In an extremely challenging year for producers and consumers alike, Field to Family put local food on more plates than ever before. We are immensely proud of the new efforts, creative adaptations and successful operations that helped us grow momentum surrounding local foods and make positive change in our local food system.
Flip through to learn more about our 2020-21 accomplishments.
Creating Connections
When Iowa City’s beloved farmers market was canceled, we reached out to the City of Iowa City to discuss how we could support their efforts to create safe access to local farmers and vendors. The result: a contact-free Online Farmers Market that allowed vendors and shoppers to connect in a brand new way. This was our first foray into direct-to-consumer sales and proved to be a massive, challenging and extremely rewarding undertaking. In partnership with the Iowa City Department of Parks and Recreation, we fulfilled 11,026 orders from May to October, putting $485,256 directly into vendors’ pockets.
In response to customer and vendor demand, we decided to continue offering an Online Farmers Market for five weeks in November and December, which has enhanced opportunities to buy and sell local food during the winter months.
We have also worked hard to connect community members to the farmers growing their food in several other ways, including our searchable online local food database, an in-depth guide to accessing local foods during the pandemic and by introducing our audience to local farmers through creative storytelling. In 2021, Field to Family continued offering an Online Farmers Market with a new partnership with Johnson County. Packing for cold storage products was fulfilled as before, at our warehouse, with dry food packing at the old Carfax building owned by Johnson County. Distribution was at the Health and Human Services Building parking ramp, all within a few hundred feet of our office.
Expanding Access
The pandemic had a swift and severe impact on food security worldwide, including in our community. In April and May 2020, we addressed a sudden and immediate produce shortage at food pantries by reassigning funding for our Farm Stands program to provide free weekly deliveries of locally-sourced fresh foods to five local food assistance agencies: Coralville Community Food Pantry, the North Liberty Community Pantry, the Solon Community Food Pantry, ICCompassion and the Domestic Violence Intervention Program. In all we delivered 2354 pounds of fresh food over six weeks, purchasing some of our farmers’ last remaining storage crops from 2019 and first spring crops of 2020.
Our Farm Stands Program, which provided free seasonally available whole local foods to food insecure households in Johnson County operated from June to November in 2020, with the extension thanks to donations by Online Farmers Market Customers. In all, we distributed 6,600 pounds of food to 859 households in pre-assembled food boxes at 12 locations in Johnson County. Compared to 2019, we reached 12 more households and distributed nearly twice as much food by weight.
Field to Family also provided increased support to food access programs and agencies that continues today. The Coralville Food Pantry purchased more fresh, local produce from our hub than in previous years. We worked with Johnson County Social Services to provide funding to CommUnity to purchase from Field to Family for their mobile food pantry. Throughout the summer, we worked with schools and pantries to put local food into free school lunches provided through the extended Summer Food Service Program program. We successfully applied for a permit from the USDA to accept SNAP as payment for our Online Farmers Market customers and continue to do so in 2022.
Distributing Delicious
While our Food Hub work increased with the addition of a direct to consumer channel, we continued to provide wholesale local food orders to institutional customers in 2020 and 2021, increasing sales from 2019 despite challenges posed by the pandemic. Converting to an online sales platform made facilitating orders more convenient for our customers, while we diversified product offerings to include dairy, a big hit for our school partners.
By 2021, in all, we procured food from local food from 26 local farmers and distributed local food orders to 31 institutional customers, including k-12 schools, early care centers, colleges and universities, restaurants and food access agencies.
Field to Family also forayed into direct-to-consumer sales for the first time, lending support and infrastructure to the regular-season Online Farmers Markets, then taking the markets in-house in November 2020-2021.
Supporting Farm to School Education
Due to schools closing in mid-March 2020, we had to cancel our Farm to School annual educational events, including in-school Farmer Fairs for students and our School Garden Workshop for educators. However, we were able to transform in-person plans into digital content. In addition, we partnered with Iowa Valley Resource Conservation & Development to create a Farm to Classroom Resource Portal, which includes digital resources to help educators and producers bring the farm to the classroom and collaborate, even when in-person visits aren’t an option.
We continued putting local food on school lunch menus as well, connecting with several new school customers. On Iowa Local Food Day, we provided local food and educational materials for nine school districts, private schools and early care centers, more than twice as many as in 2019. We provided regular local food deliveries throughout the summer and fall for many of these school customers, too. In all, in 2021, we increased PK-12 farm to school procurement 65% from 2019 levels!
Building Infrastructure and Organizational Capacity
The growth we saw in 2020 would not have been possible had we not been able to expand our infrastructure and organizational capacity. In May 2020, we doubled our full-time staff with two new hires, who have helped us expand our reach in new and existing endeavors. We also recruited volunteers to receive, pack and distribute Online Farmers Market orders. Additionally, we have received support from individual donors like never before, with 232 donating to our program work as well as becoming “Friends” of FIeld to Family.
We also adopted an online sales platform, essential for both farmers market and wholesale customers, and built up other infrastructure as well. Moving our entire operations was no small feat, but in doing so, we greatly expanded our dry storage space, was able to move our cold storage walk-in cooler inside allowing year-round use and used a 22-foot box truck on numerous occasions in order to meet growing demand with excellent food safety practices. Additionally, while Field to Family continues to partner with Table to Table to share space, we now have our own entrance and storefront at Pepperwood Plaza.
Field to Family’s staff capacity reduced in late 2021 due to life changes and new opportunities for Giselle Bruskewitz, Julia Poska and Ben Dolan. We hired Emily Roberts as our new Operations Manager, and maintained seasonal support staff to help fill the gaps, while our Executive Director Michelle Kenyon took on new responsibilities managing the day to day as well as providing organizational leadership. Olivia Bohlmann, originally hired as a seasonal part-time support staff was promoted to permanent part-time Operations Associate and we recruited a back-up driver, Kyla Christensen-Szalanski, to help on the big delivery days. Michelle, Emily, Olivia and Kyla are currently on Field to Family’s staff as of today (May of 2022).
We are proud of our impact, but much work remains in order to create the community-based food system we envision: one that makes it easy for us to eat with the seasons, for farmers to make a living and for our food to be grown in diverse, abundant and healthy ecosystems.
If you are inspired to help us maintain and grow our momentum in 2023, join us by making a donation.