Playing middle-woman

As an 18-year-old, Noelle Ferdon was “blown away” by the abundance of fresh fruit and vegetables at the Saturday farmers’ market in downtown Chico.

She was studying political science at Chico State, not yet immersed in agriculture as she is today. But even then, Ferdon was interested in food, and not just in preparing and eating it. She wanted to know where the food came from, who was buying it, and what sorts of underlying connections made it all happen.

So it feels natural for her, nearly two decades later, to be on the verge of launching the North Valley Food Hub, a new organization connecting local growers to wholesale buyers with the ultimate goal of taking the local food movement to new heights in the tri-county area.

Ferdon, now 36, was born in Houston, Texas, and then lived in Indiana before enrolling at Chico State, she said during a recent interview. From there, she studied public interest and environmental law at Golden Gate University in San Francisco. After earning her law degree at age 25, she wasn’t sure where it would take her, but she knew she wouldn’t become an attorney.

“I don’t like to argue,” she explained. “I don’t mind being persuasive when I need to be, but lawyers like to argue, and that wasn’t where I wanted to be.

“I was really moved by agriculture,” she continued. “I knew that I had a public-interest spirit, a ‘fight the good fight’ kind of energy about my life, and I’ve always loved the history of agriculture and the connection to the communities in our region. So, working in food systems was a path I wanted to go down.”

Ferdon started along that path by moving back to Chico and co-founding Slow Food Shasta-Cascade, part of the international counter-movement to fast-food culture. She subsequently landed a job with the national policy organization Food & Water Watch, helping establish their West Coast office from 2007 to 2009. As a result, she spent much of her time back in the Bay Area, where signs of the burgeoning Buy Fresh Buy Local program were everywhere—in restaurants, grocery stores and farmers’ markets. It occurred to Ferdon that a similar program could thrive here, given the North State’s agricultural diversity.

“We have rangeland, specialty crop products, acres and acres of nuts and rice, and value added by wineries and olive oil producers—but there was nothing like Buy Fresh Buy Local to help raise that visibility and connect those markets,” she said.

So she approached the Northern California Regional Land Trust with a proposal for a localized Buy Fresh Buy Local program. (For more on that, see “Local growers prosper,” page 12.)

The program was awarded a substantial grant from the California Department of Food and Agriculture, and Ferdon used that funding to “establish a baseline, to get an idea of where we’re at with local food production and distribution.” With the help of Chico State agriculture professor Jacob Brimlow, she surveyed growers and buyers in the region.

“What I was hearing was that many of the growers sold to direct markets—the farmers’ markets,” she said. “But they can’t sell everything they grow in those direct markets. They’re stuck in the middle: too big for those direct markets, too small for the mainstream, broadline distribution markets.”

In fact, about 75 percent of 5,024 farms in the tri-county region fall into that middle category, according to the 2012 agricultural census.

“Meanwhile, I’m hearing from all kinds of buyers—independent groceries, restaurants, specialty food stores, cafés—that they would love to buy local food, but they can’t go to the farmers’ market and pay retail prices,” she said. For restaurants especially, contracting with a couple dozen different local growers can be logistically daunting.

Another survey finding was a widespread need for centralized cold storage—that would help growers expand their business by keeping their produce longer. Considering all of the issues local growers recounted, Ferdon “lumped it all into one thing and called it a food hub.”

A food hub is an online marketplace where wholesale buyers can purchase from multiple local growers at one time in order to satisfy their large volume demands. The concept has been picking up steam nationally. According to the 2013 National Food Hub Survey, 62 percent of food hubs began operating within the last five years.

With a website up and running, the North Valley Food Hub is set to open its first market in October.

Looking back on how far she’s come, Ferdon said she long questioned whether family farmers would consider her an equal in business matters.

“I don’t come from a second- or third- or fourth-generation farming family; sometimes, I wondered whether that would affect my credibility in some way,” she said. “But it just hasn’t. The agriculture community has been so open, so engaged in this project all along.”