![\"\"](\"https:\/\/missouriindependent.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/root54-1024x512.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
With the help of a now-defunded program from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Travis Jones and Makeesha Munro spend almost 15 hours a week traveling to various farmers markets and selling their culinary mushrooms to other buyers in Sedalia, Joplin and Springfield (Meg Cunningham\/The Beacon).<\/p>\n
When Makeesha Munro and her partner Travis Jones started their farm in Collins, Missouri, they didn\u2019t expect to be traveling across the state to sell the culinary mushrooms they grow.<\/p>\n
Jones was semiretired and looking for a way to leverage their property for additional income. One night, they decided to dive into farming mushrooms. After a few late-night online purchases, Root 54 Farm was up and running.<\/p>\n
They made some mistakes along the way. But with the help of a now-defunded program from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, they spend almost 15 hours a week traveling to various farmers markets and selling to other buyers in Sedalia, Joplin and Springfield.<\/p>\n
\u201cOwning a business is overwhelming,\u201d Jones said. \u201cFarming is overwhelming. When the two come together, it\u2019s super overwhelming. So we are really grateful to people who help.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Heartland Regional Food Business Center was a part of a Biden administration program aimed at increasing the resilience of local food systems following the COVID-19 pandemic. The program aimed to help small and midsized farms with things like market access and technical assistance to help them grow and maintain their businesses.<\/p>\n
But under Trump administration budget cuts, USDA terminated the program.<\/p>\n
Now, its leaders are figuring out how to move forward under a new moniker \u2014 the Heartland Regional Food Business Coalition \u2014 and without the millions of dollars in federal funding once used to support their work.<\/p>\n
The program reimbursed farmers for big purchases and helped make connections between farmers and potential buyers. Jones and Munro were never selected for monetary support, but the connections they made helped their business take off.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe met a lot of the people we needed to meet,\u201d Jones said.<\/p>\n
<\/strong><\/p>\n \t<\/p>\n Heartland was one of a handful regional food business centers established by the USDA. It officially launched in 2023 to help farmers across Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, Oklahoma and some Arkansas counties.<\/p>\n The group was slated to get $25 million in funding over four years. But it only made one round of grants to farmers before the rest of the funding was rescinded this summer.<\/p>\n In the only round of grant funding under USDA, Heartland provided nearly $4 million in financial assistance to 90 farmers after receiving nearly 500 applications from across the region.<\/p>\n Heartland was preparing for the second round of Business Builder grants \u2014 nearly $9 million in funding \u2014 and expected over 1,000 farmers to apply. Instead, it got word that federal funds may be pulled.<\/p>\n The group and its farmers ended up waiting six months to see if that money would actually be paid out.<\/p>\n One farmer was a sunflower producer who was looking for funds to upgrade his packaging process.<\/p>\n \u201cHe was ready and poised to expand his market this year,\u201d said Katie Nixon, who currently shepherds the coalition through New Growth, a rural community development corporation in El Dorado Springs, Missouri.<\/p>\n Because the funding comes as reimbursements, farmers had to make the upgrades before they could see any of the money.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re paralyzed \u2014 you\u2019ve gotten this grant and they say, \u2018If you spend the money, you\u2019re not going to get reimbursed,\u2019\u201d Nixon said. \u201cSo do you say, \u2018Well forget it, I\u2019m just going to go my own way and lose $50,000, or do you wait?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Along with programs like Local Food for Schools, which was also eliminated earlier this year<\/a>, the federal initiative was part of a larger effort to promote local food systems across the country.<\/p>\n \u201cThey took the conditions of the region and really focused to amplify that to provide an unmet demand from the rest of the nation,\u201d said Hannah Quigley, a policy specialist at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. \u201cThey were investing in scaling very regional specialized products.\u201d<\/p>\n Support from the regional centers across the country resulted in more than 2,600 new partnerships between farmers and buyers, a June 2024 USDA brief<\/a> said.<\/p>\n The June data also showed the program taking off. Farmers were starting to report improved processing, distribution, storage and aggregation of regional food products as a result of the support from their regional centers under the initiative.<\/p>\n Part of the reason for the success is because the money was there to actually keep people involved in the conversation. There are so many demands on small farmers, Nixon said. Without the possibility of some financial support, it can be difficult to prioritize where to spend your time.