Vermont food hubs outline growth, gaps and infrastructure needs to House Agriculture committee

BURLINGTON, Vt. — Representatives of six Vermont nonprofit food hubs told the House Agriculture, Food Resiliency, & Forestry Committee on a day-long panel that their organizations have become essential to connecting local farms to schools, hospitals, retailers and food shelves — but that the network faces mounting infrastructure and funding challenges.

"By the end of the hour and a half here, our hope is that you will understand everything there is to know about food hubs in Vermont," Jake Claro, farm to plate director at the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund, told the committee as he opened the panel describing the hubs' roles in aggregation, storage, logistics and marketing.

The committee heard that the six hubs represented — ACORN (Middlebury), Center for an Agricultural Economy (Hardwick), Food Connects (Brattleboro), Green Mountain Farm Direct (Newport/NEK), Intervale Center (Burlington) and Vermont Farmers Food Center (Rutland) — collectively move millions of dollars of local and regional food and provide services that many producers and small customers cannot access through national distributors.

"We're stronger together," Lindsay Burke, executive director of the Addison County Relocalization Network (ACORN), said, describing ACORN's online wholesale marketplace, cross-docking and its Pharmacy Food-as-Medicine program. Burke said ACORN opened a physical food-hub operation in Middlebury in fall 2022 and now offers short-term cold storage, weekly distribution and last-mile delivery.

John Ramsey, executive director of the Center for an Agricultural Economy in Hardwick, described the organization's production and processing work, including the Vermont Food Venture Center and Farm Connects trucking service. "Our trucks are going out six days a week — back roads,…