A new kind of middleman is helping small farmers get their produce into larger stores—without sacrificing quality or income

By Sam Fromartz
Photo by N. Scott Trimble

It might be hard to believe that this cold, dank, 27,000-square-foot warehouse in Eugene, Oregon, across the road from several natural gas storage tanks and a giant commercial composting operation, represents a distant ideal of food distribution. But it just might. The cement loading docks of Organically Grown Company are quiet at 8 a.m., but earlier in the morning, well before dawn, workers here and at another facility twice as big in Portland were pushing pallets of organic produce into waiting trucks. Some are stamped with the LADYBUG label, indicating produce grown on farms in the Pacific Northwest.

I had arrived at this quiet outpost of the wholesale produce business to meet with David Lively, a one-time farmer who has passionately promoted local, organic, and sustainable food for three decades. In a tight office upstairs, Lively is wearing a T-shirt and shorts and looks a bit fatigued this morning. He apologizes. “We pulled some late nights,” he says.

The company had just concluded a three-day conference in Portland that brought more than 200 farmers and suppliers together with 400-odd customers. The meetings began early in the morning and ended at the hotel bar late at night. Although Lively and his team were feeling the after-effects, the meeting was crucial for people who knew each other only through invoice slips and phone calls. Organically Grown Company, or OGC, is at the center of this network, chipping away at a mission to deliver fresh, organic, and local food to places where most consumers shop—supermarkets and co-ops.

The trucking fleets and chilled warehouses in this endeavor often stand at odds with the typical images of “local” and “sustainable” foods, such as bustling farmers’ markets, community-supported agriculture programs that deliver a box of vegetables to your door, or farmers hauling freshly butchered lamb into restaurants. No doubt, those alternative, direct sales channels have been vitally important for farmers, especially smaller ones that can’t produce enough to break into mainstream food channels or who don’t want to, because of the compromises that might entail. Plus, direct sales channels give the farmer the full dollar in a sale, cutting out the middleman often caricatured as the scourge of agriculture.