Building a Better Remote Food System

Frontier Food Hub Offers Solutions for Rural Farmers, School Kitchens, Food Pantry Managers, and Home Chefs Across Southwest New Mexico

By Jennifer C. Olson · Photos by Stephanie Cameron

De Colores Farms napa cabbage at the Frontier Food Hub.

Let’s say you farm. After a few years of experience as a farmworker and after starting a family, you decide to start your own operation. You buy a plot of land and move to a new place, a rural village that’s nearly forty miles from a population hub serving the roughly thirty thousand residents of a tri-county area. You plant what intrigues you, what you expect will grow and, ultimately, sell. It’s just you, your partner, and your ten-year-old working the land, harvesting and packing the crops, and selling the food. The local farmers market is held twice a week, and before each market day, your three pairs of hands feverishly pick, wash, and load every ripened vegetable into your truck. When the bell signals the market’s opening, you pray for customers. The last thing you want is to haul these vegetables home, and there’s no other outlet for a small-scale farmer like yourself. If only there were a way to guarantee sales, feed thankful mouths, waste nothing, and earn a living growing food.

Let’s say you cook in a school. The kitchen budget is tight—only a couple dollars to feed each hungry head. The community demands fresh and healthy meals for its children. The list of ingredients fitting both bills is short. If only you could score some squash from so-and-so’s parents, a big bunch of herbs from the garden down the road, and a slab of locally raised meat.

Let’s say you manage a food pantry. You know how many people would go hungry without the services you provide. You feel indebted to the Roadrunner Food Bank for its constancy and reliability. You strive to supply your clients with the healthiest food possible and yet, economically, cannot quite get everyone what you want for them.

Let’s say you like to eat. You value food, like exploring new flavors, and appreciate a beautiful slicing tomato, ripened on the vine instead of in a truck.

Priscilla Garcia-Franzoni is that farmer. Hannah Dumas is that school chef. Jennifer Metzler is that food pantry manager. People like you and me are the eaters who dream of perfectly ripe, unbruised fruit and locally grown vegetables. And Frontier Food Hub was specifically born to turn each of these wishes into reality.

With a mission to grow the local food economy, improve food access, and reduce food insecurity, Frontier Food Hub is expanding according to the needs of southwest New Mexico’s community. Or, as its manager, Ben Rasmussen, would say, “Our organizational focus is identifying the challenges and issues of frontier communities and developing solutions.”

In 2018, Frontier Food Hub launched under the National Center for Frontier Communities, a 501(c)3 nonprofit headquartered in Silver City. Along with Rasmussen, Frontier Food Hub goes round thanks to the work of driver Gay Hedges, online sales guru Johannes Lenser, and sales and logistics chief John Song. “We work with dozens of growers around the region and state and provide a lot of different services. Our main service is that we aggregate, market, and distribute locally grown food,” explained Rasmussen. The impetus was to provide growers in remote areas access to larger markets around the state, in part by running a community supported agriculture subscription box. “We’re able to track market data, and provide crop planning and consultations with growers on how to grow or expand their business to meet market demands. We’re able to consolidate data and offer them planting schedules and advice on which varieties are most in demand and how to price,” Rasmussen said.

Ben Rasmussen and his son Dominic at the Frontier Food Hub.

For the Growers

Garcia-Franzoni owns Datura Farms in Buckhorn, growing tomatoes, chiles, squashes, and cucumbers. With nine years’ experience, she is in her second season running her own farm. Coming from a larger, more connected market, she reached out to Rasmussen last year upon discovering the lack of places to sell her produce. “He looked at the land and agreed to buy what we had to offer. I cut my farmers market days to one and everything else goes to the food hub,” she said.

The coordination between growers and Frontier Food Hub happens on a predictable schedule, but there’s flexibility when farmers ask for it. “A week before, one of the coordinators will ask what we have available. Once we get that email, we gauge to see if we can offer fourteen pints of chiles or twenty pounds of beefsteak tomatoes,” Garcia-Franzoni said. “Every Tuesday, we harvest early in the morning, package and label everything. Then I meet them at The Commons [Center for Food Security and Sustainability] for delivery.”

Of the two thousand pounds of food Datura Farms grew last year, Frontier Food Hub bought six hundred. This year, Garcia-Franzoni is doubling production. “Knowing what the food hub will buy gives me an idea of what seeds to invest in and how many beds to prepare. Last year, I was guessing and buying seed,” she said.

Frontier Food Hub’s community supported agriculture (CSA) subscription box program is exciting for farmers, not only because of the stable check but because it links them to the local food community. “At the Wednesday market, I didn’t know if I’d make $60 or $200. Now, when I have this amount of produce, I know I will make this amount. The food hub pays fair prices,” said Garcia-Franzoni, who likes knowing that what she grows still goes to local households.

She said Frontier Food Hub is an important help to farmers. “Ben takes time to talk to me about the projects, the successes, and the areas of improvement. He gives me the heads-up about grant opportunities, even offering help with specific grants. I’m going into this new business and don’t know what to expect, so the food hub gives me that security and sense of community.”

Frontier Food Hub also accepts liability of all the products it sells, educates growers on best practices, and facilitates the processes and certifications growers must adopt to enter new markets. For example, two on-staff certified food safety trainers train school growers in food safety considerations both before and after harvest—from composting and water sources to hygiene, sanitation, and food storage.

The Commons in Silver City.

