Delta Advantage
Our team is planning a food warehouse with dry and cold storage in Sunflower County, serving food value chain members such as small, disadvantaged farmers in Sunflower and surrounding counties. The warehouse will be built within the existing former Allen Canning Plant in Moorhead, a brownfield site consisting of a 295,000 square feet facility on 95 acres. A local non‐profit, Delta Advantage Center (DAC), owns the facility; Warehouses4Good will develop a team of local stakeholders to manage the warehouse operation and provide project management support in the pre-development, design, procurement, and construction phases.
Once built, the facility will:
- More efficiently link regional food producers to regional consumers, replacing out‐of‐state foods with locally sourced foods.
- Deliver regional food producers and processors much needed access to cold chain infrastructure.
- Provide regional food producers and processors competitive access to wholesale and institutional markets in East Coast, Mid‐South, and Mid‐West states.
- Improve food access and food security in the Delta, with associated health and life expectancy benefits.
Regional Food Systems Partnership
The Delta Food System Partnership is focusing on building an equitable, sustainable, and resilient regional trade network in the Mississippi Delta region (from Memphis to Jackson). The Partnership is addressing the following needs:
- Local self-organization, to improve community self-awareness and cohesion
- Improved training and infrastructure, to grow volume while improving product integrity
- Helping producers, food businesses, and local communities think and work together by building and empowering relationships – and trust –throughout the food value chain
The Partnership is meeting these needs by investing in organizations and community development; expanding quality management tools; implementing an anchor farm program with the Partnership; and expanding the cooperative relationships built within the regional food supply chain.
Our team includes Up In Farms, University of Mississippi’s Community First Research Center for Wellbeing and Creative Achievement (CREW), Chatham University’s Center for Regional Agriculture, Food, and Transformation (CRAFT), DRA Resources, Southern Rural Black Woman’s Initiative, and the Mississippi Department of Agriculture and Commerce.
Warehouses4Good is the link that manages our partnering organizations to ensure the team exceeds expectations for planning, compliance, communication, monitoring, and project execution.
Climate Smart
Applying climate smart practices, combined with a unique marketing opportunity – climate smart branding – creates a substantial opportunity to increase output for historically under-represented farmers in the Delta.
Our Climate Smart team will advocate best management practices, new methods for improved and climate-smart production, and access to markets increases producer income. These efforts spur economic development and strengthens the local and regional foodshed. Implementing climate smart practices also improves the nation’s resilience by replacing production lost in other areas of the country to climate change impacts (e.g., extended drought).
Working with five demonstration farms in Mississippi and South Carolina, the team will develop and implement conservation/production plans – “Smart Crop Plans” for climate-smart commodities, supporting the creation of a corresponding knowledge-based training platform. We will measure impacts on GHG emissions and productivity over time by farm, region, soil type, and product type.
This work continues our initiative to create a resilient and sustainable local, food system to support our planned network of warehouses.
Local Foods Promotion Program – Producer Quality Management
Small, limited resource, and historically underserved farmers are well behind the adoption curve for quality management systems (QMS) and technologies that improve production planning, monitoring, food safety, and marketing. Quality systems and technology currently available target high volume production, focusing on users with high-end computing hardware and peripherals. This is the market targeted by almost all of the emerging ag-tech providers.
In the Mississippi Delta, we are working with Up in Farms and other partners to field an alternative – FarmQMS, deployed on smart phones and tablets – that small, disadvantaged farmers can implement at minimal up-front and operating cost. With a light, responsive front end and intuitive user interface, Farm QMS is a digital gateway for capturing harvest and food safety data at the point of production. Once this information is entered, Farm QMS supports “digital twin” food tracking as products moves from harvest through the mid-tier value chain and on to end points such as grocers, institutions, food service, and consumers.
Warehouses4Good is providing project management and grant compliance support for this initiative in our efforts to build a sustainable food system in rural America.
Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program
We are supporting our local partner, Mississippi Delta Council for Farm Workers Opportunities (MDC), with an immersive on-farm/ranch training program for 60 regional producers. The training provides valuable support and information in areas such as soil preparation, sourcing seeds and seedlings, planting, production, harvest, labor, equipment, cold storage, and aggregating crops for sale.
The program provides on-farm support services in small groups or with one-on-one coaching. Our team is providing producers the opportunity to implement on-farm tech through the web-based farm inventory program, FarmQMS, to give beginning farmers and ranchers the knowledge, skills, and tools needed to make informed decisions for their operations and enhance their sustainability.
The program’s goal is to increase income through improved production; connect buyers through an online marketplace; provide a more accurate harvest prediction and better inventory management and marketing; and integrate Harmonized GAP into smaller scale farm operations and enable participants to be competitive and responsive throughout a crisis such as Covid-19 and beyond.
Delta USDA Regional Food Business Center
Warehouses4Good is partnering with the Mississippi Delta Council for Farm Workers Opportunities (MDC), a minority-founded and -run non- profit in Clarksdale, MS, to lead the Delta RFBC to deliver Grow Delta, Feed Delta, Buy Delta. Drawing on MDC and 18 regional partners’ experience, we are working to increase agricultural business knowledge, success, and resilience – from farm gate through retail– prioritizing small disadvantaged producers, processors, and intermediaries in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and East Texas..
The Center will address barriers widely regarded as impediments to the growth of the Southern food system: poor connectivity, lack of local self-organization, insufficient diversity, reluctance to embrace innovation, and climate smart practices, and inadequate food supply chain infrastructure. Addressing these barriers, we have set a goal to replace 2% of the food currently imported into the region with local crops and meats – increasing regional producer income by more than $100 million per year. This effort extends our commitment to establishing a robust and enduring local food system in rural communities.
