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People In Your Neighborhood
Tool to strengthen and coordinate Hudson Valley agriculture
by Philip Ehrensaft
American consumers are increasingly inclined to buy food from local, identifiable sources, produced with environmentally sustainable practices, and preferably from family farms as opposed to large-scale agribusiness. There are many farmers who would be all too glad to oblige them.
But there's a frequent disconnect that prevents those mutual desires from being realized. That disconnect is the lack of an agricultural transportation, warehousing, processing and distribution infrastructure that can cost-effectively move local, source-identified farm products to the buyers who want them. Our food system is predominantly organized by large-scale agribusinesses that run a fine-honed network for collecting, processing and distributing farm products to supermarket chains, large institutional purchasers like cafeterias in public institutions, or major private companies.
In effect, farmers can build the baseball fields, and many consumers want to sit in the stands, but the infrastructure for getting the two parties together is weak. One rapidly growing organizational tool for merging the two parties is a “food hub,” a combination farm marketing, farm family support, and often community-building tool that is being actively analyzed and encouraged by the United States Department of Agriculture.
The Hudson Valley Food Hubs Initiative, a policy research project sponsored by the New World Foundation's Local Economies Project, is one of the most ambitious and thorough investigations to date of this new way of linking farmers and consumers. The lead researcher, Sarah Brannen, from Upstream Advisers in Poughkeepsie, has produced a must-read analysis not only for Hudson Valley citizens focusing on agriculture, and economic development in general, but for a national audience as well. localeconomies-hv.org/food-system/food-hub
That's by virtue of Brannen's combing the experiences of food hubs nationally, choosing 12 for looking at best practices, and seeing how these lessons might or might not apply in Hudson Valley circumstances. The Hudson Valley is a region with one of the highest potentials for food hubs to link local producers and consumers, and thus bears national attention.
The Valley still has plenty of good agricultural land that hasn't been paved over; much of the land is suitable for high value per acre, sustainably produced fruits and vegetables, or craft dairy and meat production; the Valley is one of the only regions of New York with substantial population growth, and a relatively high proportion of its consumers are inclined to buy local, source-identified food; it is next door to the country's largest single food market, where there's also high enthusiasm for sustainably produced local food, not to mention copious vitamin pills and herbal supplements to counter the lousy air and sheer stress of the place.
So precisely what is this “food hub” beast? And how effective can it be in building up effective transportation, storage, processing and marketing links between local farmers who want to produce source-identified food rather than anonymous commodities shipped into the agribusiness system, and regional consumers who would like to buy what farmers want to produce?
A new national USDA research report—The Role of Food Hubs in Local Food Marketing by James Matson, Martha Sullins and Chris Cook—first cites a working definition of a farm hub: “a business or organization that actively manages the aggregation, distribution and marketing of source-identified food products primarily from local and regional producers to strengthen their ability to satisfy wholesale, retail and institutional demand.”
Then Matson, Sullins and Cook immediately nuance the definition on two counts: 1) Community-building and environmentalism. Many hubs evolved from educational or social missions to bring consumers and producers together. Besides selling local foods, they educate buyers about the importance of retaining food dollars in the local economy, and conserving farmland; 2) Virtual organizations. In this Internet era, very functional hubs exist that do not consist of brick and mortar facilities; rather, they “live” primarily in a virtual context and are thus able to transmit information quickly among local buyers and sellers.
So food hubs assume diverse organizational forms in pursuing a core mandate of linking local producers and consumers, ranging from private for-profit companies delivering to wholesalers and large institutions, and on to community nonprofits facilitating direct contact, both economic and social between farmers and local consumers, and a strong emphasis on helping small and medium-sized family farms survive and thrive in a food system tilted towards big farms.
Among the 168 food hubs that were studied by the USDA researchers, there were 67 private companies, 54 nonprofit organizations, 36 cooperatives, 8 publicly held companies, and 3 informal arrangement. Criss-crossing these ownership forms, there was also diverse targeting of clientele: 70 focused on farm sales to businesses or institutions; 60 focused on sales to consumers; and 38 did both.
Foods hubs are an experiment in progress. Sixty percent of hubs inventoried by the USDA have existed for less than five years, another nine percent for six to ten years, and only nine percent for 29 years or more.
