Central Food Corridor & Cohort

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In 2022, the Kansas Rural Center (KRC) and our partners, Kansas Wesleyan University and Common Ground Producers and Growers, applied for grant funding from the USDA to work on developing the regional food system in Central Kansas, particularly the counties surrounding I-135 from Wichita through Salina. The aim being to work with farmers to build a cooperative food hub, ideally one that would be farmer-led and farmer-owned. The food hub would assist the farmers involved with local food aggregation, marketing, and delivery so that the group could serve larger wholesale markets, such as hospital or school cafeterias, that farmers would struggle to fulfill sales to on their own.

In 2022 the Kansas Rural Center (KRC) applied for grant funding from the USDA to work on developing the regional food system in Central Kansas, particularly the counties surrounding I-135 from Wichita through Salina.  Our aim was to work with farmers to build a cooperative food hub, ideally one that would be farmer-led and farmer-owned.  The food hub would assist the farmers involved with local food aggregation, marketing, and delivery so that the group could serve larger wholesale markets, such as hospital or school cafeterias, that farmers would struggle to fulfill sales to on their own. 

While Kansas has many excellent farmers growing food for our communities, numerous challenges face those producers who grow fruits, vegetables, meat, small grains, and other food intended to be sold directly to the consumer or otherwise stay in the local and regional food system. While farmers growing large fields of row crops have traditionally had access to trucking, cooperative grain elevators, crop marketing agencies, and other systems that work with them to sell and move their products, those same aggregation, marketing, and delivery mechanisms are difficult to come by for smaller diversified farmers who seek to collaborate and sell their food locally/regionally.

As KRC has worked with our non-profit partners, producers and retailers of locally grown products to develop a food hub with a centralized building for aggregation and processing, we have shifted our attention away from brick and mortar to building relationships between farmers and creating a network of growers who have the desire to work together and create a network or "cohort" that is farmer-owned and led.

This opens the doors to helpful collaboration that may lead to benefits such as agreeing to carry each other's products in on-farm stores or other storefronts, sharing access to specialized equipment, knowledge sharing, combining orders to fill a refrigerated truck together or scaling up together to use their fulfillment power to open new market opportunities.

If the original intention of having a centralized brick-and-mortar food hub is realized, we feel it will be most successful if the initiative is a farmer-led venture with support from Kansas Rural Center and like-minded partners. Many of these farmers and partners are recipients of Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure (RFSI) and the Business Builder grants from  Heartland Regional Food Business Center. These funds are intended to help scale up farmers' businesses to support local, resilient food systems. The development of a cohort is underway with these farmers as the initial thought leaders, shaping the way. They're joining together to see how these businesses can envision their growth and expansion by working with other like-minded farmers across the Central Kansas region. Currently, the "Central Food Cohort" is meeting via Zoom and has occasional in-person get-togethers with the goal of getting more people lined up to help one another grow and enhance their businesses. As this group of farmers builds their network, they look forward to extending their collaboration beyond central Kansas and even the state.

The next in-person gathering will be July 29, from 1-3 pm at the Local Food Summit in Salina. If you want more information, are interested in getting involved, or want to help spread the word please check out our website at https://www.kansasruralcenter.org/foodhub and you can reach out to Teresa Kelly, Food Value Chain Coordinator at KRC.

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