Editor’s note: This is part of a series of stories called “Feeding Solutions” about efforts to address hunger and health issues in Kansas.
Go to the produce aisle of most grocery stores, and odds are the fruits and vegetables have traveled hundreds, if not thousands of miles.
Most of that food is harvested on farms that operate on an industrial scale before it’s loaded into refrigerated semis for distribution.
That lettuce? Probably comes from California. Bananas? Most are from Mexico. Potatoes? Idaho is a likely source.
These existing supply chains present a challenge for small farmers who want to sell what they grow to local consumers. It’s hard to sell locally grown heirloom tomatoes to large grocery chains that buy produce by the truckload.
“A lot of entry points for new farmers are farmers markets,” said Katie Nixon, who owns and operates Green Gate Farm in Wheatland, Missouri, with her husband, Ken. “That’s pretty good for a while, but you kind of get stuck there.”
Fifteen years ago, Nixon started exploring what it would take to help farmers in the Kansas City region get their food to a larger market. As an advocate working for Lincoln University Cooperative Extension, she had seen firsthand that many farmers struggle to sell the food they grow at a fair price.
“There weren’t a lot of options if you wanted to go wholesale,” Nixon said. “It’s tough. People wanted local food, but distribution companies weren’t focused on it. There was some of that happening, but a lot of farmers didn’t have access.”
Her solution? Create a food hub. This idea didn’t come out of the blue. At the time, regional food hubs — which collect, market and distribute food from small and midsize regional farms — were flourishing across the United States.
One study showed that between 2007 and 2014, the number of food hubs had increased nearly 300%. Some were nonprofit organizations, others were for-profit businesses, still others were cooperatives. Despite this growth, the Kansas City region, home to the American Royal and former headquarters of the Future Farmers of America, had yet to fully embrace the trend.
In addition to farmers markets, small farms — defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as those grossing less than $350,000 a year — can also sell straight to the consumer through community supported agriculture (CSA) subscriptions that give individuals a weekly or monthly bag of produce in exchange for an upfront investment.
Nixon’s vision, coupled with her stamina and ability to build a coalition of organizations dedicated to sustainable agriculture and healthy eating, would provide small to midsize farmers with another option. The work eventually paid off. In 2016, Nixon, who by then had started her own farm, joined four other growers to launch the Kansas City Food Hub, a farmer-owned and operated cooperative that strives to introduce local food into the Kansas City region’s supply chain.
By the end of its first growing season, with an additional 11 farmers coming on board, the Food Hub reached $30,000 in sales. Today, 10 years later, the Food Hub has grown to 47 farmers. Last year, it sold $610,000 of produce, meat, eggs and dairy.
That figure pales next to the millions in food sales the Kansas City region generates every year. But the Food Hub isn’t trying to compete with large distributors and chains. It’s comfortable with its status as an underdog in the world of Big Food.
Instead, the Food Hub aims to promote sustainable farming; give consumers greater access to healthy, local food; and give farmworkers the opportunity to make a better living. It operates on a human scale, not an industrial scale, said Nixon, the Food Hub’s board president. “It’s bringing dignity to the food system.”
Katie Nixon, who owns and operates Green Gate Farm in Wheatland, Missouri, joined four other growers to launch the Kansas City Food Hub, a farmer-owned and operated cooperative that strives to introduce local food into the Kansas City region’s supply chain.
Averting disasters
Communities across Kansas also struggle to get fresh local food to consumers. Never mind that the state boasts the sixth-largest agricultural economy in the United States, the vast majority of its farmland is devoted to commodity crops like wheat, soybeans, corn and sorghum.
“There are so few small, local farms in Kansas,” said Tricia Jenkins, assistant professor of urban food systems at Kansas State University Olathe.
Jenkins studies the resiliency of food systems, specifically how they can promote food security and healthier eating habits for everyone. Food hubs that support small farms and deliver fresh, healthy food to their communities are a crucial part of that system.
Jenkins notes that Kansas is beginning to explore the utility of food hubs to aggregate and market fresh local food. The Kansas Rural Center in Wichita is launching a working group to study how to best implement a food hub in central Kansas. Piccalilli Farm in Riley County is drawing on a federal grant to build a storage facility that will allow it to expand its ability to aggregate produce and dairy products from other farmers that it sells online.
The Kansas City Food Hub, however, is by far the largest of its kind in the region, Jenkins said. Yet it represents only a very small share of the overall food market.
“We’ll never be able to grow enough food to support Kansas City’s population with all locally grown food,” Jenkins said. “But what a food hub really can do is it can touch on those aspects of food security.”
Local and urban food systems, she said, are strengthened by the connections forged among food hubs, farmers, food banks, farmers markets, schools and nonprofits that support sustainable agriculture. “There is all this connective tissue and social capital between food hubs, growers, nonprofits and neighborhood groups that can quickly respond to crises and get people fed,” Jenkins said. “I think social ties are typically undervalued, but critical in disaster scenarios.”
