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.
Ralph Fedele sits at a desk in the historic Irondale Schoolhouse, which he led the effort to relocate to downtown Millerton.
Fedele moved to Millerton from New York City 37 years ago, in 1988, and has since worn many hats — volunteer, historian, advocate, elected official — yet he still doesn’t believe he’s earned that title.
“I’m a transplant,” he said matter of factly. “I’m from the city.”
Before settling in Millerton, Fedele spent 25 years working in merchandising at JCPenney.
His roots, however, trace back to Rhinebeck, where he grew up on a 97-acre farm and enjoyed what he describes as an idyllic childhood.
“It was marvelous,” he said, with a twinkle of nostalgia in his eyes. As a boy, he climbed apple trees, spent hours in the family barn’s hayloft, played with neighbors until sunset, and helped his Sicilian grandmother — his nonna — in the garden. Today, Fedele wears her ring. “Any time I’m a little depressed or I want to remember,” he said, “I can talk to her.”
Growing up with an Italian grandmother sparked a lifelong love of history and culture. That curiosity eventually took Fedele to Italy, where he visited the church in which his grandmother was baptized. “Because I love history so much, I wanted to know where my grandmother was from, so I traveled to her village in Sicily.”
Along the way, he uncovered another piece of family history. His great-grandfather, Giovanni Nicolini, was a noted Italian sculptor whose work still stands outside Palermo’s Teatro Massimo, the largest opera house in Italy. Fedele later made a pilgrimage there and photographed his ancestor’s name on the bronze plaque outside of the theater.
Ralph Fedele sits at a table in the historic Irondale Schoolhouse in downtown Millerton. Fedele led the effort to renovate and relocate the schoolhouse to the center of the village.Photo by Aly Morrissey
The Irondale Schoolhouse
Years after settling in Millerton full time, Fedele was driving north on Route 22 when he spotted an old, classic building and couldn’t stop thinking about it.
“It was in dire straits,” he recalled. “Right on the road, but beautiful. I remember thinking, ‘Wouldn’t that be a great building to move into the village?’”
That moment would eventually turn into Fedele’s lasting legacy.
He left his post at the North East Historical Society to found Friends of the Irondale Schoolhouse, leading an eight-year effort to “move, restore, and repurpose the building.”
Supervisor Chris Kennan said the project remains inseparable from Fedele’s name. “Every time I pass by the Schoolhouse, I think of Ralph,” Kennan said. “It was his vision and persistence that enabled this dream to become a reality.”
Fedele joked that people may have thought he was crazy during the lengthy restoration. “I was a tyrant,” he said with a laugh. “I really made sure that we were able to get it done.” The effort required coordination with the state, the county, village and town officials, and his newly assembled nonprofit board.
As a self-proclaimed history buff, Fedele didn’t stop at the restoration. He found a list of students in old records and did what any determined historian would do. He opened the telephone book and started making calls.
Eventually, he tracked down one of the schoolhouse’s original students — Mary (Mechare) Leitch — who, at the age of 101, returned to the building after renovations were complete.
“It was a marvelous time,” smiled Fedele. “I was so happy to see her.”
‘Trust is earned’
Today, even though he won’t call himself a local, Fedele is a familiar fixture in town. You can find him each week enjoying conversation and a cup of coffee at Talk of the Town Deli, or getting stopped in town by neighbors and friends for a chat.
“I have gained the trust and confidence of a lot of people,” Fedele said. “It comes a little bit at a time. Trust is earned.”
Not only has Fedele served as a town board member, he has volunteered for Townscape and served as the president of the North East Historical Society. He was also one of the first advocates of preserving history by fixing toppled gravestones at the Spencer’s Corners Burying Ground.
His service was formally recognized at his final Town Board meeting through a resolution commending his three four-year terms as councilman, citing his “good humor, kindness to all and deep concern for the community’s senior citizens and for those living on fixed incomes.”
An emotional Fedele addressed the room with a mantra he often repeats. “When you leave, leave this place a little bit better than you found it,” he said. “That’s what I have always tried to do.”
Neighbors react
During the public comment, several residents stood to thank Fedele.
Claire Goodman, a member of the village Zoning Board of Appeals and Townscape volunteer, said Fedele was among the first to welcome her to Millerton.
“Whether we’re standing out in the cold, scrubbing tombstones at Spencer’s Corners, or ringing the bell at the schoolhouse, you always have such grace and you’re such a gentleman.” She added, “The way you laugh, it opens my heart.”
Kathy Chow, who serves on the Conservation Advisory Council and the Climate Smart Task Force, referred to Fedele as a “pitbull,” adding, “We all have hard things that we do, and we keep pushing at it, but you’re the one who makes me think I can keep going.”
Fedele describes his retirement from the town board as bittersweet. “I’m going to miss this,” he said. “I really am.”
