Food Hub Network
Coordinator: Sydney DeLuna
Co-coordinator: Lauren Gwin
What is a food hub?
Food hubs are businesses or organizations that aggregate, distribute, and market locally grown and made food products. Hubs connect local and regional agricultural producers to wholesale, retail, and institutional buyers they can’t reach on their own.
Hubs tend to focus on producers who use sustainable, regenerative, humane agricultural practices to grow healthy, nutritious food.
Hubs also often have goals related to food security, equity and inclusion, and local economic development. These values and goals are often not “profitable,” given the structure and inequities within the dominant, mainstream food system. Hubs require support to stay true to their missions and visions.
What is the Food Hub Network?
The Oregon Food Hub Club is a peer learning community of local food hub projects around the state, primarily in rural areas. These projects include nonprofit organizations, farmers, ranchers, and fishermen, small food businesses, rural economic development agencies, and others. The network began convening in February 2019 and includes both established and developing hub projects.
Building Worker Centered Culture Series
Join OCFSN and North Coast Food Web’s Director Yana Ludwig in a deep dive into building worker-centered cultures. We will collectively explore a framework to think about, discuss, and make decisions about our cultures and policies. We will invest in developing the intellectual and policy foundations to enable more worker-centered decision making, and create better work environments, work-life balances, and values integration in our food systems spaces. Each session will have some presentation, some space for discussion, and resource / further exploration sharing.
Yana Ludwig has served as the Executive or Co-Director for 6 organizations, served on 4 nonprofit Boards, been part of two worker owned co-ops, and consulted on HR with several more. She is the co-author of The Cooperative Culture Handbook, and worker-centered activism has been a main theme of her so-called "spare time" for the last 8 years, including a US Senate run in 2020 as an open socialist. She is constantly working to bring management (with a little "m") and worker solidarity together in creative ways.
This virtual series will take place on Wednesdays June 5th, 12th, 19th, 26th and July 3rd from noon to 1:30 pm. Below are the session descriptions. All sessions will have time for breakout discussions and resources will be provided for each session.
Session One: Centering Workers Starts with Wages
This session will provide a series overview of general worker-centered HR principles. Then we'll take a deep dive into wage setting, a discussion of unpaid internships and how both they relate to equity. We'll also look at real raises, and what COLA is and why it matters.
Session Two: Meritocracy and other Lies
This session will look at cooperative culture and the ways that Meritocracy, Protestant Work Ethic and other core cultural beliefs drive how our economy is structured to encourage competitive and siloing dynamics. We'll look at evaluations and feedback, and how effectiveness is affected by the number of hours we expect from people.
Session Three: Policies for the People
This session will focus on benefits policies, contextualized by a consideration of how small businesses and nonprofits are hurt by the displacement of societal obligations onto employers. We'll do an Equity and Benefits 101, talk about PTO policies and the need to justify taking care of ourselves, and how an annual benefits survey can help keep it real.
Session Four: Who Gets the Good Jobs? And what we can do about it
This session will be a critical look at opportunity and privilege in the workplace. We'll look at job postings, interviews and hiring other processes through an equity (and legal) lens, and discuss the concept of “color blind” and how seeing the whole person changes what we value in hiring.
Session Five: There is Only One System
For our last session, we will go big picture and talk about how food, housing and healthcare intersect at a systems level and impact material needs. Bringing it back to the workplace, we'll talk resilience needs for mammals (that's us!), and take a brief look at workplace organizing and shared leadership models and how they can help build long-term strength for a worker-centered culture. Finally, we'll take some time for series reflections and integration of topics.
Resources
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What is a food hub anyway? At the 2024 OSU Small Farms Conference a panel of representatives from Oregon Food Hubs delivered this presentation, focused on explaining what food hubs are, what they do, and highlighting several of the food hubs across the state.
Read this 2021 publication to learn more about the established and emerging food hubs in Oregon. [Prepared by Kiara Kashuba and published by Oregon State University’s Center for Small Farms & Community Food Systems]
Check out this MAP that shows the Oregon Food Hubs that are part of our network.
Oregon Food Hub Feasibility Studies
Southwest Oregon Food Hub Feasibility Assessment
Assessment year: 2020
Area of focus: 5 SW counties - Douglas, Coos, Curry, Jackson, Josephine
Assessment was funded by Neighborworks Umpqua, Ford Family Foundation, City of Roseburg and Blue Zones Project-Umpqua and done by consultant Anthony Flaccavento, SCALE.
Source: presentation given by Erin Maidlow, at Food Hub Club meeting, Dec. 2020
North Coast Food Hub Feasibility Report
Assessment year: 2020
Area of focus: Tillamook and Clatsop County with the intent to serve the entire North Coast region, including Columbia County and parts of Southern Washington. Report funded by 2020 Business Oregon Rural Opportunity Initiative grant awarded to Visit Tillamook Coast
Klamath County Food Hub Feasibility Study
Assessment year: 2019
Area of focus: Klamath County
Assessment was conducted by the South Central Oregon Economic Development District
Wallowa County (NE Oregon) Food Hub Feasibility Study
Published Deceember 2017
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Published in 2020 by Michigan State University Center for Regional Food Systems & Wallace Center at Winrock International.
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Financial Management for Food Hub Success by Wallace Center
A Racial Equity Implementation Guide for Food Hubs by Tamara Jones, Dara Cooper, Simran Noor, & Alsie Parks
How to Wholesale: Post-Harvest Handling Best Practices for the Wholesale Market
Production Planning for Aggregators: A Guide to Aggregating Crop Production from Multiple Producers to Serve Volume Buyers by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University
Food Safety Modernization Act’s (FMSA) Preventive Controls Rule is the section most likely to pertain to food hubs. Download Standard operating procedure templates and watch the series of webinars hosted by Dr. Erin DiCaprio of the Cooperative Extension in Community Food Safety at the UC Davis Department of Food Science and Technology.
SNAP/EBT Resources:
The CSA Farmer’s Nationwide Guide to Accepting SNAP/EBT Payments by Zenger Farm
Farm Direct Incentives Guide Resource Library on SNAP/EBT and Nutrition Incentives Technology
Retail Food Box Programs:
Retail Box Toolkit from Iowa State University
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The PNW F&B is at its simplest, a google group. With over hundreds of members it has become a central communication point for regional food businesses. The group contains 3 years of rich data full of resources and answers to problems. We sell equipment to each other, collaborate on marketing campaigns, trade contacts, and support each other’s success. Each month community catalyst and connector, Hannah Kullberg, hosts Community Conversations and Office Hours to deepen the support and community connections.
The PNW F&B is a sliding scale membership model with scholarships available and free for farmers with code “FARMERLIFE”.
As OFSCN is a Community Partner, there are 8 memberships available for OFSCN members with code “OFSCN22”.
We are stronger together.
Fact Sheets
Food Hub Feasibility Studies
First page of south central Oregon food hub feasibility study. produce in neat boxes.
Northeast Oregon Food Hub Feasibility
Central Oregon Food Hub Feasibility Study
Lane County Public Market an dFood Hub Market Analysis (2014)
North Coast Food Hub Feasibility Report
Southwest Oregon Food Hub Feasibility Assessment
USDA How to Write a Feasibility Study
