Healthier, Wealthier, and Wiser

By Brian Williams

A manufacturing facility is not a customary part of a residential subdivision plan. Neither do most housing developers employ a "chief of wellness planning."

But Bucking Horse in Fort Collins, Colorado, is not a typical subdivision, and Bellisimo Inc. is not a typical developer. This 240-acre new urbanist neighborhood, built on a former farm, will have 1,055 housing units when it is completed late next year. It will incorporate local food as more than an amenity and a garden, says developer Gino Campana.

In cities across the country, planners are talking about local food in a way that goes far beyond community gardens and farmers markets. They're talking about processing and distribution, slaughterhouses and trucks, jobs and economic development.

"If people have jobs with a living wage, that's a first step toward improving food access," says Theresa M. Zawacki, executive administrator of the Louisville Metro Economic Development Department.

Concern about food deserts in low-income neighborhoods is often what sparks interest in local food. But planners soon discover that in order to increase the supply of fresh, healthful local food, they need a food processing and distribution infrastructure that provides markets for farmers and access to consumers. Local food systems also create jobs, keep food dollars in the local economy, and encourage public-private partnerships.

Kristin Kirkpatrick is the chief of wellness planning for Bellisimo. She has a degree in health and exercise science from Colorado State University in Fort Collins and a master's in urban and regional planning from the University of Colorado. As a health planner, she is passionate about the way healthful food can be incorporated not just into the design of the subdivision, but into the lives of residents.

She will manage research into how local food is integrated into the lives of Bucking Horse residents and people who live in the adjacent new urbanist Side Hill development, which will be merged into Bucking Horse. As an urban planner, she is excited about the mix of uses: farming, residences, retail (a restaurant in the original farmhouse and a winery in one of the barns), and even industrial, in the form of a local food processing and distribution center.

Still, "we have a gap right now," says Campana, who is also a city councilman. "Fort Collins schools want to have a farm-to-school program, but we don't have an aggregator-processor." A proposed food hub, just over the ridge from the retail area, will allow local food from various farms in the area to be gathered at one point and then sorted, prepared, and shipped to the schools. The hub also could be a commissary for local restaurants.

Build a model

A model is emerging. While Bucking Horse is a modern, urban-edge development, its food focus has a lot in common with a century-old, decidedly urban neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio.

The Food District @ Weinland Park was planned between 2011 and 2013 through an $864,000 HUD Community Challenge grant managed by the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission and several partners. Residents of the neighborhood, which has a 36 percent unemployment rate, wanted jobs. A developer envisioned community gardens on a utility easement along a railroad embankment, next to the apartments he proposed for a brownfield site.

The revitalization plan for the neighborhood includes gardens, small-scale urban farming, and a food-processing hub that will create jobs for residents, a job training and placement program, a food co-op and cafe, and a banquet hall, plus education programs and other community amenities. MORPC handed the plan over last August to a community development corporation that is seeking funding for the project.

"It's a social enterprise, but it must operate as a viable business," says Kerstin Carr, MORPC's director of planning and environment. She adds that the Food District would be a model for and component of the 12-county regional food system MORPC envisioned in its 2010 Central Ohio Local Food Assessment and Plan. The region needs not just a single food hub, but a network of such hubs, each with different specialties to add value to local products, according to the plan. MORPC works closely with the Mid-Ohio Foodbank and several local processors and distributors, and is working to bring funders and lenders to the table through its regional food council.

The regional council seeks ways to implement the 24 recommendations in MORPC's plan. In April, it hosted a forum to fill a need for slaughterhouses that process local hogs and cattle. The goal was to get a fifth-generation family business in Columbus and a slaughterhouse operated by the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections to change their business models to serve local producers. The council invited farmers, processors, lenders, grocers, food-service companies, and state, local, and federal government officials to seek a solution.

"Most commercial beef and pork is being transported at great expense to processing facilities in the western Corn Belt for slaughter," says Tony Logan, director of USDA Rural Development's Ohio office, who chaired the session. "That wealth could easily be captured in Ohio if we have a viable meat-processing industry. It would have the added benefit of allowing people to have a fresher meat product on their table."

Bucking Horse and the Food District have very different settings and populations, but share a worldview: The way to improve people's nutrition and health habits is to create a culture of food, from growing to processing to access. Viewing local food as economic development, as Zawacki says, leads to the jobs that make it easier for people to buy good food.

