The Moos Room™

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Joe: Welcome to the Moosroom, everybody. This is Dr. Joe Armstrong. I'm with Emily today. No, Bradley. That's okay.
Emily: Oh, I feel like it's been a while since I've been around though, so it's nice to be back. I've missed you all.
Joe: It is nice to have you back. I missed you too. More importantly for once than Emily, we have a guest today and with us today is Nikki Warner, the communications Director for The Good Acre, which is just down the road from me here at campus. Thanks for being here, Nikki.
Nikki: Thanks. I'm excited to be here.
Joe: The way this all started was way back over 100 episodes ago. Natasha Mortenson was on the podcast and in response to a question from us saying, "My kids are going to grow up in the cities. How do I keep them close to agriculture?" one of the things she brought up was The Good Acre. That's how we got here. It took us a while to get here, over 100 episodes, but that's how we got here. Before we get started in full, there's two questions we ask every guest, Nikki, and we'll help you if you need help on this one. The first one we'll start is, what is your favorite breed of dairy Cow? You can look up some pictures real quick.
Emily: Pulling up Google quick.
Nikki: I'm going to google that.
Emily: Hey-
Joe: All good. Okay, that's fine.
Emily: -I respect that. You want to make an informed decision.
Nikki: I will say Jersey Cattle because that's chocolate milk cow. Correct?
Emily: Oh, man. Joe's reaction. There are no right or wrong answers, but Joe is convinced the only right answer is Jersey. Bradley, who's not here agrees.
Joe: It's true.
Nikki: I'm an East Coast person, so I have a little bit of cow literacy, but yes, those jersey cattle. That's where it's at. I used to work at Farmer's Markets in D.C. and there was a dairy from Maryland that had a-- Clear Springs Creamery, I believe they had a herd of jersey cattle, and best milk and yogurt. They'd sell it at market and keep people just chugging right from the bottle, best.
Joe: You can't go wrong. This is one of my favorite guests so far.
Nikki: This is off to a good start. All right.
Joe: Great start. Before we move on to the next question, we've got some totals to update. Bradley had a guest on by himself last week and didn't have the list, because I don't allow him to have the list. Not sure I would trust him to not edit the totals.
Emily: I would not trust him. I just want to be clear.
Joe: The tally as it sits now with last week our votes and this week we have Holstein at 23, Jersey at 17 now, creeping up, Brown Swiss at nine, Montb�liarde at three, Dutch Belted at three \, Guernsey at three with a special shout out to Taffy. Normandy at two, Milking Shorthorn at one, and Ayrshire at one. Get your Googling ready. The next question is, what is your favorite breed of beef Cow?
Emily: There's a lot more options with beef cattle, so I feel like it always takes a little more time.
Nikki: Gosh, that's a tough question. I don't know. I get a lot of my beef from Sunshine Harvest Farm and I don't know what kind of cows that they have.
Joe: Well, let's look.
Nikki: They've got beef, pork, and lamb.
Joe: Oh, they've got a bunch of different ones. It looks like.
Nikki: I was going to say, I bet there's a photo and every cow looks different in it.
Joe: That is true. Hard to pick out a definitive breed there.
Nikki: My favorite type of beef cow is the one that's nearest me. That's my answer.
Emily: Oh, I like that.
Joe: Local.
Nikki: I'll reach out and ask them, "Who's been to the butcher's shop lately?"
Joe: Yes. Reach out, let me know. We'll update accordingly. I do have to update it either way for last week because we had some shift. Black Angus are at 16, Harford's are at 10, Black Baldy at four. Scottish Highlander at four, Red Angus at three, Shorthorn at three, Charolais at three now, Belted Galloway at two, Brahman at two, and then all with one, Stabilizer, Gelbvieh Kenya, Simmental, Lori Jersey, Normandy Belgium, Blue Brangus, Piedmontese, and White Park. There's plenty. They all taste great.
Emily: They do.
Joe: Obviously, you can't go wrong really, but there is a right answer there as well.
Emily: Can we move on with it now, Joe?
Joe: Yes.
Emily: We'll move on.
Nikki: Move on.
Joe: We'll get to the actual programming now after we've answered those two important questions. All right. Nikki, big picture and mission right away, get everyone on the same page, what is The Good Acre?
