Story and photos by Owen Woods | owen@alamosacitizen.com
MOSCA mornings are something else entirely. Typically, they’re as quiet as it gets. The locals are having coffee at the Pit Stop before the sun gets too high. Travelers fill up on snacks and gas and head to the Dunes. Birds swoop and swoon in trees. Over on Terry Street, the bustle of diesel engines and machinery, reverse beeps and tractor carburetors bring to life an otherwise quiet town.
The town of Mosca lies in the heart of the Valley, so it makes sense that local food is grown, distributed, and curated here. Two of the San Luis Valley’s major produce distributors share a building–a building that was once a potato warehouse, then was a school, and is now a potato warehouse once again.
Most of the folks at White Rock Specialties and the Valley Roots Food Hub have started their day along with the sun. There’s an abundance of coffee and music.
White Rock’s potatoes fill the old Sangre de Cristo school building with the starchy aroma of Valley potatoes. Though, even before White Rock moved in, the building always had a hint of potatoes.
Meanwhile, across the hall at the Food Hub, a few young workers are packing up local and fresh produce into orders and boxes. The colors and smells are eye-popping and mouth-watering. Green of every shade, meat of every cut, herbs of every land, and potatoes of every size come and go from this place.
The food ranges from Gosar Sausages of all varieties, eggs, fresh-baked bread and pastries from the Amish, fresh stone fruit from the Rocky Ford area, vegetables and herbs, potatoes, onions, you name it. All of the food is brought in from the San Luis Valley or just beyond.
During the delivery season, two days are more important than the rest: Wednesdays and Thursdays. Every Wednesday morning, the Food Hub’s delivery drivers make their stops around to the local producers. They aggregate the harvest and bring it back to “Base” in Mosca.
“My philosophy is, if you invest in your food, you’re investing in your health, you’re investing in the community, you’re investing in the people who grow the food for you.”
— Al Stone
Once everything arrives, the food starts to get separated into different orders and the “Fresh Boxes,” a subscription program that lasts 13 weeks. The Fresh Boxes are just that: boxes with fresh food, made to a specified order each week. Most of the food inside is a surprise. Other produce is arranged to fulfill some of the larger orders that go to businesses around the Valley. The crew fulfills about 100 orders a week, a third of which goes straight to the consumer.
Thursdays are delivery days. Alamosa Citizen rode along with Food Hub delivery driver Alex Disbrow. The route started in Mosca just before 10 a.m. Before leaving Mosca, Disbrow pulled over and rifled through his bag. From a collection of six or seven CDs he plucked out The Misfits. So the journey began …
The route traipsed along Hwy 17 to Crestone then over to Saguache with a few stops along the way, then back to base. Most of the ride consisted of talking about music, movies, and food.
Disbrow’s job is relaxing for the most part. He makes his stops, chats with the folks accepting their deliveries, then continues on the road until the job is done. “It’s pretty mellow for the most part, a lot of the time, I’m just checking out the road, listening to tunes. It’s nice once you are on the route for a little bit because you have to map it all the time and you kinda know the beat.”
When asked if he’s ever experienced anything crazy or wild while delivering, he didn’t have anything too out-of-the-ordinary to say. Except once while delivering to a residence, the owner’s big tom turkeys chased Disbrow around his truck until he was able to escape.
All pretty typical delivery stuff, he joked.
Disbrow was raised in Clearwater, Florida, and attended college in Boulder. Then he moved around the states for a few years. He and his fiancée, though, wanted wide open skies. Near the end of 2020, they found a place to call home in the SLV.
When he’s not delivering food, he’s working on his own at-home production of food and mushrooms. Recently, he said he perfected growing cordyceps mushrooms and got an organic certification.
Being closer to the food is also part of the reason he ended up here.
THE deliveries made that Thursday were not typical places. A few, of course, were. Such as Our Food is Art, a restaurant in Crestone that sources almost entirely local food and ingredients, and the Crestone Mercantile store. These are regular customers of the Food Hub’s deliveries. Then the spots got a little more unusual: Joyful Journey and Valley View Hot Springs received portions of their food from the Food Hub. Then, in Saguache, food was delivered to the county social services building.
