June 2015 -- The NC Growing Together Summer 2015 Local Food Supply Chain Apprentices are on the ground and ready to get started on their 8-week assignments! Meet them below: Josie Walker is from Trenton, NC and is currently an Agricultural and Environmental Systems student at North Carolina A&T University. She will be working [...]
June 2015 -- Over the past four years, NC State Horticulture Science PhD student Drew Marticorena has been studying the "Local Multiplier Effect", the economic ripple effect that occurs within a community when consumers spend their money at independent, locally-owned businesses. While there are databases that contain standard multipliers used by economic developers across [...]
Navigating the USDA GAP Audit: Wake County June 16, 2015 - 9 am to 4 pm NC Growing Together is partnering with Carolina Farm Stewardship Association, North Carolina State University, and North Carolina Cooperative Extension to deliver workshops across the state with the aim of providing farmers with the tools to reduce food safety risks [...]
March 2015 - Mike Burris, who served as the Director of Produce for 27 years at Merchant"s Distributors, Inc., the Hickory-based grocery distributor that online casino is a sister company to NCGT partner Lowes Foods, has a new role, focused specifically on increasing the amount of locally-grown North Carolina produce distributed by MDI. "I"ll be [...]
March 2015 - The economic success of fruit and vegetable production is highly dependent on postharvest quality preservation. When marketing fresh fruits and vegetables, understanding the processes affecting product quality during storage and transportation is essential in obtaining a premium price for the product. To assist growers in developing skills that will provide a competitive [...]
March 2015 - On March 2 at the Raulston Arboretum in Raleigh, approximately 20 North Carolina growers and buyers sat across tables from each other, in a kind of business development speed-dating. They had eight minutes to decide if they were potentially a good fit for each others' business. Attendees included produce farmers from all [...]
March 2015 - NC Growing Together has updated several pricing and quality control resources for growers. To supplement its popular guide Wholesale and Retail Product Specifications: Guidance and Best Practices for Fresh Produce, NCGT recently released a new Slide Set with additional photos to illustrate product quality and information from quality control specialists on proper [...]
February 2015 - One of the biggest challenges facing local small and mid-sized producers and large-scale "mainstream" buyers (grocery chains and wholesale distributors) is how to move smaller volumes of source-identified product from farm to point-of-sale at a price that keeps everybody along the supply chain in business. NC Growing Together is working to develop and [...]
February 2015 - Food distributor Cornucopia Cheese & Specialty Foods Company was founded in 1980 in the back of a community grocery store in rural Alamance County. It is now one of the leading cheese and specialty food suppliers in the Southeast, providing over 1,000 products to customers in North Carolina, Virginia and surrounding states. Working [...]
February 2015 - NC Growing Together is partnering with NC Farm Bureau, NC State University Department of Horticultural Science, and NC Cooperative Extension to offer the Farmer Idea Lab, a new "Lunch-N-Learn" webinar series designed to offer farmer-to-farmer sharing of success stories and lessons learned. The first webinar, Farm Smarter Not Harder, was held on February 5. [...]
