USDA awards $25 million to UNL team, regional partners focused on better access to fresh food

LINCOLN, Neb. (Nebraska Examiner) — Rural and urban residents who struggle to find fresh and healthy food close to home could soon get help from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, with the help of $25 million from federal taxpayers.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a $25 million cooperative agreement award to UNL to improve local supply chains by connecting regional buyers and sellers of fresh food.

UNL will lead this effort with partner organizations and producers in a five-state region. UNL will focus on building out digital tools and traditional outreach to local farmers growing vegetables, fruits and more, working with nearby distributors, wholesalers and retailers.

One of 12 new regional food centers

The new Heartland Regional Foods Business Center, which will be housed in an existing building on UNL’s East Campus, will serve Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Missouri and Oklahoma. It’s one of a dozen such centers USDA is funding nationally.

Mary Emery directs Rural Prosperity Nebraska, the UNL group that will lead the five-state center and coordinate with 30 public and private partners, including university extension offices in other states.

She said the COVID-19 pandemic exposed how complicated American supply chains are for all kinds of products, and rural and urban food deserts faced difficulties trying to purchase healthy food. The center aims to reduce food insecurity.

“One of the challenges for local consumers in the more rural areas is getting access to local produce, or any produce at all,” she said. “If I have really great crops, and I want to get them three towns over, that’s really hard to do.”

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said the food centers should help address this, providing a chance for more income for local farmers and grocery stores and more choices for local consumers.

He said the joint program would build “greater resilience in our overall food system.” The feds have set aside $400 million for the food centers and grants. That grant process is being designed.

The job ahead

The UNL group will start by working with the University of Nebraska at Omaha and other institutions to map and analyze the networks of known producers, distributors, wholesalers and retailers.

Their aim: Identify assets and resources that could get more fresh food more quickly and efficiently to the places where people need it.

“One way to think about it is there are many players in this field, and they all have a piece of the puzzle, but we never get together to see how all the puzzle pieces fit,” Emery said. “This will help with that.”

Some of the money will go toward better organizing and boosting growers closer to where their product could be bought and sold, she said. Some will go to improve logistics.

Producers, consumers to benefit

The new center will also work with local producers on connecting them with existing tools to develop business plans that can help them make money producing specialty crops.

One factor in rural food deserts is the loss of local grocery stores, which contributed in recent years to a decline in how some rural Nebraskans view their communities. The 2022 Rural Nebraska Poll by UNL found a record 31% said their rural towns had changed for the worse.

UNL is already working with rural communities on how to start co-op grocery stores in towns where the only local option might be a convenience store. The new center might bolster those efforts and work with other regional universities like Iowa State University on buttressing smaller-scale food processing. 

The food center award is one of the largest UNL has ever received, university spokeswoman Leslie Reed said. UNL received a similarly sized federal grant for robotics in 2022.

Of the $25 million for the food center, about $6 million will stay at UNL. About $12 million will go to the grants to build out the system. The rest will go to partner organizations, including the Center for Rural Affairs, Oklahoma State University and the University of Missouri at Columbia.

“What we want to do is, instead of creating a number of little patchworks to connect things, we want to look at the whole system and connect the system so we don’t need little patches,” Emery said.

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