Fritz Boettner Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

With Coronavirus Roiling Food Supply, Local Agriculture Sees Resurgence

Debby Dulworth has a lot of conversations with her cattle each day. She swings open a gate, driving the herd with repeated calls and the Hereford cattle, respond in kind with groans and snorts.

“They talk to me,” Dulworth said with a laugh, as the cows come bounding out into a fresh field of Kentucky fescue and buttercups. She’s been corralling them from pasture to pasture on her farm for decades near Monkey’s Eyebrow, Kentucky, nestled in a bend of the Ohio River.

Most of the time, they move at her call. The more stubborn ones she herds with the threat of an electric wire she slowly drags through the field. The wire isn’t hot usually, but the cows don’t know that.

“They learn very quickly. They don’t like being shocked,” Dulworth said. “They’re pretty smart that way. They’re smarter than people that way.”

Dulworth and her husband sell their grass-fed beef throughout west Kentucky, much of it through word of mouth. They were worried about sales after demand last year had dropped off. Then pandemic hit.

“People started calling in, and actually it started in March and it really picked up throughout April, until now, we have way more customers than we can find processors to take,” she said.

A couple calls a month of inquiries turned into several a day — many new customers — of people wanting orders of their beef. And while they were taking new orders, they had trouble trying to meet that new demand.

Small meat processors in the region that would normally take their cattle were now telling Dulworth they didn’t have available appointments until December, or even April of next year. Other livestock farmers are also seeing a spike in demand and are trying to get their cattle processed to fulfill the new orders.

Across the Ohio Valley, farmers that sell locally are seeing skyrocketing interest in the food they offer as the pandemic brings fears of food shortages in grocery stores, slowed production in meatpacking plants caused by COVID-19 outbreaks, and a radically different grocery store experience.

Dulworth and other farmers see a moment of opportunity to show consumers a new way to get their food locally, a way that she believes can benefit both the buyers and the local suppliers.

New Opportunities

For weeks on end beginning in March, Fritz Boettner was getting little sleep.

Boettner runs the Turnrow Appalachian Farm Collective in West Virginia, a cooperative that brings together produce and livestock farmers throughout the state and region to supply local food to restaurants, schools, and individuals.

While orders from restaurants had halted due to coronavirus-related shutdowns, demand from individuals was booming, from about $5,000 per week during normal circumstances to nearly $30,000 a week.

To keep up, he was spending long days just to unload produce being shipped from multiple local farms, re-package it to customers, and then reload to be sent to consumers.

“I keep buying meat from producers. First it was 50 pounds, and 100 pounds, and 300 pounds, and then bought 300 pounds — all gone in two days,” Boettner said. “I’m like ‘alright, maybe I should be buying 1000 pounds.’”

Other outlets offering Appalachian produce report a similar surge. The Chesterhill Produce Auction in southeast Ohio has seen about 60 new customers in the past two weeks looking for the ramps, asparagus, green onions, and other offerings, said Jessica Dotson, who helps run operations at the auction. During normal times last year, the auction would see only about 10 new customers a week.

“A lot of people are coming out and buying the vegetable stocks to grow their own gardens because of the food scarcity,” Dotson said. “If they can provide for their self or get it just down the road … it’s definitely a lot better than having to rely on a big store.”

Boettner said his cooperative is a new discovery for many looking for food alternatives as shortages and higher prices affect grocery stores, largely connected to COVID-19 outbreaks in meatpacking plants. Instead of walking into a grocery store, people can pick up food packaged together in locations throughout the state.

“No one wants to go to the grocery store. And then you look at the food system in general, at a national level … and it’s scary. Meat plants shutting down because everybody has COVID,” Boettner said. “How does that affect the meat I’m eating? And then they go to the store, and it’s not there. So your traditional food systems are a little bit scary right now.”

Moving Forward

It’s not clear if this new interest in local agriculture will last, especially given the economic uncertainty that lies ahead. But Boettner said he thinks the pandemic could bring a significant shift.

“Now, things could change if we head into a deep depression, or where no one has jobs and money in order to pay for it,” he said. “We’re not all of a sudden gonna be able to pivot and feed the entire state of West Virginia within Turnrow, it’s impossible.”

While he doesn’t think substantial change will come in the next few years, this pandemic could be a turning point to build upon small changes over the course of future decades.

