban water supply. in Colorado’s thirsty cities are hungry for
cities and food is in short supply.
Dan planted the soil we’re standing on
with eleven types of garlic. He shows me a variety of onion that he’s also growing:
A simple price-per-pound calculation for produce cannot
of Dan Hobbs, and the stories of so many other farmers in the
the worth of four centuries of continuous food stewardship? What
barcode reflects the properties of an onion that could potentially
prevent breast cancer? How do we put a price tag on a story?
Colorado Number 6. To me it looks like an onion as ordinary as its name. But Dan
explains that Colorado Number 6 is being studied for properties that could prevent
breast cancer. Later, I interview Dr. Michael
Bartolo, a scientist at Colorado State Univer-
sity’s Arkansas Valley Research Center.
Examples of 19th- and early 20th-Century publications of country living focused on production agriculture and the rural farm household,
6
including seasonal recipes. LOCALFOODSHIFT.COM
What Metric
quantiďŹ es the worth of
fourcenturies
?
of continuous
food stewardship
an’s story begins in the soil. He chose the Arkansas Valley as the
D
evolve a lot faster than animals. You see them adapting to their envi-
looking for: The extended growing season of the sun-rich region
and plant breeding. It’s lifelong learning.” It could also be lifesaving
of the silty clay loam. The climate, too, was just what Dan was
allows him to raise long-season crops such as butternut squash and poblano peppers, and local growers explain that the tremendous
temperature difference between the hot days and cool nights helps crops develop superior flavor. Completing the trifecta of ideal farming factors is irrigation water free of contaminants. Along with
senior water rights that ensure Dan and his partner, Jamie Dunston, will be able to irrigate their fields on the drought-prone plains of
southeastern Colorado, water of exceptional quality is delivered by
the Bessemer Ditch. Pueblo Reservoir upstream traps sediments
and salts in its still waters; the flow released from the reservoir
above Hobbs Family Farm is of a purity that matches Dan’s farming
ronment, and you can shepherd that evolution along through selection
learning with climatologists pointing toward deepening drought in
the Southwest. As we face climate uncertainty in the coming
decades, knowledge about the drought-tolerance of plant varieties
adapted to dry environments becomes an asset of ever-increasing
value in our portfolio of resilience.
Varied flavors, too, arise from Dan’s creative plant breed-
ing. Hobbs Family Farm is best known for its carrot seeds and the
many varieties of garlic it grows, but the cornucopia of crops har-
vested from its fields could make the mouth of any locavore water.
If the juice of a plump Kilarney Red garlic clove that stains your
fingers with its lingering scent doesn’t make your taste buds twitch,
philosophy—no chemicals, no genetically modified seeds.
crush a Peacevine cherry tomato between your teeth and taste the
thrips, a bane of many commercial agriculture enterprises, he
your tongue. This is food—not the “food” pyramided in the fluores-
When I ask Dan if Hobbs Family Farm has struggled with
explains that his onions and garlic do attract this pest. “I used to
juice: Rivulets tart and sweet twine together as they slide across
cent glare of a supermarket after being freed from the steel prison
worry about it and spray organic-approved insecticidal soap, but I
of a long-haul truck.
hydrated soils can resist them and produce great yields. On depleted
the founder of biodynamics, Rudolf Steiner. An agricultural vision-
stopped years ago. I’ve found that healthy plants grown in healthy and
soils, insects of all kinds are more of an issue.”
A fifth-generation Coloradan, Dan is a first-generation
farmer. At age seventeen he lived with the Guarani Indians of
Paraguay, where he got hooked on working with the soil and with
people in agricultural communities. After earning a degree in Latin
Dan’s farming philosophy is informed by the teachings of
ary who insisted on treating the health of the soil, the food it grows,
and the people who eat it as one interconnected system, Steiner issued a clarion call at the beginning of the twentieth century to
approach farming holistically—a call that echoes through the
writings of contemporary farming luminaries like Wendell Berry
American studies, he began apprenticing on farms in New Mexico
and Michael Pollan. The increasing popularity of approaching food,
ment work,” he says. “And I liked the agriculture itself. I’ve been doing
a long lineage.
in the summer of 1990. “From a very young age I loved rural developthose two pieces all these years.”
In 2000, while searching for a place to farm in Colorado,
Dan looked over the fields of Avondale that had been cultivated
to grow traditional field crops like corn and hay, and he saw the
potential to reawaken a regional foodshed. Dan’s creative drive runs through his family. His father, Justice Gregory Hobbs, Jr., is as
well-known for penning lines of poetry as he is for his many years
of public service on the Colorado Supreme Court. Dan’s creativity infuses his farm, where each crop he grows seems a poem written in soil. In cultivating seeds adapted to the parched steppes of this
western landscape, he melds the practical with the lyrical. From the
fertile earth he brings forth the Hopi Black Bean and the Cosmic Purple Carrot, the Huerfano Bliss Melon and the Copper Sun
Shallot. Rossa di Milano, a farm favorite, is a ruby-colored heirloom onion from Italy shaped like a bulging heart.
