“There was one man who was a Japanese immigrant. He’d been in an internment camp as a child. He was an elderly man, and he took a bite of a tomato that came off the mobile pantry, and he just stood by the truck and cried. He hadn’t had access to something that fresh and delicious since he was a child.”
Cassie Wyss, co-owner of Crossroads Community Farm along with Michael Noltner, says stories like these are why she’s committed to getting quality produce into food-access programs. Fresh fruits and vegetables are among the most desirable foods at pantries, but they’re also among the most difficult and expensive to provide consistently. As a result, produce donations often come from surplus crops or items that couldn’t be sold wholesale.
In 2020, Crossroads began developing Purpose Grown Project, a farmer-led food-access model, in collaboration with Rooted and Neighborhood House Madison. Unlike traditional models, farmers in Purpose Grown intentionally cultivate their produce for food-access partners, ensuring pantry clients are receiving the same quality offered to paying customers. To remain financially viable, growing produce specifically for these programs requires more than farming alone.
“It’s harder to get other farmers to do this because you have to become a fundraiser,” says Cassie. “Not everyone wants to take that on. … Essentially, I farm in the summer, and then in the winter, I kind of become what you would call in the nonprofit world a development coordinator.”
That commitment to fundraising is fundamental not only to Purpose Grown Project, but to other food-access partnerships Crossroads has built over the years. Cassie is always looking for ways to stretch each dollar further, building relationships with pantries and partner organizations that help amplify financial contributions. Badger Prairie Needs Network, for example, matched $40,000 Crossroads raised this summer, resulting in $80,000 worth of vegetables delivered to their pantry.
Today’s scale of operations looks very different than when Crossroads first began donating. In that first summer, roughly 800 boxes of produce went out—equating to a $14,000 program at the time. Today, Cassie says she raised around $216,000 this winter to support food-access work across multiple partner organizations.
“We’re beginning a relationship with The River; we’re beginning a relationship with WayForward in Middleton; and we’re in our second year of directly supplying Allied Food Pantry, which is a pop-up Wednesday-morning-only pantry that happens at the Boys and Girls Club. And we also supply Healthy Food for All for the mobile pantry.”
But that system didn’t always look this way. When Cassie and Michael first started the farm, it was entirely rooted in environmental stewardship without a formal social component. The goal was to grow food organically and build a self-sustaining farm. Over time, that vision became a reality, taking shape as a solar-powered farm producing high-quality food for their customers—a result many farmers would be satisfied with.
Then again, Cassie says she’s not the type of person who accomplishes her goals then rides it out for the next 15 years. She recalls a moment from her days in grad school that really struck a nerve. “There’s a critique of the environmental movement that says it’s great you want to keep the water clean and save the earth for seven generations, but there’s people who can’t eat right now.
“We’d done the environmental thing, so what do we do socially now? There’s not much more we can do to be greener in the space of this business, so what can this business do? How can it leverage the product that we grow, the community we’ve built, to do something that addresses the social side of this?”
With no clear map telling her how to get Crossroads’ food into pantries, Cassie went to the City of Madison to see what they suggested. That outreach led to an eventual phone call from the Mellowhood Foundation and the Meadowood neighborhood.
“I was like, ‘Awesome. How do we do this?’ So together from nowhere, we developed our own program where I began fundraising and sending fresh food, delivering it to Good Shepherd Lutheran Church.
“That was the plan. COVID hits. They said, ‘Actually, instead of wholesaling all this stuff, just do your CSA thing. Even though there will be some waste, we need to get food to people, and we’ll just drop it off.’ So for two years, they were dropping off food as a community check in. It was a way to be like, ‘Hey, how are you doing? Are you alright?’ It was really important.”
After the pandemic, Mellowhood’s logistics shifted alongside demand for distribution. With fewer drivers, food began moving through Badger Prairie Needs Network as a key redistribution point. Cassie also connected with Joe Mingle of Healthy Food for All. To this day, these two partnerships remain critical to the success of Crossroads’ food-access work.
You’d never know it reading this article, but at its core, Crossroads is a for-profit business. It’s just leveraging its production and community networks to support a robust food-access program, donating 25 percent of its produce. Members are asked to donate on top of their purchases, with those additional contributions helping to support food that moves into pantries and mobile support systems. The farm is effectively operating in two directions: serving its paying customers while sustaining a stream of food access.
As Cassie and I were talking, she had to take frequent breaks to respond to her radio, keeping all the moving parts of the operation in sync. Then there’s the logistics of paying her farm hands a fair wage while maintaining equipment. She points out that donating to hunger just isn’t sexy. It provides temporary relief, not a lasting solution, meaning the requests for money are ongoing. Even so, Cassie and Michael ensure there is no difference in quality between the food going to paying customers and the food going to food-access partners.
“It makes people feel really good,” says Cassie. “They feel more cared for when they get the same stuff everybody else gets. There’s a dignity in that. Everybody deserves access to fresh, delicious, healthy, nourishing food.”
Kyle Jacobson is copy editor and lead writer for Madison Locally Sourced.
Photographs by Eric Tadsen.
Purpose Grown Project
c/o Crossroads Community Farm LLC
4144 County Road JJ
Cross Plains, WI 53528
(608) 798-0219
crossroadscommunityfarm.com/food-access-work