Brannen's mandate was to take a systematic look at how each of these diverse approaches to organizing food hubs might or might not work well to advance farming in the Hudson Valley. The report pulls together a very large body of information on the 3,100 farms working 474,00 acres, and generating $322 million gross farm sales in the nine counties along the Hudson River from Westchester and Rockland through Columbia, Greene, and Sullivan counties—in addition to the New York City food market's potential for Hudson Valley farming. Brannen also interviewed 117 farmers and food business people; organized seven food hub listening sessions involving 200+ people, and assembled an impressive expert advisory board to give her advice and feedback as she proceeded. One also has the distinct impression that she read every study, major and minor, of the food hub experience in the US.
One surprise in the Hudson Valley Food Hubs Initiativereport, a well-founded surprise, is its conclusion that projects for creating a big, central regional food hub for the Valley would not be an optimal move. Given the diverse nature of farming here, sales and distribution networks are equally diverse. One size does not fit all, as it might, for example, if Illinois and Iowa organic corn and soybean farmers wanted to band together to reach adjacent urban markets. In the Hudson Valley, farmers and merchants in the fruit, vegetable, dairy, meat and poultry sub-sectors are already performing some typical farm hub functions appropriate for their quite different respective sectors. This ranges from direct farm sales and farmers' markets to Community Supported Agriculture, and on to farmer co-ops and farmers using their own trucks for delivery to local retailers.
With respect to existing food-hub-equivalent arrangements for reaching individual consumers and small retailers, Brannen advocates solidifying and extending what has already started.
In contrast, a new effort is needed for building organizations that overcome predominantly weak links between the Valley's farmers and the large-scale purchasers who are the big sluggers in our current food system. That includes big supermarkets and food wholesalers, food services in the Valley's large private firms, and big public institutions like hospitals or schools. This will require building new capacities, like on-farm quality controlled packing of produce, and especially recruiting management and sales people who know how deal with the big purchasers. Given increasing consumer preferences for local source-identified food, and the desire of the big purchasers to make money delivering what consumers want, that can be done.
Above all, Hudson Valley citizens' organizations must make it very clear to their governments, nonprofits, and large private firms that they want firm commitments to buy local, source-identified food.
Vassar's Powerhouse Festival kicks off its 29th edition
by Philip Ehrensaft
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| Chloe Sevigny in Abigail/1702. © Vassar & NYSF / Buck Lewis. |
Industrial incubators are key organizations for local economic development. They offer low-cost space, communications facilities, and expert advice to young enterprises that will hopefully grow up into pillars of the regional economy. The Powerhouse Theater Festival, a partnership between the nonprofit organization New York Stage and Film and Vassar College, is a parallel incubator for the Big Apple's theater scene. Its mission is to provide a setting and resources where playwrights, directors, actors and staging specialists can develop new works, free from the usual commercial and daily living pressures. The development stages range from first readings of scripts in progress, all the way through fully staged productions of dramas and musicals.
Powerhouse began as a modest festival in 1985, presenting three staged plays and three script readings. The name of the festival comes from the conversion of Vassar's old electric generation plant into one fine theater. Now Powerhouse involves 200+ New York City theater professionals, plus 49 students following an intensive apprenticeship program. They live and work at Vassar College during June and July, and kick off a performance calendar running from June 21through July 28.
As one actress put it during a post-play discussion between audience members and performers, interchanges are one of the most attractive parts of the Powerhouse experience: Vassar College and New York Stage and Film have created a wonderful summer camp for the New York City theater world—a camp where actors can actively collaborate with writers and directors in shaping new works, as opposed to receiving a finished script and learning one's part. For authors, this brings us nicely back to Shakespeare's time, when such mutuality was the norm.
Powerhouse is spearheaded by two people: the producing director, Vassar's Ed Cheetham, and New York Stage and Film's artistic director, Johanna Pfaelzer. Cheetham is a local boy from Wappingers Falls who went on to study theater at Niagara University. He considers himself very fortunate, given the precarious theater employment market, to have landed this plum but very demanding job—and back home in the Hudson Valley to boot. It took long, hard work to get there: after graduating with a drama degree from Niagara University in 1987, Cheetham was hired as an assistant to Powerhouse's producing director in 1988, returned in 1991 as an apprentice director, then returned in various roles every summer from 1999 onward, and was named producing director in 2006.
