Penn State University Farm-to-Table Program
• Laura Young - Farmer, Young American Growers; Farmers Market
Manager, North Atherton Farmers Market
• Lisa Wandel - Director, PSU Residential Dining Services
• John Mondock - Purchasing Director, PSU Residential Dining Services:
865-6386
March 28, 2012 Update
From left, John Mondock, Lisa Wandel, Mick Kodner, Bob Ricketts, Laura
Young
Laura Young kicked off the meeting - held at her and Jay's house - with
some background about the January 12 meeting at Penn State’s residential
dining offices, highlighting a main idea that came out of that meeting:
Penn State food buyers are very interested in buying more local food, and
eager to meet farmers halfway to make it happen. They’re even open to
adjusting current practices to deal constructively with problems that
emerge while the relationships develop. They just want to get started.
Laura Young kicked off the meeting - held at her and Jay's house - with
some background about the January 12 meeting at Penn State’s residential
dining offices, highlighting a main idea that came out of that meeting:
Penn State food buyers are very interested in buying more local food, and
eager to meet farmers halfway to make it happen. They’re even open to
adjusting current practices to deal constructively with problems that
emerge while the relationships develop. They just want to get started.
Laura said she contacted a lot of local vendors through her local food
networks and that those present were just the “tip of the iceberg” of
farmers who may be interested in selling to Penn State to help stabilize
their incomes with a steady, reliable market, especially for food not being
sold at farmers markets.
The participants included: Jay and Laura Young, Lisa Wandel, John
Mondock, Chuck Mothersbaugh and Marie Hornbein (Mothersbaugh Farm
in Spring Mills), Jim Eisenstein (Jade Family Farm in Port Royal), Mark
Ardry (Ardry Farm in Howard), Janet Robinson (The Piper’s Peck in
Bellefonte and the State College Friday Downtown Farmers Market),
Emmanuel Zucker (Sunset Valley Farm in Perry County), Harold Kreider
(Kreider Farm in Thompsontown), Levi Ash (Spring Mills), Jacob and Sara
Stoltzfus (Spring Mills), Mark Maloney (Greenmoore Gardens in Port
Matilda), Bob Ricketts (Fasta Pasta in State College), Mick Kodner
(Dancing Creek Farm in Port Royal), Dave Cranage (PSU Hospitality
program, Café Laura), Jeremy Bean (PSU Campus Sustainability Office).
Lisa and John said 14,000 students live on campus, eating in five dining
halls open seven days a week from 7 a.m. to 1 a.m. Their office also buys
food for 11 commonwealth campuses, serving another 14,000 customers.
And students are getting more interested in seasonal, local foods, especially
roasted vegetables, especially Brussels sprouts (introduced last fall to
enthusiastic consumption).
BIDDING - Bid sheets go out by fax Mondays and Thursdays, listing
pounds of each item sought. Bids from vendors are due by 9 a.m. Tuesday
for Friday delivery, and by 9 a.m. Friday for Tuesday delivery (the
purchasing office is staffed 6 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.)
Most produce is currently purchased from wholesale vendors around the
state, who buy it from producers at auction. After the bids are accepted,
non-winning vendors can call in to find out what the winning bid was, as a
way of estimating price points for the next round. Payment turnaround
averages 14 days. (Even though the winning bids aren’t available to anyone
who hasn’t placed a bid, John said he could put together average prices for
the previous month, to provide ballpark figures for farmers trying to figure
out if bidding is worth it for their available products.)
John said that although Penn State buyers can pay a small percentage
premium for PA-produced food, they might not be able to pay farmers
market prices. But since currently produce is bought from vendors who buy
at wholesale auctions where local farmers already sell some of their nonfarmers-market produce, prices will probably be comparable.
Crop overages can be quickly and easily absorbed by the scale of the
biweekly purchases, rather than rotting, to be composted or turned back
under the field. There’s even a market for over-ripe or blemished produce;
kitchen staff often make spaghetti sauce and salsa from just-past-prime
tomatoes, in an effort to reduce waste and wring every bit of nutrition from
students' meal plan dollars banked in August each year.