“It’s still a long game,” Boettner said. “Is it a pivot point to where we can start to head that direction into a more sustainable food system?”

Boettner and other local farmers hope by introducing new people to locally-sourced agriculture they can show consumers the benefits of knowing where their food comes from and the community benefits of keeping the profits local.

Debby Dulworth and her husband changed their business model in 2003 to sell their cattle directly to people in the region out of financial necessity, compared to sending cattle to feedlots. In the late 1990’s, they were more than $300,000 in debt after years of stagnant prices for their feedlot cattle and the purchase of a local feed mill that flopped.

Debby Dulworth on her cattle farm near Money’s Eyebrow, KY.

By selling cattle directly to others in west Kentucky, they could keep more of the revenue that otherwise could go to other stakeholders: those who owned the transportation taking cattle to feedlots, those who owned the feedlots, and those who owned meatpacking plants where many cattle eventually end up.

“We’re at the bottom of the food chain. And by keeping them here and doing all that work ourselves, we got to take all those profits and keep them which helped us get out of debt,” Dulworth said. “It’s not an exorbitant living, but it’s a good living.”

Another beef cattle farmer near Lewisburg, West Virginia, also sees this renewed interest as an opportunity to put more investment back in local agriculture, in a state where investment in fossil fuel industries has dominated the state.

Jennifer “Tootie” Jones said her family farm has also seen sales spike the past few months, to the point where they’ve had to hire a person to answer the phone and manage online orders.

With those in the state trying to make local agriculture a sustainable part of the regional economy, she believes the federal government and state could do more to invest in small-scale agriculture.

She said even as she’s hired new employees in the past month, she still struggles with banks and financing for her farm.

“Look what we have here, and look at how much more money we could probably bring into our banks, bring into our businesses, loan opportunities,” Jones said. “But it’s not coal, and it’s not timber, and not stone. And I just don’t get it, because it’s the thing we all need the most — food.”

Bill Aims to Get More W.Va. Produce Into State Agencies, Schools

On a recent Monday, students at James Monroe High School in Monroe County eat french bread pizza, corn, beans and mixed fruit. They also have three, locally sourced salad options to choose from: a spinach salad with bright red cherry tomatoes, a pre-made salad or a make-you-own salad bar.

“We hear that these foods look so much better, put together,” said Kimberly Gusler, the high school’s head cook. She said that since the school began using local salad greens and vegetables and fruits when available, students appear to be eating more of them.

“They love the way the salads look.”

Spinach salad made with locally grown greens on the lunch line at James Monroe High School.

James Monroe is one of a handful of schools in West Virginia participating in the Farm to School program that helps get local food into schools and encourages schools to participate in agricultural activities.

A new bill passed by the West Virginia Legislature this year, will expand the use of local foods to all of the state’s schools and state-led institutions.HB 2396, also called the West Virginia Fresh Food Act, requires beginning July 1, 2019, all state-funded institutions to purchase a minimum of 5 percent of fresh produce, meat and poultry products from West Virginia producers.

The bill’s text states the idea behind the legislation is to support West Virginia farmers and allow them to expand, as well as boost access to healthy, fresh food.

By creating a built-in demand by state-led institutions and schools, which alone purchase $100 million worth of food from out-of-state sources according to the West Virginia Farm Bureau, the hope is the bill will stimulate the state’s agricultural economy, said Spencer Moss, executive director of the West Virginia Food and Farm Coalition, which supported the bill. (In the interest of transparency, we should note that the West Virginia Food and Farm Coalition is a financial supporter of West Virginia Public Broadcasting.)

“This bill’s a really great way to invest in West Virginia communities, but also West Virginia agriculture and farmers,” she said.

Tomatoes growing at Sprouting Farms in Talcott, West Virginia.

West Virginia has a rich farming culture and one of the highest concentrations of family-owned farms in the country, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. However, the majority of farms aren’t very big. The average farm size in West Virginia is just 157 acres, and small farm sizes and low production present challenges to both farmers seeking to make a living as well as businesses, schools and agencies that want to use locally grown food.

“In West Virginia, we often talk about there being a chicken-and-an-egg issue with with regards to agriculture,” Moss said. “So we know, especially in fruits and vegetables and produce production, that we have a very low supply. And that’s geography related, it’s labor related, but it’s also market demand related. So, farmers need a market if they’re going to scale up their operation.”