Beyond food

Louisville Metro's approach is similar to MORPC's regional vision. In January, Metro invited 70 agriculture and food specialists to a two-day facilitated "Barn Raising" in downtown Louisville to discuss how to meet an estimated $650 million demand for local food in the city. The need goes far beyond food cultivation. The event included companies that process and distribute food, and those that finance food infrastructure.

"They did a nice job of bringing production, processing, distribution, marketing — the whole food chain — to one place at the same time," says Bill Johnson, president and CEO of Farm Credit Mid-America, the Louisville-based, federally chartered agricultural lender that serves Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, and Tennessee. "It was a novel approach, and something we wanted to support and be part of."

The Barn Raising identified 11 projects that attendees will spearhead. They include rural aggregation centers (food hubs) that would feature value-added processing; investment capital for market development; training for beginning farmers; and collaboration to increase meat supply.

Another project is the Dairy Guild — a consortium of dairy farmers, cheesemakers, and marketing entrepreneurs. "We've been riding the local-food wave while reviving a brand that was well-known in Louisville for over a century," says Bob Ehrler of Ehrler's Micro Dairy, a Dairy Guild participant. "We sell it, they make it."

He is from a long line of Ehrlers delivering milk in Louisville since 1867, and became an attorney in the years after the family business was sold in 1975. Two years ago, he restarted the family brand as a distributor of milk and other local dairy products to homes in Louisville. Ehrler's has grown from nine customers the first week in 2012 to almost 250 home deliveries today — enough to require the purchase of a second truck and the expansion of the staff to three part-time employees. He also serves farmers markets.

The Philadelphia-based Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission also started with a regional strategy, Eating Here: Greater Philadelphia's Food System Plan, but is now planning multifaceted urban and neighborhood projects. The Philadelphia plan was released in 2011, about a year after DVRPC completed an assessment of the foodshed within a 100-mile radius of the city.

"The plan has goals based on economic development," says Alison Hastings, who managed the process as the agency's senior environmental planner. "A lot of the recommendations are about jobs, training, concentrating jobs in cities, and making food-related jobs higher quality and higher paying."

The 52 recommendations were split among the categories of farming and sustainable agriculture, conservation, economic development, health, fairness, and collaboration. Some involved policy approaches, and others were business and farming practices.

One of the region's more notable achievements emerged as the plan was gaining steam. Common Market Philadelphia is an urban food hub set up to aggregate enough fresh food from southeast Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey to serve hospitals and other institutions in the region, as well residents of neighborhoods that lack access to full-service grocery stores. It is one of five hubs featured in "Solving Local," a new report by the Wallace Center, a nonprofit organization in Arlington, Virginia, that seeks market-based approaches to more sustainable food and agriculture.

Haile Johnston, Common Market's cofounder and director, said at a conference in Denver this year that the operation had $2 million in sales last year and is now self-supporting. Speaking at the New Partners for Smart Growth Conference in February, Johnston said that the hub employs about 15 people year-round, and up to 22 during the peak harvest season in the fall.

Camden, New Jersey, across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, could use that kind of economic activity. The Campbell Soup Company wants to invest in the troubled city it has called home for almost 150 years.

The company turned to DVRPC for assistance with an initiative it calls the Camden Food Economy Strategy, which is about halfway through its two-year planning process. Amy Verbofsky, a DVRPC food system planner, says the intent is to address both job creation and access to healthful food in a low-income community that recently lost a full-service grocery. One challenge is finding a niche for the project. Planners don't want to duplicate or compete with the Philadelphia food hub. Verbofsky says the business anchor in Camden is more likely to be a food-processing facility.

Public markets

Detroit has gotten a lot of attention for its urban farms and shrinking-city approach to planning. The Detroit Eastern Market is also noteworthy.

Across America, cities developed around public markets. The 19th century food hubs served as wholesale and retail marketplaces for food delivered on wagons by local farmers and on trains from distant locations. They in turn gave rise to local distributors, many of which still operate today as fifth-, sixth-, even seventh-generation family businesses. In most places, those markets are long gone, and many of the old family businesses were replaced by national companies shipping produce across the country.

But Eastern Market is intact, with its sheds and loading docks and all the food-related businesses that sprang up around the market over the last 100 years. More than 80 such businesses — produce distributors, meat retailers and wholesalers, cold-storage warehouses, a slaughterhouse, garden-supply stores, and restaurants — are within a few blocks of the market.

