New Local Food Solutions Papers Released

Two new Local Food Solutions Papers are now available, Rebates 101, as well as BPS - Organizational Culture. Local Food Solutions Papers feature solutions and insights on how to overcome barriers and challenges to local food procurement. All 18 volumes are available on our website.

Webinar Series

The Greenbelt Fund has partnered with the U.S. National Good Food Network on a series of value chain coordination webinars.

On October 25, the second in the series explores how value chains, like all entities, are not isolated, but are rooted in context. One role of value chain coordination is to improve the conditions in which the local value chains exist. Learn more on the Greenbelt Fund website. 

Ontario Agriculture Week

This month we celebrated Ontario Agriculture Week, a week dedicated to highlighting farmers and local producers who provide the delicious Ontario food we enjoy together, culminating in Thanksgiving.

Greenbelt Fund CEO Ed McDonnell shared his thoughts on the overarching benefits and opportunities the Greenbelt has for farmers and the agri-food economy as a whole in his op-ed celebrating Ontario Agriculture Week.

Local Food Literacy Roundtable

On October 4, the Greenbelt Fund hosted a Local Food Literacy Roundtable event to facilitate the sharing of experiences and insights of tracking and measuring results of local food literacy initiatives.  

The session provided valuable insights and ideas for how to improve and standardize measurement of these programs.

Local Food Expo

Halton Healthcare recently held their Local Food Expo during Agriculture Week at the Oakville Trafalgar Memorial Hospital.

The expo has been a mainstay since 2014, when they received a grant for the 'Good for You, Locally Grown' project, which helps get more local food into hospital kitchens.

Over 1,000 attendees were able to sample products from Ontario producers, including Greenbelt Fund grantees D&D Poultry and Stemmler's Meats and Cheese Inc.

Food Hub Financial Benchmarking Survey

Deadline: November 30, 2018

The Greenbelt Fund is partnering with the Wallace Center and Farm Credit East to undertake this Food Hub Financial Benchmarking Survey based on their past successful surveys in the United States.

With your help, we can benchmark Ontario’s food hub sector to help us all better understand where the food hub sector is headed, and help individual hub operators understand how to get on, and stay on, the path to long-term financial success.

Each participant in the survey is automatically entered to win a RoboCoupe Food Processor a handy item for food hub operators that prepares, cuts, slices, and dices local food!