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Michael Dunne: I’m Michael Dunne. Perhaps it seems like a million years ago, but it wasn’t that far back in our past when the farms and ranches of the Willamette Valley actually fed all the people who live here. After all, it is a rich agricultural area. But of course, globalization has created a food system where your food staples probably come from states, nations and even continents away. In that race to make our food cheaper and more efficient, we’ve lost the real connection between local farmers and everybody else. Today on the show, you’ll meet a nonprofit in Corvallis that’s working to reestablish these connections and, in the process, help develop a better food web. Then, in the last part of our show, our reporter will update us on the potential strike that could drastically affect colleges throughout Oregon. Kirsten Miller, the director of Ten Rivers Food Web. Kirsten, thank you so much for coming on the program.
Kirsten Miller: Thanks so much for having me.
Dunne: Let’s start with this. Tell us about Ten Rivers, what you do and who you serve.
Miller: We work to build a resilient local food web in Benton, Linn and Lincoln counties. So let’s start with this: What makes a food web resilient? And then, of course, the opposite side of that question is: What destabilizes a food web? What stabilizes a food web are the three core tenets of the work that we do. We work to build community resilience. That means that in times of emergency, we have infrastructure in place, we have connections happening between farms and eaters, and we can move food quickly. It also means that, with the changing climate, we are prepared. We also work on strengthening local farms and the economy by supporting local farmers and making connections between their sales. We have that already at the farmers market, but we don’t have that infrastructure for institutions, and that’s why we started the Mid Valley Food Hub, which sells local food to institutions. We work with 10 different farms. What stabilizes a local food web is relationships: having connections between the people who grow food, the people who are moving food and the people who are eating. The work that we do is relational and not transactional, and it is those connections that will make our community resilient in the future. What would throw us off is if only a small section of our community is able to access local food. That means we are all at more risk of not supporting the entire food web.
Dunne: Tell us about the programs that you administer at your nonprofit.
Miller: We have four programs: the Mid Valley Food Hub, Fill Your Pantry, an online directory and a soil amendment sale. Our newest program is the Mid Valley Food Hub, which sells local food to institutions. We primarily serve schools. Last year, we provided 21,000 K-12 students fresh local food from 11 small farms, and we sold 22,000 pounds of local food to schools, restaurants and food banks. We focused on institutions because in this community, we have a lot of access to local food at our farmers markets, but institutions have an undue responsibility, and it requires a lot more effort for them to buy in such large bulk. Us as an intermediary means that farmers can stay in the fields doing their work, and that we help make the connections to the schools, which require a little more effort in order to build trust and confidence that the product is going to arrive when it needs to and exactly as anticipated. So that’s one of our programs.
Another is Fill Your Pantry, which is coming up in November. It’s a bulk-buying farmers market, so it’s similar to the farmers markets that you might have in your backyard or community, but we focus on bulk. You buy 40 pounds of potatoes and you store it for the winter, because in a lot of parts of our service area, Benton, Linn and Lincoln counties, there are not year-round markets. This helps farmers have an opportunity to sell food before the quieter, slower winter season, and community members can store their food for the winter. There are also chefs there cooking up tasty treats for free for attendees, so that they can build their confidence with cooking more winter vegetables. So that’s two.
The third is our soil amendment sale. If you’re a gardener, that’s great for you. It’s the best way to access bulk pricing on amendments, so compost or all sorts of fancy things, vermiculite, and we also have cover crop seeds. You buy online in January. We aggregate all the orders together, and you can pick them up at the Benton County Fairgrounds in March, and we load up your vehicle.
The very last program is our online directory. For folks who want to find a U-pick or want to find half a cow, they can go on to our directory, which you can find through our website, tenriversfoodweb.org, and you can find exactly what you’re looking for.
Dunne: Okay, I’m curious, because what you just described sounds like a very idealistic situation that, I don’t know, 100 years ago is probably how things worked. Is part of the reason that you exist that we’ve sort of lost that food web connection in our community, whether it’s Linn County, Benton County or anywhere else?