By creating a 5 percent purchasing demand from schools and other state-led institutions, the state is effectively creating that demand, Moss said.

Economists that study local food and agriculture have found that investment in local food systems creates an outsized impact to the local economy. It’s called the “multiplier effect,” and the idea is that for every $1 spent with a local farmer, that investment will come back into the community worth $1.40 to $1.80, because when local farmers have more money to spend they will do so in their communities whether it be through investment in their operations or at the local store.

“Whereas, if I’m investing $1 in a company that’s not based in West Virginia, doesn’t use West Virginia product, that money is just gone,” Moss said. “It just leaves our communities.”

Logistics Challenge

A refrigerated truck used to help transport locally grown produce.

But while the West Virginia Fresh Food Act creates a new market for locally-grown food, getting that food to state institutions — schools, colleges and prisons, etc. — poses a challenge.

“The prices are higher, logistics are tougher, it’s not what they’re used to,” said Fritz Boettner, the director of food systems for Turnrow Appalachian Food Collective. This food hub aggregates product from about 75 farmers across southern West Virginia and beyond, and helps get it into the hands of people, businesses and schools.

Boettner said, in his experience, everyone wants to use more locally grown food, however, sourcing can be a challenge. Most restaurants and institutions are used to using one distributor, like U.S. Foods, which provides a list of everything from apples to zucchini.

“And all we have are seasonal products,” he said.

Turnrow, and other food hubs across the state, coordinate with many farmers to fill orders. He said selling to state-institutions could be very beneficial, but the success of the effort will largely be dictated by how the West Virginia Department of Agriculture writes the rules for how the bill is carried out and enforced.

It also hinges on the flexibility of state-led institutions to pay more for locally-grown food, and that is not a given.

“Everyone has to work in budgets that are given to them,” Boettner adds.

Next Steps

West Virginia Agriculture Commissioner Kent Leonhardt acknowledges local food may cost more upfront, but in an interview he said local produce is fresher, more appealing and should last longer.

“There should be less waste, they should be able to have a little bit more carryover,” he said. “So in the end, it may even save money to the institutions.”

He also expects it to have a postive effect on the health of West Virginians.

This month, ahead of the July 1 effective date, the Agriculture Department is expected to reach out to stakeholders affected by the bill including farmers, groups like the West Virginia Food and Farm Coalition and state-led institutions to talk about what each party needs to make the bill’s mandate a reality.

Leonhardt said he hopes the agency can create a master list of sorts that could help state-led institutions more easily begin purchasing local food. The Department of Agriculture is also in charge of creating enforcement policies, all without any new funding, Leonhardt said.

“This is another unfunded mandate, that we’re going to gladly pick up the mantle and do it, but it’s going to strain our resources a little bit,” he said, adding regardless, he is excited by the possibilities. “I believe once we get all the rules in place, I think that the economic development and the return to the state through that economic development will help more than offset the cost.”

The salad bar at James Monroe High School.

Back at James Monroe High School, lunch is winding down. The self-serve salad bar looks like a tornado blew through it.

That makes head cook Kimberly Gusler smile. She said she’d love to see more schools offer locally sourced foods.

“I think it would be a great thing for them, I really do,” she said. “For kids to get more nutrition through their meals because the fresh food is the best food.”

In W.Va., Small Farmers Face Tough Odds as One Project Aims to Help

This story is part of an episode of Inside Appalachia about projects aimed at spurring job growth in Appalachia.

On a recent Monday morning, as the rising sun burns off the low-hanging fog and fishermen haul in their morning catches from the Greenbrier River, at Sprouting Farms, the day is well underway.

Produce has been harvested and safely stored in a giant refrigerator. Employees are packaging cherry tomatoes into plastic clamshells, activities you might find at any of the farms that dot the Greenbrier Valley.

But while the daily tasks are handled at this production-scale vegetable farm, the crux of Sprouting Farms’ mission goes beyond the fields at hand.

High tunnels can be rented for $30 per month at Sprouting Farms in Talcott, WV.

“Our goal is to not just make this site work, but the whole regional food system work, and we have lots of farmers and partners who are interested in making that happen,” says Sprouting Farms project Director Fritz Boettner.

