The average piece of produce travels over 1,500 miles before it ever reaches your plate. Unless you are lucky enough to live in the Lahontan Valley where you can get your vegetable right up the road from anyone of our local food producers.
The Fallon Food Hub has expanded their capacity and is currently taking orders for the Farm Share Basket which provides local produce on a weekly basis. Customers “subscribe” to the service and pick up their order at various location around town. While the Food Hub is in the design process for their new facility at the corner of S. Maine Street and Fairview, the subscription boxes can be picked up at Lattain Farms or the Churchill County Library.
“The Food Hub is still around,” said Kelli Kelly, Executive Director, “but until we get our new building, we just have this really super efficient way of distributing local produce and products.”
Kelly said that the subscription boxes for this summer were sold out before the summer season had even started, at 125 boxes per week. But then the group got word that the DROPP (Distributers of Regional Organic Produce and Products) in Reno was closing down.
DROPP is the wholesale arm of the Great Basin Community Food Co-op that provided all the local produce to the Co-op, giving local and regional farmers a place to distribute their products to the restaurants and stores in the Reno/Carson area. When they announced that they were closing down operations on May 20th – a casualty of COVID – local farmers lost their single largest customer.
Kelly said with no demand from the restaurants, and then the cancellation of Burning Man; “they (DROPP) would do nearly $50,000 in sales a week just to Burning Man for several weeks so not having that revenue stream was the nail in the coffin.”
For many of the farmer producers in Fallon, DROPP was their single largest customer and the Fallon Food Hub/Great Basin Basket Share was their second largest. Now they are forced to look at a plan for how to deal with their largest outlet for sales is closing.
“I was quite happy being in that place being sold out,” said Kelly, “it was manageable, it was profitable, but we decided to increase the number of subscriptions we have available, expanding our capacity up to 300.”
Although the subscription basket program has served the Reno/Carson/Gardnerville areas for several years, Churchill County is now the single largest pickup location and the interest in buying the local farm share has increased. Kelly said there has been a cultural change here and people are thinking more about where their food comes from.
“Small scale regional food systems are way more resilient than our national food system,” said Kelly. “If there is any sort of breakdown, if 50% of the nations’ carrots are grown on one farm in southern California and something happens to that farm you loose 50% of your supply of carrots and that is not a resilient system.”
She said there is a potential here in Churchill County for a lot more people to eat within the regional food system and the more people who do that the stronger and more resilient is the local system. “If we could sell 400 boxes of local produce in Churchill County, we wouldn’t deliver outside of the community. We would keep all the food here so the food that’s raised here is consumed here. And then we would help develop small food systems in other areas, the places we go now; Washoe County and Carson Valley – we would help existing systems expand their base so they have the capacity to sell more. The whole reason for the Food Hub is to step up our operation to support our local farmers.”
With nearly 15 local farmers and producers participating in the Food Hub/Farm Share, including
Lattin Farms, Salishas Delicious, Pioneer Farms, PlantLove Homestead, 2 Ravens Ranch, Holley Family Farm, Dayton Valley Aquaponics, and Desert Farming Initiative, the local community has access to eggs, beef, pork, honey, fresh vegetables of every kind and so much more.
If the thought of your vegetables as world travelers doesn’t quite sit well, consider ordering your local veggies from your neighbors through the Fallon Food Hub by going to this link:
https://www.harvie.farm/signup/fallon-food-hub or if you want to give the idea a one-time try you can go here: https://www.harvie.farm/farm-stand/fallon-food-hub
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