8
“Plant breeding is incredibly dynamic,” says Dan. “Plants
site for his organic farm because of the high mineral content
LOCALFOODSHIFT.COM
farmers, eaters, soil, and water as a single subject is an idea with
Some of Dan’s soil wisdom he gathered by watching people
in other cultures who have lived for millennia close to nature’s
cycles and consider them sacred. Some of his knowledge was earned through the school of hard knocks, in which lessons are learned
by trial and error and painstaking observation—as in the case with
the garlic he planted a bit shallower this year and is now pushing
through the soil during a warm day in early February. He is watching
these nascent sprigs closely. He will adjust his cultivation methods
based on the feedback provided by the land and the plants he grows.
Dan’s constant monitoring of soil conditions is coupled to
his obsession with water—necessary if his farm is to prosper in a
region where the skies are stingy with rain. “I think of a foodshed
and a watershed as synonymous,” he says.
The concept of “organic” has become standardized and
stable in our culture; the concept of a “foodshed” is still emerging. Hobbs Family Farm lies in the Arkansas River watershed, the
largest and driest of the state’s watersheds. (A watershed is a basin bounded by ridges that drain snowmelt and rain toward a river
system.) The Arkansas River, born in blizzards on the Collegiate
Peaks above Leadville, sluices across the southeastern plains, form-
ing a lifeline in this dry land. Equating a foodshed with a watershed in the droughty West—where precipitation is so sparse that irrigated agriculture is the only viable way to produce volumes of food large
enough to feed burgeoning cities—may not be the final word in the evolving definition of a foodshed, but it can serve as a sensible start. Once again, when we burrow back into history we find
that modern ideas about food and farming have very deep roots
indeed. John Wesley Powell, best known for leading the first descent of the Colorado River in 1869, was speaking the language of the
locavore long before bioregionalism became sexy. One of the most
accomplished scientists of his day, Powell created maps of the West
based not on the straight-line state boundaries we recognize today but around the sinuous shapes of watersheds. In spending time
close to the arid land, Powell recognized that the rivers that wind
their way through the deserts and plains of the American West are paramount. He concluded that systems of self-governance should arise within the watersheds of western lands so that citizens could
manage rivers and agriculture, forests and grasslands, as a unified
whole—a system as indivisible as a human body. But Powell’s vision of watershed democracy and local land and river stewardship
was ultimately trampled beneath the westward rush of developers
...the concept
foodshed of a
stoked on moneyed dreams of Manifest Destiny. It’s a short leap
from the standardized township grids that settled the West to the placeless supermarkets of today.
Dan Hobbs, and other farmers like him who are committed
to the sustainable use of local water resources, to building the health of the soil, and to feeding their neighbors nutritious food, are creating a new system that echoes the old vision of John Wesley Powell:
a foodshed mapped onto a watershed mapped onto a self-reliant
emerging. is still
community.
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s Dan and I leave his thirty cultivated acres and head down the
A
road to visit the Excelsior Farmers Exchange food hub, I’m
struck by what’s at stake. Southeastern Colorado is one of the
world’s most important seed-production regions due to a rare combination of factors:
fertile, mineral-rich soils; high-quality
get more of their products to people in the surrounding commu-
nity. And thus was born in the late 1990s Tres Rios, an agricultural
cooperative headquartered in Denver and with members on the
Arkansas, Colorado, and Rio Grande Rivers.
Dan points out that a corporation exists to benefit its
shareholders; a cooperative, in contrast, is created to benefit its
members. “Each member has one vote,” explains Dan. “It’s a democratic
regulated irrigation
form of business.” He credits the time he spent at a Quaker college
rain that can damage
process that aims for the consent of all participants—as helping
water (as opposed to
learning the principle of consensus—a group decision-making
seed and cause plant
place him on the path of working cooperatively with other farmers.
optimal long- term storage; and a seed-saving tradition stretching
get off the ground: Tres Rios disbanded in 2003 due to management
eties. The soil of Hobbs Family Farm is classified as Prime Irrigated
in local food as there is now. Dan says, “All the struggles and failures
honored Dan with its 2012 Innovation in Conservation Award.
effort didn’t work, we figured out how to retool and do things better.”