Nikki: The Good Acre is a nonprofit food hub. Our mission is to unlock economic opportunity for farmers in our region through a unique combination of personalized support and market development. We work mostly with produce farmers, specialty crop growers. We've been open here-- Our facility in Falcon Heights opened in the fall of 2015. This will be our eighth season here at The Good Acre. We move a lot of local food through our food hub to wholesale buyers and community members through our Farm Share program. Yes, that's it in a nutshell. Food hubs are pretty complex operations though, but out of intense complexities, a lot of intense simplicities can emerge and really those simplicities, it boils down to technical assistance and market access for farmers is really what our core competency is here.
A lot of that is because of the infrastructure that we have. Our food hub facility consists of about 45,000 cubic feet of cold storage. We've got some freezer storage, we've got space for dry storage, and a big open warehouse floor where we aggregate, which really is according to the USDA's definition what a food hub's primary function is. I think the USDA's definition is actually a food hub is a business or organization that manages the aggregation, distribution, and marketing of local food products to strengthen their ability to satisfy wholesale and institutional demand. That is definitely what happens here at The Good Acre and so much more there.
Joe: There's a lot going on. There's programs everywhere. We'll get to them. Another question just for background sake is where did it start and who had the vision to get this thing rolling?
Nikki: Yes. that's a great question. We were seed-funded by actually a few members of the Pohlad Family. Pohlad Family Foundation, a big name here in Minnesota. Pohlad's own the Twins. They do a lot of philanthropic work in the Twin Cities, especially in the food space, and starting back in 2014, 2015, they were doing a lot of research to find out what were some of the gaps that existed in the food system that were preventing farmers from getting market access, that were preventing local foods from being in all the places that we shop for foods and eat local foods. They did a lot of research to find out what they could do to help bolster a regional food system here in the Twin Cities. That's how they got hooked up with our initial general manager and then turned executive director. Our founding ED was Reese Williams who had about 20 years of organic farming experience.
He really understood that aggregation is a huge unlock for institutions that want to be able to source locally but can't manage the relationships with many small farmers to fulfill some of those larger orders that wholesale institutions place. It was settled that a food hub facility is what the Pohlads would start investing in. That was really critical infrastructure investment upfront that they put up to allow us to even have this space. In addition to the warehouse and the cold storage, the dry storage, and the floor space for aggregation, we also have a community kitchen that's home to about two dozen local food makers. We also have a classroom too that we rent out to different groups working in the sustainability and food space. It really is a place where food and community come together.
Joe: I'm hearing a ton of words in your response to that, that really reflect into the cattle industry as well. Especially when we're talking small producers, emerging farmers, part of the issue is figuring out how to have a stronger hand in the market. We do have concepts similar to this where we have calf pools or things where we actually pool resources from several small farmers to then find market share. It's cool to hear it talked about on the produce side as well. Again, the challenges seem fairly similar. It's space and time and money and all this other stuff and coordination mostly. Before we get into the programs and all the other things you have going on because there's a huge list of things you guys are doing. What are some of those challenges that you guys have seen and how you chose to reach into the areas you did?
Nikki: Well, I think that our current food system is a globalized food system. It's a fragile food system based on large supply chains. As we've seen during the pandemic, whenever one part of the chain fails, it can be disastrous. Supply chains were in the news during the pandemic in ways that we'd never seen before here at The Good Acre. I think that what we are trying to do here is not necessarily the most efficient thing. I think efficiency is how we've got into the place that we're at with our food system right now. It's these smaller regional supply chains where regional producers have market access to be sustainable to invest back in the health of their soil and their own farm businesses. It's these types of operations that are going to be what helps us have a more resilient food system, especially in the face of a changing climate.
Joe: You've said the word sustainable a couple of different times here and I think I've heard you use it both ways. Economic sustainability, environmental sustainability, in which it's always, especially working with farmers, you got to have both. One of the questions I have when I look through your materials and in your programs is, do you guys have a set of requirements for your farmers as far as do they have to apply? Do they have to conform to a certain set of standards before they can be involved with your food hub?
