The Northeast Ohio Agriculture Innovation Center will set up shop at Ohio State University’s Wooster campus to help ag producers with business planning and market development for value-added products. The center plans to open this fall.

The center, developed by Ohio State University College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (CFAES), is the result of close to a $1 million grant from USDA Rural Development, with matching in-kind funds of nearly $500,000 from OSU. The three-year investment was awarded through the USDA Agriculture Innovation Center Program.

“Northeast Ohio is a great agricultural region with rich prime soils and is home to a diversity of businesses and farms, including the highest concentration of women farmers, and small and medium farms in Ohio,” said Shoshanah Inwood, CFAES program director and rural sociologist.

Liaison for Amish community

The center will hire four new staff members, including two new OSU Extension positions focused on value-added agriculture business planning and market development in northeast Ohio. The area is also home to a large Amish population who make up a substantial proportion of the region’s farms. For this reason, the center will bring on the first national and regional Amish and plain people community liaison to help bridge the cultural gap and provide technical assistance to this sector of the value-added agriculture economy.

Value-added products are raw agricultural products that have been modified or enhanced to have a higher market value or a longer shelf life. Some examples include fruits made into pies or jams, meats made into jerky, and tomatoes and peppers made into salsa. 

“We found that the services available to support VAA producers are disconnected and dispersed throughout the region,” Inwood says. “By connecting the resources to each other and promoting their availability to the community, we will make the process more efficient and better able to support their growth, development and economic prosperity.”

U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown is a proponent of the Agriculture Innovation Center Program. As the first senator from Ohio to serve on the Senate Agriculture Committee in more than 50 years, he successfully secured a number of provisions in the 2018 Farm Bill, including permanent mandatory funding for USDA’s Value-Added Producer Grant Program and the reauthorization of the Agriculture Innovation Center Program.

“The Northeast Ohio Agriculture Innovation Center will help grow local small businesses, and support local and regional food production in Northeast Ohio,” Brown said. “When we give Ohio farm and food businesses more tools to sell their products, we can strengthen local supply chains, bring down prices, and allow small producers to better compete with large corporations.”

Source: OSU Extension