The COVID-19 pandemic, for example, underscored how food hubs can respond more quickly to crises than the massive and less nimble global supply chain that delivers the vast majority of food to American consumers. Across the country, food quickly disappeared from shelves as weeks of panic-buying set in. Grocery stores put limits on food purchases.
Meanwhile, many food hubs, including Kansas City’s, were hit hard. “We basically lost all of our customers, mainly corporate cafeterias and food boxes for their employees, overnight,” Nixon said.
But the KC Food Hub was small enough that it could quickly pivot to a different model. Within days, it drew on its network of community partners to recruit “neighborhood captains” who got food boxes to individual residents. At its peak, the new system was delivering 450 boxes a week.
Was this profitable for the Food Hub? Probably not, Nixon said. But what’s important is the farmers were compensated. The food they’d grown did not become compost. “We put our farmers first,” Nixon adds. “It costs money to do that. But it also creates so many benefits for communities.”
Nixon, the food hub’s board president, says the venture is bringing dignity to the food system.
The tricky art of scaling up
On paper, building a regional food hub sounds straightforward: Give farmers a place to bring their food; market that food to customers who want to buy local produce; then safely store and transport the food to those customers.
In practice, building that system from scratch and then maintaining it is complicated.
Nixon discovered just how complicated in the early years of trying to get the Food Hub off the ground. To start, she had to build a coalition of interested parties, most of them nonprofit organizations dedicated to promoting healthy eating or sustainable farming. “My nature is 100% collaborative,” Nixon said. “Every time I’m working on something, if I’m alone I feel uncomfortable. There have been so many people that have created this.”
Further, to persuade farmers to join the hub, Nixon knew that the coalition would have to demonstrate that a strong market for local food existed. To that end, the coalition conducted a feasibility study — surveying prospective customers, including area corporations, schools, restaurants and grocers — that revealed there was at least a $125 million demand.
This was an encouraging figure. But Nixon and others knew such a sizable demand would far outstrip the initial capacity. Small and medium-sized farmers simply could not begin producing that amount of food overnight. To meet the demand coming from larger institutions, many of these farmers would have to grow more food or target their production to the kind of food the market wanted.
“It’s tricky to scale up,” Nixon said. “The logistics are really complicated and expensive.” A school may want locally grown lettuce but farmers may not have exactly what the school wants. “Is it mixed lettuce? Head lettuce? What quantities do they want? A case? A bushel? Do they want it from a safety certified farmer? We had six meetings with one school before they even made one purchase.”
There were also concerns among some farmers that a food hub would compete with their direct-to-consumer sales at farmers markets and through CSAs. Others didn’t know if they could consistently meet the cosmetic demands from wholesale buyers — to grow, for example, uniform and perfectly shaped cucumbers. What would they do with the curved, funky shapes that don’t deter the typical customer at a farmers market?
Despite these concerns, a survey of farmers indicated that about 20 were interested in participating in the food hub. They were all invited to a meeting. Only seven showed up. But that was enough for the organizers to move forward. In 2016, even after two of those seven farmers dropped out, the remaining five, including Nixon, who had recently started her farming business, joined forces and created the cooperative.
Jacob Thomas of JET Produce and Meats near Leavenworth inspects his cucumber plants for mites near Leavenworth. His farm was one of the first to join the Kansas City Food Hub.
Hard to keep up
Organizers of food hubs are under no illusion that their efforts can address all the challenges small farmers face. A seismic shift in federal agriculture policies would be required.
As it stands, those policies have long delivered a disproportionate amount of subsidies to the largest farms and wealthiest farmers — those making at least $1 million a year. In 2024, for example, those high-income earners and corporate-owned farms accounted for 8% of all farms, yet received nearly 50% of all subsidies. Most of these farms grow non-perishable commodity crops that are traded on global markets. The grains, beans and rice they grow are distributed by such agribusiness giants as Cargill and Archer-Daniels-Midland.
“Healthy food is still categorized as a specialty crop under the USDA definition,” Nixon said, “whereas it should be defined as an essential part of our diet.”
The National Family Farm Coalition, a Washington, D.C., advocacy organization, notes that the country’s food system has never seen this level of inequity. “The U.S. food system today is considered by most standards to be more concentrated than at any point in the last century around a handful of multinational corporations and their subsidiaries.”
This concentration extends to grocery stores. For example, the top three grocery retailers in Kansas — Walmart, Kroger and Hy-Vee — accounted for 63% of the state’s market in 2023. Contrast that with 2000, when the top three retailers -– Four B Corp., Fleming Co. Inc. and Hy-Vee – represented just 26% of the market.
As a handful of retailers grabs more and more of the grocery market, those chains are able to purchase food in larger and larger quantities at lower prices. Distributors are able to deliver that food safely in larger quantities. This means those at the front end of that supply chain, the farmers, must grow and find ways to store their produce in larger quantities. And they must accept the prices set by national behemoths.
Most small, specialty farmers can’t keep up. And even if they could, they would have no bargaining power. “Farmers are always price takers and not price makers,” Nixon said. “The company is going to tell you what they can pay for your product, and you’re going to have to make it work.”
