Linking Local Farms and Institutions in the Chippewa Valley
In the March/April '09 issue of Pea Soup, we wrote about the Chippewa Valley Buy Local Consortium, a model for institutional partnership with local food producers. While the consortium had already begun delivering local food to Sacred Heart Hospital in Eau Claire, it was still working on becoming a legal entity.
The consortium is now a co-op! The official launch of the Producers & Buyers Co-op took place June 12 at the Eau Claire Area Chamber of Commerce Breakfast in the Valley.
The Co-op facilitates buying and selling for farmers in 12 counties in the Chippewa Valley region. Sacred Heart Hospital is a founding partner in the project and committed 10% of its $2 million food budget to purchasing local food products in order to provide a market to help the organization get off the ground.
“Having a stable market price allows me to do more long-range planning with my farm operation,” said Darrel Lorch of Lorcrest Farms, Inc., in Blair, Wisconsin. Lorch also serves as an ad hoc member of the Co-op board.
The Co-op intends to bring new buyers on board as products are sourced and serves institutions such as schools, universities, colleges, hospitals, and businesses that provide cafeteria services.
Currently, the Co-op is working to facilitate the production and purchase of locally produced meats (beef, pork, chicken, fish) fruits & vegetables, dairy & eggs, dry goods, and other locally-produced food.
“Support of the Co-op helps rebuild the local processing infrastructure (i.e. for processing meats, dairy, etc.), and expand local food production by providing a stable market.” said Co-op coordinator Mary C. Anderson*, a value-added farmer with extensive direct sales experience.
The idea for the Co-op began in January 2008, when representatives from River Country RC&D and Sacred Heart Hospital met with area farmers at the Midwest Value Added Agricultural Conference and Wisconsin Local Food Summit. In June 2008, Sacred Heart CEO Steve Ronstrom, pledged 10% of the hospital’s $2 million food budget to buying local food. On July 17 a Buy Local Buy Wisconsin grant was awarded to River Country RC&D to pioneer the best way to get local food to local institutions.
After many planning meetings with local farmers, March 26, 2009 marked the State’s formalization of Articles of Incorporation to create the Producers & Buyers Co-op.
To date, the Producers & Buyers Co-op facilitated the purchase over 26,000 pounds of locally grown product from over 14 local rural communities.
“There have been profound changes over the past century for farm families and rural communities, and in the 1990s alone Wisconsin lost almost 40% of its dairy farms. It’s our responsibility to buy local food to support our local agriculture industry,” said Rick Beckler, Co-op organizer and Sacred Heart Hospital’s Director of Hospitality Services. “We have had an outpouring of warm compliments on our food from patients, our Meals on Wheels patrons and employees.”
*Mary Anderson email: Mary.Anderson@rcdnet.
UPDATE 11/09/09 - The
first annual meeting of the Producers & Buyers Co-op will be held
November 10 at 6 p.m. at Sacred Heart Hospital’s Community Auditorium
(900 West Clairemont Ave.) and the public is invited. Members will
elect new officers and approve bylaws and have opportunities to share
the organization’s recent success and future goals and taste local food
products. Please RSVP by calling (715) 579-5013. A reception will begin
at 6 p.m. and the program will begin at 6:30 p.m.
The annual Co-op meeting will provide information on membership opportunities for farmers and processors, and institutions.
A Model for an Institutional Partnership with Local Food Producers - Initiated by Sacred Heart Hospital of Eau Claire, WI
When Rick Beckler came to the 2008 Midwest Value Added Ag Conference and WI Local Food Summit, he 
was a man with a mission. That mission: score some local food for Eau Claire’s Sacred Heart Hospital, where he works as Hospitality Services Director.
Among Rick’s responsibilities is purchasing the hospital’s food with a budget of over $2 million each year. He had purchased local food in the past, but the barriers of seasonal production, transportation, processing, delivery and pricing were slowing his ability to make progress. In one of the final sessions of the conference, Rick stood up and addressed the farmers. “I’ve got $2 million to spend on food – does anyone here want a piece of that?” Needless to say, he got their attention.