Miller: Absolutely. This was normal. We grew our own food. We were connected to the soil and the earth and our neighbors in those ways, and that is less common today. With the industrialization of our food and with the international waters of where our food comes from and the distribution systems, that has entirely shifted. The work that we are doing is relational. It is moving away from just transactions of purchasing and consuming food, and instead knowing where your food comes from, being connected to the farms it is coming from, and having really high-quality food because it hasn’t sat on a truck or a boat for days, weeks or longer. We really focus on these connections because we want to imagine a future where everyone in our community is able to eat really highly nutritious, fresh local food, and that requires us doing this slow relational work of getting to know farms and connecting them to eaters and institutions, so that we have built this collective muscle of how to keep food in our own community. That is going to become a greater need, as you see with fuel costs going up right now. It’s going to be more and more expensive to bring food to us, and we have such an opportunity in our community to grow a plethora and a really diverse breadth of ingredients. We’re very fortunate here.
Dunne: I’m glad you brought that up, because it seems like today there are so many challenges for farmers. You talked about fuel costs, and of course tariffs have been impacting our food system. And then there have been scares over lettuce and those types of bacteria or pathogens that have made people sick. Talk about some of the challenges that farmers face in our community right now, and how your organization specifically helps those farmers overcome some of those challenges.
Miller: The challenges are real, and it mostly comes down to affordability and cost. We have been trying to address the cost of food by securing grants. In this last year, we secured $20,000 for food banks and SNAP households to buy local food. That happened both through the Mid Valley Food Hub purchases for food banks and through our support of SNAP recipients at our Fill Your Pantry event in November. So that’s one way, to get subsidies. Maybe the future of subsidies is not subsidizing certain products and commodities in our country, but subsidizing really high-quality food. The other way is helping farms reach new markets. A farmer does not have the time to go meet with a school district and have a conversation about what their needs are, how many students they have to serve and what their parameters are. So a lot of it comes down to time and cost.
Dunne: Why is local food, locally grown food, so important to a community? I know a lot of people think, “I just don’t care where my food comes from. I go to the grocery store, I buy it.” Talk about the importance of what local food means, especially in the Willamette Valley.
Miller: I might be answering this in an odd way, but I used to be a school garden teacher, and when I did that work, I was the rock star on those school campuses. I would arrive, and the kids were so excited because they wanted to be out in the garden growing food and getting to eat the things that they grew. I’m answering this question this way because I understand that local food is considered a luxury in a lot of ways, or not important in a lot of ways. But just as COVID-19 taught us how much we crave connection to other humans, I think that what comes from sitting down at a table when you have put care into a meal is what we’re craving. That doesn’t mean it took 12 hours to prepare, but even just a little bit of love for half an hour, with a couple of really solid ingredients to start with. I think it’s that connection and community. I also think that people eat a lot more healthfully, not because it’s the right thing to do, but because they start experiencing these vibrant flavors that they haven’t been exposed to very much. When you’re eating from packages, there’s not a lot of vegetables. Even in a lot of restaurants, there’s not a lot of vegetables, and they can be really fantastic.
Dunne: I’m wondering, too. I’ve talked to a lot of nonprofits, and especially in the past two years, there have been a lot of cuts at the federal level to different programs. I’m wondering, has that affected you and the clients and customers that you serve?
Miller: At this point, not us as a nonprofit. Of course, the general pressure of the economy has affected the farms that we’re working with. We are really small and nimble. We have three part-time people, equaling less than one full-time equivalent, and we recirculated nearly $100,000 into the local economy last year with a very bare-bones staff. We are doing a September fundraising campaign, and we were aiming to raise $30,000. We’re already at $22,000, so we’ve been making really good progress. I think that is a demonstration of how excited people are, not just to be feeding students and those experiencing food insecurity through our food bank work and our school work, but also because people want something to be excited about. I think it’s the positive progress that we’ve been making, because we’re showing that we’re doing a lot with really few dollars.
Dunne: Kirsten, my last question for you is this: If folks listening to us want to help, want to be a participant, want to get more engaged in what you’re doing, what can they do?
Miller: First of all, you could go to our website to get more information: tenriversfoodweb.org. Learn about the events, and come to Fill Your Pantry. We’d love to have you there. It’s Nov. 15 at the Benton County Fairgrounds. You can also find information about how to donate, if that’s something you’re willing to do, and you can sign up for our newsletter and learn more about the events that we have over the course of the year.