diseases); an arid climate that dries the seed down fast and provides back to the 1870s that involves locally adapted and improved variFarmland of National Importance, and the Palmer Land Trust
Despite the significance of working farms in this region,
all of the connections that Dan has pointed out to me are tenuous:
links to the history of the region, to the open space that teems with wildlife, to the farming knowledge that comes from living close to
The initial marketing and distribution cooperative didn’t
challenges and a lack of capital. Also, there wasn’t as much interest
are an important part of building a new food system. When that first Next came Arkansas Valley Organic Growers (AVOG). This
farmer-owned marketing and distribution cooperative, founded
in 2006, took five years to grow from a good idea into a fully func-
tioning cooperative. What did Dan
and others do differently with
the land, to the abundance of food produced from local soil. Once
AVOG to help it succeed where
severed, these connections are difficult to restore. Thirsty, land-
Tres Rios had failed? Dan explains,
gobbling subdivisions are spreading outward from Pueblo just a short drive down the road from Excelsior Farmers Exchange. Is
“AVOG grew in a more measured
a food hub? How did this food hub idea come about?
head low. There was also better
and careful manner, keeping over-
the key to keeping these irrigated agricultural lands in production
board-level involvement and over-
Dan explains that after he had figured out how to cultivate
crops at Hobbs Family Farm, he and other Arkansas Valley farmers
had to figure out selling. Many farmers are like writers in that they
are better at the creative act of growing something than they are at
figuring out how to market it. Selling is time-consuming, and it
can be soul-wearying for a creative person who wants to commit
acts of poetry in the soil. But the fruits of the farm must find their way to market so that bills can be paid.
Owners of small organic farms—ranging from ten to fifty
acres and scattered throughout varying microclimates of the
Arkansas Valley—worked with nature to produce an abundance of grains, nutrient-dense veggies, stone fruits like peaches, and a
smorgasbord of livestock products. While delivering their food to buyers, they kept passing each other on the roads and bumping
into each other in parking lots. They realized that by coordinating their production they could become more efficient farmers and
10
LOCALFOODSHIFT.COM
sight of management. Similar scales,
philosophies, practices, and geographical proximity of founders helped a lot, too.”
Now ten AVOG-member farms around Colorado Springs
and Pueblo, along with ten or so additional farms that AVOG
works with, provide fresh produce, herbs, eggs, and meat to one
of Colorado’s major population centers. Residents of Colorado’s
southern Front Range eat good food from locally owned and operated farms. No chemical fertilizers or pesticides, no GMOs, no drugs —and no storyless distance for the food to travel. It isn’t delivered
in the cargo holds of airplanes flying in from Chile or in tractortrailers roaring across interstates from the agribusiness opera-
tions of California. It is grown by farmers like Dan—farmers who
live within the Arkansas Valley and spend their days working in the soil with melted snow from the Rockies and sorting through seeds bred across centuries to thrive in the local environment.
Arkansas Valley Organic Growers caught on with locavores,
who signed up for AVOG’s Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program and its Farm Fresh Buying Club—a program that allows
groups to purchase food at wholesale pricing. To further broaden its reach, AVOG provided food to local restaurants. The Arkansas
Valley Organic Growers “Farmer Approved” label attracted diners
seeking exceptional taste and responsibly grown food in restaurants in
Colorado Springs and Pueblo. AVOG
farmers supplemented the seasonal
produce they provided with winter-
storage vegetables such as onions and
squash, meat and eggs available year
round, and greens grown year-round in
high tunnels (a high tunnel, or hoophouse, is a low-cost, unheated version of a standard greenhouse). Colorado College became the
largest purchaser of AVOG’s food, underscoring the role of institutional buyers as drivers in the shift toward a robust local food system. AVOG developed a following. Stories were swapped about
the sweetness of the melons that ripened in the soil of these small farms. Pepper fanatics compared chilés grown by AVOG farmers
to the finest they had tasted anywhere. From chefs seeking the
freshest ingredients to gourmands chasing superior flavor, from
citizens looking for ways to support the economic health of their communities to environmentalists searching for sustainable life-
style choices, there was widespread agreement that the food produced by AVOG was superior to typical supermarket fare.
But for all AVOG’s progress, its market share of food sold
in the Colorado Springs-Pueblo region was still a thin sliver of the overall economic pie. In the Arkansas Valley and throughout
Colorado, moving local food to the next level poses a major challenge.
How does that sliver of market share become a fat slice of the pie?
How does a ripple in the food system lead to a significant shift?