TRANSPORTATION - Residential dining has a central warehouse, which
could be the drop point for farmers’ deliveries, or, if it’s easier, they could
deliver to the dining hall that’s going to use the delivered food. Farmers
could also partner with each other, to pool their products and make one
delivery on behalf of several farms. The central warehouse is open for
deliveries Monday through Fridays 7 a.m. to 2 p.m.; individual dining halls
are staffed daily from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Food must be packed in closed boxes for stacking in coolers. For other
packaging and handling standards, Dave Cranage has a 16-page “standard
operating procedures” document he used when selling Rock Springs farm
produce to dining halls when it wasn't needed for Café Laura. He’s happy
to share it with farmers considering selling to Penn State. And the
university is more than willing to save boxes for farmers to pick up and
reuse for the next delivery, to save on packaging costs.
Delivery drivers also already stop to pick up some supplies (although not
yet fresh produce) while they’re driving across the state between campuses,
because they’re going past anyway. So pick-up might be another option for
farmers unable to arrange their own deliveries, depending on how far they
are from established delivery routes.
CUSTOM GROWING – John and Lisa said they’d also be interested in
working with farmers to arrange custom growing, planning ahead together
in January and February so farmers can buy seeds and prepare fields to
grow crops for the dining halls and sell them at a pre-arranged price, “like a
giant CSA.” Staff are currently preparing menus for the Fall 2012
semester, Lisa noted – menus are planned far in advance and are also
flexible enough to deal with variable crop productivity.
CHICKEN PROCESSING – Penn State must buy USDA-inspected chicken,
but there are no USDA inspection facilities in the Centre region. So there’s
a need for a stationary or mobile unit, perhaps owned by a cooperative of
farmers, able to run it one or two days per month and freeze the chicken for
sale to PSU.
DAIRY - Dairy products for the University Park campus are all purchased
from the Creamery, but the commonwealth campuses purchase from
outside vendors, so farmers closer to, say, Harrisburg, could put in bids to
supply the Harrisburg kitchens.
FOOD HUB VISION - Dave also mentioned that he’s obtained software
useful for organizing a food hub: a single, warehouse-style building to
facilitate food commerce. Using the software, farmers could get online and
post that they have 300 pounds of tomatoes for sale; restaurant buyers
could review available produce, and place an order for, say, 200 pounds,
while home cooks could also access the site and order smaller household
quantities.
Farmers would then deliver all produce ordered to a single location, where
buyers would come to pick it up. The facility could also house CSA farm
deliveries and pick-ups. Farmers markets could set up in there for all-
weather sales. There could be value-added facilities for food processing,
and facilities for restaurants to drop off compostable scraps and farmers to
pick up finished compost.
MAIN POINT - “Pretty much anything we grow, it’s worth asking,” said
Laura, summing it up. “It never hurts to ask.”
If you’re a farmer interested in selling to Penn State, or know one, the
primary contact person is John Mondock. Call him at 865-6386.
BACKGROUND - PSU Farm-to-Table - January 2012 Updates
January 12, 2012 - There was a vigorous discussion at the offices of Penn
State’s residential dining program about what Penn State is already doing
to put local and Pennsylvania-raised food on student plates, and how to
build on those successes to support more local farmers and cook more
locally grown meals.
The group included Jim Eisenstein, Laura Young, Lisa Wandel, Jim
Richard, John Mondock, Diane Byron Imbruglia, Erik Foley and Jeremy
Bean (affiliations listed at bottom of page) Upshot? There’s a lot of
potential to build a very strong local food system around the university,
and the foundations are already in place, making it much easier to set up a
virtuous circle.
Farmers who sell some of their available produce at good market prices to
a reliable year-round buyer gain a new stream of stable income; vendors
are generally paid within two weeks of billing the residential dining
purchasing office. Steady income supports farmer efforts to grow more
food, build season extension structures like hoop houses and greenhouses,
and build up the market for local food. Penn State gets an increasingly
resilient local supply of food for the kitchens, plus more opportunities for
students to get to know the farmers growing their food. And the symbiosis
opens up more opportunities for old-farmer conservation and new-farmer
cultivation through mentoring relationships.
The key to success (paraphrasing Jim Richard) is developing stable,
symbiotic, trusting relationships between farmers, Penn State food buyers
and possibly local farm consortium organizers.
Main Points:
1) At Penn State, Diane, John, Jim and Lisa have already done a lot
of the work to clear away hurdles for local farmers interested in
selling food to Penn State. They’re extremely enthusiastic about
working through remaining hurdles, and – as an auxiliary organization
fully funded by students enrolled in meal plans - they have the
administrative flexibility to do it, by adapting menus to match seasonal
supplies and helping farmers coordinate regulatory compliance on things
like food-grade packaging, closed-vehicle transportation and product
traceability.
