Northfield Community Action Center will receive $105,000 in funds to expand food rescue capacity at its Faribault and Northfield program locations.
For its Faribault programming, it will purchase and install a cooler/freezer that increases the amount of food that can be rescued and stored. It will install pallet-sized doors on the cooler/freezers at their Faribault and Northfield locations, allowing staff and volunteers to stock and distribute refrigerated goods more efficiently.
To further expand food rescue storage at its Northfield location, CAC will keep the same refrigeration units while bumping out one wall to increase the units’ overall area.
Through these efforts, CAC will double its storage and food rescue capacity in Faribault and increase its Northfield storage and rescue capacity by 60%. With increased cooler/freezer storage capacity, CAC expects that it could increase its food rescue intake by around 30%.
Sharing Our Roots will receive $414,402 in funds to provide a holistic approach to food waste reduction by strengthening an equitable hyper-local food system and providing long-term shared infrastructure and training opportunities for the growing farmer cohort at the Sharing Our Roots Farm just outside of Northfield.
This project will provide infrastructure for immigrant and emerging farmers at Sharing Our Roots to properly wash, handle, and store produce, and will provide farmers with crop planning and field design knowledge.
These projects, along with 11 others across the state, will have a positive economic, environmental and social impact on the communities they serve.
Of all the food Minnesotans throw out, over 95% could be diverted from the landfill and about 46% could have been eaten or donated, according to an MPCA-commissioned study of solid waste in 2019 and 2020. Growing, raising, processing, and delivering food also uses resources such as water, land, fuel, packaging materials, and more. These processes also contribute to air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. When food spoils or is thrown away before we eat it, everything that goes into creating the food is wasted. The wasted food also takes up space in landfills and releases greenhouse gases as it decomposes rather than nourishing people or alleviating food insecurity.
