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Applied and Extension

A Coordinated Farm to Institution Supply Chain Approach to Increase Market Access and Community Food Security Dara Bloom*, Dara Bloom, Bhavisha Gulabrai, Lauren Davis, Anuoluwapo Adelabu, Robyn Stout, Shironda Brown, Biswanath Dari,

Regionalization promotes food system resilience; however, direct markets can exclude low-income consumers, while small-scale farmers struggle to access wholesale markets. Farm to Institution (F2I) programs, including early care and education, schools, universities, and senior services, address these challenges by working with community institutions that provide healthy meals while opening wholesale channels for small to mid-scale farmers. The Center for Environmental Farming Systems has implemented individual F2I programs in North Carolina for many years.  However, we have never intentionally coordinated among multiple F2I programs. In 2024, we received a grant from Southern SARE to explore how integrating F2I supply chains might generate strategies that can address the challenges observed when programs are implemented individually. We are currently in our second year of piloting a coordinated F2I approach, working with a group of farmers, child care programs, the county school district, a local university, and senior living facilities in one rural county in North Carolina. Our team has facilitated relationship development, collected baseline data, and conducted a process evaluation to develop a set of lessons learned. We will share our preliminary findings, including an assessment of how institutional markets are bifurcated by volume and food safety requirements, and how to leverage these differences to create a pathway to build farmer capacity to scale up among market types. We will also share an online ordering platform we developed specifically to coordinate among multiple farmers and small-scale institutions, with additional functionality to accept payments, open ordering to families and staff, and calculate optimized shared delivery routes. By sharing lessons learned, tools, and preliminary resource guides from this pilot program, we will provide a roadmap for replicating coordinated F2I models to increase community food security and market access for farmers.