Nikki: Ooh, that's a great question. We don't have a formal application process. We do have a farmer intake form, so if you visit our website, the goodacre.org, you can see our-- Our farmer intake form really asks questions like, "Do you own? Do you rent? How many years have you been farming? What are up to five crops you'd be interested in growing for The Good Acre? What are your pest and weed control methods?" Basically, just some of these basic questions to find out if is this a career path. Is this a hobby? Are you a farmer? Are you a gardener? Coming to The Good Acre myself, coming from a farmer's market background, I've really had to rethink everything that I thought of as a farmer whenever I moved here to the Twin Cities.
I say the average farmer that we work with at The Good Acre is a renter. They live in Brooklyn Center, they live in East Saint Paul. They live in Falcon Heights where we're located. They farm on plots they rent. Sometimes multiple plots in the first ring suburbs. We've visited farms down off Cedar in Farmington, up near Maple Grove in [unintelligible 00:12:59] It's not like a farmer walks out in their backyard, and there's their land and they've got their house with their white picket fence. A lot of the farmers we work with are immigrant or refugee farmers. Organic certification is not even on their radar, but the thought of using chemicals is so not even a part of their lexicon. Our farmers that sell to The Good Acre are watering, seeding, weeding, and planting everything by hand. We have more farmers than we've ever worked with this season.
We've got contracts with about 55 farmers totaling just over a million dollars in contracted sales that we hope to have come through the store this season, but we've got about 130 farmers and food producers in our network total. When I started at The Good Acre in 2016, we were working with about two dozen farmers. It's really interesting to see how many farmers there are out there, the capacity that they have to grow. What we're really trying to do here with our programs and services is to match up or link up that capacity and supply that there is on the farm side with demand from wholesale buyers who are values aligned with us in that they care about sourcing local produce from farmers that are in the area so that more food from here is for here and that we're not trying to compete on price. It's really that values-based alignment that we have.
Emily: One thing I want to mention quick, Nikki, I was taking a look at The Good Acres website, and the first tab I went to was you do have a tab with some of the farmers that you work with and that was really cool. You get to see what farm they represent, where that produce is actually coming from, so where their land is. You get a really nice sense for who these people are. I saw there was a couple of family pictures and some couples, and just a wide breadth, and variety of people that are doing this. I encourage people to check that out. It's very cool. Nice feature of the website. A question I have related to that, for the most part, do farmers come to The Good Acre, fill out your intake form, and say, "We want to work with you."? As The Good Acre, have you done any outreach looking-- say one of your wholesale buyers is looking for a specific product, will you then turn around and try to find a farm that has that product? How does that work?
Nikki: That's a great question. I think that really farmers have come to us through word of mouth. We've spent a lot of time just investing in building relationships with our farmers. Sometimes our network partly expands because farmers tell their friends, farmers tell their family members who start their own farm plots. It really ranges the gamut. I will say one of the biggest game-changers for us in how we've been able to reach more farmers, how we've been able to grow from that dozen, two dozen farmers to like the 130-plus that we've got on our roster right now is through our LEAFF program. Our LEAFF program, it's something we started in 2020. It's the Local Emergency Assistance Farmer Fund. It was established really as a response to the pandemic.
March 2020, seeds were already in the ground, markets weren't opening in the same way that they were before. There was a harvest coming and for a lot of farmers, there was no place for it to go. We pooled together with quite a few different partners to pool our funds together to let farmers at markets know that they could bring that produce to The Good Acre. We would pay market rate prices for it and we donate that produce to hunger relief organizations in the Twin Cities who the demand has only increased from 2020 for fresh produce at food shelves across the state. Through that program, we were able to offer farmers a guarantee that we'll purchase up to $X amount. That first season, it was up to $7,500 worth of produce that we guaranteed to buy from each farmer in the program.
This year, our LEAFF program, we have, I believe it's 68 farmers that are going to be in the program and we're guaranteeing to purchase up to $5,000 from each of those farmers in the program. We like to call it wholesale training wheels because to be able to grow for wholesale, you've got to have wax boxes, you got to have bunch sizes appropriately, you got to have the right case weight. This is all part of the technical assistance that we offer farmers who are looking to expand their market access beyond just direct sales to farmer's markets or their own CSA. Because we're working with partners that we are donating the produce to, we can really lessen the amount of orders that are rejected because of certain quality control issues.