Cheetham actually has two demanding jobs in the Powerhouse Festival. First, as producing director, he has to make the whole ball of wax work: the physical and administrative infrastructure, and the logistics of everything from housing artists to opening nights. If the theater world is anything like the opera world that I know, that can often be the equivalent of trying to herd cats.
Second, Cheetham also directs Powerhouse's intensive internship training program. Performances of three different plays are the public face of this program. This year, the 49 carefully selected interns will perform an ancient classic, Agamemnon by Aeschylus; Shakespeare's As You Like It; and a modern classic, Frederico Garcia Lorca's Blood Wedding. Behind the scenes, the interns are getting classes in all the dimensions of the theater world: writing, directing, stage design, the theater business and on. If they want to spend their life in theater, they see the full range of possibilities. The most important part of their training, however, is likely informal occasions like BBQ dinners where they can interact with the top professional writers, directors or actors taking part in the festival.
To my eyes and ears, intern performances were highlight events in the 2012 Powerhouse Festival, and that's saying a great deal, given the high caliber of the professional productions. These talented, hard-working student artists, directed by professionals who love to teach, bring exceptional energy to the stage. The internship performances are free to the public, all the more incentive to take them in.
Powerhouse interns are also trained in Soundpainting, Woodstock-based composer Walter Thompson's invention of a gestural vocabulary for directing on-the-spot composition of music, intertwined with visual arts, dancing and literature. Late Thursday evening Soundpainting performances start on July 4 at Vassar's Lehman-Loeb Art Center. We'll get a chance to see why this Hudson Valley invention sparked an international Soundpainting movement.
As Powerhouse's artistic director, Johanna Pfaelzer must read through a plethora of scripts and proposals before making hard choices about what gets on the festival calendar. That calendar includes two Mainstageproductions that are in the final stages of development, and ready after the 2013 Festival performances to shop themselves as candidates for runs on Broadway, or Broadway's Off and Off-Off variants.
Downtown Race Riot by two Broadway veterans, writer Seth Zvi Rosenfeld and director Scott Elliot, looks at the hard choices that an 18-year-old must make in the face of a Washington Square race riot compounded by tribal loyalties and petty beefs. When the Lights Went Out centers around six interwoven stories about experiences during the Northeast electric blackout of 2003. This is a debut for the Iraqi-American playwright Mozhan Marno; One of the six stories focuses on an Iraqi immigrant making her way across the Brooklyn Bridge, chasing memories of her lost son and homeland.
Bright Star, the first of two fully staged musicals for 2013, features bluegrass-tinged music co-composed by star actor Steve Martin, who also wrote the book. You best buy tickets early on for this musical set in the Blue Ridge Mountains. A Musical Inspired by the Brooklyn Hero Supply Company is based on characters created by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman. A superhero's daughter does not want the cape passed on, and is ready and willing to exchange roles with an idealistic young Brooklynite who longs for super-herodom. Who else but Chabon would dream up something like that?
The Inside Looks series features two semi-staged workshops. Found is a musical loosely inspired by the life of Found magazine editor Davy Rothbart, who must choose between his cherished, wild road life of discovery, and settling down with the love of his life, a school teacher. Mother of Invention unfolds as an aging Dottie Rupp is moved into assisted living by her children. Mom's memory is failing, a mysterious stranger shows up, and the offspring start wondering whether the mom they thought they knew might have a very different history.
Powerhouse 2013 begins and ends with a weekend of readings of plays in first drafts. The Readings Festival has no admission charge, but the venue is small, so it's best to reserve a place in advance. This intimacy offers maximum opportunities to interact with authors, learn different approaches to making drama work, and offer feedback that improves their work.
If you are looking for a good at-home vacation in Stubborn Recession times, devoting your free time to the nationally prominent Powerhouse Theater Festival is a fine option. The same goes for anyone who loves theater or wants to discover theater. We have a national resource in our own backyard.
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