I was very excited to see the Sacred Heart Hospital display at this year’s Value Added Conference, and motivated enough by my conversation with Rick to come to the 7am presentation. The question I had come to the conference with was, “How do we overcome the barriers to establish local/regional food systems?” While some speakers focused on more research to find out what is happening on the ground, which could then be used to steer public policy, here was a group that came together through a perfect storm of circumstances to create a new model for local food systems. They began working on the bugs of their new model by proceeding with buying and selling rather than waiting for politicians and researchers. If you build it, they will come, indeed!
After the ’08 Local Food Summit, Sacred Heart Hospital partnered with River Country RC&D, (a local not-for-profit with over 10 years experience in value-added agriculture) and began hosting focus groups and planning meetings with farmers to develop the infrastructure to channel local products into institutions. In late February funding for local food initiatives became available through the newly state-funded Buy Local Buy Wisconsin Grant.
By the time the grant was announced the group had two weeks to put the application together to meet the deadline. Pam Herdrich of River Country RC&D was the primary writer of the grant application, the goal being the creation of the Chippewa Valley Buy Local Consortium, which would bring together farms and institutions who wish to sell and purchase food locally. Sacred Heart hospital pledged up to 10% of it’s $2 million food budget to purchasing local food, and committed in-kind support of $15,000 in matching funds in the form of staff, supplies and support.
While waiting to hear about the grant, the Steering Committee decided to begin “working-out-the-bugs” by starting with delivery of beef products to Sacred Heart. For example, institutional buyers such as Sacred Heart have had the convenience of ordering on a Monday and receiving on Wednesday. To begin the local ordering process, a date needs to be set with a local state inspected processor and it may take a few days to a few weeks. And as industrial buyers typically use a number of the same cuts, the chefs at the hospital needed to fine-tune the menus to use available cuts.
In June the Steering Committee received notice that they would receive the grant. They proceeded to work with farmers to grow chicken and pork and beef that met the basic requirements to sell into the project. This allowed more time to coordinate processing dates before fall, when additional processing dates are unavailable. Also in June, the first delivery of local product by the consortium to the hospital was made;
a whole steer from Lorcrest Farms of Blair, Wisconsin.
On July 17, Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle visited Sacred Heart Hospital to announce the statewide “Buy Local, Buy Wisconsin” (BLBW) grant awards during a hospital delivery of food from local farmers. Governor Doyle chose Eau Claire as the city to announce the grants due to the innovative partnership being created between Sacred Heart Hospital and River Country RC&D, presenting a check to RC for $41,660.
The grant officially launched the Chippewa Valley Buy Local Consortium. A kind of buying club, the Consortium employs an experienced coordinator, Mary C. Anderson1. Mary worked for River Country RC&D for 10+ years and has extensive experience coordinating and developing sustainable agriculture and community based programs. She is also a farmer with her own State license for meat production, and has personal and extensive direct experience in product quality and safety.
As Coordinator, Mary facilitates buying and selling by reaching out to farmers in the Chippewa Valley. The Consortium facilitates the task of finding 
and developing local food sources, organizes the process of buying and selling, and inviting other area institutions to buy local food, manages product orders from institutions, fills orders and coordinates deliveries.
Receiving the grant was a great boost to the group’s efforts, but the job ahead was mind-boggling. There was no model for a local/regional food system to service institutions in the state of Wisconsin. It was up to this group of farmers, River Country, Sacred Heart Hospital and the newly created Consortium to figure out the next steps.
By December the General Structure and Operating guidelines for the consortium were completed. They created a work flowchart to identify all the players and steps between farm and fork, as well as an organizational chart.
Currently the Consortium is working on becoming a legal entity. “We have been advised that this looks like a multi stakeholder cooperative,” says Mary. “The pros are that it is set up to have people enter and exit the co-op easily, any profits can be funneled back to the memberships; cons are that it might be slower to make changes (not as nimble when issues arise). We have been actively looking for funding all along but we are not counting on any additional grant dollars to launch; we are hoping to be self sustaining through membership and transaction fees.”
Why would a hospital be willing to overcome the many barriers to purchasing local food when they could just put in one order to a national food service distributor and have everything delivered just they way they need it when they want it?