From when Dan began growing in the Arkansas Valley in
2000, he has been moving steadily toward increasing the scale of
his sales. He stepped up from his single farm to the AVOG cooperative. AVOG stepped up from a standard CSA model to a buying
club and restaurant distribution. But to make that good food available to a much larger segment of the public has required another step up. To get the local food revolution rolling in southeastern Colorado, Dan had to help place a food hub at its center.
food hub idea
How did this
come about
?
pportunities to purchase food from the people who grow it
O
seem to be everywhere these days. Yet despite the proliferation
of farmers’ markets and community-supported agriculture
ventures, food that passes directly from the hands of a farmer to the
plate of an appreciative eater is still tremendously rare in the grand
scheme of our food system. Arguably much more important than a direct farmer-to-eater model are channels that can distribute
locally grown food on a broader scale. Restaurants are an obvious
example—and certainly the farm-to-table culinary craze has been
a boon both to farmers and eaters. Grocery stores that purchase
local food provide opportunities for farmers to reach a wider market,
and the large chain stores can move significant quantities of locally grown meat, dairy products, and produce from farmers to eaters.
Institutional players in the food game are of vital importance. When schools, universities, hospitals, government offices, and senior
centers all begin buying locally-sourced food, waves of change begin to build. When systems are put in place to allow farmers to meet
the demand for local food, these waves can create a sea change that
“fill their food prescriptions” at an AVOG farmstand in an urban food desert of Pueblo. You crave the distinctive flavors of the raw milk
and grass-fed beef Doug produces (they taste like the Arkansas
Valley), and you celebrate the riotous kick that Dan’s peppers and
garlic give the cuisine you cook. You love this clean, fresh food—
you buy it through AVOG’s CSA and feed it to your family. But can
you sustain an entire hospital by purchasing food packed in mis-
matched boxes and delivered at random times in pickup trucks
with stacks of separate invoices from various farmers?
Now imagine a different scenario. A shiny fourteen-foot
refrigerated truck with the eye-catching AVOG beet logo and the
motto “Local Food for Local People” emblazoned on its sides pulls
up to the loading bay of the hospital right on time according to its
weekly schedule. Ed, the delivery guy with an impressive mustache
and forearms that look powerful enough to bend steel pipes,
immediately gets to work wheeling a dolly stacked with uniform
boxes packed with carefully sorted produce and meat products of
consistent quality and the highest safety standards, fulfilling the
sweeps across our culture, transforming the way we eat.
single order you phoned in to the AVOG office earlier in the week.
structure in place to get food from fields to markets. Small- and
market scale and the food hub scale as seen through the eyes of
system often lack the logistical tools necessary to gather, store, and
many people. The AVOG food hub model allows a hospital admin-
The industrial food chain has a vast and efficient infra-
medium-size farms that choose to operate outside the industrial
transport food on a scale larger than a farmers’ market. A regional food hub occupies the middle ground between the small scale of
That, in an organic nutshell, is the difference between the farmers’
a person charged with providing a large volume of food to a great
istrator to fulfill her professional duty to provide a reliable food
supply to patients and staff. It also allows her, as a conscientious
a farmers’ market or a community-supported agriculture project
citizen, to support good farmers like Doug and Dan, thereby
massive quantities of processed substances into the pipeline of
scenario are corporations in distant cities that control the indus-
and the behemoth of the industrial food system, which pumps
strengthening her community. The only losers in this win-win
institutional purchasers. A food hub, by managing the aggregation
trial food system.
helps fill that logistical void. And a food hub makes life easier not
UCCS Sport Nutrition
and distribution of healthful food sourced from local producers,
just for farmers but for managers of institutions who want to buy local but are daunted by the logistics.
Imagine you’re a hospital administrator responsible for
providing many hundreds of meals each week to patients and staff. And imagine that Doug Wiley shows up in the parking lot with his Dodge pickup holding a freezer full of meat from his Larga Vista
graduate student Kim Williams helps prepare garlic for fall planting at Hobbs Family Farm.
Ranch. Then Dan Hobbs turns up the same day in a van peddling
sacks of his signature chilés, broad shouldered and meaty with just the right level of spice. You know that Doug and his family have fed
locals and cared for the land and water for nearly a century, and you agree with Dan’s natural farming philosophy and his dedication to strengthening the community through a cooperative approach. You appreciate that doctors in Pueblo have started prescribing fresh
produce through an innovative partnership that allows patients to
13
mall family farmers, along with donning sunhats while working
S
in the fields, are forced to wear many additional hats. They often act as their own attorneys wading through complicated water
rights litigation, their own accountants, and their own marketing and distribution managers.
