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Coastside farms are coming together to create a regional food hub, a move that will shorten the agriculture supply chain, combat food waste and connect small- and medium-scale farms to online retailers, institutions, school districts and hospitals.
Brisa Ranch, a small organic farm in Pescadero, began a partnership with Kitchen Table Advisors, San Mateo Resource Conservation District and Tomkat Ranch Educational Foundation in 2022 and applied to the USDA Local Food Promotion Program planning grant, which was awarded in 2023. While it’s still in the planning phase and does not yet have a name, Brisa Ranch co-founder Verónica Mazariegos-Anastassiou said the regional food hub has “already started.”
“Maybe it doesn’t have its own name, and maybe it’s attached to Farms Together, but for me, ultimately what a food hub is is the logistics side to farming,” she said.
Farms Together is a statewide effort developed by the California Association of Food Banks, Fresh Approach and the Community Alliance with Family Farmers to connect small and mid-scale farms to food banks. Brisa Ranch, along with eight other farms, began participating in the program last month, working together to provide food on a weekly basis to the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank for at least six months. Mazariegos-Anastassiou thinks of Pescadero Farms Together as a pilot program for the Pescadero food hub.
“As an individual farm, but also increasingly connecting the other farms in the area, we’ve been working with other food hubs,” she said. “Pescadero Farms Together is its own project, but we’re already seeing how it’s opening avenues for us to collaborate with fellow hubs and fellow regions of production.”
Some of these food hubs include FEED Cooperative in Sonoma County and Capay Valley Farm Shop in Capay Valley, and farms partnering with Brisa Ranch include Fifth Crow Farm, Blue House Farm, R&R Fresh Farms and Rancho Las Palmas.
Mazariegos-Anastassiou explained oftentimes small-and medium-scale farms focus on community supported agriculture and farmers markets.
“Although those are great models for certain farms, if we’re going to see a revival of our agriculture region, we need to think about how our area can be producing for our regional foodshed, and that means selling to (large) businesses, not only to restaurants,” she said.
Larger institutions, organizations and companies, however, will want a large quantity of product, something a small farm cannot deliver on its own.
“If we come together and we bring our product together, now it makes more sense for them to source locally,” Mazariegos-Anastassiou said.
Additionally, a food hub allows farms to share infrastructure to process food on site, resulting in a decrease in food waste. Sharing the marketing responsibilities also allows farmers to focus on growing and producing and lowers the barrier to entry for farmers looking to start their own businesses.
“As a farmer, we have to do it all,” Mazariegos-Anastassiou said. “We have to grow the food, which is just part of what we’re doing. We’re managing land and resources. And so having an entity for those farms that don’t necessarily want to take on the entire marketing of their products, this would be an easy outlet.”
Perhaps most importantly, a food hub replaces the need for a distribution company, shortening the agriculture supply chain, resulting in more local food and higher profit for farmers. Some local farms predominantly sell to distribution companies in Salinas or Watsonville for very low prices, said Mazariegos-Anastassiou.
“Many people experienced during the pandemic our over-reliance on very long supply chains and how easily they can be disrupted when we rely on food that’s coming from far away,” she said. “And so I feel a food hub is also investing in our regional food sources.”
Mazariegos-Anastassiou said the next step is to meet again with producers in the summer to share findings and research.
