Can more local farm produce find its way into more institutional dining halls, giving local farmers a steady market for their goods? A test case is being made using that versatile, long-growing, nutrient-rich vegetable, kale.
The project aims to connect Upper Valley farmers with a facility to prepare the kale for institutional use, with a commitment from Dartmouth College’s Dining Services to buy the processed kale for at least the first year it’s available.
Along with Dartmouth, the project partners are the Center for an Agricultural Economy in Hardwick, VT, which will truck and process the kale, using new equipment the grant allows them to purchase; and Vital Communities, which is connecting Upper Valley farmers to the project and helping with public communications about the project’s benefits.
The project is funded by a $100,000 Food Vision Prize from the Henry P. Kendall Foundation, awarded in October 2025, as well as $15,000 in matching funds from Dartmouth’s Student Wellness Office and Office of State Grant Relations and Community Engagement. The prize application was written by Dartmouth’s Sustainability Office, which is managing the overall project.
This project was the result of many conversations to understand the barriers to local food procurement followed by meetings with key players, wrote Laura Braasch, Assistant Director of Dartmouth Sustainability. “When farmers, processors, and institutions sit at the same table, we can find solutions that build resilience up and down the supply chain,” she said. “We hope this project leads to sustainable and lasting changes that nourish our students, sustain our soils, and sow the seeds of a thriving and secure local food economy.”
Although it might seem easy for a school or hospital to buy produce from the farmer next door, it’s not, said Cameron Huftalen, a Vital Communities Food and Farm Project Manager. “In our work with local farmers, they’ve told us they would love to have the steady business of institutional customers, but they don’t have the time and money to find those opportunities and market themselves to them.”
In addition, institutional dining services tend to need produce that has been processed – trimmed, chopped, and in some cases frozen – which small farms usually can’t do efficiently on their own.
Rachel Xia UG gets food from Bonnie Emery in ’53 Commons Dartmouth dining hall. Copyright Katie Lenhart, Dartmouth College.
The Center in Hardwick increasingly fills that role for farms in the region, currently supplying approximately 50 schools with prepped local food. The grant will improve their capability through the purchase of a $61,425 Sormac BSM Belt Slicer. The slicer would replace an aging and undersized Robot Coupe food processor at the Center’s Just Cut facility, reducing labor costs and improving the profitability of not just kale but 12 other products of the facility.
The Center currently trucks food from Upper Valley farms, but the project will make that trucking more efficient by increasing the volume of food the Center collects on its Upper Valley route and opening possibilities of trucking other products besides kale from participating area farms.
Kale was chosen as the test product because various institutions expressed interest in it as a product, including Dartmouth, and because it has a relatively long local growing season and can be served in a variety of ways in dining halls, including rough chopped for a salad or cooked and frozen for stews, soups, and stir-fries.
Even with all these efficiencies lowering the cost of locally grown food, it is not likely to cost less than food from the usual sources. “Ultimately, local food will almost always cost more than conventional food because the negative impacts of our industrial food systems are externalized,” wrote Braasch. Those “hidden” costs—climate damage, water depletion, health impacts, and rural community erosion—are paid by taxpayers, health insurers, and the environment, not the food producers themselves. In contrast, local food carries its costs of labor, equipment, risk, and small‑scale logistics that the industrial system hides behind scale and subsidies.
By investing in a processing hub, creating a reliable purchasing network, and embedding the project in Dartmouth’s food procurement policy, the partners are effectively internalizing a slice of those externalities, wrote Braasch. “The result is not just a higher price tag on kale; it’s a price that reflects the true value of a resilient, healthy, and locally rooted food system—an investment whose returns are measured in cleaner air, stronger farms, and fewer dollars spent on downstream health and environmental remediation.”
Because of this, the project also includes time and resources for communication – to both Dartmouth students and staff and the general public — about the benefits of buying and eating locally sourced food. “By clearly articulating the many co-benefits of local food procurement to key stakeholders at Dartmouth and in the community, we will create a broad ecosystem of support to promote and finance future local food procurement,” the application states.
Research and development are happening through the winter and spring; the goal is for the local kale to be in the dining hall this fall.
Connecting new farms to the Center in Hardwick could lead to the Center buying other vegetables from those farms to process and resell – extending the project’s impact beyond Dartmouth and kale, Huftalen said.