Dunne: Sounds great. She is Kirsten Miller, the director of Ten Rivers Food Web. Kirsten, thanks so much for talking with us.
Miller: Thank you.
Dunne: As we finish out the show today, we’re going to bring in one of our reporters to update us all on the potential for a higher education strike that could have major impacts on Oregon colleges and universities. KLCC’s Nathan Wilk. Nathan, welcome back into the studio. Thanks so much for coming in.
Nathan Wilk: Thanks so much for having me.
Dunne: You’ve been covering this story. Who are the classified employees of Oregon’s seven public universities that could go on strike?
Wilk: We’re talking here about the University of Oregon, Oregon State, Portland State, Western Oregon, Eastern Oregon, Southern Oregon and the Oregon Institute of Technology. These are not faculty, but they are a lot of the everyday workers you would see at a university. Some are dining hall workers. There are office staff. There are custodial workers. These are a lot of the jobs that help these universities run.
Dunne: Sure, exactly. Very important positions, and of course we’re just getting back to school, so they are not on strike yet. When could this happen? Give us a picture of the timing of this potential.
Wilk: They have authorized a strike. To back up, they bargain in an interesting way, which is that all of these employees from all these universities bargain with all of the universities that I just mentioned together, which is different from a lot of other unions. They have voted to authorize a strike, which means they’ve given notice to the universities, and it could start Sept. 28 or later. That’s the earliest date, and that’s the date that we’re all looking at.
Dunne: What have these union representatives said about why they might go on strike? What are they potentially striking for?
Wilk: It’s contract negotiations. I spoke with Jennifer Smith, who is the union president for these workers at UO, and she talks about how the economic offer that they have now, which has improved over the course of bargaining, still doesn’t really reflect the cost-of-living increases or the economic uncertainty and insecurity that a lot of these classified employees are experiencing. In addition, she talked about some of the things that the universities proposed to get rid of in the contract, specifically protections around layoffs and outsourcing work. They want to get further along and get a better deal, and they’re willing to strike over it.
Dunne: What has management said? What has been their offer, and how are they categorizing this potential strike?
Wilk: The schools are offering a 1.5% base salary increase this year and an additional 1% raise next year. They say they have the best benefits package for public employees anywhere in the western states, and they say they still want to work out a deal and will meet again Sept. 24 to continue these negotiations. They want to avoid a strike. They also said that if it gets closer, they will make preparations to allow the universities to keep running if this happens.
Dunne: My next question is, boy, what if a strike happens? What could be the impact? We’re talking about thousands of employees doing a lot of stuff that you need for major universities.
Wilk: Sure. Not only that, but Sept. 28, the proposed date, is the first day of school at the University of Oregon and at several of the universities that would potentially be involved in the strike. Jennifer Smith, the union president for UO that I spoke to, said, “Yeah, students would feel pain. This would be unfortunate.” She said the university has a choice to make about whether students are eating chicken nuggets for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Dunne: Because I would imagine that if a strike happens, food service, something like that, might simply not be available on these campuses.
Wilk: It depends. At the University of Oregon, for example, there are student workers in a different union who also make up many of those dining hall workers. So we wouldn’t see a complete shutdown, for example. But this would certainly be a large-scale impact.
Dunne: Are negotiations happening right now? I’m not going to ask you to put a number on the likelihood of a strike, but are they trying to work this out as we speak?
Wilk: They definitely are. When I spoke to them, there was not a tone of, “This is going to happen,” or, “We’re giving up on this.” Both the union and the universities have said they ultimately don’t want a strike, if they can find another way to do this.
Dunne: Okay, well, we know you will stay on top of this. Nathan Wilk, reporter for us here at KLCC. Thanks for updating us.
Wilk: Thank you, Michael.
Dunne: That’s the show for today. All episodes of “Oregon on the Record” are available as a podcast at klcc.org. Tomorrow on the show, yours truly goes sand surfing on the Oregon coast, and we’ll tell the story of this relatively new and fun sport. I’m Michael Dunne, host of “Oregon on the Record.” Thanks for listening.
