Haerah Baird
Tackling Food System Reform from the Ground Up
by Holly Madrigal
If you are interested in local food in Mendocino County, you have likely heard of the MendoLake Food Hub. A program of North Coast Opportunities (NCO), the Food Hub was originally created to connect farmers and producers in the area with local buyers like restaurants, schools, and hospitals. During the pandemic, the program received additional COVID funding and expanded access to individuals for home delivery. Now you, too, can purchase high quality, exceptionally fresh food grown and produced in this county.
The program provides an online marketplace that is open for orders twice a week, allowing the farmers and producers to post what is available. In addition to fruits and vegetables from local farmers, the store offers a myriad of local goods, like bread, flour and other grains, honey and bee products, eggs, mushrooms, cheese, ferments, and so much more. After the ordering period closes, farmers and producers deliver their goods to the closest climate-controlled “nodes” located strategically around the county and managed by the Food Hub. A Food Hub truck makes the rounds a couple hours later, picking up the boxed bounty from the nodes and delivering to their warehouse, where it is assembled into customer orders and delivered the next day.
At the helm of the operation is Program Manager Haerah Baird, whose diverse professional experiences provided excellent preparation for her current role. In her early career, Haerah worked for the federal government—not surprising considering she grew up in the suburbs outside of Washington, D.C. One of her many jobs included reviewing applications for emergency visas to the United States. Applicants might need a life-saving surgery, or be a recently orphaned child whose only living relatives are in the States. “That was one of my favorite jobs, but it was hard, too. It showed me at a pretty young age the extreme difficulties some people face, and how much help they need,” shares Haerah. “It also taught me the power of individual work as part of a bigger mission. I didn’t process applications, but I received and triaged all the cases, which was maybe one of the most critical parts of the entire program—to make sure the most urgent cases were reviewed first.”
Haerah had another realization during her 20s that influenced both her life and professional choices—namely, the abundance of toxins present in day-to-day life in America. Preservatives and other chemicals in our food, toxic ingredients in household products, an overreliance on pharmaceuticals, and exposure to and ingestion of synthetic components that might be detrimental to health seemed to be ubiquitous. Haerah began to look at food as medicine, and to seek out natural solutions to support her health as well as reduce negative impacts on the environment.
Yet it was Haerah’s experience in the cannabis industry that best prepared her to take the helm of the MendoLake Food Hub. This included working for a collective of small production farmers, overseeing compliance measures, developing white label products for the retail market, and managing a $1M supply chain for a large cannabis company in Los Angeles. As a result, Haerah has seen first-hand the pressures on farmers both from the marketplace and the regulatory requirements, all designed to favor Big Ag. She has a sensitivity to the economics of our regional food system, direct experience with how product travels from its source to the consumer, an understanding of how to transform goods into value-added products, and a deep desire to reform the flawed and fragile system we have now into something better.
“People already don’t remember the pandemic. The food shelves were empty,” Haerah remarks. “The food supply broke, and we still haven’t addressed it. More disasters are in our future. We need a more robust and localized system. It’s so important to build now for a sustainable future.” Fortunately, Haerah’s new position includes working on a strategic level with farmers and buyers, county food policy councils, and other food organizations, allowing her to advocate for that future on many levels.
Haerah began managing the MendoLake Food Hub in the fall of 2023. “I was happy to move back into the nonprofit world where I feel like my work is really helping people,” she shares. Working with a small but mighty staff, the Food Hub promotes and manages the website, builds relationships and contracts with farmers, and travels all over Mendocino and Lake Counties picking up and dropping off orders.
But Haerah and the team at NCO balance the big picture as well, seeking additional funding sources or collaborations to further the work of supporting local agriculture and providing community nutrition. One grant allows The Food Hub to provide group and one-to-one farmer technical training, education, and services. Another, received last year, is called the Edible Food Recovery Grant. “Many people do not know that the green ‘waste’ that enters our landfills rots and contributes significantly to methane gas released into the atmosphere. Much of what grocery stores have to remove from the produce shelves is still very usable—for example, in a bag of clementines, if one begins to mold, the whole bag is pulled from the shelf, “ Haerah shares. “We can open that bag, pull out the moldy one, wash the rest, and give them to people who have challenges accessing fresh fruit. We just delivered about 600 pounds of food to one of our local food banks that would have gone in the trash if we didn’t have the grant to fund this work.”
This program is just one of the many that the Food Hub administers to help our community in need. “Mendocino County has a number of nonprofits that help underserved individuals with specific nutrition needs,” explains Haerah. “Food pantries can often supply shelf-stable goods, but fresh produce and nutrient-dense or dietary-specific offerings can be a challenge. By helping redirect some of these perfectly good leftovers, we are both helping address climate change and giving people who need food the food they really need.”
Haerah elaborates, “Modern supply chain involves understanding of a myriad of technology, systems, scale, business operations and administration, and so much more to be competitive and provide sustainability for this version of farming, and those are the things I can contribute. The cracks are beginning to show in our existing food systems, and we need to be ready to feed our community through times of disaster and change. It’s embarrassing that we have so much food waste and so many hungry people coexisting in America.”
Growing and stabilizing our local food systems is an uphill climb since mass market produce is so heavily subsidized, and the average person does not typically think about where their food comes from and how it gets to them. “In the subsidized food industry, from field to table, farmers are not paid living wages, food travels hundreds of miles, and corporate businesses look for cheaper prices rather than promoting nutrition, food security, healthy economics, or anything else we need to survive,” says Haerah. “To me it’s a no-brainer to want to buy produce from your local farmer, to know that your money is going to the farmer or producer, and to further develop the Food Hub. Our challenge is figuring out how to make what we sell affordable for everyone, because everyone is used to the subsidized prices.”
Through these challenges, programs like the MendoLake Food Hub play a proactive role in ensuring our local farmers and producers have an ongoing and stable market outlet for their goods, and our community has access to those high quality foods, picked the day after you order and delivered right to you the day after that. It doesn’t get any fresher than that!
Order farm direct at mendolake.localfoodmarketplace.com. See The Food Hub at the Farm Convergence March 19th at Ridgewood Ranch. This annual gathering brings many new and existing farmers, buyers, and supporters together to learn from each other and connect. To learn more about Farmers Convergence or how to join the food hub please email mendolakefoodhub@ncoinc.org. To learn more about the Edible Food Recovery Program please email sseidensticker@ncoinc.org.