<\/p>\n \u201cThis just helped (relationships) become stronger and more formalized, because you had money to help keep people at the table,\u201d Nixon said.<\/p>\n \u201cWe know that a lot of food and farm businesses came to us for technical assistance because they saw the Business Builder opportunity,\u201d Nixon said. \u201cSo having that funding to be able to offer really gets people motivated.\u201d<\/p>\n Only a small portion of federal farm support goes to producers of specialty crops, which includes produce like fruits and vegetables or nursery crops, Quigley said.<\/p>\n In the 1970s, the U.S. was a net exporter<\/a> of those specialty crops. By the mid-1990s, it became a net importer. Still, in 2020 speciality crops contributed nearly $54 billion to U.S. agriculture\u2019s $363 billion in cash receipts, USDA data from 2022 show.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have plenty of land and the way that our food system is organized right now, with commodity crops \u2014 most of those are grown specifically to send somewhere else to export,\u201d Nixon said. \u201cWhat if even just a sliver of that energy was actually to domesticate real food products?\u201d<\/p>\n For smaller farmers, having dedicated support for funding and market access could make a huge difference in their success.<\/p>\n Heartland hosts monthly new farmer calls and connects farmers with established mentors to help them grow their specialty crop.<\/p>\n \u201cThey were connecting these farmers who might not have immediately known how to get connected to a distributor,\u201d Quigley said. \u201cI think a farmer could figure it out, but it might take them two full years, potentially three different growing seasons \u2026 to figure it out.\u201d<\/p>\n From July 2023 to June 2024, the centers nationwide formalized more than 250 partnerships for their farmers. In the last six months of 2024, they finalized 466.<\/p>\n They were trying to reach the farmers who traditionally don\u2019t receive USDA loans, Nixon said.<\/p>\n Nixon and her colleagues are looking for sources to make up for some of the lost USDA funding. But what exactly that will mean is still unclear.<\/p>\n \u201cLocal food is not easy,\u201d Nixon said. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to make it easier.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/strong><\/p>\n \t<\/p>\n Part of the difficulty in building up more regional food systems comes from connecting farmers to wholesale buyers who need large quantities of produce.<\/p>\n That was some of what the regional centers were aiming to address.<\/p>\n \u201cIn some cases, they connected small farmers to an aggregator, or someone who brokered purchases, then they were able to aggregate them, buy from all these small farmers and then sell to a single buyer,\u201d Quigley said.<\/p>\n That structure could help incentivize larger purchasers like food banks, states or school districts to buy more local food.<\/p>\n Because of the control wholesale grocery suppliers have over those markets, it can be more difficult for businesses to stray away from what has become the mainstream model for buying food.<\/p>\n Quigley pointed to agreements the USDA has with states that let states take a more hands-on approach to local food purchasing.<\/p>\n \u201cThat brings those contracts down from a national scale or a 12-state scale, down to a single-state scale,\u201d Quigley said. \u201cIt allows for a greater number of farmers and businesses to be able to successfully bid on those contracts. They don\u2019t have to have a distribution network to serve 12 states, they can just serve a single state.\u201d<\/p>\n A 2020 local food marketing survey<\/a> found that the number of farms selling locally produced food fell by 12% nationwide from 2015 to 2020.<\/p>\n Still, Missouri is seeing some growth when it comes to produce farmers. The 2022<\/a> Census of Agriculture in Missouri found that the number of farms working in greenhouse, nursery and floriculture production had grown to 485 in 2022, up from 348 in 2017.<\/p>\n In 2021, more than 90% of the farms selling food directly to consumers<\/a> were considered small farms.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you buy from somebody local, your money stays local,\u201d Munro said. \u201cWhen you\u2019re in the local food business, you really get to know people, and we really do support each other. It\u2019s part of what I love, it is a community.\u201d<\/p>\n This article<\/a> first appeared on Beacon: Missouri<\/a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License<\/a>. With the help of a now-defunded program from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Travis Jones and Makeesha Munro spend almost 15 hours a week traveling to various farmers markets and selling their culinary mushrooms to other buyers in Sedalia, Joplin and Springfield (Meg Cunningham\/The Beacon). When Makeesha Munro and her partner Travis Jones started their…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7714,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kadence_starter_templates_imported_post":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat\u2019s next for the regional food business centers?\u00a0<\/h4>\n
How to build out a regional food system\u00a0<\/h4>\n
![](\"https:\/\/thebeaconnews.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/iconbeacon-150x150.png?crop=1\"){kind=tracking}
<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"