The Northwest Connecticut Food Hub connects regional farmers with wholesale customers, even during these winter months when local food is harder to come by.
Farmers list available items each week on the hub’s online platform — at this time of year mostly roots, squash, apples, mushrooms and greens. Restaurants, schools, grocery stores, and food pantries can go online and order aggregated items from multiple farms for delivery.
If one farm only has butternut squash left in storage from the fall harvest, another might be flush with arugula coming out of a winterized greenhouse, while another still has beets in the cooler. Alone, each crop might be hard to sell or hard to use, but put them together in a restaurant’s shopping cart through the Hub’s online platform and you have a winter salad special on the menu.
The Food Hub is a locally developed spin on a more typical industrial food distribution model where large farms that specialize in one item or another ship their crops to warehouses to be repackaged and trucked off to retail grocery stores or food service venues.
By the very nature of our region’s topography, farms are relatively small and far from customers. Valleys and slopes don’t make for wide, expansive fields, and quiet windy roads often set farmers at a distance from population centers. Growing a diverse range of crops is good for the soil and for business resiliency — if a crop is a flop one year, there are others that likely did well. All of these factors make for colorful, bucolic farm landscapes throughout Northwest Connecticut, but they also present local farmers with a significant marketing challenge, and local buyers with the significant logistical question of how to access fresh, local food.
The Food Hub began operations in 2017 as a project supported by the region’s economic development plan to help bridge these gaps between the unique growers we have in our region and potential customers. It is an initiative of the nonprofit Partners for Sustainable Healthy Communities, whose board oversees operations. Day-to-day management of the Hub falls to Renee Giroux, a farmer herself who knows firsthand the challenges and opportunities of farmers in the area.
“The Hub helps with distribution while lifting everyone up,” said Giroux. “It isn’t a place where farms are in competition with one another, but rather gives them an additional outlet to expand their businesses into.”
Photo by Janna Siller
Locally grown produce aggregated at the food hub for delivery to a local food pantry.
While some buyers, like restaurants and grocery stores, pay full wholesale prices for the farm products, others have their deliveries subsidized by different grants. The Hub cobbles together a number of funding sources to allow them to work with schools, food pantries and health care facilities. Ed-Advance, an education nonprofit, helps fund farm-to-school initiatives facilitated by the Hub. A community wellness grant allows diabetes patients to receive produce prescription deliveries through Hartford Healthcare. Community foundations support food pantry purchases.
“Individual farmers don’t have time to navigate all the potential funding sources that can help expand their markets,” said Food Hub board member Jocelyn Ayer. “That’s where the Hub comes in. We work with partners to secure funding for a wide range of projects.”
On a frigid December day, Susan Zappulla-Peters arrived bright and early at the Hub’s Torrington warehouse with a delivery of radishes and scallions from the farm her son manages, Maple Bank Farm in Roxbury. “The first time I delivered here, I was so inspired by what Renee is doing that I asked if I could help. Now I volunteer every week after I drop off Maple Bank’s produce.”
Zappula-Peters spent the morning receiving produce off farmers’ pickup trucks and compiling orders as generated onto lists by the online purchase platform. The pallets quickly filled up with food, including apples from March Farm in Bethlehem; carrots and cabbage from Vibrant Farm in Bantam; and sweet potatoes and potatoes from River Bank Farm in Roxbury. Zappula-Peters helped Giroux and driver Stuart Rabinowitz load a van headed for a delivery route that included Charlotte Hungerford Hospital, the Corner Food Pantry in Lakeville, and Fishes and Loaves Food Pantry in North Canaan.
“I love that this food, the best our region has to offer, is reaching people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to access it,” said Zappula-Peters in between moving pallets.
Max Amsterdam reaches out to pet a red panda at the Trevor-Lovejoy Zoo on Millbrook School’s campus on Wednesday, Dec. 17. Amsterdam is a senior at Millbrook School and serves as the zoo’s head student curator.
Stahl said the zoo has been engaged in a long-range master planning process for several years as part of preparing for its next Association of Zoos and Aquariums accreditation review in 2027. “We knew we had to make a plan and look toward the future,” Stahl said. “We had to think about what more we could be doing for the animals, for students and for the community.”
Construction is nearing completion on a new animal holding barn, the first step toward housing off-exhibit animals. Funded by philanthropist Barbara Tober — whom Stahl described as the project’s “catalyst” — the facility is required under AZA accreditation standards. The holding barn will serve as a first stop for new animals required to quarantine before entering an exhibit. It will also safely house animals when enclosures are being repaired or when they need rehabilitation.
The new animal hospital, which zoo staff are referring to as an animal wellness center, is poised to be four times larger than the existing space. Stahl said the team is looking forward to dramatically expanding the zoo’s ability to treat animals on campus, eliminating the need to transport them off-site for procedures like X-rays or ultrasounds.
Max Amsterdam feeds a red panda at the Trevor-Lovejoy Zoo on the Millbrook School campus on Wednesday, Dec. 17. Amsterdam said he became interested in the school's zoo in his freshman year when he watched an older student perform a biopsy on a wolf that had passed away at the zoo.Photo by Aly Morrissey
Stahl said a primary goal of the master plan and the animal wellness center is to “bring the outside in.” The public will be allowed to watch certain procedures and operations to learn more about the veterinary work that goes on behind the scenes.
In addition to the zoo’s around-the-clock staff, rotating veterinarians visit the zoo each week to check on the animals and perform routine procedures. The current space is limited, and zoo staff are eager to have an expanded footprint.
“Right now we’re very limited space-wise,” Stahl said. “This new facility will let us have more space, more vets and more learning happening.”
Max Amsterdam has lived at the Millbrook School as a boarding student for four years and has held a working role at the zoo throughout that time. Today, in his senior year, he serves as the zoo’s head student curator — a coveted leadership role that requires a formal application and selection process.
When Amsterdam first applied to Millbrook School, the zoo was not front-of-mind. Although he wanted to become a veterinarian as a young child, the desire dissipated until he set foot in the Trevor-Lovejoy Zoo as a freshman.
“I watched a senior perform a biopsy on a red wolf that had passed away from a uterine tumor,” Amsterdam said. “I didn’t even know that students could do that. I realized right then how incredible this place was and the zoo became my thing.”
Over his four years at Millbrook, Amsterdam has assisted veterinarians, shadowed medical procedures, conducted necropsies and even traveled with staff to national AZA conferences. “As you grow, you gain a relationship with the staff and vets, and when they know you can handle it, they let you do more,” he said.
With graduation on the horizon and plans to study biology at Bucknell, Amsterdam admits he’s a little jealous of the future students that will benefit from the new zoo facilities.
At the end of the day, he is grateful for the hands-on experience he has received in his leadership roles at the zoo. Millbrook School is the only high school in the country with an AZA-accredited zoo on its campus.
“I’m jealous, but I’m also so grateful that the zoo got that donation because it’s needed,” Amsterdam smiled. “We deserve it, too. It’s a lot of hard work by the staff and students — it’s 200% effort seven days a week, and not many people see that.”
