September 2017 -- NC Growing Together has partnered with the Piedmont Triad Regional Council (PTRC) to host a GIS update of the North Carolina Local Food Infrastructure Inventory. NC Growing Together originally established the Inventory in 2014 as a tool for food and farming businesses to understand the competitive landscape and find business partners. [...]
NC Growing Together is working with a new "partner": CEFS' University Foods Systems: Farm to Campus, Campus to Farm initiative (UFOODS). UFOODS seeks to network campuses with their local food communities, specifically to develop new market opportunities for producers.
The grant work will focus on two types of unharvested produce: cosmetically imperfect (does not meet USDA #1 standards for scarring, size, or shape, but is otherwise edible); and produce that meets USDA #1 standards but is left in the field because harvesting costs exceed the market price of the produce. Figuring out how to "recover" this otherwise wasted produce can both improve growers' bottom line and make our food system more efficient and sustainable..
Graham Givens May/June 2016 -- The Center for Environmental Farming Systems' Supply Chain Scholars are creating connections between business and local food systems work. Graham Givens and Kaitlyn Sutton are both MBA students at NC State University's Jenkins Graduate School of Management. As Supply Chain Scholars, they are looking at ways to build [...]
FreshPoint's Dan Batchelder explaining grading requirements to a producer at a recent Postharvest Handling workshop. April 2016 -- NC Growing Together is bringing together small-scale farmers and food service and retail buyers for capacity-building along the local food supply chain. Events such as Grower-Buyer Mixers and Postharvest Handling Workshops provide opportunities for peer-to-peer [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 - 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 [...]
December 2014 - NCGT is proud to announce the Summer 2015 Local Food Supply Chain Apprenticeship. Through an exciting 8-week program, apprentices will have the opportunity to work with a local food hub, a businesses, or an organization that works with local food while gaining critical training and professional development related to local food systems [...]
