New Entry's World PEAS CSA and Food Hub is at the center of an excellent new ecoRI article (“Food Hubs: Heart of Local Food Movement”). Kate Petcosky, World PEAS CSA and Food Access Coordinator, provided some choice quotes, like this one:

Petcosky explained that food hubs are helping to challenge assumptions about volume that have plagued the local food movement. “They can scale up the amount of local food available in markets by collaborating with multiple producers in new and interesting ways,” she said. “A single small farm operating alone wouldn’t have this capacity, but when farms work together, there is exponentially greater potential.”

And this one:

“At this point, we are aggregating from 30 different refugee or immigrant beginning farmers, and moving about $160,000 worth of produce. … Our farmers can’t be at farmers markets every day, so we are taking over the direct consumer relationships.”

And this one:

“We are excited to see food hubs expanding,” said Petcosky, noting that some food hubs are building infrastructure to store food year-round. “It creates an actual alternative, a response to the question: ‘How can we feed a nation without big agriculture?’”

If you have a stake in local foods, read the whole article - it's well worth your while!