There's a lot more flexibility there because it's not like we're fulfilling specific crop orders which is a whole nother level of technical assistance that we provide farmers. I will say since 2020, we've had about 85 different farmers be a part of the LEAFF program. About half of the farmers, I think it's of the 85, 45 that we work with now have ongoing wholesale contracts where we do that preseason planning with them and they have more guaranteed consistent sales which in turn helps them with financing if they want to lease new equipment, buy land, those kind of things. It shows proof of income. It really has been probably the best way that we've been able to get new farmers into this wholesale program and it's working.
Joe: A lot of the things you're talking about, especially this program is really cool and I like the description as the wholesale training wheels. That's a perfect description. It's not inexpensive to do, 68 farmers at $5,000 a piece. What I'm asking is how do you guys keep up that ability to do those things for these farmers? What keeps the money coming in for you?
Nikki: Well, The Good Acre is a 501(c)(3) non-profit and we have been from the get-go, which is really instrumental. About 75% of our funding comes from philanthropic donations, grants, individual donations. The produce biz doesn't have very high margins. I think the USDA just released-- Their latest figures that are, was is it 14 cents of each dollar goes to the farmer. Here at The Good Acre, it's more like 85 cents of each dollar goes back to the farmer. Our margins are pretty thin. Our programs aren't all self-sustaining, but through this philanthropic support, and actually this year through the state legislature, we were able to secure some funding. In Minnesota, we've got the trifecta of the DFL in the governor's office, in the House and Senate. We all know what the F in DFL stands for, Democratic Farmer Labor Party.
We really were helping those ag committees in the House and Senate know that if they want to invest in farmers in Minnesota in building community food systems that are resilient, that allow our most vulnerable citizens to get healthy culturally-relevant crops, investing in programs like the LEAFF program are wise investments to make. We were able to secure $600,000 through the ag omnibus bill that passed in May. We'll get $300,000 of that starting in January for the 2024 fiscal year and again next year. That money is going directly to purchase produce from Minnesota Farmers in the LEAFF Program. We try to bolster that with additional funds that we fundraise and apply for grants for but it's also been really interesting. During the pandemic, even the federal government threw a lot of money into nutrition and food programs.
There was a lot of throwing spaghetti to the wall and seeing what sticks. A lot of that one-time funding has expired, but I think there's a lot of lessons learned about what did work. We saw some tremendous numbers about child hunger being reversed whenever there was child tax credits out there, is just one example. Some of these investments in market access specifically for small produce farmers have had huge positive economic impacts in communities where these farmers live and work and farm. The USDA's Local Food Purchase Assistance grant program is a big one that they just closed applications for that grant now, the LFPA program. It's really to allow more organizations to do exactly what we're doing with the LEAFF program, which is sourcing produce from underserved or underrepresented farmers, and donating it, getting it to communities in need.
It's really cool to see models like the LEAFF program being replicated in other parts of the state. That was also part of what we were advocating for in the legislature this year. Our initial bill was requesting, I think it was $500,000 yearly to be able to run The Good Acres LEAFF Program and expand it to other parts of the state where we have pilot projects in Bemidji and Rice County and other parts of the state where there's a lot of need and interest in partners to do similar programs.
Joe: It sounds complicated, and like you said, margins are tight. I applaud you, Emily, and I, being an extension, though, about grants and the process of grant writing.
Nikki: Oh, yes. [laughs].
Joe: We applaud you for sticking with that. One of the things that we've been talking about a lot is whole wholesale and you guys helping with the market and trying to get that wholesale connection. We haven't really touched on your farm share program too much. It's become much more popular, I think since the pandemic, farm share programs, CSAs, those kind of things. Tell us about your program and maybe what makes it different from other programs.
Nikki: Great question. We're really intentional and we have been since the early days not to call our program a CSA because the CSA really is, we're honoring that relationship that one household has with one farm. Because we're an aggregator, our farm share really, it's a multi-farm share. We've sourced from anywhere from 20 to 30 different farmers and producers for the items in our full-season farm share, which is an 18-week season. This week is actually the very first week of the farm share. We've got 520 full-season members that'll pick up here at The Good Acre or offsite. We've got about over a dozen other pickup locations across the Twin Cities plus all kinds of cool add-ons. We've got a meat add-on from Sunshine Harvest Farm. We've got eggs, cheese, bread. We've got a locally milled flour add-on.
