Food Hub on the Radio
- JU Food Hub member
- Aug 23
- 2 min read
On a recent sunny summer afternoon, a reporter from Vermont Public visited three of our local farms. Living in Underhill, she got our food hub pamphlet in the mail and wanted to know more about our work and how it might be benefiting local producers. Here are a few excerpts from farmer’s perspective.
“Local farmers say it’s helpful to get more people talking and thinking about local food — because they don’t necessarily have a lot of time for marketing.”
“The mailer that they put out was huge,” Chamberlain said of the food hub. “There's always new faces in town, as people come and go and age out. So it's always great to get the word out and share like, ‘Hey, we're here.’”
Spencer Hardy from The Farm Upstream said that “the food hub could also be useful in a surplus crop situation. “We've got tons of tomatoes that we can't get out the door fast enough, and if there was a space or a bunch of people that wanted to can those or freeze them for the schools for later in the season, or somehow make good use of our surplus when we have a bumper crop of something, that would be really awesome,” he said.
One of the longer-term dreams for the food hub is to open a facility for processing and storing food locally, according to David Clift. That's similar to the dream for Christa Alexander, a co-owner of Jericho Settlers Farm: to bring enough growers and up-front capital together to share something like a carrot co-packing plant, and to create enough efficiency to lower prices for customers.
“In Vermont, we're like, so close to that,” Alexander said. “But I feel like we haven't quite hit the tipping point, where it's enough volume and price for the growers to jump on board. And how do we get there?”
Those are the kinds of questions the Jericho Underhill Food Hub is looking into.
“We want to build a community that's resilient,” Clift said. He added that they’re doing so by meeting one of the Jericho-Underhill community’s most basic needs: access to food.