“Years ago a lot of us in AVOG had an aha-moment,” says
Dan. “None of us could really grow our operations because of the lack of infrastructure. AVOG had a truck, which was great, but what we
really needed was a home—we needed a central facility where we could
aggregate everything to control food quality and safety and streamline
distribution. We needed a food hub.” Dan points out that the pioneering concept of a food hub actually has deep roots in agricultural
communities. “We’ve lost so much rural farm infrastructure during
the industrial agriculture era of the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s. Now we’re
The nonprofit in AVOG’s food hub partnership is
NewFarms. This New Mexico-based 501(c)3 organization that was
founded in 1990 leads grassroots efforts in southern Colorado and
northern New Mexico in the areas of education, demonstration,
economic development, and fiscal sponsorship of food and agri-
cultural projects. Dan explains that NewFarms conducted a three-
year capital campaign to secure funding for the physical space
to house AVOG’s food hub. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) provided a small piece of the funding, but most of
the capital came from Colorado-based foundations. After Gates
Family Foundation provided a generous challenge grant, other
Colorado foundations followed suit, including Anschutz, Coors,
rebuilding the food system. A food hub is basically new packaging
Boettcher, Packard, and El Pomar’s Southeast Regional Council.
playbook. We used to do that kind of work a lot in the 1920s and 30s.”
between nonprofit NewFarms and for-profit AVOG as the key to
of an old idea. It’s right out of the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union Rocky Mountain Farmers Union (RMFU), a grassroots
organization headquartered in Denver, has been serving farmers
in Colorado, Wyoming, and New Mexico since 1907. It is now at the
forefront of Colorado’s food hub revival. Dan explains that farmers’
exchanges—where farmers once gathered to purchase supplies and
sell what they’d grown—were standard fixtures of rural economies
Both Dan and Darien credit the strategic partnership
getting Excelsior Farmers Exchange up and running. According to Darien, it usually takes four to five years of grant funding to keep
a food hub afloat before it can become profitable and financially self-sustaining.
After an extensive search for the perfect facility, NewFarms
worked out a very affordable seven-year lease-to-purchase agree-
before agriculture became consolidated and industrialized follow-
ment with the Pueblo School District on the former Excelsior Middle
a fossil-fuel platform and replaced knowledge-intensive farming
Located near the confluence of the Arkansas and Huerfano Rivers,
incrementally through the generations, like layers of soil. When
and to Pueblo, about twenty miles to the west.
ing World War II. Before corporate America moved agriculture to
with technology-intensive methods, farming lessons accumulated modern farmers purge the chemicals and throw out the patented
seeds and start to rebuild the local food systems that industrial
agriculture dismantled, some old ideas like farmers’ exchanges start to make plenty of sense.
By creating efficiencies that allow local growers to increase
their production, food hubs can help satisfy the skyrocketing
demand for locally-farmed food. “Food hubs systematize local food
and ensure its long-term availability,” explains Darien Cabral, who
created the business plan for the AVOG food hub. With thirty years of economic development experience in New Mexico, Darien is
now working with RMFU to develop business plans for food hubs in northern New Mexico and in Colorado communities such as Montrose and Steamboat.
Darien’s plan for the AVOG food hub created a partner-
ship between the for-profit farmers’ cooperative and a nonprofit
entity that incubates the food hub, provides education to growers and consumers, and makes the food hub available to all farmers
14
and food entrepreneurs in the area who want to use the facility—
storing their produce, for example, or using the commercial kitchen.
LOCALFOODSHIFT.COM
School, a handsome brick building vacant since the late-1980s.
Excelsior is easily accessible both to nearby AVOG-member farms
systematize
“Food hubs
local food and ensure its
long-term availability.”
After an initial management shuffle slowed efforts to get
the food hub off the ground, Beki Guion took over as AVOG’s
general manager. And in the summer of 2014, Excelsior Farmers
Exchange food hub began operations. Beki walks me through the
former school’s repurposed spaces, beginning with the principal’s
office and teachers’ lounge, which have been turned into administrative headquarters. Beki explains that this food hub is set up
to serve farmers from ten counties in southeastern Colorado with
Building local food systems can come down to seemingly
mundane details like buying boxes in bulk and standardizing
invoices. Food hubs like Excelsior Farmers Exchange manage these
details in ways that maximize profits for small farmers and free
them to focus on growing tasty, nutrient-dense food—increasing
both health and wealth within their community. USDA Secretary
Tom Vilsack has stated, “By serving as a link between the farm or
ranch and regional buyers, food hubs keep more of the retail food
storage—dry, cold, and frozen—along with a vegetable-washing
dollar circulating in the local economy.”
minimally processed food such as roasted peppers and stewed
emissions. Food from multiple farmers, when combined for
facility, a packaging center, a commercial kitchen for producing
tomatoes, a seed library, and custom seed-cleaning equipment.
“Managing all this is more than a full-time job,” says Beki, who has the slightly preoccupied air of someone juggling a dozen different tasks simultaneously.