If any dairy farmers are interested in a dairy add-on, you can email me at nikki@thegoodacre.org. [laughs] Our Farm Share program is really the first program that we had to be able to buy produce from farmers and get it out into the community. It's really the only direct-to-consumer channel that we have. Our wholesale, we're really far removed from the end eater. Our customers for wholesale are other wholesale buyers. We are not sure all the places that it goes. Especially with Second Harvest, for example, they're one of the largest food banks in the Midwest, and they've got hundreds of agency partners that the produce that they purchased through our Food hub can end up at. The Farm Share program it's really something that we hold close because those 520 households are really engaged with the work we do.
They get to know our farmers, they get to eat the same food that goes out through our wholesale program. We've also been able to extend that farm share, those direct-to-consumer offerings to be year-round because it's totally possible to eat local in Minnesota all year round despite our notorious winter. We've got a harvest share that's a smaller program that goes peak season, August through end of September. We've got grilling boxes, which is once a month, June, July, August, September. We've got a late-season share, an off-season share. We try to have some sort of offering or curated box for our Farm Share members and for our community members each month out of the year.
Joe: There's a lot going on there. I encourage you to check it out. There's all sorts of options. Like you said, there's add-ons, all sorts of things there. We've talked a lot about-- Basically, you have two sets of programs. Stuff that's focused on the grower and then people who produce food and then you have your culinary programs as well. We haven't touched on that at all. I know people are listening and they're like, "How is there even more going on in this one place?" but there is. Culinary side of things, tell us what you guys got going there.
Nikki: I think you said it best, Dr. Joe. There's a lot going on. One of the conclusions that we've really come to in the strategic planning process that we just recently completed is that we're really trying to build not just a sustainable and resilient food system, but a community-centered food system. Actually, this summer we are transitioning our culinary programs to Healthy Roots Institute, which is run by an extremely talented woman named Lashelle Cunningham. She has really created our culinary training program from the ground up, and we're really excited for her to take that on her own at Healthy Roots Institute. The culinary program started here at The Good Acre because as we were developing wholesale markets in the farm-to-school K through 12 school space, we learned pretty quick that you cannot sell a nutrition service team a thousand pounds of butternut squash and expect it to go well.
You've got to do recipe development, you've got to get staff buy-in, you've got to teach scratch cooking skills. In an effort to not try to house all of the things [chuckles] in this small facility, we've really taken a hard look at where we can do better by partnering. That's a perfect example of how and why we're transitioning these culinary programs. Michelle and Healthy Roots will definitely be our preferred culinary program provider, but there's a lot of really talented chefs doing this kind of work in school lunch rooms and other food service management kitchens across the cities. Especially for schools though, scratch cooking is just one of those things that once you get over the hump and the change of just going from heat and serve to scratch cooking, it pays off dividends. The food tastes better, it's healthier, it's cheaper to do everything from scratch.
It's just you've got to work on efficiencies to be able to feed 1,000, 2000, 3000 kids in four hours. A lot of that also depends on more investment from Department of Agriculture, for example. They've got this Agri Grant program that can help schools buy equipment to do more scratch cooking, Robocues, combi ovens, tilt skillets. These are all industrial equipment that kitchens need to be able to make food in large quantities and fast with whole unprocessed produce. Kitchens in schools across the country have really been decimated over the years. Reinvesting back into those ways that create more market access opportunities for farmers ultimately is something that we're really invested in furthering, and we're not doing it alone, which is the cool thing.
Joe: It's all amazing. I'm so glad that Natasha told us that we had to get you on it. I'm sorry it took so long to get there. Maybe you expected this question, but I think hopefully you expected this question. It's produce focused. This is the Moos Room, it's all about cows. We can go two different ways with this. Why did you choose to go with a produce-focused system, and is there any plan To get into or including meat in a more meaningful way in your program?
Nikki: That's a really good question. I would say that we got into the produce biz or this place opened up really with the produce focus precisely because a lot of the direct market farmers didn't have any other option besides just farmer's markets or they didn't have the marketing skills or capabilities to find other markets on their own outside of a farmer's market. There was a need there specifically for produce farmers in this Twin Cities region. Then just today, I was looking at our 2022 numbers and we collect a lot of data. As an aggregator, as the customer for all of these 130 farmers that work with us or that we have transactions with in some way shape or form, 90% of our sales happen in an 18 to 20-week window from June to the first hard frost.
