By Frank Daniels IV
Staff Writer
Local food cooperative Sandhills Farm to Table will not continue into its 16th season. Managing director Mandy Davis announced the closing in an email to customers, stating the co-op’s 2024 season was “one of the lowest and most inconsistent years” of participation in its 15-year history.
The business, which operated similar to a multi-farm community-supported agriculture network, was a multi-stakeholder cooperative, meaning producers, workers and consumers all owned a portion of the business. According to its website, Sandhills Farm to Table was one of the first of its kind in the country where all stakeholders shared equal ownership.
In a followup conversation with The Pilot, Davis said that while the organization may be dissolving, local food availability is higher than ever in the region.
“We have a farmers market almost seven days a week,” she said. “There’s new grocery stores. There are so many different opportunities for people to find what they’re looking for, especially the way the community supports local. It just became a challenge for our farmers to be able to provide for those outlets as well as us.”
Davis managed the organization for over nine years, but the original partnership formed in 2009. Partially, the impetus was an answer to the challenge some regional farms faced in the wake of decreased tobacco consumption and production, Davis explained in a 2022 interview with Pilot Radio. She said there were many farmers who had the land, the equipment and the desire to keep farming, but they needed to find a profitable replacement crop.
Also, in the mid-2000s Americans began to recognize the health benefits of seeking local produce. The newly coined “locavore” was chosen as the New Oxford American Dictionary’s word of the year in 2007. Those two factors created the perfect opportunity for the creation of Sandhills Farm to Table, and the cooperative formed to connect local farmers to local consumers.
In the ensuing years, it continued to grow. Many of its charter members and farms, like Priest Family Farms, Billy Carter Farms and Highlanders Farm, remained in the co-op even after a hurricane in 2019 forced the operation to relocate from its original location in Whispering Pines into the Sandhills AgInnovation Center. Sandhills Farm to Table claimed an average of 20 farms each year contributing produce for the cooperative.
Consumer growth spiked during COVID. In 2020, Davis said they were delivering around 500 boxes each week in Moore and surrounding counties. But she said that was short-lived.
“ That was a peak year for us, and it was amazing,” she said “Then, very quickly, our box count dropped soon after people got back out into the world. People really wanted to get into doing their own thing, growing their own food. They were so ready to get back out, and we just kind of lost our momentum.”
Even though many charter members and others continued to support the co-op, telling Davis they would “get a little bit here and there,” those members began to rely on it less. In those post-COVID years, that shift in consumer behaviors has continued trending toward decreased participation.
“ The ‘little bit,’ after a few years, wasn’t enough to keep us up and running,” Davis said.
Instrumental in the co-op’s early success was its workplace wellness program. Organizations like First Bank, Sandhills Pediatrics, FirstHealth of the Carolinas, area churches and the town of Aberdeen became Farm to Table box drop-off locations, with some businesses offering to pay a portion of the subscription fee for their employees. That, too, began to wane as employers explored other wellness programs or options.
Sandhills Farm to Table held a farmer meeting ahead of each season, and for the past few years Davis has been sharing her read on the trend with the producers. But the farms had been experiencing their own shift.
Another product of the necessary adjustments around social distancing was producers moving to more farmers markets and creating on-site farm stands to offer their crops, which they were having difficulty selling elsewhere, including those that previously wouldn’t have considered that effort worth the time.
Davis said that she began to notice farmers at the meetings who weren’t able to offer product for the co-op boxes throughout the season, because they would sell out of that produce at their own farm stands. Other farms offered what Davis called value-added products. because they weren’t typically available from other sources. They saw more direct-to-consumer distribution opportunities as the larger market adjusted to consumer tastes, like a local rice producer based out of Oriental.
“ When we started out with Tidewater Grain, it was amazing,” she said. “Their farmers are neighbors with our facility in Ellerbe, but they have an amazing business and you can find their product almost anywhere now.”
Those changes may hold a glimpse of the county’s local food future. Davis believes the community will carry on through the efforts of these farms. In conversations with farmers in recent weeks, she has heard tentative interest in continuing what they had with Sandhills Farm to Table Cooperative in some way.
The multi-stakeholder model is not the only style of co-op. In a producer cooperative, farms might share equipment and processing costs and coordinate on efforts like marketing, distribution and sales.
“I think, if it’s done correctly,” Davis said, “it could help the farmers kind of find their own venture.”
Davis said she’s confident that the Sandhills AgInnovation Center and the Moore County Cooperative Extension will be able to help coordinate communication and resources for the farmers after Sandhills Farm to Table shuts down. And she is still willing to help the farms and farmers where she can, but she felt changes on both sides of the equation caused the co-op to become disconnected and stray from the original concept.
“What we did ran its course,” she said. “Now the farmers are getting back to square one, and I think that something like this could be rebuilt.”
Davis urged those who supported Sandhills Farm to Table to continue that support for the farms and farmers that call our region home.
In the email announcing the closure, she said the co-op “delivered hundreds of thousands of produce boxes” to pickup sites at businesses, schools and churches with the help of “countless” volunteers. She included the most recent producer stakeholders, 29 farms with website links and addresses, in the email sent with the closure announcement, adding the co-op had worked with many others over the years.
“It has been an honor and a pleasure to serve the community over the past 15 years,” she said. “We are forever grateful for the support, and we truly hope you will continue to support local agriculture in any way you can.”
Contact Frank Daniels IV at (910) 693-2486 or frank@thepilot.com.