The families of both of Beki’s great-grandparents emigrated
from Slovenia to homestead in the Cañon City area. They eventually
bought a farm in the rich bottomland where Four Mile Creek meets
the Arkansas River. Now a fourth-generation farm and ranch,
Family Roots Farm was one of the founding members of AVOG.
Beki earned a bachelor’s degree in art and pottery and then applied
A less-obvious benefit of food hubs is a reduction in carbon
delivery to buyers, eliminates many single-passenger trips in trucks carting small loads to farmers’ markets and the back doors of
restaurants. Along with creating cost and carbon efficiencies,
Excelsior Farmers Exchange has allowed for a tighter food safety
system, enhanced quality control, and the ability of small farmers
to collectively purchase liability insurance. Dan says, “When we
used to sort through stuff on trucks, we made a lot of mistakes, and some
customers got really mad. Having a hub where everything is centralized
and standardized has really helped us professionalize.”
her artistry to growing food on her family’s farm. Now she has stopped raising crops so she can focus on growing Excelsior Farmers Exchange.
As we look at sacks of watermelon radishes and stacks of
flattened boxes, Dan explains that distribution and packaging were the first two services provided by the food hub. He says, “It’s so
expensive to buy your own packaging. Now that we purchase boxes in
bulk, the cost of the boxes has gone way down.”
Beki adds, “This hub has been a huge benefit for our growers
because they have one place to drop food off and one invoice to write.
That means less driving and less paperwork for them.”
“That’s so important for scaling up,” says Dan. “We were
completely bottlenecked into a certain size on our farm. We were spending so much time bunching and packaging and washing and delivering. We really couldn’t spend more time growing.”
15
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Fourth-generation farmer at Family Roots Farm and now Excelsior Farmers Exchange manager, Beki Guion washes heirloom carrots before packing for delivery to the food hub’s customers.
17
Beki leads me through the old shop area of the school,
where lathes and table saws have been replaced by a wash line to
clean produce, scales to weigh it, and a cleverly designed chilé
roaster with water jets to peel the peppers. As we take a look inside
a cavernous walk-in that smells like onions, she tells me, “It will be a
“I wouldn’t say we’re successful yet,” cautions Dan. “We’ve
come a long way but we still have a long way to go. We need one million in sales to be profitable. We’re about halfway there this year.”
And what makes establishing a successful food hub so
miracle if we break even this year.” In the food hub certification
difficult?
of food hubs fail.
up to economies of scale quick enough to make these things work. A lot
course Beki is currently taking, she learned that some 90-95 percent “Time will tell how all these efforts play out,” adds Dan.
“There’s a whole range of food hub projects that are trying to emerge— from feasibility to early implementation. There’re probably going to be a lot of failures.”
Excelsior Farmers Exchange, in operation for a little over
Dan answers, “Probably the single biggest challenge is getting
of the initial adopters tend to be smaller organic producers. The small
producers aren’t going to be able to carry the day—so we’ve got to build bridges into the midscale farm community to grow these food hubs.”
Excelsior Farmers Exchange has built bridges to conven-
tional growers, raising eyebrows among some organic purists.
a year now, has allowed AVOG to extend its reach into more local
“Conventional has an important role in our business,” Dan tells me as
And AVOG is creating a new brand, Headwaters Growers Co-op,
“Some of our buyers can’t afford organic prices or don’t want to pay
restaurants, including the Broadmoor Resort in Colorado Springs. as it positions itself to target more institutions and large chains.
Dan explains, “Headwaters is basically a
brand we’re going to use as we introduce
we take a look at bags of conventionally grown local pinto beans.
them. And a lot of conventional midsize growers are better capitalized
than small organic farmers—they produce a lot of volume. They can help us scale up local food production in a significant way.”
Also, by working with conventional farmers, AVOG can
our products into stores such as Whole Foods.
influence them to try organic methods. If the owner of a one-
the river, our water rights, and the impor-
selling to organic markets to put even a single acre under organic
We like how it emphasizes our position on tance of the water in this arid land. Also,
some people in Denver and Colorado Springs, where we market our
hundred-acre conventional farm is inspired by AVOG’s success
cultivation as an experiment, that’s one less acre being drenched in pesticides, one more acre of soil that can begin to heal. Perhaps in
products, don’t know about the Arkansas River and our agricultural
time that one-acre experiment becomes ten acres. And if consumer
from people in Arkansas looking for good local food!”
one-hundred-acre conventional farm could someday be converted
heritage—they think we’re an Arkansas outfit. And we were getting calls
18
Why has AVOG’s food hub been so successful?