There are food pantries in locations throughout the Valley designed as places where people can pick up their food from a cool, shady place. Two of these locations are at two homes in Crestone and Saguache.
And of course, home deliveries are part of the program, too. People are able to order their produce online and either have it delivered to their home or to one of the pantries or pick-up locations. Home deliveries don’t happen as frequently as do the businesses, because the pickup locations make it easier on everyone, but it is one option that brings local food right to your doorstep.
Al Stone, dubbed Valley Roots Food Hub’s markets manager & mycelium architect, invited The Citizen to get an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the operation. She allowed us to point our cameras at what they do and how they do it. Part of their operation as a whole is transparency, she said. Over the course of a few weeks, The Citizen took part and observed how one piece of the local food puzzle is put together, while meeting the people behind it all.
A shift of values might be needed to support these local food efforts, she said. “What do you want to spend your money on?”
Community Supported Agriculture
Community Supported Agriculture is a type of marketing, according to the USDA, that consists of a community supporting local farm operations and farmland becomes “either legally or spiritually, the community’s farm, with the growers and consumers providing mutual support and sharing the risks and benefits of food production.”
Stone said participating in a CSA is like “actively being part of a system and supporting a farm and knowing a farm, and being intimate with that.”
Since Valley Roots is a food hub, it is a “multi-farm” CSA. Traditionally, Stone said, CSA’s are small-scale operations where people will drive out to get the food straight from the farm.
She said what makes the food hub unique is its home deliveries and multiple pick-up locations. She’s working with the communities of Antonito and Buena Vista to add pick-up locations.
“Those partnerships are super vital,” she said.
“My dream is to get a pickup location in every town,” she said. Before that happens, she said there needs to be interest. However, she said “Antonito has been on the top of my list, for sure.”
The food hub has expanded out to Pagosa and is rolling around the idea of expanding out to Durango, but “we’re not hard-pressed, necessarily. I really want to focus our CSA efforts regionally.”
A shift of values might be needed to support these local food efforts, she said. “What do you want to spend your money on?”
The Food Network
These people are the middle-people of local foods. They are growers and producers themselves. All of them have a job that is perhaps far more important than they may get credit for. “People need food,” Stone said.
The delivery drivers are making sure that on four-wheels or six, the food that was grown just down the street gets to its destination in Denver or Del Norte.
Besides how operations are handled, transparency extends to who grows the food and how they grow it so that customers and clients know exactly where that food came from.
“The customer also needs to have that assurance,” Stone said. With a worry of pesticides, herbicides, and factory farming weighing into produce purchases, every plant, vegetable, or baked good has a story to tell – and often that story is of fresh growth, careful harvesting, and a chemical-free transport.
The food hub started with five employees before COVID-19, now they’re at a steady 10.
With the pandemic, online orders skyrocketed. So overnight, Stone explained, operations had to be adjusted. Now three years later, the operation is full of life and food and has its footprint in every corner of the Valley, and just about every corner of the state.
The food hub’s delivery network extends from Antonito to Leadville, Cañon City then onto Denver, Colorado Springs, and Pueblo. Deliveries go as far east as Trinidad and Walsenburg, and as far west as Durango. Don’t forget about everything in between.
In the heart of the Valley, in the small town of Mosca, everything quiets down not long after 6 p.m. That doesn’t mean the food stops growing. The farmers who curate their produce for the rest of the world are still hard at work. They’ll be working that midnight oil and then they’ll be up at the crack of dawn.
The Valley Roots Food Hub’s employees and drivers will be up with them to collect fresh produce. Alex Disbrow, JD Kettle, and the drivers who travel far and wide to collect the goods will be jamming to their own music or podcasts, shaking hands with farmers and growers, but what they’ll be doing, at the end of the day, is connecting the scattered pieces of a food puzzle.
It’s a complicated puzzle with a lot of pieces and moving parts. It’s worth the effort. Stone said, “My philosophy is, if you invest in your food, you’re investing in your health, you’re investing in the community, you’re investing in the people who grow the food for you.”
