Raised beds and a small hoop house are part of the Farms on Baldwin project, started this year as part of the Northeast Ohio Food Hub. Crops will be sold at the Northside Farmers' market and used for value added products at the Shared use commercial Kitchen Incubator at 901 Elm in Youngstown, scheduled to begin on a modest sclae in August, and expand over the next two years.
The first round stakeholder session for Mahoning County generated numerous ideas and approaches for business start-up and expansion in the Ag-Bio cluster. These are documented in the Google Doc spreadsheet at this link: http://tinyurl.com/mahoning-first-round (see abbreviated snapshot below). Please take a look and make any additional entries or revisions to those we noted.
Phase one of the kitchen incubator will include use of a licensed kitchen for baked goods and small volume commercial and startup catering activities. The Food Hub building - the former Penguin Pub north of YSU campus at 901 Elm in Youngstown - is being retrofitted in stages. We hope for late May or early June startup.
Phase two will include flash freezing and fresh vegetable preparation and packaging, for 2012.
Phase three, funding permitting, will include thermal processing.
The market moves inside through Dec. 24th with fall veggies, apples, baked goods, and value added products. 1105 Elm Street inside First Unitarian Universalist Church through patio. Hours 10:00 - Noon.
Goodness Grows held three taste tests in June as a part of this project, "Youngstown Eats Local Produce," as I call it. Our focus crops were strawberries, rhubarb, zucchini, and peas. Two sessions were held at Boardman High School with students studying for the Ohio Graduation Test, and one session was with elementary students at Camp Newport, a day-camp and summer lunch program on Youngstown's south side. We had between 15 and 20 students at each tasting, which is ten or twenty students fewer than we expected each time.
Registration is now open for the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association’s (OEFFA) 34th annual conference, Growing Opportunities, Cultivating Change. The conference will take place Saturday, February 16 and Sunday, February 17, 2013 in Granville, Ohio (Licking County).