The Jefferson Area Board for Aging hopes to one day construct a frozen foods processing facility, and the group got a push in that direction Thursday when U.S. Agriculture Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan showed up to announce a grant to the agency.
The funds — about $55,000 — will go to fund a feasibility study for the project. The grant is one of 77, totaling more than $4 million nationwide, announced Thursday.
“You give a little bit of money to the right people, you can go the distance,” she said.
JABA officials said they already use locally grown food in their meals, but they’d like to increase the extent to which they use it. The freezing facility would allow them to stockpile fresh produce for the off-season. It would also allow them to create their own frozen meals for home delivery, Judy Berger, the group’s manager of community nutrition, said. As things stand, JABA is purchasing the meals from Florida — at least 50,000 each year, she said.
Between a fifth and fourth of the food the group uses for the 36,000 “senior meals” it creates at its Hillsdale Drive kitchen is locally produced. Even without a processing facility, the group has started freezing some produce, and officials hope to boost the amount of local food used at the group’s assisted living facility and its intergenerational center in Louisa County, which combine for about 113,000 meals annually.
Merrigan said that a frozen foods facility would benefit local farmers, because selling to JABA would allow them to take home more of the price of the produce.
“What we’re trying to do is help farmers and ranchers cut out some of the middlemen,” Merrigan said.
If the feasibility study comes back positive, the group hopes to use USDA rural development funding to build the facility in a rural area.
Merrigan said part of the aim of this round of grants is to provide new domestic markets, and such programs are particularly attractive to small and mid-sized operations.
JABA CEO Gordon Walker said that the feasibility study is one of several efforts under way by JABA to increase local access to nutritious food, including an effort to open a new facility at the renovated Jefferson School.
In 2010, JABA introduced EBT capabilities at the Charlottesville City Market, which allows Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program users to use federal dollars to buy food at the market.
Merrigan praised JABA and Rep. Tom Perriello, D-Ivy, who is seeking re-election.
“You guys are ambitious, and I love it,” she said.
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