In 2017, Sprouting Farms received a $1.5 million grant from the Appalachian Regional Commission. The project was an inaugural recipient of ARC’s POWER initiative, which provides federal dollars to coal-impacted communities. The goal is to diversity and help grow these economies.

Sprouting Farms aims to boost the reach of small-scale agriculture in the eastern and southern parts of West Virginia by training new farmers and providing inexpensive land and tools for budding agriculturalists. During the project’s first year, the team quickly realized to make local food production a bustling economy of scale in a state with challenging topography and a spread-out population, they needed to boost access to markets — everything from the more traditional farmer’s markets to the wholesale level, including getting more local food in restaurants and grocery stores.

“The demand is there. I’ve never really had that issue,” Boettner says. “It’s just how do we get supply and demand a lineup and how do we get the infrastructure in the middle to sort of pull it all together.”

Tomatoes are just one of the many things grown at Sprouting Farms.

On a recent tour of the 83-acre farm, Boettner explains how Sprouting Farms is trying to break down barriers — physical, financial and market-based — so farmers can be successful in West Virginia.

Outside of the farm’s faded red barn, a row of white plastic covered greenhouses, or high tunnels, are clearly visible. Black plastic tarp is also used on some parts of the farm.

The seed starting greenhouse is one tool available to renters at Sprouting Farms.

Some of the 30 greenhouses are used by Sprouting Farms itself, but others are rented by local farmers who may not have the space or ability to invest thousands of dollars into the equipment needed to farm in this way.

One high tunnel immediately sticks out. An abundance of bright pink and yellow flowers seem to dance inside. Sunflowers peak out merrily from the back. This monthly renter is one of the farm’s first. Now in her second year, renting offers the opportunity to grow a business without making costly upfront investments, Boettner says.

“Here we’re not even talking about food,” he says. “She rents it and has a cut-flower business. She grows flowers for weddings and restaurants and things like that.”

One renter at Sprouting Farms uses her high tunnel to run a cut flower business.

Renters pay $30 per month for a 30-by-100-foot high tunnel. That includes electricity and water. For a few dollars more, they can use the farm’s tools, including the tractor.

But what if you want to be a farmer, but don’t know how?

Training the Next Generation

Beckley resident Ruby Daniels came to Sprouting Farms in March to participate in the project’s apprenticeship program.

Daniels’ family history is steeped in farming. Her great-grandfather was a slave who came to West Virginia to cut coal out of the seams before that job was done by machines. After he was injured, the family ran an orchard and a restaurant in the area.

Daniels has a master’s degree in therapeutic herbalism, and owning her own farm has long been a dream, but she says she lacked some of the production planning expertise.

“I didn’t know how to figure out the numbers,” she says, standing in the 200-square-foot greenhouse she shares. “How do I figure out if I want to sell 20 pounds, how do I figure out how many plants do I need? This was a good program for that.”

Daniels grows herbs, beans and other things in the high tunnel she shares.

Daniels makes herbal teas and tinctures with the herbs she grows and says Sprouting Farms has given her the tools she needs to expand.

“This is a good farm for teaching an apprentice because you see things,” she says. “And everybody does farming different.”

Sprouting Farms’ decision to both be a fully operational production farm and offer education program is intentional. Boettner says by running their own farm, the team can workshop the best ways to grow on a larger scale in West Virginia, which doesn’t have big swaths of flat land like the Midwest or California.

The farmers who rent or train here also benefit from having the staff and tools on site, he adds.

“One day I could say, ‘You know, rent two greenhouses and here’s an acre and you can make a living doing it,’” he says. “The hope would be one day that would be possible. Not only like, you can do that, but here’s exactly what you know, you could grow right now in order to do that and get an offer that assistance with business planning and so forth.”

Creating New Markets

Boettner is a West Virginia native and no stranger to farming. He grew up in Charleston, but spent a lot of time at his grandparent’s farm in Virginia. He says he always knew he wanted to be a farmer.

“I’m a West Virginian, and I don’t know — it’s like everybody always wants to come back, but opportunities aren’t flourishing,” he says. “And I also believe in trying to make things better than when I started.”

Sprouting Farms Director Fritz Boettner poses.

