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Southeast Iowa Regional Community Food Web holds inaugural meeting
FAIRFIELD — Local food producers and distributors gathered Wednesday to discuss how they can create a regional food web.
More than 60 people met at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds for an all-day workshop to ignite what organizers dubbed the Southeast Iowa Regional Community Food Web. Fairfield resident Bob Ferguson organized the event, which sought to identify the community’s food resources and which resources it is lacking. Participants brainstormed ideas for improving local food production and distribution, then voted on which projects they’d like to prioritize.
Ferguson said that the most popular idea was creating a food processing facility, particularly one that did grains. The company Breadtopia mills grains, and participants considered that a good complement to their service would be a facility that cleans grains. Participants also showed interest in creating processing facilities for meat and vegetables, though those would need to be separate facilities to avoid cross-contamination.
Tera Johnson, founder of the Food Finance Institute, traveled from Madison, Wisconsin, to lead Wednesday’s group discussion. She said she was glad to work with such an engaged group of people, and that she received nothing but positive comments from people who were glad they came.
“There’s power in coordination and consensus building,” Johnson said. “It was nice that the participants in the room are already stakeholders with roles to play.”
Ferguson said some of the other ideas that received a lot of votes from participants were consumer education, mentorship and technical assistance, and business support for farmers.
The idea to create a Southeast Iowa Regional Food Web was hatched about four years ago when Ferguson was chatting with Bob Riley, a Des Moines businessman who runs four businesses, including Feed Energy. They were talking about how they’d like to create an organization similar to Iowa’s Cultivation Corridor between Ames and Des Moines, where industries collaborate to promote food science.
“I suggested that we needed to have a Regeneration Corridor,” Ferguson said. “We convened a daylong conference at his office, which was attended by people from around the country.”
Unfortunately, momentum for their planned Regeneration Corridor stalled when the Missouri River flooded soon after the meeting, which wiped out one of Riley’s production facilities. Just as he was recovering from that, the COVID pandemic hit and put everything on hold.
“Just recently, I wanted to revive the idea, so I called Bob and asked him, ‘How about we create a corridor on Highway 34 from Ottumwa to Burlington, and from the Missouri border up to Washington and Louisa counties.”
One of the first local people Ferguson talked to about this new business “corridor” was Mike Heaton, development director for NewBoCo. Heaton loved the idea. Ferguson called Tera Johnson to ask what she thought of the idea.
“I asked her, ‘Am I out of my mind?’ and she said, ‘No, not at all,’” Ferguson said.
Johnson was part of a group of economic developers who traveled from Madison, Wisconsin to Denver, Colorado, to learn how Denver was able to grow so much. The two cities were once about the same size, but today Madison has 270,000 people while Denver has exploded to over 700,000. She learned that economic developers in Denver relied on a regional approach, where neighboring counties collaborated on development projects rather than seeing each other as competition. Ferguson said he’s excited at the prospect of Southeast Iowa being able to copy Denver’s success.
Call Andy Hallman at 641-575-0135 or email him at andy.hallman@southeastiowaunion.com