LOCALFOODSHIFT.COM
demand for organic local food continues to build, that entire to organic production.
an is as much a student of human nature as he is an observer
D
of soil biology. When he isn’t growing crops, he’s nurturing
fourteen other food hub efforts in New Mexico and Colorado
AVOG MEMBER FARMS
through his offseason work as a cooperative specialist with Rocky Mountain Farmers Union. Excelsior Farmers Exchange is the
farthest along—“the leader of the pack,” Dan calls it. “I suspect the
food hubs that succeed will be led by farmers.” This conclusion, based
on Dan’s hard-won personal experience growing relationships
among food producers, is supported by research from Community
Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF), a nonprofit organization that
advocates for California’s family farmers and sustainable agricul-
ture. After fifteen years of experience with food hubs and local food distribution, CAFF released a study in 2014 concluding that food hubs, unless owned and operated by farmers, are likely to fail.
Excelsior Farmers Exchange is the first food hub owned and oper-
ated by farmers in Colorado.
In what was once the Excelsior school library where stu-
dents napped and shot spitballs, now farming classes, workshops,
and meetings are held. As we walk through a classroom space, Beki
and Dan explain that Excelsior Farmers Exchange was designed
both to serve AVOG farmers and to be open to the general public. This openness stands in sharp contrast to industrial agriculture,
dominated by fiercely protected intellectual property, locked labo-
BLUE RAVEN FARM PUEBLO Honey, tree fruit, vegetables
COUNTRY ROOTS FARM PUEBLO Vegetables, small fruit, eggs, goat meat
FROST FARM HANOVER Vegetables, lamb, beef
FAMILY ROOTS FARM
ratories, and corporate headquarters under tight security. The
CAÑON CITY Vegetables, vegetable starts
sharing of knowledge and resources. By banding together and en-
HOBBS FAMILY FARM
emphasis at Excelsior Farmers Exchange is, well, exchange—the gaging the public, small farmers in southeastern Colorado are
building something potentially powerful.
This food hub is an old idea serving the new purpose
of decentralizing the industrial food system. If Excelsior Farmers Exchange can help small farmers in the region build viable busi-
nesses and move a significant amount of locally produced food from the pitchforks of growers to the forks of citizens in the Arkansas
AVONDALE Garlic, vegetables, open-pollinated seeds
LARGA VISTA RANCH BOONE Mixed vegetables, pork, beef, raw milk
OSITE ORCHARD
Valley watershed, it could serve as a model for other regions of the
HOTCHKISS Mixed tree fruit, grapes
to try to start one of these food hub projects, we’re happy to share
RING-A-DING FARM
state. Dan says, “Our feeling is that anybody who has the gumption
our experience and materials. Even though we might be competitive
HOWARD Greens, vegetables
overall project of strengthening communities.”
VENETUCCI FARM
network of food hubs could create even more efficiencies in distri-
FOUNTAIN Vegetables, small grains, pork
Director of Cooperative Development for Rocky Mountain Farmers
WEATHERVANE FARM
on a certain level, ultimately we’re all collaborators working on the As a single food hub pools resources for farmers, so a
bution and marketing, further increasing scale. Bill Stevenson,
Union, tells me that a series of meetings among food hubs is underway. He explains that this movement to create an alliance of food
BUENA VISTA Vegetables
The one seed
willpatent never is
that industrial agriculture
creativity.
hubs is being spearheaded by Dan and Beki and the rest of AVOG. The first meeting among existing and emerging food hubs from
Buying local food is, of course, a delicious way to liberate
our families and communities from the industrial food system’s
Colorado and Wyoming was held in Denver in March. These food
stranglehold on our health and finances. Freedom tastes like a glass
Excelsior Farmers Exchange, where they will share ideas about how
chilé or posole made from Concho corn.
hubs will again gather at harvest time in the late summer at
they can move forward, together, to meet demand for local food. Perhaps the local food revolution in Colorado will one
day revolve around dozens of hubs much like Excelsior Farmers
Exchange, all of them working cooperatively to bolster the health of
of raw milk or a slice of chèvre goat cheese, like a roasted Pueblo As we stand looking out at irrigated fields still growing
peppers and melons rather than subdivisions and shopping malls,
Dan tells me, “We’ve lost so much because of industrial agriculture
—infrastructure, relationships, seeds. Rebuilding the food system
the soil, to steward water resources and strengthen communities,
isn’t going to happen overnight. It’s a lifetime of work for all of us in
barriers to bringing this vision into being, however, are many. Not
are there, and the public interest is there, so we have a lot going in our
and to provide all citizens access to healthful, affordable food. The least is money. Small farmers determined to grow good food for
AVOG. There are plenty of challenges to overcome. But the resources favor, too.” Perhaps the best thing they have going for them is the
their communities face a system stacked sky-high with subsidies.
increasing interest in food and farming among the next generation.
autonomy of their communities, by eating locally grown food must
from Excelsior, went to school in the building that now houses the
Citizens who want to reclaim their health, and the health and
contend with the government-supported industrial juggernaut that makes a can of soda produced in a faraway place cost less than a peach grown responsibly in local soil. But when conscientious
eaters and responsible farmers find each other, together they begin to build alternative systems. Farmers like Dan are too busy bringing these new systems into existence to dwell on the inequities
visited on growers by a disastrous scheme that subsidizes diseases
of diet and dismantles the self-reliance of communities. The one seed that industrial agriculture will never patent is creativity.
