Going Mainstream with Locally Grown Food

Cheng’s career didn’t begin in the local, sus­tain­able food move­ment, but in tech­nol­ogy as a writer and edi­tor for tech­nol­ogy giant Cisco Systems. After 10 years, she decided she’d had enough of the cor­po­rate world and took straight after her pas­sion: the envi­ron­ment. At first as a hobby, she cre­ated a web­site called OmOrganics.org to help spread the word about organic agri­cul­ture and its many benefits.

“It’s inter­est­ing because even today a lot of peo­ple don’t know about all the ben­e­fits from organ­ics and the harm from con­ven­tional farm­ing,” Cheng told Organic Connections. “You name it, every envi­ron­men­tal prob­lem touches agri­cul­ture. And so that was really how I first got into agri­cul­ture: hobby. In the process, in the non-profit world you end up cross­ing a lot of other non-profits who are work­ing in and around what you are doing. In the San Francisco Bay Area there are over 150 dif­fer­ent orga­ni­za­tions work­ing with food and farm­ing, so I quickly learned that the prob­lem with agri­cul­ture went much deeper than just organic ver­sus chemicals.”

Interestingly, Cheng dis­cov­ered that a real prob­lem in get­ting locally and sus­tain­ably grown food into the main­stream wasn’t so much envi­ron­men­tal as orga­ni­za­tional. At the time, there was no real way for buy­ers and sell­ers to con­nect and do busi­ness. The solu­tion seemed sim­ple: to evolve an online tool to con­nect up regional buy­ers and sell­ers so that busi­ness between them could take place. In 2009 she went live with a new web­site, FarmsReach, to accom­plish just that.

After the site was up, though, Cheng dis­cov­ered another issue. In fact, she dis­cov­ered a whole other layer of issues. “When FarmsReach first launched, we got a lot of momen­tum with sign­ing up farm­ers and buy­ers,” she related. “But we soon dis­cov­ered that there are also logis­ti­cal prob­lems that mean more than just con­nect­ing buyer and sup­plier. How do you actu­ally get it there? And how do small or medium farm­ers serve the larger sup­ply chan­nels? Ultimately if you are talk­ing about mak­ing change, that means get­ting regional healthy food into the big­ger vol­ume chan­nels, and a lot of small and medium farms don’t have the capac­ity or the busi­ness savvy to know how to mar­ket them­selves to the big­ger buy­ers, or logis­ti­cally they just can’t. The big­ger buy­ers, such as dis­trib­u­tors or large insti­tu­tions, need large vol­umes on a con­sis­tent basis. No sin­gle small farmer can sup­ply that kind of con­sis­tency or volume.”

In order to meet the vol­ume that the larger buy­ers require, Cheng soon real­ized that what was needed were inter­me­di­ate agents known as “aggre­ga­tors.” An aggre­ga­tor is a non-profit or some­times city-funded com­pany that pools crops from smaller farms into quan­ti­ties that buy­ers can then rely on. They had existed before Cheng began her work but were few and far between and in many cases hadn’t come up to the orga­ni­za­tional level needed to truly deal in the mainstream.

“Over the past 100 years we have lost the infra­struc­ture that facil­i­tates regional food dis­tri­b­u­tion,” said Cheng. “It’s not very glam­orous or any­thing, but we’re talk­ing about docks and ware­houses and cool­ing facil­i­ties in rural areas so that all these small and medium farms can have a place to aggre­gate their prod­uct and pack it, cre­at­ing more con­sol­i­dated deliv­er­ies to urban areas.”

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There was an evo­lu­tion that needed to occur on the buyer side as well. “Historically, a lot of these farms form co-ops, and some of them are really great at it,” Cheng said. “But they haven‘t put that same energy into coor­di­nat­ing the buy­ers to com­mit to buy­ing vol­ume. Where regional food pro­grams have been doing bet­ter, buy­ers are engaged and com­mit­ted to these regional pro­grams. They com­mit to pur­chas­ing a cer­tain vol­ume, and by doing so, the buy­ers have more of a hands-on approach in help­ing those sup­pli­ers bet­ter serve them.”

Another ele­ment Cheng has found work­able, and one she is shar­ing, is a model called the busi­ness clus­ter. “A busi­ness clus­ter just means a group of non-profits and for-profits phys­i­cally all work­ing together to make it hap­pen,” Cheng explained. “It’s obvi­ously not effi­cient to have five orga­ni­za­tions doing the work—but that’s how dys­func­tional it’s been for the past sev­eral decades. So, within a clus­ter, maybe one group is doing farm out­reach and advo­cacy, one group is doing consumer/buyer advo­cacy, then per­haps there is a con­nec­tional dis­trib­u­tor part­ner who is help­ing with the hard labor and logis­tics of deliv­ery, and maybe another group that sets up the aggre­ga­tion point in the rural area. Each region is slightly dif­fer­ent; that’s the char­ac­ter­is­tic of hav­ing a lot of dis­tinct groups and the com­mu­nity all chip­ping in—a divi­sion of labor to make it happen.”

Cheng is get­ting to be a real expert on the sub­ject, as not long ago she became the recip­i­ent of a grant from the USDA/CDFA for the pur­pose of research­ing ele­ments that have worked in regional food sys­tems. She is in the process of locat­ing aggre­ga­tors, buy­ers and food sys­tems and ana­lyz­ing their work­a­bil­ity. She is then shar­ing the research to help oth­ers get up and run­ning. The idea is to fin­ish the research project, work­ing with a core group of aggre­ga­tors and buy­ers, then retool FarmsReach to meet the new stan­dards and relaunch broadly.

It hasn’t been an easy road, but Cheng has her goal firmly in mind. “In the end, what we hope to have is a sys­tem that facil­i­tates regional sys­tems to oper­ate effi­ciently and viably,” she con­cluded. “That will be accom­plished by help­ing exist­ing aggre­ga­tors to become stream­lined and run more pro­fes­sion­ally. It will also be accom­plished by assist­ing areas where there isn’t an aggre­ga­tion pro­gram set up, and help­ing them to get estab­lished using our sys­tem as well. The goal is to become a util­ity for aggre­ga­tors of all types and buy­ers of all types and for the whole­sale channel.”

With peo­ple like Melanie Cheng bring­ing prac­ti­cal orga­ni­za­tion to the local, sus­tain­able move­ment, hav­ing real food on our tables every day isn’t just a dream; it’s really going to happen—and not so far into the future.

To find out more about FarmsReach, visit their web­site at www.farmsreach.com.