Sarah Kingzack raises grass-fed beef near Westport, N.Y. She also teaches high school English. “I’ve always had an off-farm job,” she said. “I don’t know anyone who has a small farm who doesn’t also have another job.”

Kingzack knows firsthand how hard it is to make ends meet as a small farmer. Market complexities, economies of scale and conventional food systems don’t support farmers like Kingzack, who raises 20 head of cattle per year and sells halves, quarters and cuts.

“The price of fuel went up, so the price of hay goes up,” she said. “Our butchering fees have essentially gone up every year for the past four years.”

Inflation makes life harder for her neighbors in the region who already grapple with poverty. And climate change intensifies those challenges by bringing persistent heat, drought, and intermittent flooding to Westport. “There is a squeeze from all sides,” Kingzack said.

With Essex Food Hub, Kingzack’s KZ Farm has found a partner that is building out food systems that work for small and medium-sized farms. “For me, the Hub is this critical organization that is trying to cushion the really negative impacts of all of these things, so that farms can still be viable,” she said.

Federal investment has been a valuable tool in North Country food system build-outs, but sudden funding cuts destabilize markets and undermine efforts. “It feels like a lot of the systems in our country that we need to survive are not being invested in enough,” Kingzack said. “Once a farm field is lost, or once a farm goes out of business, it’s hard to reverse that trend, unless we have a very serious investment in organizations like the Hub that enable local farms or a diversified region of farms to survive.”

For Kingzack, the Hub offers wholesale aggregation and distribution through New York’s North Country and as far as New York City. “It’s huge because we are a very small farm,” Kingzack said. “We wouldn’t be able to wholesale otherwise.”

Through Essex Food Hub, schools, restaurants, grocery stores and hospitals can order online from more than 50 local producers. “They are able to market our products alongside a bunch of other products, they aggregate my products along with other local farm products, and then they deliver,” Kingzack said.

Through federal Local Food Purchase Assistance (LFPA), the Hub also purchased more than half a million dollars of local food for distribution. LFPA has now been eliminated, part of more than a billion dollars in federal funding cuts to local food purchasing in schools and pantries. This loss had the biggest impact on producers, but it also affected the Hub’s capacity.

The Essex Food Hub started out as the Hub on the Hill in Essex, N.Y., before converting to a nonprofit and building out a permanent home with a larger retail space in neighboring Westport. Now, they’re building out a commercial kitchen, production space and cold,dry storage to support start-up caterers, bakers and cheesemakers.

Kingzack understands the value of this project: KZ Farm stored meat in the Hub’s small commercial freezer until she could build out her own on-farm storage.

Essex Food Hub’s build-out is supported by an $860,000 Resilient Food System Infrastructure (RFSI) award from the federal government and a half-million-dollar grant from the Northern Border Regional Commission, a federal-state partnership serving the most distressed counties of New York, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont.

The commission has been defunded, though the grant is still proceeding. The RFSI funding had been frozen but was released in June. “The program is proceeding in N.Y., but also feels uncertain,” said Essex Food Hub director of outreach Kim La Reau.

The delay shortened the timeline for construction by a year—a year in which building material prices increased and tariffs jostled markets for food production equipment. RFSI grantees are scrambling to catch up and meet project budgets in a new reality.

Kingzack said that some long-time farmers are wondering if it’s time to get out. But she holds tight to a vision in which she’s a small but vital component in a rich local and regional food network that benefits all her neighbors.

“What I envision for this 50 acres of land is that we fit into a much bigger tapestry of farms in our region,” she said. “That we just add in the few thousand pounds of meat that we produce every year to the pot of what our region is producing, adding to the overall resilience of this place.”

With Kingzack’s beef as one of many ingredients, these regional food producers are starting to cook up a pretty tasty — and resilient — recipe.