We have to look beyond produce to sustain the operation of this facility on a year-round basis. We work with a lot of value-added producers, hot sauce, kimchi, sauerkraut. We've got a whole fermentation station in our warehouse just of makers that use our shared-use commercial kitchen space. I think that also expands into meat, dairy, eggs, and that kind of thing. One thing that we do see a lot of though is who we source from over the course of the year really changes. I think that the numbers from last year were that 87% of the produce that came through our door last year were from farmers of color, but whenever you look at off-peak season months most of our produce comes from white-owned mechanized farms who have the ability to do storage crops that are season extension.
There's not a lot of farmers of color that are providing enough meat, eggs, and dairy to fulfill some of the wholesale orders that we have in the winter months. We're looking into why that is, what are some of the barriers that businesses are facing because we'd like to be able to use the capacity of this space better when it's not produce time of year. Yes, that's something we're definitely looking into.
Joe: That's really nice to know. I know that the question was quite leading, coming from us and our bias, to say, "Where are the cows in all this?" but there's cheese, there's meat, and I think I can speak for extension on this, if you guys need any help in getting to that point, let us know. Emily, Brad, and I are more than happy to help dairy or the beef side of things. I guess we can talk about other species as well if you have that issue as well.
Nikki: Yes, one perfect example is a lot of these farm-to-school grants that school districts in the state of Minnesota are getting allow for the purchase of Minnesota-grown and raised beef products. Sometimes we have a hard time finding enough supply or those producers, so we absolutely should talk because I think that the farm-to-school reimbursement funds are higher than they've ever been. Let's make sure that those schools that have those dollars to buy local product, especially if they want to buy meat products for their lunch line can get connected with producers either through places like The Good Acre that aggregate or through producers in their own communities. Yes, let us know.
Joe: Perfect. We will definitely follow up after.
Emily: We have discussed a lot here and I think learned a lot, not only about what The Good Acre does, but also I've learned a lot about how our food systems are at play, especially in the Metro area. I'm not in the Metro, so I don't always see how those systems work. It's been great having you, Nikki, and I, again, encourage everybody, learn more about The Good Acre. thegoodacre.org is their website. Please check it out. I have had the opportunity to tour the facility in the past. It is beautiful. It's such a great resource for the community and such a great resource for all food producers that need that extra hub to go to. Thank you so much for being on Nikki. I'm curious if, if anybody here listening is like, "Hey, I'd like to just check that place out and go and see it," is there ever an opportunity to go in for a tour or can people just check in and say hello? How can people access The Good Acre?
Nikki: Totally. I love to give a tour so people can reach out to me directly, nikki@thegoodacre.org if they want to pop in. Also, we are right on Larpenteur Avenue, at the next building right next to the entrance of the State Fairgrounds. If you're in Falcon Heights for the State Fair this summer drive by The Good Acre, I'm hoping to have a fun little yard sign situation that helps people, links to a video to show them what happens in this space. You can sign up for our quarterly newsletters and our website to get program updates. Follow us on social media, The Good Acre MN Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Yes, I'd love to show anybody who's interested around, who wants to talk aggregation and food hubs and food systems. We are a real passionate bunch here at The Good Acre, so if you have a favorite type of beef cow that you want to tell me about, just step on in. I'll tell you my favorite variety of heirloom squash. How about that?
Emily: That sounds like a perfect trade-off. Thank you so much again, Nikki. I think with that, we are going to wrap the episode there. Again, if you want to follow The Good Acre on social media, that's at The Good Acre MN. You can also find them online, thegoodacre.org. If you want to find the Moos Room on the interwebs, you can find us@extension.umn.edu and on Twitter at UMN Newsroom and at UMN Farm Safety. If you have questions, comments, or scathing rebuttals about today's episode, you can email those to themoosroom @umn.edu. That's themoosroom@umn.edu. You can also call and leave us a voicemail. Our line is 612 624 3610. That is a wrap. Nikki, thank you again so much for joining us.
Nikki: Thank you, Emily. Thanks, Dr. Joe. It's been a pleasure.
Emily: All right. Bye, everyone.
Joe: Bye.
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