HARDWICK, Vt. (WCAX) – An expanded food hub in Caledonia County is aimed at helping Vermont farms find new markets for their products.
Delivery drivers were busy on Tuesday morning at the new Hardwick Food Hub unloading milk from a local farm.
“Our trucks are going out to the farms picking up the product and delivering them to schools, hospitals, farmstands,” explained Jon Ramsay with the Center for an Agricultural Economy.
The hub started in 2018 but operations began out of the new facility last month. Ramsay says they’re taking in items like apples, ice cream, and even hops on a daily basis.
Before the product is delivered, it comes to the hub’s 22,000-square-foot facility. Last year they moved roughly 4.5 million pounds of local food off farms to stores and businesses throughout the state.
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“Tuesday through Saturday – that’s what’s happening every day here — it’s about $40,000 a day coming through this space here for local farms,” Ramsay said.
Megen Hall with Riverside Farm is among those who use the hub to get products to local food shelves, which means an expanded reach throughout the state. “It’s hard to have the kind of markets that it has to really make a big income on a small scale level, but to have other avenues for sales is really great,” she said.
In response to the Trump administration’s recent $2 million in cuts to local food programs, Ramsay says that gives the hub an even larger role to play in keeping those partnerships running. “It’s really tied to local food access, farm viability, and keeping our working landscape active and open — that is all part of the equation for how Vermont is going to do that in the future.”
The hub will install a solar array in the coming months to serve as a model for other eco-friendly spaces in the future.
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