Published in Spring 2024
By: Laura Bennett, The Vegucation Station
Each year at the OSU Small Farms Conference, we prioritize purchasing the conference food from local farms. We do our best to curate a delicious meal that celebrates local food from our small farmers and producers, many who are in attendance at the conference. It means a lot for farmers to leave their fields, pastures, and long lists of chores to make the trek out for our annual conference. And farmers know food, so serving a good meal is a must. But what does it take to pull off this farm to table meal for nearly a thousand hungry farmers?
Through an ever expanding web of connections in our farming community, we weave together an understanding of what local foods are in season, work with our catering team to develop a menu that is both exciting and logistically feasible to serve, and then we put all the pieces together. It is a choreographed movement of thousands of pounds of food up and down the valley.
Of course, there are a handful of challenges which make this task much easier said than done. The event is in February, which is not a notoriously abundant time of year. Farmers tend to have roots and squash, and more roots and more squash. And this year, the conference came just weeks after an ice storm that wiped out the many overwintering crops.
Beyond the limitations of winter availability, much of the work we do goes toward bridging the gap between our catering team and our local producers: this is where I come in! Every year, the Small Farms team appoints a Local Food Procurement Coordinator to work on this project. As a local farmer and chef myself, I’ve had a lot of fun fulfilling this role for the last two years, getting the chance to take my mind off my own farm projects and connect with fellow farmers.
One of my favorite things about this work is getting to visit the farms, production kitchens, and distribution warehouses that make up our food system. I weave my way in and out of walk-in coolers, search for hidden keys to get into old storage facilities, tour around farms exchanging planting techniques, and work out random pick-ups at houses and workplaces to make the whole adventure run smoothly.
Together, Arnold Dining Hall’s Chef de Cuisine, Caitlin Lash, and I worked alongside the incredible OSU catering team to come up with a menu that would satisfy all of our goals as well as the logistical limitations of serving nearly a thousand people. A Benton county local from Monroe, Chef Caitlin, started her culinary career studying at Linn Benton Community College and said she never looked back.
Lash says that compared to the remaining eighty percent of Arnold Dining Hall’s catering business, where clients choose from a series of pre-made menus, this project was a definite change of pace from day to day operations, requiring lots of coordination, prep sheets, and well-executed fire times. Due to the nature of the task at hand, both Chef Caitlin and I were particularly interested in using Umi Organic’s yakisoba noodles for their ability to be baked in quantity. Caitlin’s first time working with the brand, she said, “It was really fun getting to do the menu off of the yakisoba…. I was blown away by how easy they were to work with.”
Lola Milholland, author, and co-founder and CEO of Umi Organic, is a one producer leading the way for local producers to enter into farm to institution sales outlets, helping to get her wholegrain noodles, featuring locally grown and milled flours, into schools across the country. Umi worked with Oregon State University’s Food Innovation Center to make their noodles bakeable in cafeteria kitchens that have limited staffing and infrastructure, without compromising on that springy yakisoba texture. You can read more about Lola and her team’s work in her recent piece for The Guardian, Noodles of opportunity: how an Oregon law boosted a small food business and built community.
Yakisoba is also a great dish to serve in the winter because it can be tossed with equal parts cabbage, carrots, and radishes that farmers do have in abundance. With our main dish decided on and inspired by our local produce selection, Chef Caitlin immediately started listing off side dish after side dish that would pair well with the yakisoba. Purple daikon radishes, Tetsukabuto squash, oyster mushrooms, green garlic, mustard greens–slowly but surely, our menu started to take form.
Coming from a Filipino and Spanish family, Caitlin said she was immersed in Asian culture from a young age and was “really excited to work with Asian cuisine… Every chef has a comfort cuisine and Asian is definitely mine,” she said. From rich Gochujang Bok Choy & Carrots, to Thai basil Tofu & Tempeh, to Yakisoba, Japchae, Cilantro Tahini Slaw, and so much more, this year’s lunch would definitely not have been the same without the heart and experience that Chef Caitlin brought to the project.
It was an absolute pleasure working with our small farms community and Chef Caitlin to bring this project to life this year. With a lunch budget of $20- 25 per attendee, and breakfast and reception snacks adding an extra $15 per person, we sourced from over twenty local farmers and producers to buy in nearly 2,500 pounds of local food, putting around $10,000 back into our local food economy.
Bridging the gap between farms and institutions is a part of a larger conversation that farmers are having right now, a topic that many echoed at both the Farm to School and Small Farms conferences. Many local farmers and producers would love to secure steady, wholesale contracts with local schools and other institutions, and likewise many institutions are excited to invest in more local sourcing options. And as we know, there’s still a lot more work to be done in continuing to nourish the systems needed to allow those relationships to develop into strong economies.
A huge thanks to everyone who came out to this year’s Small Farms Conference, to Chef Caitlin and the entire catering team at Arnold Dining Hall, and to the twenty-two local farmers and producers who provided the fresh vegetables, mushrooms, meat, eggs, cheese, beans, berries, and teas that became our incredible meals for the day. From pulling off this one meal and the snacks, to all the connections and relationships that help our small farms thrive, it takes a full food system to do it all.
2024 Featured Local Farms and Producers: Campo Collective, Choi’s Kimchi, Deep Roots Farm, Gathering Together Farm, Greenville Farms, Kiyokawa Family Orchards, La Terra Vita, Little Garden Organic Farm, Lonely Lane Farms, Mindful Mushrooms, Oshala Farm, Oso Honey Farm, OSU Beaver Cheese, Pablo Munoz Farms, Riverland Family Farm, Shinji Kawai, Squirrel and Crow, Stoneboat Farm, Storybook Farm, Sun Gold Farm, The Mushroomery, and Umi Organic Noodles