‘Farm to institution’ is the practice of purchasing locally grown foods for food service settings like schools, hospitals, colleges, and business campuses. This growing movement supports agricultural producers, increases meal quality and transparency, and provides opportunities for connection between rural and urban communities.
While institutions already purchase grain in many forms, they often lack the knowledge, relationships, skills, or culinary capacity to incorporate local grains. Identifying a need for network building and resource development to increase the use of grains, beans, and oilseeds in Midwest institutional culinary programs, the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems (CIAS) and Artisan Grain Collaborative (AGC) established the Grains to Trays initiative. This initiative represents a long-term vision to simultaneously grow staple crop value chains and farm to institution efforts in the region, focusing on strategies to increase the use of regionally produced and processed grains in Upper Midwest institutions.
This webpage acts as a clearinghouse for research, farmer support resources, and practitioner tools developed as part of these efforts.
Latest addition, August 2023: The State of Mobile Grain Processing in the Upper Midwest
Grain cleaning options for small and specialty grains are limited; farmers in the region continue to cite that important grain processing step as a primary barrier for scaling up and meeting potential buyer demands. This brief focuses on the gaps and opportunities related to small grains cleaning and investigates whether mobile grain processing is a possible solution for addressing this bottleneck in the Upper Midwest grain value chain.