Doug Wiley, whose Larga Vista Ranch is just down the road
food hub, and he served as president of Tres Rios, the farmers’
cooperative that was the forerunner to AVOG. “This food hub has
been a long time in the making,” says Doug, who will soon carry his
family’s farming legacy past the century mark. When I ask Doug if
his sons will someday be part of the food hub, he chuckles and
says, “A couple days ago when I was feeding cows my four-year-old,
Doran, said to me, ‘Dada, will you teach me how to farm?’ That was the best thing I ever heard.” “
As Dan, Beki, and I step outside the Excelsior building into
the warm winter sun, Dan says, “Creativity is an important part of
rural development work. Building organizations, bringing people together to try to solve problems and take advantage of opportu-
nities—creativity is just as important with these projects as it is with plant breeding.”
After spending time with Dan listening to his encyclopedic
knowledge of topics ranging from Colorado’s history of cooperative
agriculture ventures to the genetics of corn, and after witnessing his talent for solving problems from organic pest control to business development, I believe he could have been successful in any
endeavor he’d decided to pursue. But from the time he was a boy growing up in Denver, Dan was drawn to the soil of rural places. He knew he wanted to work with seeds and with communities
dedicated to growing good food. He could have been a NASA engineer but he chose to be a farmer. I’m grateful he did, and it seems
the least I can do is to partner with him in his enterprise by purchasing the tasty results of his labor.
Contributing Editor Stephen Grace is a non-fiction author and novelist who has gained a reputation for total immersion in his subjects. He’s a passionate adventurer willing to personally go to great lengths (and great distances) to get to the heart of a story. His most recently-published book is Dam Nation: How Water Shaped the West and Will Determine Its Future, and he served as a consultant for the film DamNation. This summer, two of his latest works will be released: The Great Divide (a film and accompanying book) and Grow: Stories from the Urban Food Movement (about his deep encounter with urban agriculture in the Denver metro area). Steve is, according to one of his peers, “one of our most lucid and comprehensive expositors, a writer whose guidance, vision, and good sense are essential compass points for the rest of us.”
21
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We need to reconnect to one another and to the places where we live.We need to reaffirm the primacy of relationships over transactions. To do this, we are going to need to develop new, imaginative capital flows and new imaginative approaches to agriculture. And we are going to have to slow down.” —Woody Tasch, Founder of Slow Money
Similar to the CSA farms that many of us have come to know and love, we would like for you to consider
LOCAL FOOD SHIFT as your magazine. A growing community of committed subscriber-members is
what will make it possible for us to better serve our readership with the very best regional local food
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For instance, in addition to a subscription to the print magazine and having it mailed right to your door,
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Become a founding member today! Visit LocalFoodShift.com/join
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RMFU’s Co-op Development Center is helping connect farmers with consumers. Find out how at RMFU.org
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Have you heard? We will be in Denver together with a global gathering of practitioners and experts from field to fork to turn the herd towards better meat, less. Please join us for eatings and meetings, culinary workshops and ranch tours.
June 4-6, 2015 Denver, Colorado Log onto http://www.slowfoodusa.org/slow-meat-2015 to learn how you can join the conversation. Major support for Slow Meat is provided by the Grace Communications Foundation, 11th Hour Project and the TomKat Charitable Trust.
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Bringing our money back down to earth. That’s what scores of Coloradans are doing via four investment clubs — Boulderr,, Denverr, Fort Collins and Aspen. The newest club, 2Forks, is the first to be organized as a nonprofit, providing 0% loans to local farmers and small food enterprises.
SA AVE V THE DA ATE! TE! September Sept 19-20, Slow Money Colorado Regional Gathering at Sustainable Settings in Carbondale
Willow and Mara King of Ozuké. This rapidly growing Boulder-based maker of fermented foods is committed to local sourcing and has received Slow Money funding.
Since 2010, 37 Slow Money local networks and clubs have formed around the e countr country. ry y. More than $40 million has been invested in over 400 small food enterprises. Over 30,000 people have signed the Slow Money Principles.
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