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Networking is a Key to Building Local Food Systems in Illinois
- Bob Benenson
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Farmer-advocate Jeff Hake convenes builders on monthly Collaborative Zoom call
Local Food Forum contributor Bob Heuer of HNA Networks kicks off a series of stories about convening organizations and platforms that support growth and development of Illinois’ local food systems, starting with this piece about the Illinois Food System Infrastructure Collaborative.
Bob co-authored this article with Brian Williams, a semi-retired journalist and urban planner with 25 years of focusing on regional food systems in Ohio and Illinois.
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By Bob Heuer & Brian Williams/HNA Networks
The Illinois Food System Infrastructure Collaborative (IFSIC) is a mouthful of a moniker for a group of agri-food advocates and entrepreneurs.
IFSIC’s mission is vaguely defined and its funding is modest grant money from several sources. Yet its diverse mix of members are cobbling together the most crucial parts of local food systems: processing and distribution of farm products.
Collaborative action — mobilized through communities of practice such as IFSIC — could be just the ticket to catalyze the missing bounty of financial capital. Their online meetings take place at noon central on the second Tuesday of every month, and they welcome new members with a strong interest in food and ag infrastructure (click the button below to join).
This Tuesday (May 12), Tufts University senior lecturer Cathy Stanton will talk about her experience as a member of a small-town Massachusetts food co-op. She explores the challenges of small-scale food systems competing against corporations in her 2024 book titled Food Margins: Lessons from an Unlikely Grocer.
“This might be the best food system book I've ever read,” says IFSIC manager Jeff Hake, who also co-owns Funks Grove Heritage Fruits & Grains Farm in McLean County, Illinois with wife Katie Funk and her brother Jonathan Funk.
He describes the IFSIC monthly meetings as “part collaboration, part commiseration and a connector” of farmers, ag organizations, local governments and food-related businesses. IFSIC is a resource for a range of enterprises, including commercial kitchens, post-harvest processing systems and independent groceries.
“As people create a shared resource that could benefit many players in our food system, they also find that our economy and culture are genuinely opposed” to locally scaled community-based enterprise, Jeff says.
He continues, “There’s an overwhelming amount of details to manage, and it most often causes people to quit. And that, ultimately, is what I want IFSIC to be able to prevent. I want to help all these well-meaning, smart, capable people to affect change in our food system faster, so we can get to the future we've been dreaming about before the industrial food system finally consumes all hope for viable alternatives.”
IFSIC regulars represent all parts of Illinois. The Alton Food Hub is making St. Louis — about 25 miles south across the Mississippi River — the market for its goods. In Logan County north of Springfield, the county economic development agency is helping to build a regional food system. In Waukegan near Illinois’ northeast corner, the College of Lake County is building a $20 million Urban Farm Center overlooking Lake Michigan.
Farmer-Led Collaborative
“It’s hard to have a viable career as a farmer, which is one of the most fundamental jobs a person can have,” Jeff observes. “The challenge of being successful in farming is very often beyond the farm gate. Getting more local food to people requires processing, value adding and selling.”
He recalls growing up in Massachusetts with a childhood fascination about plants. A college interest in social justice led him to agriculture and food systems.
He came to Illinois for a job with The Land Connection, which was founded in 2001 to protect farmland and support beginning farmers. He ended up staying after marrying into a family that has been farming in east-central Illinois’ McLean County for more than 200 years.
One of the family’s original products was Funks Grove Pure Maple Sirup — spelled with an “i” as Noah Webster did in his 1808 dictionary. Great-Great Grandma Hazel Funk insisted on that spelling in her will.
In 2016, Jeff started Funks Grove Heritage Fruits & Grains Farm with wife Katie and brother-in-law Jonathan. Their grain is milled into various flours, muffin mixes and other products. This Funk family business is independent of the sirup operation but uses the sirup as an additive to many of its products.
What they grow (raw grains) and what they sell (flour mixes) requires a milling process to be ready for market. Thus Jeff saw the need for — and developed an interest in — building processing and distribution networks that serve farmers who are growing on a smaller scale in ways that regenerate farmland.
This is nothing new. In fact, it simply re-creates the food systems of the Funks’ forebears. Transforming grains into flour (or cattle into beef, turkeys into Thanksgiving dinner, etc.) was done at the local level for generations. Then those processors consolidated into regional businesses and eventually into concentrations of four processors that capture 60 percent to 80 percent of the market for most commodities and farmland inputs.
IFSIC’s Origins
In 2021, Dan Kenney had a different vision. His DeKalb County Community Gardens sought support for a food hub and other food-related amenities as part of a mixed-use development. That goal drove creation of IFSIC. Early members included Healthy Food Hub in Chicago and the Greater Wabash Food Council in rural Southeast Illinois. The council focuses on institutional markets for schools, nursing homes and summer programs.
Jeff joined IFSIC as facilitator in 2023. “I sought to narrow the focus to infrastructure so we could dig into the details of the problems we're trying to solve. Those details emerge when we come up with authentically good ideas to solve food system problems and then discover why those things aren't already being done. They're incredibly difficult to solve and people usually burn out before those good ideas are actualized.”
Jeff manages IFSIC’s $75,000 budget with additional support from Illinois Stewardship Alliance (ISA), IFSIC’s fiscal sponsor. Jeff previously worked with ISA as Local Food Organizer.
Financial resources have come from the Chicago Region Food System Fund, the Illinois Food Movement Fund, and the Illinois Specialty Crop Block Grant program. New research this year will be supported by University of Illinois Extension.
The April 14 IFSIC call featured a presentation from Ritchie Wai of Farmers Rising, a leading farmer education non-profit based in Caledonia, Illinois (near Rockford). He walked through the specifics of the organization’s new equipment-sharing program for beginning farmers.
The presentation reflected the implicit challenges in local food system infrastructure: Navigating both the hard truths of running a business with what Jeff calls “the softer, squishier needs of meeting the mission of the program, of trying to develop trust in a community, of actually affecting change in our food system.”
“Ritchie is not trying to start Sunbelt Rentals — he's trying to cultivate the next generation of farmers,” Jeff explains. “His idea is analogous to other calls we've hosted before and will host again.”
Brian Williams is a semi-retired journalist and urban planner with 25 years of focus on regional food systems in Ohio and Illinois. Reach Brian at Local-nexus.
Bob Heuer leads HNA Networks which is developing a project in partnership with Chicago Wilderness Alliance to pilot the National Association of Counties’ “Good Food For All” policy. Reach Bob at bob@hnanetworks.net.
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