2) Penn State buys a lot of food, and orders go out to bid twice a week for
Tuesday and Friday deliveries. So even though menus are planned
months in advance, they can be changed on the fly to deal with
the inevitable variability in farming weather and production – to
use up bumper crops at risk of rottting in the field if not eaten quickly, and
to substitute other foods when field conditions delay or ruin local crops.
3) The purchasing system can absorb very small lots into the
supply stream. For example, Penn State dining hall customers eat – on
average, about 4,200 pounds of tomatoes each week. If a local farmer has
100 pounds of tomatoes to sell in a given week, he or she can contact Diane
to supply those 100 pounds, and Diane can buy the 100 pounds and order
the rest of the tomatoes from other local farms or suppliers outside the
area. (Diane said size standards for tomatoes are more rigid than for other
produce – tomatoes have to be the right size for the slicers in the kitchens,
and packaged in easily stackable boxes for efficient inventory storage &
stock rotation. Size standards for other foods are much more flexible.)
4) Farmers’ market managers are already in a good position to
gather and funnel information about crop status and seasonal
production trends to Penn State buyers, to guide menu planning
week by week. And Penn State buyers and chefs are already
interested in working with individual farmers to build crop
calendars guiding seasonal menus, and even incorporate food
preservation and pickling into meal planning to help the local food supply
last long after the central Pennsylvania growing season.
5) Many farms that already participate in area farmers markets already
have the insurance coverage required to comply with Penn State’s
standards.
6) The Campus Sustainability Office stands ready to facilitate as needed
with meeting arrangements, policy drafting, etc.
7) The enormous size of the Penn State dining services market
and buying power paradoxically means farmers committed to
diversified, sustainable crop management don’t have to
monocrop. Small producers can sell the university a small fraction of the
supply needed by the Penn State kitchens - whatever those local farmers
aren't selling to their current customer base - and Penn State can purchase
the rest from other sources while creating systemic incentives for small
farms to continue expanding local capacity.
Current Local Food Buying at Penn State
PA-produced items account for 13.7% of total food service purchases. 16%
of total purchases are counted as "local" and "green," including
compostable and recyclable non-food items which are not necessarily PAproduced. Currently, about 0.3% of the food purchased for the
dining halls is Pennsylvania-grown fresh produce.
During bidding rounds twice each week, vendors can supply two bids for
each item – one out-of-state price, one in-state price - and the buyers
have the budget flexibility to preferentially choose Pennsylvania
products, giving vendors incentive to source food in-state.
Through a partnership between Café Laura, students in the Hotel,
Restaurant & Institutional Management 430 class, and a fertile 2-acre
garden at Penn State’s Rock Springs horticulture facilities, Penn State
students, faculty and staff coordinate crop production, delivery and
preparation for on-campus meals. The program was developed and
implemented by Dave Cranage and Scott King. During the peak summer
growing season, residential dining staffers reach out to the Café
Laura/Horticulture Farm program to buy surplus produce and build
menus around those ingredients.
The residential dining staff also sets up special dining hall events every
semester, featuring Tait Farm, Harner Farm and other local producers.
Buying More Local Food - Obstacles and Opportunities
“One of our major hurdles is finding potential local vendors,”
John Mondock said. “We are certainly willing to meet with any and all
vendors that may have questions or want to gain more knowledge about
Housing and Food Services and our needs. We are willing to work
individually with any vendor to develop a good working relationship.”
For the local farming community, Penn State standing ready to buy as few
as 20 pounds of produce at a time from a single farm is “huge," Laura
Young said. "That’s so easy to step into.”
Lisa Wandel said she’d love to see a local farmers' consortium created, to
handle insurance, bidding, refrigerated storage, inventory control and
transportation to the dining halls, allowing farmers to keep their main
focus and time allocation on farming, and make deliveries at their
convenience to a single central location.
Young said that might be a good project for the students in the Penn
State Community Food Security Club: writing grants to create a food hub
organization that could aggregate food from many small farms and
organize it for sale to Penn State dining halls.
And, Jim Eisenstein pointed out, there’s already a good regional model for
structuring such a farm consortium: Tuscarora Organic Growers based in
the Juniata Valley, with 20+ years of experience coordinating production,
packaging, inspections and distribution for local organic farms supplying
regional restaurants here and in the Washington DC area.
