FamilyFarmed EXPO/Good Food Festival
 The FamilyFarmed EXPO has grown to be the leading event supporting the Good Food Movement in the Midwest. It includes a trade show, food and farm financing conference, food policy summit, and celebration of local and responsibly produced food.
The purpose of the event is to link local farmers and family-owned producers of food and farm products with the public, trade buyers, and leaders in the field to foster relationships that facilitate the growth of local food systems. The 2011 Chicago event attracted 4,500 attendees and over 150 exhibitors.
After realizing the EXPO was about building the Good Food Movement, the FamilyFarmed.org board changed the name to Good Food Festival and Conference. In 2011, FamilyFarmed.org partnered with the Santa Monica Farmers Market to produce the event in Los Angeles. In its first year, with nearly 8,000 people attending, the festival brought together farmers, food producers, national and local leaders, trade buyers, and families and individuals for a five-day gathering. We are now working on planning Good Food events in both Chicago and Santa Monica in 2012.
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Farmer Training
At the suggestion of wholesale buyers, FamilyFarmed.org provides technical assistance and training for farmers. The FamilyFarmed.org publication Wholesale Success: A Farmer's Guide to Selling, Postharvest Handling, and Packing Produce is a 255-page manual that includes comprehensive sections on issues such as Building Relationships with Buyers, Maintaining the Cold Chain, On-Farm Food Safety, Calculating Return on Investment, and more. This is the leading manual of its type and includes over 100 crop profiles that give specific harvesting, cooling, storage, and packing information on most of the fruits and vegetables grown commercially in the United States.
In 2011 through a partnership with USDA Risk Management Agency, FamilyFarmed.org trained over 600 farmers in five states using Wholesale Success as the primary training tool. FamilyFarmed.org also facilitates "Meet the Buyer" events in select markets to connect local producers with wholesale buyers face to face. Farmers and buyers learn from each other and build relationships resulting in strong business partnerships.With support from FamilyFarmed.org, this model is now being adopted in other markets by NGO partners who hold annual Meet the Buyer events in their regions.
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Market Development--Connecting Food Purchasers and Trade Buyers
A key element to building local and organic food sales is connecting farmers and food processors with trade buyers. Ninety-nine percent of the agricultural products consumed in America are purchased through wholesale channels. FamilyFarmed.org has developed working relationships with many of the leading buyers of local and organic food in America.
 Whole Foods Market and Goodness Greeness (the second-largest organic distributor in the U.S.) are both longtime strategic partners that participate in all FamilyFarmed.org events. In 2011 Whole Foods and FamilyFarmed.org launched a local produce procurement partnership that resulted in many new farmers selling produce to their regional distribution center in the Midwest. Chipotle Mexican Grill, the country's largest fast casual restaurant chain committed to serving sustainably raised and locally sourced ingredients, is also a national strategic partner for FamilyFarmed.org. Work with Chipotle includes procurement and food safety for its growers.
Most major distributors supplying food to Chicago restaurants and foodservice buyers, including SYSCO and US Foods-the two largest distributors in America, now come to the Good Food Trade Show to meet farmers and showcase their commitment to local food. With funding from the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, FamilyFarmed.org recently launched a new strategic initiative to develop the local food supply chain for the Green Chicago Restaurant Coalition. This organization has 300 affiliated restaurants and foodservice companies and helps them procure green products at affordable prices.
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Farm to School
 Schools and universities provide a major opportunity of growth for Good Food sales. Recognizing this opportunity, FamilyFarmed.org has partnered with Chicago Public Schools (CPS) to help develop their local food procurement program. In the past two years, their foodservice provider, Chartwells-Thompson Hospitality, purchased over $4 million in food from local farmers in the FamilyFarmed.org network.
This innovative program includes a preference for fruit and vegetable farms using Integrated Pest Management techniques and produce grown without the use of organophosphate pesticides. CPS recently purchased $1.1 million in antibiotic-free chicken sourced from an Indiana Amish farmer, the largest purchase of its type in the U.S. The partners that developed this program first came together at the 2011 Chicago FamilyFarmed EXPO, and it is now being replicated nationally with leadership from School Food FOCUS and the Pew Charitable Trusts.
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Food Hub Development
One of the key challenges faced by the Good Food Movement is developing a robust supply chain of sustainably produced food that is grown close to the place of consumption and efficiently transported to end users. Some local food has a high carbon footprint due to the fact that transportation systems are not efficient. And in many parts of the country, fruit and vegetable farmers have not scaled up production because they don't have assurances that there are sufficient markets for their produce.
Realizing this, FamilyFarmed.org has done work in three states to research the development of produce aggregation facilities. These facilities, often referred to as food hubs, aggregate, cool, pack, sell, and efficiently transport locally grown produce. This gives farmers and wholesale buyers assurances that the highest quality product will be sold for fair prices. In Illinois and Virginia FamilyFarmed.org led feasibility studies examining need for produce food hubs, and in Dane County, Wisconsin, FamilyFarmed.org was a contractor on a study examining the need for produce aggregation. Click here to read our Southern Wisconsin study and our other local food reports
As a result of this work, three operating food hubs were launched in 2011, one in Virginia and two in Illinois. Blue Ridge Produce in Virginia is a 35,000-square-foot facility that now purchases and packs product from 50 farmers and sells to Whole Foods, Chipotle, hospitals, schools, and other wholesale buyers.
FamilyFarmed.org has also helped to develop two farmer-owned aggregation facilities in Peoria and Kankakee, Illinois, rural areas with strong histories of vegetable production. They are now selling to many leading wholesale buyers and currently are engaged with FamilyFarmed.org to do crop planning for the 2012 season, which will significantly ramp up production and sales.
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Food Safety
On-Farm Food Safety is key for farmers of all sizes. Increasingly, wholesale buyers require that farms have Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) food safety certification. In order to achieve this, farms need to create a food safety plan, account for their food safety best practices as described in the plan, and have an auditor review the plan and operations on the farm. This is a complicated process, and some farms don't have the technical skill do it. As a result, many have been forced to hire consultants and engage in a lengthy, time-consuming, and expensive process to create these materials.
Realizing this, Jim Slama and FamilyFarmed.org have created the nationally significant On-Farm Food Safety Project whereby small to mid-scale fruit and vegetable farmers have access to a free, easy-to-use online tool that helps them create a personalized food safety plan and to adopt best practices in food. Lead funding was provided by the USDA Risk Management Agency, plus major sponsorships from Chipotle, SYSCO, Earthbound Farm, Wallace Center, Farm Aid and Compass Group (the largest foodservice company in the world.)
 | Kathleen Merrigan
Deputy Secretary of Agriculture |
The tool was launched on December 15, 2011, at a press conference at USDA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. Kathleen Merrigan, Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, hosted the gathering and it was attended by media, both in person and through teleconference. "USDA believes that a strong farm safety net-including effective, market-based risk solutions for producers of all variety and size-is crucial to sustain the vitality of American agriculture," said Merrigan. "Effectively managing risk is important to all producers, and having an acceptable food safety program is in the best interest of consumers, buyers, and the farmers themselves. USDA is proud to have worked with private, public and non-profit partners to introduce this free tool to farmers seeking to gain certification as a Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) producer."
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