This summer, I interned for two organizations working in tandem to create more resilient food systems in rural Virginia and Appalachia. The first, Foodshed Capital, works to provide sustainable and underserved farmers with flexible financing needed to thrive and grow. The other, 4P Foods, unlocks B2B and B2C markets for small and underserved farmers by serving as an aggregator and distributor of their products. Together, these organizations address both consumer and producer sides of our food system. Foodshed Capital offers regional food producers and processors the capital needed to thrive, while 4P Foods helps to bring more of their product to more people, doing so with fairer prices and wages relative to the dominant industrial food system.
With both organizations, I developed systems to measure the organization’s impact on the communities they worked in and the farmers with whom they worked. To do so, I worked first to understand the lives of the farmers and processors in our network. I spent a day traveling around Virginia with 4P Foods and UVA Dining listening to farmers of color explain what inefficiencies and obstacles hindered their success and kept farming from being a more viable means of supporting oneself. With Foodshed Capital, I spoke to millers at the end of their facility’s production capacity, planning what it would take to meet growing demand. One week prior, I heard about a produce and livestock operation struggling to make ends meet despite their personal investment, passion, and hundreds of worked hours.
Through such narratives, the perspectives of partner organizations, and the examples set by major institutions, I designed frameworks to both capture our impact and highlight what has gone unaddressed. Through these syntheses, each organization can see how they exist in rural communities, making clear a comparison between the organization’s presence and stated priorities - environmental resource resilience, economic growth, or otherwise. With Foodshed Capital my work went one step further, collecting the resources needed by our producers and processor pool. These resources offered support beyond flexible financing, ranging from business strategy guides, to bookkeeping trainings, to organizations supporting women- or minority-owned farmers, to aggregated government grant and micro-loan opportunities.
Through these organizations, I developed an acute understanding of the realities and obstacles facing agricultural communities in and around Virginia. Inefficiencies plague the path from local farm to mainstream market, each shrinking local profit margins. Meanwhile, farms and food affect a community’s economic development, its health, the viability of its environmental resources, and its equitable opportunities. A prosperous path forward for rural Virginia and Appalachia depends on solutions that smooth the path from farm to fork, and accessible agricultural supports that consider the limitations of the small farm and the life of the farmer with sustained environmental concern.
My work shaped my focus as a MPP candidate, narrowing my broad food and agriculture focus to the obstacles that prevent high quality, local food from entering mainstream markets without draining the producing communities of their resources, time and livelihoods. I thank the Talder Fellowship for supporting me in these tremendous opportunities.