For the Schools

Schools are markets that individual growers have had trouble breaking into because of insurance and liability barriers. Frontier Food Hub funnels local foods to about half a dozen school kitchens regularly. “The food hub inspects farms and then assumes liability. They fall under our umbrella,” Rasmussen said. While the USDA Farm to School grant enabled Frontier Food Hub to kick off many of the school market relationships and bring more awareness of food production to youngsters, most of the business today is conducted through the New Mexico Grown Farm to School Program, which allocates funds for schools to purchase locally grown food. Rasmussen said both programs sustain growers economically while introducing students to farm-fresh foods.

Hannah Dumas is the kitchen manager at the Guadalupe Montessori School in Silver City, and her kitchen also serves Aldo Leopold Charter School each fall through spring. During the school year, they plate an average of 175 lunches per day and provide snacks to the Montessori children, who most enjoy biting into locally grown fruit and vegetables from the shade of their school garden.

“Whenever I’m going to be featuring an item that’s going to be served in the raw, like tomatoes,” Dumas said, “what I know the hub will provide is flavor. Plus, the nutrients are higher and we’re also getting a good price.” She also sources local pinto beans and cornmeal through Frontier Food Hub. The cornmeal, made from both blue and yellow corn, is grown outside Tamaya, so “the kids are getting exposed to this cornbread that’s this beautiful lilac color.”

In Dumas’s view, having delicious and beautiful meals makes the students’ eating experience feel special, more gourmet. “They’re getting cilantro and chopped chives—things you wouldn’t expect to see on a school lunch plate. The younger ones are forming their palates. We hope that they continue to expect beautiful produce as part of each meal they eat.”

Logistically, sourcing through the food hub is a piece of cake, Dumas said. “They’re accommodating. They’re great communicators. They deliver straight to the school. They’re not only connecting schools with farms but helping farmers jump through the hoops to be on the New Mexico Grown Grants approved supplier list, which allows me to then purchase from these farms.”

Left: Priscilla Garcia-Franzoni at Datura Farms. Top Right: Grounds at The Commons in Silver City. Bottom right: Entrance to Datura Farms in Buckhorn. 

For Our Tables

Through food pantries, Frontier Food Hub distributes thousands of pounds of locally grown produce and contributes healthy bulk-food items, also supporting fundraising initiatives to improve the quality and quantity of foods that get distributed. “Folks that utilize food pantries should get high-quality, healthy staple foods every time they visit. It shouldn’t be a luxury,” Rasmussen said.

In the past, when a grower like Garcia-Franzoni didn’t sell out at a farmers market, the alternative was either donating or composting the rest of that week’s harvest. Now, on certain market dates, Frontier Food Hub will purchase all participating farmers’ leftover produce at regular market prices for distribution for free at local food pantries. “It’s key that we’re nimble and responsive,” Rasmussen said.

Operating out of rented space at The Commons, Frontier Food Hub has a convenient line to the food pantry. “They have a real understanding of what’s fresh and wholesome and actually provides a good basis for a meal versus a bunch of random ingredients tossed in a box that people may not be able to use,” said Jennifer Metzler, program manager for the food pantry at The Commons.

To be less reliant on food banks that are hours away, the two organizations are assembling a new cold-food storage facility at The Commons this summer while working toward creating a local warehouse. “It would give us more control over our inventory of healthy food, not just for the CSA program but for our client neighbors,” Metzler said.

Along the same lines of bringing farm-fresh produce within everyone’s reach, the Frontier Food Hub CSA program accepts SNAP EBT cards from subscribers. “Accessibility is important, because local food can be seen as more expensive and elitist or only available to people who have extra money to spend,” Rasmussen said.

A win-win arrangement, CSA subscribers might even be receiving food grown by their friends and neighbors, overzealous gardeners or beginning farmers who aren’t ready to wholesale their goods. While the USDA defines a very small farm as one doing under $250,000 in sales, Frontier Food Hub works with people farming on even a microscale. “We mean all the way to backyard growers,” Rasmussen said. “As long as we’re able to trace their products and ensure food safety, we can incorporate their food into our subscription boxes at very low prices.”

In addition to ensuring that sixty CSA customers can have confidence in the mushrooms and lettuce that they find in their weekly boxes, Frontier Food Hub aims to reduce the burden of access for farmers—and even those who would be farmers if they had the right support. Assuming some of the risk for farmers by providing insurance and quality control, Frontier Food Hub allows CSA subscribers to enjoy the benefits of local food production.

On top of all that, Frontier Food Hub staff and volunteers manage the Southwest New Mexico Seed Library and engage in food policy advocacy alongside the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition and the New Mexico Food & Agriculture Policy Council.

For Community

While working to improve the Southwest’s remote food system, Frontier Food Hub invites others to follow. “We’re demonstrating that there’s huge benefit, both social and economic, to operating a food hub and working to further connect the remote food system,” Rasmussen said. “We created a Frontier Food Hub Tool Kit designed to help other remote communities.”

And while they may be a model program, Frontier Food Hub also learns from, shares resources between, and partners with the several other food hubs across New Mexico. Another key partner is the New Mexico Farmers’ Marketing Association, which has opened school markets, works with the approved supplier list, runs the state Double Up Food Bucks program, and administers the USDA Regional Food System Partnership to strengthen the viability and resilience of regional food economies through collaboration and coordination.

“We don’t exist in a vacuum,” Rasmussen acknowledged. “The more connected we can be, the better it works out for individual food hubs, growers, and buyers.”