Thank you for showing up for the AgStackers Roundtable, and for bringing your attention to the unglamorous bits of food systems as well as the inspiring ones.
Three months ago there were three of us on the call. This time there were six, from different places and with different stakes in the work, and it made for a really good, practical conversation. It also meant we could talk about local food without pretending one model fits everywhere.
Huge thanks to Adam Cohen, Al Knock from Son of the Soil, Cheryl Queen of Markets, Tim Connolly, and Farmer Sam👩🌾🐑🌱 for bringing so much clarity and lived experience into the room.
We kept circling one question. How do you make real food easier to access, without quietly relying on farmers to carry the whole system on their backs.
Because most people do want real food. They also need it to be accessible, and accessible is not just price. It is time and transport, routine, and the friction of getting food into a normal week when you are working, parenting, caring, commuting, and trying to keep your head above water.
Adam named one of the core tensions early on, and it stayed with me because it is both true and easy to miss when you are looking for a single solution.
“Farmers markets are part of a local food system, but they are not a local food system by themselves.”
Adam Cohen, Growing is HALF the Battle!
Markets matter. They are where trust is built, where farmers are seen, and where you can have the kind of customer relationship you do not get through a supermarket shelf. But we also talked honestly about how markets can drift, how reselling muddies the waters, and how easy it is for “farmers market” to become a label rather than a guarantee.
Cheryl brought us back to what is at stake when we get this right, and when we get it wrong.
“It’s about keeping farmers farming. It’s about short supply chains, about access to real food for people, and stopping taking food for granted, stopping taking farmers for granted.”
Cheryl Queen of Markets
We also talked about the practical strain on producers. The reality that you can work all week producing food, then spend your weekend hauling it, setting up, selling for hours, packing down, and doing it again, because consistency is what keeps customers coming back. That is not a complaint, it is just physics. It is one reason why the conversation kept moving toward the missing middle, the infrastructure that makes local food possible at scale without burning people out.
Adam made the case for food hubs that aggregate produce from multiple farms, use an online ordering window, and then run a single weekly pickup. Not to replace markets, but to remove friction for customers and remove some of the endless extra labour for farmers.
Sam grounded it in the reality of logistics and regulation, especially around processing. Even when there is demand, the bottlenecks are real, and they shape what can be sold and how.
Tim brought us back to resilience as a principle. If one choke point can topple the whole house of cards, then we do not have resilience. We have a system optimised for convenience and cost, and it is starting to show its fractures.
If there was one shared thread running through it all, it was this. We cannot rebuild food resilience by telling people to try harder.
We rebuild it by making real food easier to access, and by building the local infrastructure that takes some of the load off farmers so they can keep farming.
That might look like better markets. It might look like food hubs. It might look like school gardens and food education. It might look like community processing facilities, or simply more honest conversations about what food actually costs.
Probably it looks like different combinations of all of those things, depending on where you live.
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