BSU commits $300,000 to Muncie Food Hub

MUNCIE — Ball State University has earmarked nearly $300,000 to help establish a regional food hub to ramp up the supply of locally produced food.

Indiana has more than 58,000 farms that generate in excess of $11 billion a year in sales, yet Indiana sources at least 90 percent of its food from out of state. Only 2.4 percent of farms in Indiana grow vegetables, melons and potatoes, and only 1 percent of Hoosier farms grow fruits, nuts and berries.

Trying to establish an East Central Indiana food hub to supply not only retail but also wholesale and institutional markets like restaurants, schools, hospitals or universities will be a risky undertaking.

According to a state department of agriculture study published in May, proposed food hubs in Batesville, Elkhart, Evansville, Fort Wayne and Columbus are facing challenges that include lack of cold storage/warehousing space, financing, finding enough food, and the high cost to small farmers of obtaining Good Agriculture Practices certification to minimize risks of microbial food safety hazards.

To have a successful food hub in Muncie, "it would have to be marketed to capture institutional consumers and restaurants," the study reported. The challenges for Muncie include "reliable volumes for institutional buyers (e.g. Ball State University)," "getting producers to have proper certifications for selling to institutional buyers," "available warehousing space" and identifying "a champion to lead the effort."

Those latter two challenges apparently have been overcome. Ball State is the champion and the warehousing space will be downtown in the former Cintas industrial laundry building — now owned by the nonprofit Sustainable Muncie — and now known as GearBox: Muncie — A Maker Hub.

Ball State University President Paul Ferguson has been promoting "nurtured risk," entrepreneurial projects, research, community engagement and student-centered programs since taking over at BSU. "We will embrace risk ... and we will fail," he said in February during his State of the University speech. "But failing is OK as long as you learn from it."

The $294,042 Muncie Food Hub project is one of 16 "innovative and entrepreneurial" "academic-excellence" proposals that were awarded a total of $4.2 million in private funding raised by Ball State recently.

There are only three existing food hubs in Indiana — Hoosier Harvest Market in Greenfield, the Purple Porch Co-op in South Bend, and This Old Farm in Colfax/Clinton County. This Old Farm's slogans include "responsible food, responsibly priced," "rejuvenating the land one farm at a time," and "making ethical food a reality."

The U.S. Department of Agriculture defines a food hub as a business or organization that 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."

"The term 'source identified' simply means that one can identify at all points along the food distribution model where that food originated and who produced it," Roy Ballard, a Purdue extension educator who was instrumental in establishing Hoosier Harvest Market, told The Star Press. "In some cases when food safety is involved the idea is to be able to trace it back to the field, but in most cases it is to be able for the shopper who orders the product to have some assurance that what they are purchasing was grown by farmer John Doe in … Indiana and not his Asian, Floridian or Central American counterpart."

At Hoosier Harvest Market, customers shop and place orders online, farmers deliver products to the aggregation point, and customers pick up orders at locations ranging from downtown Indianapolis to Fishers to Spiceland in Henry County.

Recent interest in local foods and sustainable agriculture has exploded among Ball State faculty, students and the Muncie community, according to Joshua Gruver, a professor of natural resources who is championing the Muncie Food Hub along with Scott Truex, an associate professor of urban planning, and others. Gruver says the hub will provide healthy, affordable and fresh food.

The Star Press asked Skip Robb, who raises grass-fed beef and lamb at his Gospel Trails Farm in Blackford County, his opinion of the proposed Muncie Food Hub.

He says he has heard about, but is "almost totally ignorant of," the concept, so he's leery.

"One of the things I like about what we do is we know the people who buy from us and they know us," Robb said. "If we go into a food hub system I think you lose that intimacy between the consumer and the producer. The one-on-one is very valuable for both sides. I think that would get lost in a food hub."

He also fears that his product would become "just another commodity" in a food hub. "The commodity system has helped consumers quite a bit," he said. "We have some of the cheapest food in the world but also some of the worst food in the world. The nutritional value of the food produced is not what it could be."

The Muncie Food Hub is a proposal that has brought many people and organizations together, notes Jason Donati, chair of Muncie's Urban Gardening Initiative, which encourages food production in community gardens and on vacant lots. "This has helped to address some of the food desert issues that affect our community on a very small level, but creating a food hub partnership to provide a better network for local farmers … could help address these issues on a larger level," he told The Star Press.

Donati added, "Working with professors and students from Ball State, and integrating them into our downtown community, will be a positive move forward for Muncie. I hope to continue to see more people learning how to grow their own food, and more families in our downtown neighborhoods having access to locally produced, fresh food options."

Semi-retired former Ball State official John Fallon, the director of Sustainable Muncie, calls the food hub "perhaps the most important project in our region" because it has so many dimensions, including economic; "the alignment or realignment of the growing capacity of our regional farmers with the food needs and consumption patterns in the city;" and wellness, in that "you are what you eat." "We would all likely benefit from a more healthy diet."

Fallon also called the food hub "a diversified initiative" that involves lots of local organizations, "not just a few people out at Ball State determining what might be best." "I am thrilled the plan is to have the whole thing headquartered out of GearBox:Muncie."

The Muncie Food Hub could aggregate and distribute "just about anything," says Michael O'Donnell, a Purdue extension agent in Delaware County who signed a letter supporting the project. "It can be a huge range, not that we have tons of production, but it wouldn't be exclusive to just vegetables. It can include meat and poultry and eggs and dairy."

He calls Hoosier Harvest Market "more of an online farmers market" and says This Old Farm's "big thing is processing livestock."

"For a food hub to make sense there has to be a … critical number of growers that want to come together and make something like that happen, or some business that does a good job of organizing growers. I think it's very much up in the air. There just needs to be a number of conversations and meetings to vision this thing out and see what might make sense."

Contact Seth Slabaugh at (765) 213-5834.