Yolo Food Hub Network

The Problem

Small and mid-scale farms in Yolo County form a foundation of the region's economy and supply the broader upper Central Valley and Sacramento region of California. The region faces growing food equity challenges, increasing extreme weather events, and small and medium farm operations being crowded out of the market by large scale corporate growers and distributors. Few of these local farms have had the volume and pricing to compete with mega-distributors to supply even local public institutions. The Yolo Food Hub Network was established by local, equity-focused farm support organizations to explore how to aggregate, store, process, and distribute local farm product to local schools, hospitals, prisons, universities, restaurants and groceries. RCC joined this effort to facilitate an update and refinement of the Network's strategy and to provide technical support on the design of a regional crop aggregation and processing hub .

Intended Outcomes

A network with a collective aggregation and distribution system, coordinated through a scaled storage and processing facility and operation that can be sustained by its own sales revenue, thereby re-establishing small & medium farm operation access to institutional buyers and increasing their collective resilience in the face of extreme weather conditions.