LINC Foods

Looking to source locally grown foods? Do you have ag products you'd like to sell to a local marketplace? Joel Williamson with LINC Foods in Spokane has the answer for you.

WILLIAMSON: We're just a small farm cooperative that's a little over a year old her win Spokane and our whole purpose is to just help small farms be more sustainable by getting their products bigger institutions than an area that they couldn't do on their own. Universities, school districts, sometimes restaurants, that kind of thing.

LINC is a farmer owned co-op that acts as a middle-man

WILLIAMSON: We found working with small farmers in the area that most of them needed to sell more food than they could sell on their own through farmers markets or CSA's or farm stands. They need to do more than that if they want to make it work as a farm business or the livelihood and it's really hard to do that if those are the only channels that you have. At the same time there's a lot of institutions in Spokane that we noticed really wanted to access local food but there was no one to close that loop for them.

Williamson says they really work at getting both farmer and buyer together.

WILLIAMSON: We do try to get farmers and buyers together a couple times a year, kind of a spring and a fall event for multiple reasons. One, so they can all actually meet each other or so that farmers can pitch to the buyers about specific things that they are going to have during the next season or find out from buyers what it is that we should be growing.

And that's Washington Ag Today. I'm Greg Martin, thanks for listening on the Ag Information Network of the West.