Kearsarge Food Hub turns 10, celebrates new era of food security work

Kathleen Bigford regarded Bradford, like she did most of New Hampshire, as a greying place.

Having lived in town for decades and taught at the ConVal district middle school in neighboring Antrim for 25 years, she’d seen many young people leave the area and pursue their passions elsewhere. Then, as she approached her retirement, five of them returned.

“They had gone to school together, had traveled the world and had decided, ‘We want to be in Bradford and establish a food network with local farmers and have a place where local people can buy local food,’” she recalled.

Bigford remembered having once taught a unit on food waste where she learned that the average American wastes 300 pounds of food per year. Apart from those few weeks in her own classroom, she had never been involved in her local food system. Even so, she joined their venture, the Kearsarge Food Hub, and watched as the nonprofit began working to help local food growers and stem food insecurity in central New Hampshire. “The first reactions that we got was ‘Bradford really needs this.’”

That was 10 years ago.

Since then, the Food Hub has grown from a small farmstand to encompass food system education programming and a storefront at Sweet Beet Market and Cafe. In 2024, the Food Hub worked with more than 250 food growers and vendors, donated more than $100,000 worth of food and saw nearly $1 million in revenue between sales, grants, individual contributions and other sources of income.

And without any explicit intention of doing so, the burgeoning operation has become a stand-out employer in Bradford and infused the town with youthful vigor.

“Younger people have moved into town. Some of them I’ve even talked with on the porch of Sweet Beet. They’ve said to me, ‘We found this place and thought yeah, we want to move to Bradford,’” said Bigford, who now chairs the organization’s board. “The demographic has changed and I would attribute it largely to the presence of what we did.”

As it enters its second decade, the Food Hub is evolving: Executive Director France Hahn is stepping down into a part-time development role and Pierre Hahn, the long-time manager of Sweet Beet Farm, will begin operating the farm’s West Road location independently this year. Sweet Beet will live on at the Food Hub’s original home, the half-acre “Baby Beet” plot and farmstand on Route 114, where its work will focus more on small-scale farming and education.

Communication and collaboration will guide the next 10 years of “KFH2,” said Hanna Flanders, the Food Hub’s director of community engagement.

Envisioning the organization’s future has been a more purposeful exercise at this stage than it was a decade ago; creating the Food Hub was a learning experience for its co-founders.

“All of the positions have been very much learning on the job. None of us had been trained in what we’re doing now, for better or worse,” said Flanders.

The idea of mobilizing around food access in the area was nothing new, but the nonprofit’s ability to follow through on its mission defined its success, she said.

Flanders remembered presenting the Food Hub’s vision for a strong local food system at Rotary Clubs and town meetings across central New Hampshire with other founding members. The act of farming lent the nonprofit some credibility among food growers, she said, and the farm stand in downtown Bradford gave them visibility and helped them build trust within the community.

In 2017, the Food Hub began renovating and moving into its retail location on West Main Street, and its leaders decided soon after to become a 501c3 nonprofit, a choice that enabled it to expand its fundraising capacity. Relying only on the Market and Cafe’s low profit margins, the Food Hub might not have been able to do as much food access work, offering discounts to certain groups of shoppers and donating food to local food security partners.

“Our dream was to pilot like a farmers market that’s year-round and that has more than vegetables. We wanted to be the bridge between the agricultural community and the consumers and the neighbors who need to eat food, which is all of us,” Flanders said. “We felt strongly that this was possible.”

Building that bridge has always involved education.

Two days after Cassie McCormack-LaShier and her husband Jacob graduated from Colby-Sawyer College in 2021, the couple joined the Food Hub’s apprenticeship program. Almost overnight they were given complete latitude to seed, plant, market and sell produce harvested from the Baby Beet plot; more importantly, they were given the freedom to experiment and the grace to fail and learn from that failure.

Once their apprenticeship ended, they stayed with the nonprofit. While her husband worked with the organization’s food security and donations initiatives, later transitioning to work at Sweet Beet Farm, McCormack-LaShier worked in the market and was subsequently named the Food Hub’s food access manager.

“Neither of us are from this area, so the way that the Food Hub and the community as a whole welcomed us with open arms has been incredible,” McCormack-LaShier said. “There was an awakening moment where I started to think, ‘If there’s a change I want to see, maybe I should put my money where my mouth is and choose to go do it myself.’”

The couple has carried that attitude into their new endeavor, a farm of their own in Sutton. Last year, they built raised beds and planted perennials on a single-acre plot at Blaisdell Hill Farm that had been a hayfield for generations. This year, their produce — garlic, brussels, broccoli, onions, lettuce and, of course, beets — has already found its way to some local food retailers, including Sweet Beet Market.

As the Food Hub moves to place more of an emphasis on education during its next phase of growth, Bigford was reminded of the parts of teaching that she enjoyed the most.

“It was getting kids into the community and being able to show them that they have a voice and they can make a difference,” she said.

When bringing new people into the organization, from hiring a new executive director to training young farmers, Bigford said the Food Hub will put a priority on people who share the heartbeat of the organization.

“Someone who can guide us, someone who can take us to the next level,” she said. “Because there is a next level.”

Rebeca Pereira can be reached at rpereira@cmonitor.com