After spending some time in Colorado, Boettner did move back. He co-founded a consulting firm called Downstream Strategies. Clients began hiring him to look into different economic development opportunities for West Virginia. One that came up a lot was agriculture.

At some point he and his business partner decided to take the thought experiments to the fields. Using a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, they crafted a business plan. Then, they heard about the ARC grant.

“Right now we need to be that catalyst and I think we need to be some of those risk takers,” he says. “And to me, that’s what the investment of the ARC grant is, to try to build something that does not exist currently and it’s hard to do that.”

Marshall University’s Robert C Byrd Institute partnered with the project for the ARC grant. While it has helped launch Sprouting Farms, Boettner says there’s still a big obstacle before agriculture is a viable economy here.

“We know that here the markets are a challenge,” he says.

West Virginia leads the nation in small farms. Of the more than 20,000 farms here, 97 percent of them are considered small and 93 percent are family-owned, according to the USDA. Most vegetable farmers in the state gross ring less than $50,000 a year, and once expenses are accounted for, it’s hardly a good living. Selling more produce, or higher-value produce, to restaurants or grocery stores, could help.

That’s why Sprouting Farms started a food hub, Greenbrier Valley Grown. Food hubs are a centralized location where farmers can bring their food for processing and to go to market. They become the middleman. Farmers tell the hub what they have to sell. The hub aggregates it and delivers it to buyers. A restaurant might be getting squash from four different farms, but it’s delivered by just one entity: The hub.

The refrigerated truck owned by the Greenbrier Valley Grown food hub is used to transport food from the eastern part of the state to customers in Charleston, including at the Capitol Market.

Todd Schmidt, an associate professor at Cornell University who studies agribusiness development in rural communities, says food hubs are growing in popularity across the country as more restaurants, grocery stores and other institutions seek more local food, because increasingly their customers ask for it.

“The market access issue, particularly in thinking about collaborative marketing operations, cooperatives, food hubs is something that is, that is providing beneficial to small-scale producers,” he says.

‘Helping Each Other Out’

Having access to a food hub has benefited Roger Dolan, who owns The Wild Bean in downtown Lewisburg. The hip coffee shop also serves vegetarian fare and does a rocking trade in smoothies.

Dolan says he has always tried to source as much of the produce The Wild Bean uses locally, but says it was hard juggling communications with multiple farms to get what he needed. Then he found a food hub and, despite an occasional produce shortage, he says it’s a boon to business to be able to advertise the restaurant uses locally-sourced produce.

“We’re putting money right back into our local economy by supporting local farmers that are going to come to our shop and spend their money,” he says. “It’s like a cycle, we’re each helping each other out.”

This fall, the two largest food hubs in the southern and eastern portions of West Virginia are converging. Sprouting Farms’ Greenbrier Valley Grown and ReFresh Appalachia’s food hub are joining with other large producers and growers’ groups under the umbrella organization, the Turnrow Appalachian Farm Collective.

“We’re trying to achieve some economies of scale here and hopefully to get West Virginia agriculture products into bigger markets,” says Brandon Dennison, the founder of the Coalfield Development Corporation, which runs farmer training program ReFresh Appalachia

The West Virginia Department of Agriculture estimates West Virginians consume $8 billion of food annually but the state only produces $800 million. If the new combined food hub can boost the amount of locally produced food bought by West Virginians by just a few percentage points, it could have big returns, says Jim Matson, an agricultural economist based in South Carolina.

“We’re not trying to replace every amount of food that comes in there with local food in most cases,” he says. “We’re just trying to add a little bit to it that can help to support these local families, add to local communities.”

Just the Beginning

Back at the farm, Boettner and I climb to the top of a hill to get the birds-eye view of Sprouting Farms.

As we look out over the land, dotted with white covered high tunnels, he reflects on the work they’ve accomplished so far.

“I’m happy with the progress we’ve made, absolutely, but I also know there’s an extremely long way to go,” he says laughing.

Boettner says as the project goes into its second year, it does so with more data and feedback on what has worked so far, and what hasn’t. One thing he doesn’t question is the appetite for more local food.

Sprouting Farms has two more years of federal funding from the ARC for the first phrase of the project. They’re hoping that in the meantime, they can find a way to be more self-sustaining, bringing a profit to their organization, to continue after the grant runs out.