Dan Carmody, president of the nonprofit Eastern Market Corporation, thinks they can be the springboard for urban revitalization in the area, and markets for both urban farms and rural farms across Michigan. He also wants Eastern Market to avoid turning into "a gilded palace of sexy food — which is what too many markets have become," he said last fall at a symposium on urban local food organized by Ohio State University's Knowlton School of Architecture.

In other words, local food should be for all the people, not just the "foodies." Carmody adds that in making healthy food readily available in so-called food deserts, people need to realize that food access is a demand problem, not just a supply problem. It's about education.

In Fort Collins, Gino Campana likes to say, "You can have M&Ms in a bowl, or fresh cherries in bowl. Either way, people will take a handful. We need to have more bowls of fresh cherries."

Such comments show that the leaders of local-food initiatives across the country have an odd mix of business sense and idealistic passion. Campana, a businessman at heart, does not sound forced or insincere when he looks at plans for Bucking Horse and says, "I'm feeding my soul."

The financing picture

The farm at Bucking Horse will have a manager employed by the home owners association. But Campana wants more than just a gardener.

"The farmer that we're looking to hire will have to be unique, entrepreneurial," he says. With a $45,000 base annual salary, the farmer will be expected to manage 3.5 acres of produce for a 1,100-household CSA, plus a "working farm" with goats, chickens, and ducks. Any ventures beyond that — horticulture classes, pickling classes — would pay extra. Ideally, the farmer would be able to hire additional staff for new ventures.

For local food systems to emerge and reach their economic and social potential, it's going to take a lot of entrepreneurs — on farms, among the processors who add value to fresh food, and among the distributors who must find efficient and cost-effective ways to operate their trucks. It's also going to take money. Because national players have dominated food for decades, lenders are skeptical of the value of start-up local systems.

It's going to require collaboration among diverse stakeholders — like MORPC's Regional Food Council in Ohio, or Metro's Barn Raising in Kentucky, where Farm Credit Mid-America's involvement is an encouraging sign.

Established by Congress in 1916 as a lender for young, beginning, and small farmers, the Farm Credit System was the nation's first such government-supported enterprise. The underserved local-food movement may be a natural fit. CoBank, a part of the system, has provided grants and loans for local food projects in Washington, D.C., and Cleveland, among other places. Farm Credit Mid-America has worked with Cleveland Clinic to set up urban greenhouses, where operators provide produce for local restaurants.

Beyond its financial role, Farm Credit also provides expertise, and its involvement in a project can help bring other capital interests to the table.

"We serve all of agriculture," says Johnson of Farm Credit Mid-America. "Local food is an important piece of the puzzle. Farm Credit is one of the initial sponsors of the new Local Food Association — a national trade organization for both buyers and sellers." Based in Midway, Kentucky, near Lexington, the association has a board of directors with such diverse members as a top executive of Sodexo Campus Services and Michael Hamm of Michigan State University, a national authority on local food issues.

The key role of lenders and businesses in local food systems is okay with planning agencies, which usually see themselves as "dot connectors."

"We are not implementers," says Hastings of Delaware Valley RPC. "We're doing outreach in terms of understanding how food moves the ways it does or where businesses are located. But in the end, it's really less about government and more about the private sector."

Brian Williams is the agriculture specialist at the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission.

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Resources

Images: Top — Pequea Valley Farms, a 36-acre dairy farm in southern Lancaster County, is one of Common Market Philadelphia's 75 local and regional farmers. Common Market distributes sustainable foods grown within a 200-mile radius of Philadelphia to schools, hospitals, and other institutions in the Mid-Atlantic region. Photo Courtesy Common Market. Middle — A rendering of the proposed Food District @ Weinland Park shows how the food hub would look on a former brownfield site within the historic urban neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio. Rendering courtesy Design Group. Bottom — Dan Carmody, president of the Eastern Market Corporation, believes public markets like Detroit's historic Eastern Market are key to urban revitalization. Photo by Brian Williams.

Bucking Horse: www.bellisimoinc.com/projects/bucking-horse

Louisville Barn Raising: www.louisvillebarnraising.com/#

2010 Central Ohio Local Food Assessment and Plan: www.morpc.org/pdf/CentralOhioLocalFoodAssessmentAndPlan2010.pdf

Eating Here: Greater Philadelphia's Food System Plan: www.dvrpc.org/reports/10063.pdf

"Solving Local," a new report by the Wallace Center: http://ngfn.org/resources/food-hubs/food-hubs-solving-local

Local Food Association: www.localfoodassociation.org