“We wish to provide patients and employees fresh food products with greater nutrition, a longer shelf life and reduce fuel/transport costs,” says Steve Ronstrom, CEO of Sacred Heart Hospital. “Following our historic Franciscan Mission to benefit and support our community, we wish to further invest in the local economy to provide additional community jobs and encourage sustainable agriculture.”
“The hospital’s commitment to purchasing local products provides a ready-made market that reduces need for farmers to advertise and reduces the risk to farmers in expanding their production,” said Rich Purdy, PhD, president, River Country. “With other regional buyers participating someday–hospitals, universities and even public schools–the local economic impact will be significant.”
There is another motivation for buying local that isn’t often talked about. Because they participate in disaster planning, whether physical disaster or a possible pandemic, hospitals have to think about things most people don’t want to.
“When considering any kind of disaster”, explains Rick Beckler, “we must have 3 days of product on hand and know who is going to service us. If our water supply was gone, we have back-ups on contract for water to be trucked to us. But what do we have locally to supply us if food delivery comes to a halt - because everything now is coming in on jet or truck? Knowing we have local production capabilities and have the avenues to access these products is very important to us.”
In other words, if a pandemic or natural disaster were to shut down transportation in the middle of winter, the hospital needs to have a plan for how it will feed its patients. And so should any institution, whether it be a nursing home, school or prison. Developing these local connections and infrastructure now not only grows our local economies (independent of what is happening in the larger economy), it is essential to our food security.
What is happening here in the Driftless Region and how can we learn from the example of leadership in the Chippewa Valley? Who might the players be?
In the Sept. 08 issue of PeaSoup, Rufus Hauke2 informed us of a new venture started last year under the umbrella name of Keewaydin Organics, marketing & distributing produce from 15 other local farms in order to provide a more stable supply of local, organic product to meet the growing demand for local food.
The Farm Food Initiative, facilitated by the Valley Stewardship Network3 has been working on local food issues for almost a year now. They are very interested in seeing how they could apply the lessons of the Chippewa Valley Buy Local Consortium here in the Driftless Region.
The goals of the Food & Farm Initiative are to improve access to healthy, locally produced foods for all members of the community; strengthen the economic viability of regional agriculture; and resolve market barriers to local producers. “Consumers like you and me and food purchasing institutions like schools and hospitals in the Driftless Area spend $208 million buying food from outside of the region every year,” says Jessica Luhning, VSN Projects Coordinator.
“We are losing $208 million in potential wealth every year that could be recirculated in our communities to keep our diversified, family farms viable and our citizens healthy. We have the resources in our farmers and our knowledgeable citizens; our biggest challenge will be funding for a project of this scale. If the community will support a project like this, the Valley Stewardship Network would love to have a seat at the table. The key here is community support.”
Vernon Memorial Healthcare (VMH)4 would also be interested in the opportunity to work with a consortium of producers to explore the various options for purchasing food locally. “Quality, value, access and cost are key considerations in any decisions we make on behalf of our patients,” according to VMH Chief Executive Officer, Garith Steiner. “VMH recently approached Sibby’s Organic Zone about having their ice cream available in our restaurant, The Grille and on the menu for our hospital inpatients,” he said.
The Chippewa Consortium funding came through a Buy Local Buy WI grant. But “although the BLBW program passed in the 07-09 budget, the grant program was not slated for permanent funding,” says Teresa Cuperus of the WI Dept. of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP)5. “DATCP believes this was a technical error in the budget process and we hope to fix it during the current budget cycle.
We will know the status of the BLBW grant program with the passing of the FY10-FY11 budget later this spring/early summer. If the grant program continues, I would anticipate the next call for proposals in the fall of 09.” There are other possilbilities for funding which Teresa can direct interested parties to.
The Consortium put their group together and applied for a grant in less than two months. Can the Driftless be ready to rock and roll in six?
by Charlene Elderkin, Marketing & Membership Manager, Viroqua Food Cooperative
1 Mary Anderson, Mary.Anderson@rcdnet.
2 (608)606-0666, rufus@keewaydinfarms.com
3 (608)637-3615, jessicavsn@frontiernet.net
4 jsteiner@vmh.org
5 (608)224-5101, Teresa.Cuperus@wisconsin.gov