New Mexico Food Hub fills vital role in region during COVID-19 pandemic

SILVER CITY, N.M. – “Seemingly overnight we lost over $75,000 in projected sales due to school and restaurant closures,” said Ben Rasmussen, manager of the Southwest New Mexico (SWNM) Food Hub. “We had literal tons of produce about to be harvested, produce we had asked growers to plant, that all of the sudden had no home. Our growers were at risk of losing big, and we had to act fast.”

Across the nation many Americans were able to see clearly the fragility of the food system: empty grocery store shelves, reports of meat shortages, farmers dumping unsold products and millions of newly unemployed people lining up for food pantries.

“Our national food system does an amazing job of hiding the relationships that sustain it,” Rasmussen said. “Any system that can simultaneously have people in need of food and farmers dumping unsold food needs correction.”

Taking charge

Based in Silver City, the SWNM Food Hub is a program of the National Center for Frontier Communities. Rasmussen guided its design and launch in April 2018 through on-the-ground research and communication with farmers, ranchers, food pantries, policy makers and others involved in the food system. He explained that the Food Hub is “dual-purpose,” as it both works with local growers to connect their produce to markets and serves the food pantry system through distribution of both locally grown food and healthy, bulk items.

“We designed the hub to respond to not only the unique needs of growers, but also to the persistent difficulties experienced by the food pantry system,” said Rasmussen.

Facing a potential crisis as markets for local produce shut down, Rasmussen said the Food Hub pivoted quickly: “We were able to leverage funding to continue to purchase that food and distribute it free of charge to food pantries. We were fortunate to be in a position to make sure that farmers received market price for their foods regardless of if it could be sold or not.”

Benefitting all

That solution was not only beneficial to growers, but also to pantries whose supplies were stressed. During the pandemic, food pantries uniformly reported an increase in demand for their services.

In March of 2021 Feeding America, the largest hunger-relief organization in the nation, reported that food banks now serve an average of 55 percent more people than before the pandemic.

Meanwhile, in New Mexico, a study found that food insecurity has nearly doubled compared to 2016-2018 rates. John Scott-Wright, president of one of the largest pantries in the southwestern New Mexico, faced that increased demand first-hand.

“Our numbers have been rising steadily and consistently throughout,” he explained. “You just never know what will happen from month to month.”

Waste management

The food bank system is essentially the waste management mechanism for the supply chain: the food that makes it to pantry shelves are often goods that no one has purchased. As the general public began to rely more on grocery stores than restaurants, food pantries experienced shortages.

“Our usual suppliers have not been able to get us regular products,” said Scott-Wright. “They are either out of food or on backorder and that has left us, and the community, without. We are glad that the Food Hub is here to pick up the slack and make sure we have enough to distribute each month.”

Since the start of the pandemic, the Food Hub has been purchasing unsold food from farmers, making runs to Costco and other wholesalers, and assuring that food gets to those who need it most. The result has been immense: since March of 2020, the Food Hub has distributed nearly $35,000 and 20,000 pounds worth of healthy bulk foods and locally-grown produce to pantries in Catron, Grant, and Luna counties.

Frontier communities

During this time the Food Hub has also made over $50,000 in payments to growers. That impact is especially effective given that the SWNM Food Hub operates in frontier communities, which are defined by their sparse populations and distance from urban centers. Of more than 200 food hubs across the country, there are no others based in the frontier.

“We like to say that frontier problems require frontier solutions,” said Stacey Cox, NCFC executive director. “Not only are we geographically isolated from population and supply centers, but we are often the first to get left out of the decision-making process and tend to get the leftovers from the supply chain.”

Rasmussen added that small, remote communities often bear the brunt of challenges in the food bank systems in the best of times. “We’re an hour off the interstate. We’re often the last stop for food bank trucks or for distributors selling to a supermarket, so the food can be less fresh.”

Food insecurity on the frontier is amplified by oversights in funding. “Many funders don’t understand the unique issues of the frontier food system,” said Cox. “We applied for funding before COVID to put us in a better position to respond to food system emergencies, but funders didn’t seem to get it. Hopefully, they do now.”

Pre-pandemic

Although the Food Hub was able to pull together limited resources to make an enormous impact, Rasmussen said the shut-down of typical markets affected the program’s financial self-sufficiency. “Right before the pandemic, the Food Hub had just come off its best year ever,” he remembered. “Sales were expanding, markets were opening up, we had developed new relationships with farmers. We were planning for 2020 to be the year that we became, if not self-sufficient, really close to it.”

That goalpost changed as the Food Hub had to use more of its budget to cover the costs of unsold produce. Despite the challenge, Rasmussen said the closures of schools and restaurants inspired the Food Hub to carve out new markets. In the summer of 2020, they launched a pilotCSA (community-supported agriculture) program, where fifty customers signed up for a weekly delivery box of fresh, locally-grown vegetables.

“It was a ten-week pilot, and people really liked it,” said Rasmussen. “We could incorporate all sorts of foods that might not traditionally be purchased by schools or other markets. We decided that it could be a potential long-term market outlet for us.”

Rasmussen said the pandemic also shed light on southwestern New Mexico’s shortage of locally-grown food, explaining, “New Mexico has done an amazing job of supporting farmers and helping increase demand for local food through outreach, education and funding efforts like Double-Up Food Bucks. These efforts and the way that the pandemic has shifted consumer demands – for example, more farmers market shoppers and less restaurant expenditures – have not been equally met with an increase in local food production or necessary shifts in production patterns.”

Local growers

The shortage of local growers that Rasmussen has observed is reflected across the nation: in 1991, small farmers made up 46 percent of total agricultural production in 1991. In 2015, that percentage had fallen to a quarter.

One way that the SWNM Food Hub would like to increase food production in the region is through a community-run greenhouse, where beginning growers could cut their teeth without the risk that starting a farm normally entails.

“The greenhouse would serve as a first step to creating a more community-focused farming system in the region where the burden of production, debt, risk, and labor isn’t placed on individuals but can be mitigated and supported by an organization,” said Rasmussen.

That organizational support for young or beginning farmers could be especially critical in New Mexico, where the average age of farmers is the second-highest in the nation. By implementing long-term, community-based solutions like the CSA program and the greenhouse, the SWNM Food Hub hopes to function alongside the larger food system to benefit small, local growers and continue to be nimble enough to respond to crises or changes in the food system.

Down the road

“The Food Hub really is for everyone,” said Rasmussen. “These next few years will see us with regular market and pantry operations in more remote communities. We want to make sure that everyone has access to fresh, healthy food and that growers find an abundance of support for whatever they might need to make their operation successful.”

NCFC founder and lifelong food system activist Carol Miller has been watching firsthand how the national supply chain impacts the frontier for decades. “If you look at the global food system, it’s a mess. Drought might impact California rice prices or a wind storm may impact meat prices – it’s a trickle-down effect that always impacts the frontier most acutely,” Miller said. “The SWNM Food Hub has flipped things from the top-down to the bottom-up, which is the change that needs to happen in the frontier for things to get better.”

Miller cultivates over 1,200 row feet of organic garden at home in northern New Mexico. “We eat from the garden year-round, and this year I’ve been able to donate over 1,000 pounds of produce to our local pantry. Security only comes from community,” Miller added. “There’s enough to go around,” said Rasmussen. “We just have to be sure that our decision-making comes from community inclusion and that we are highlighting and strengthening, not hiding, the relationships that sustain us."

Noa Greenspan is working through a summer internship with the National Center for Frontier Communities