In the meantime, buyers at the university are more than happy to set up
arrangements so individual farmers can make small batch deliveries to a
single dining hall.
If you’re an interested farmer, reach out to them. They’re eager to work
with you.
Penn State’s Standards for Products of Pennsylvania:
• Call John Mondock for more information. (But if you raise fresh produce
or livestock in Pennsylvania, you probably qualify.)
Insurance policies must include:
• Indemnification;
• Commercial General Liability insurance not less than $1,000,000 per
occurrence, listing The University as an Additional Insured
• Automobile Liability insurance not less than $500,000 per accident
• Statutory Workers' Compensation in accordance with governing law (or
qualify as a self-insurer), and $500,000 per accident of Employers'
Liability insurance.
January 17, 2012 - In conversations over the last few days, it’s become clear
that one of the remaining hurdles to more local farmers selling fruits,
veggies, meats and other foods to the Penn State residential dining halls is
the price differential.
Right now, small-scale farming – organic and sustainable – is more
expensive* than large-scale agribusiness (* if ecological costs aren’t
counted).
Those price pressures will go into reverse as fuel prices rise – especially
against declining family income – raising the costs to produce food with
intensive inputs of fertilizer and pesticide, and distribute food longdistances, above the costs to grow food small and local.
But those gears haven’t shifted yet, so we’re kind of in a race against the
clock to keep sustainable farmers in business long enough for markets to
reach and cross that inflection point.
Laura Young, Market Manager for the North Atherton Farmers Market,
provided some feedback to Penn State food service buyers after last week’s
meeting.
Information about cost points that you have could also be helpful to us.
The food sold at a farmers market tends to be sold at a higher cost than
what it is sold for at grocery stores and likely what you are able to get
through a huge supplier…Our costs tend to be higher because of our
mortgages and the cost of land and the fact that since we are doing things
on such a small scale, we get very little price breaks like the big guys do.
The other half of this issue is that even though many of us are not certified
organic, we are working in a sustainable way which often costs more –
ironically. So – this is a hurdle we’ll need to jump over as well as a group –
but I don’t think it’s insurmountable.
Lisa Wandel and John Mondock agreed that pricing may be a concern –
they can pay a little more for Pennsylvania-preferred, but probably not
farmers market prices.
Maybe the place to start building the university’s farm-to-table flow is with
crops that farmers would otherwise lose – especially when there’s surplus
that their regular customer base can’t absorb. If the choice is between no
money because the crop is rotting in the field, and some money from
selling to Penn State – which can purchase large amounts on short notice –
selling the surplus seems like a better option.
But – it brings up the labor hurdle. If it’s not even worth the farmers’ time
to harvest surplus produce because they’re too busy cultivating and
harvesting the regular crops that they already have markets for, then the
system needs a fast-response volunteer picking team – maybe
students and staff – to get into the fields and harvest for the Penn State
sale when the opportunities pop up.
The main thing is for farmers interested in working with Penn State to give
them a call or send them an email, and keep the conversation going.
Who's involved?
• Laura Young (young.lfs@gmail.com) - Market Manager of the 30vendor North Atherton Farmers Market and farmer at Young
American Growers goat & perennial flower farm; bloger at WPSU’s
Local Food Journey.
• Jim Richard (jer5@psu.edu) - Assistant Director of Residential Dining at
Penn State (South Halls Manager);
• John Mondock (xjm4@psu.edu) - Director of Purchasing, Residential
Dining at Penn State – Buyer for proteins (beef, pork, chicken),
staples (beans, grains), dairy and frozen vegetables;
• Lisa Wandel (lsw1@psu.edu) - Director of Residential Dining at Penn
State;
• Diane Byron Imbruglia (dkb4@psu.edu) Purchasing Agent, Residential
Dining at Penn State – Buyer for fresh fruits and vegetables, and
nonfood items (tableware, paper goods, etc.)
• Jeremy Bean (jeb261@psu.edu) - Education Program Associate at
the Penn State Campus Sustainability Office;
• Jim Eisenstein (j3e@psu.edu) - Retired PSU professor, current “unpaid
farmhand” at Jade Family Farm (organic CSA), and blogger
at WPSU’s Local Food Journey;
• Dave Cranage (dac2@psu.edu) - PSU Hotel, Restaurant & Institutional
Management Program; Organizer, Café Laura project.