The KC Food Hub is designed to be an intermediary in the marketplace to help small to midsize farmers compete in the retail market on a scale that gives them access to customers who agree to buy produce in sufficient quantities that will allow for higher profit margins.
Thomas Smith, the KC Food Hub’s chief business officer, notes that Walmart is not only the largest grocer in Kansas, but in the United States. “They have so much control over the consumer,” Smith said. “But more importantly they have control over the producers, who have to grow bigger and bigger quantities.”
Walmart, he said, isn’t going to buy carrots from a one-acre urban farm like the Food Hub does. “We are trying to think of pounds of carrots. Walmart is thinking of truckloads, semis and fleets of semis.”
The food hub is an essential part of JET’s business model.
The Thomases started their farm in 2012 on a half-acre.
The farm has doubled in size almost every year since.
As with all participating farmers, the Thomases follow a routine that the Food Hub has refined over the years.
Difficult without it
Jacob Thomas, who, with his wife, Jennifer, owns JET Produce and Meats in Leavenworth County, would like to see all subsidies disappear. “Let the free market decide what should be grown and not,” he said. “If you had the free market growing food, there wouldn’t be as many corn and soybeans grown. In the short term it would be really tough but in the long term it makes more sense.”
The Thomases started their farm in 2012 on a half-acre. The next year they expanded to an acre. The farm has doubled in size almost every year since. Today, about half of its 30 acres is used to grow produce, everything from greens to broccoli, sweet corn to squash. The other half supports a modest livestock operation, with cattle, chickens, ewes and hogs.
Jacob Thomas learned in the first four years that the challenge of continually expanding the farm and selling more food to more people couldn’t be sustained. He and Jennifer could only go to so many farmers markets. In 2016, they were among the first farms to participate in the Food Hub.
“I joined because I couldn’t be at more than one place all the time,” Thomas said.
Although he has experienced ups and downs with the Food Hub — especially during the pandemic when two of the Food Hub’s largest corporate customers dropped out — Thomas and his wife have come to rely on it for about 15% of the farm’s total revenue. During peak season last year, it sold 3,000 to 4,000 pounds of produce through the hub. The rest of their sales come from their on-farm store, farmers markets, and sales to a few restaurants.
But the Food Hub has been an essential part of JET’s business model. “It would’ve been very difficult to continue growing without it.”
As with all participating farmers, the Thomases follow a routine that the Food Hub has refined over the years. Every Monday during the growing season (which can extend from early spring to well into the winter) farmers list their products for sale on the Food Hub’s online ordering system. From Tuesday to Thursday, buyers select what they want.
The Food Hub staff then sends “pick tickets” to the farmers letting them know what they need to harvest. By the following Monday, the farmers bring their food or value-added products, such as jams or baked goods, to the Food Hub’s site in Kansas City, Missouri. There the food is placed in cold storage and sorted until it is delivered in refrigerated trucks from Tuesday to Thursday.
Thomas said that system would be impossible to duplicate if he were to attempt to market and deliver the food to wholesale buyers himself. “I tried to sell to Price Chopper on my own for a couple years but didn’t have the on-farm facilities to do that,” he said. “One advantage of the Food Hub was better cold storage facilities.”
Those storage facilities — not to mention the four full-time staff needed for marketing, sorting, storing and delivering the food — don’t come cheap. The Food Hub is committed to giving 80% of its revenue back to the farmer. But the remaining 20% is not enough to sustain its operations. For this reason, it has to seek alternative funding through USDA grants and partnerships with nonprofits.
With supplemental funds like those, the Food Hub is able to hire staff to help expand its market and operations. This year, for example, it aims to add more drivers and trucks to its delivery fleet.
Smith, embracing his role as chief business officer, envisions a future where the Food Hub relies less on grants and more on the revenue it generates to fund its operations. That will require scaling up. To that end, he is exploring creating food hubs in other communities, such as Topeka and East St. Louis, Illinois.
Technology will also play a role. Smith notes that in the 1970s it would have been impossible to sell food from more than 40 farmers to more than 40 school districts. “You’d have to be calling every day and keeping track of everything on a paper spreadsheet,” he said. “Now, with the website, communication is seamless. You can build efficient systems to bridge this divide.”
Technological advances give Smith hope that the Food Hub can continue to grow and become less of an underdog in the broader wholesale market. Walmart, he notes, took just three decades to dominate the grocery market. “The same can happen with the local food system, if we bring the same resources and tenacity to the table.”
It would likely take years before Smith’s vision could be fulfilled. Meanwhile, Nixon does not expect that the Food Hub will break even anytime soon. Nevertheless, she isn’t overly concerned. “If we could hit $2 million in sales, we’d be a lot closer,” she said.
As long as it can shrink the cost of doing business through continued growth, it will demonstrate its value to the community and, she hopes, get the attention of more buyers.
“This is an investment in the community,” she said. “You’re not going to get the payback in terms of money but you will in terms of healthy farmers and healthy food for people to eat.”
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