BELLOWS FALLS-It has been nearly 15 years since the idea first started taking shape, and finally, this fall, the Great River Food Co-op will find out if construction can begin at the site of the former Robertson Paper Mill.
The co-op describes itself as a “start-up cooperative dedicated to enhancing food safety and security by creating a local food ecosystem that directly connects local farmers and producers with consumers” in both Vermont and New Hampshire along the lower Connecticut River valley.
The preliminary design being considered for the co-op includes a 6,000-square-foot retail food cooperative, and 20,000 square feet of production, refrigeration, and freezer space available for local farmers.
Gary Fox, Bellows Falls’ development director and a volunteer director of the Sustainable Valley Group (SVG), said that a $136,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is funding the preliminary work of deciding on a site and creating a design for the facility and a business plan for running the co-op.
SVG is one of the main organizers of the Great River Co-op.
The seeds for a local cooperative were planted in 2011 when citizens from Walpole and Westmoreland in New Hampshire and Rockingham and Westminster in Vermont began discussing the idea.
Local farmers were the driving force behind the discussion.
Large food chains would not sell the seasonal crops from small farms, whereas a local food cooperative would provide them with a steady market. Nearly 50 area farmers responded to the original area surveys regarding the co-op.
They supported the idea, and membership grew quickly to several hundred people.
“They did a lot of planning and held annual meetings,” said Fox.
At first the organizers envisioned the co-op in Walpole and, for about a decade, a large sign at a field on Route 12 declared it the “future home of the Great River Co-op,” Fox said. “They even published a newsletter.”
But after several years, “it fizzled out,” he said.
“The whole thing ended with the Covid outbreak. Most of the board members left,” Fox said.
But the idea of a local food cooperative, perhaps including food storage and processing facilities for local farmers, was resurrected in 2023, this time centered on locating the facility on the Vermont side of the river in Bellows Falls.
By 2024, Fox said, the resuscitated group had selected a new board of directors and begun strategic planning.
“This time, though, we were talking about a food hub with processing facilities and refrigeration and freezer storage for local farmers, and a retail food store, and doing it all together at the same time,” he said.
In a letter from the board to interested citizens, the organization’s leaders wrote, “The Co-op is looking forward, not dwelling on its past. We have 100% revamped our vision and focus to be the frontline of local sustainable food in the Great River region. Let your neighbors know we are here to stay.”
A prime location
Board members asked business owners, farmers, and teachers for input and to volunteer to move the project along.
The response has been very good, Fox said. More than 60 people showed up at the first Great River Co-op public meeting.
One key property, 21 Island St. in Bellows Falls — the site of the former Robertson Paper Mill building — began to emerge as a prime location for the cooperative.
The commercial property is 58,000 square feet and an ideal location, Fox said.
Despite earlier efforts to redevelop the historic mill buildings on the site, in 2018 and 2019 the structures were taken down. The contaminated brownfield soils were either removed or contained.
The Robinson tract is owned by Island Holdings, LLC, a corporate entity that is owned in turn by the Bellows Falls Area Development Corporation. Fox, as the town’s development director, also serves as executive director for the business development nonprofit.
Sustainable Valley Group owns another building at 30 Island St., directly across from the former paper mill site, and it is already being used as an incubator food business site. Fox said SVG had been looking for new businesses to move into the building since two previous tenants’ enterprises failed in 2017.
The Vermont Economic Development Authority (VEDA), which is helping with funding for the Co-op project, wanted value-added food businesses in the building. Two local businesses, Smokin’ Bowls, a food truck and catering business, and C&K Foods, a business that processes, packages, and labels sauces, have successfully moved in.
With a food processing facility already next door, Fox said, “there is a lot of fertile ground in the area” for this sort of farm-to-table venture.
The 21 Island St. site is a five-minute walk from at least four of the main apartment complexes in Bellows Falls and a short drive from the surrounding communities in Vermont and New Hampshire.
Planning for funds, funding the plans
The USDA grant is funding the preliminary development work.
“We can’t just run on volunteers,” Fox said. “At some point you have to have hired staff. We’re looking for grants to help with that as well. Then people can focus their energy on the primary work of running the co-op.”
That planning is expected to be completed by October.
“Then we’ll take the information from those studies and use it to apply for funding,” Fox said. He added that they would be applying “for all possible grants,” including from the USDA, the Northern Border Regional Commission (NRBC), and the New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) program.
NRBC is a federal and state partnership created in 2008 to support economic development in distressed rural regions of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York.
The NMTC program, part of the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, is designed to attract private investment and gap funding to low-income communities. Two-thirds of the population in Bellows Falls is considered low income.
The NMTC program alone could provide up to a third of the project funding, Fox said. He also noted that the program also wants to see housing as a project component, so that will be taken into consideration in the design work.
Fox noted that both the Brattleboro Food Co-op and the Monadnock Food Co-op in Keene, New Hampshire, include several housing units.
If the funding falls into place, Fox said, construction could begin in the spring of 2027 or 2028.
“It’s going to take a couple of years to get members,” Fox said. “It takes a lot of work to build the membership and energy to make this successful.”
A food hub picks up steam
Fox said that educating the local communities about farm-to-table programs, cooking healthy meals, and getting young people involved is vital. To that end, other volunteers have created the Great Falls Food Hub.
Aimee Parnell, the former director of the Great Falls Regional Chamber of Commerce, is one of the organizers of the Food Hub. Its purpose is to connect the region’s people with area farmers and teach them to create healthy meals.
Working alongside other regional food programs, such as Brattleboro’s Food Connects, the Food Hub is using area farmers markets and community gardens at area schools as part of its education program.
In one program, Food Hub brings in volunteers between the ages of 10 and 20 to work with area chefs such as David Groenwold, a former River Valley Technical Center culinary arts instructor.
Groenwold takes the volunteers shopping at farmers markets in Townshend, Bellows Falls, and Putney, and then he teaches them how to design and prepare healthy meals from fresh produce.
Parnell said that just since June the Food Hub’s website has had over 34,000 visits, and its social media channels have seen a more-than-1,700% increase in followers.
Fox and Parnell said that educating local families on how to shop for and prepare locally grown, healthy food will be key to the success of the cooperative.
“We’re not just building a cooperative on paper over the next year or two,” Fox said. “We’re also building the community support.”
For more information, visit greatriverfoodcoop.com.
This News item by Robert F. Smith was written for The Commons.