September 22, 2026

By Lisa Abelar

A few years back, Jenna Moore thought it would be convenient for grocery stores and schools to be able to order local produce and have it delivered, just like they do with purchases from large-scale distributors. So, she wrote a grant, co-founded and launched the OKC Food Hub, a nonprofit organization that supports local farmers by aggregating and distributing the orders it takes through its online wholesale ordering system.

Moore believed the food hub could connect local farmers in need of markets with organizations looking to purchase locally-grown and produced food. 

“In Oklahoma, there’s not much of a wholesale market for fruit and vegetable growers at all, beyond farmers markets and direct-to-consumer sales you can do on your own farm. Once you reach a certain level of expertise in production, there just isn’t anywhere to go with that extra product. That’s the biggest need, the market access, that we’re trying to address,” Moore said.

Participating in the Local Food Purchase Assistance (LFPA) program helped the OKC Food Hub with that goal. The USDA program offered grants to organizations, like tribes and food banks, to purchase food from local producers. The idea behind the program, which was cancelled by the Trump Administration in 2025, was to create more resilient local food systems. 

The LFPA program is similar to other agriculture-based programs that use public money to support domestic food production, stabilize the food supply and protect producers against market volatility. For Moore, the program helped her connect rural farmers with new markets, made locally grown produce easier to buy, and the sales it generated supported local economies.

“The LFPA helped us get up and going as a business. We would not exist without that. That alone was a huge win,” she said. “When we had a farmer with 2,000 pounds of squash, we could buy the extra and give it to the food bank and that farmer would still make every dollar on that squash to invest in their business. A program like LFPA makes it a win-win-win for everyone.”

The OKC Food Hub operates by working with farmers across the state, primarily in rural areas like Shawnee, Washington or Sand Springs. Customers place orders for produce online through the food hub, the farmers fill them, and the food hub aggregates and distributes the orders across the Oklahoma City and Tulsa areas. Moore, who has a background in public health and familiarity with federal grants for farmers, believes the LFPA program might be the most efficient program, with the lowest administrative costs, she’s seen.

“LFPA, hands down, is the most helpful thing I’ve ever encountered for small, beginning farmers to get them the funding they need. If you’re buying their produce, they can figure out the rest,” she said. “We need that springboard to launch and scale a little and be attractive to the industrialized market which we’ve fallen out of because it is so consolidated it’s now inaccessible to small and midsize family farms.”

The program helped the OKC Food Hub offer support to small and midsize farmers in ways that alleviate an undue burden. Industrialized farms, for example, just grow. Small and midsize farms, though, have to grow, market and distribute. That undue burden is one of the reasons newer farmers burn out. Support, in the form of market access and distribution, makes the local food system more sustainable and keeps smaller farmers farming. 

“It’s a beautifully simple program to me that just hits all the metrics anyone might be interested in,” Moore said. “There’s unlimited potential there.”

Of course, when a farmer is able to sell extra squash that they would not have otherwise been able to sell, that transaction ignites local economic activity. At scale, that means when small farms are given the chance to grow, the local job market improves, local spending increases and markets for other vendors become available. The result of this type of investment in a rural community is tangible. 

“It’s kind of a tidal wave of impact economically, in terms of the different businesses that can be supported when we invest in rural and local food system development,” Moore said. 

Although the LFPA program is no longer available to the OKC Food Hub, the growth they experienced with the initial funding was instrumental in creating the connections they have now with rural farmers and producers, and the organizations doing the purchasing. Moore is hopeful that funding for something similar emerges, at the state or federal level, because she knows the impact could be exponential.

“It’s amazing how much we do with how little we have, so I always wonder if we had just a fraction of some money that was invested in what we’re doing, what could we do? We could do some serious damage,” she said. “Right now, we work with the scraps. If we had some of the money that I know other industries have, I just think we could feed a lot of people on a regular basis in a really real way.”