Resilience Nodes

NCGA's Harvest Hub is helping to fill gaps in local wholesale markets by improving the infrastructure and systems that support the ordering, aggregation, storage, and distribution of locally grown and raised foods.  This allows farmers and buyers to have 1 point of contact and delivery, through the Arcata based facility.  While most buyers in Humboldt are located along the coastal communities who are close to the Harvest Hub facility, most farm land is located in more remote regions.  The distance that separates where food is grown from where it is delivered creates challenges for small scale farmers and increases the cost of providing locally grown foods through the Harvest Hub. 

NCGA's Resilience Node project will expand cold storage access in those remote agricultural communities by installing cold storage nodes.  Produce that is ordered by the Harvest Hub can be aggregated in these cooler nodes, reducing the travel time for each farmer in that community.  Hub vehicles will pick up this food along their normal delivery routes and drop off with wholesale buyers, or bring to the Hub facility for distribution on another day.

During disasters or emergencies, these nodes can be activated as sites to collect produce donations for communities, to store food for emergency feeding entities like American Red Cross, or to provide storage for supplies for local grocers or farmers who lose power for their own cold storage, which will reduce food waste and loss during power outages.

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Emergency Food System Partnership

Civil Eats published an article about the North Coast's Emergency Food System Partnership that NCGA participates in.  Through this partnership, Harvest Hub staff helped to write a Multi-Agency Feeding Plan for Humboldt County, which outline how different food focused organizations and entities will be activated during an emergency.  This builds off the work of Harvest Hub Director Megan Kenney, who is the co-chair for the Food Access Working Group within the Humboldt COAD (Community Organizations Active in Disaster), where she ensures that locally grown and raised foods are included in emergency feeding plans and that farmers are able to safety access land and harvest food during natural disasters.