Making the Invisible Visible

If you’ve ever tried to build something new from the ground up, especially something spread out, relationship-based, and happening in a hundred different ways at once, you know the truth:

The reason it hasn’t been done before is usually because it’s hard.

As an Economic Recovery Corps (ERC) Fellow, I serve as a connector and convener for North Dakota’s regional food system - helping the right partners move good ideas into action.

I keep hearing the same thing from producers, food businesses, and community partners across North Dakota: We’re doing real work, but we can’t seem to build the stable markets, infrastructure, and support systems that match what we’re creating on the ground.

Here’s one big reason: when something isn’t visible in the data, it’s easier to overlook. Easier to underinvest in. Easier to treat as “nice” instead of necessary.

That’s why this new project matters. We’re building a credible, comprehensive baseline of the local food work already happening across the state through an economic contribution study. 

To build that baseline, we’ll be inviting producers and local food businesses to complete a survey that includes financial and operational information. I know that’s not a casual ask, and I want to be clear about why we’re doing it, how we’re handling it, and why your voice matters.

Growth you can feel

North Dakota’s local food economy is growing. You can feel it on the ground: indoor growing operations offering greens in February, local meat on school lunch trays, your favorite farmers market vendor selling out, or direct sales that happen through texts, Facebook messages, and “my friend’s cousin is coming through town this week with locally produced honey.”

But a lot of that activity disappears on paper. When it does, it’s harder to make the case for the infrastructure producers and communities are asking for - things like processing capacity, cold storage, aggregation and distribution, and market access.

A baseline changes that. It gives communities something they can point to when pursuing a new facility, building a grant proposal, designing technical assistance, or making operational decisions on how much to produce.

What this is

An economic contribution study measures the overall scale of activity using established models. Those activities include sales, jobs, and ripple effects. We’re building a defensible snapshot of local food’s economic footprint across production, processing, and sales into North Dakota markets.

FARRMS has teamed up with local food and community organizations across North Dakota to contract with North Dakota State University’s Center for Social Research and the Department of Agribusiness & Applied Economics to complete the study. These are the same research teams recognized statewide for major economic contribution work - and this effort puts local food into that same, credible lane.

Why now

The local food community is feeling real growth pressure. In FARRMS’s 2023 local food producer survey, 91% of producers said they want to expand and 60% reported more demand than supply. Nearly half said accessing larger markets is a challenge - and the top constraint was consistency of supply. These are challenges we can’t address separately. When that level of demand exists, it deserves visibility and decision-making support. (FARRMS 2023)

What we’re asking (and how it will work)

To build a statewide baseline, we’re asking people to share financial and operational information. These details are very personal to everyone, so I understand why one might hesitate with this ask.

Many communities and producers have been part of data efforts that felt extractive: information goes out, nothing useful comes back, and trust gets spent instead of built.

So here’s what I want you to know up front: we’re building this in a way that respects your time, your privacy, and your reality.

Purpose

This is about establishing a baseline that can support better decisions about what producers and communities feel every day: processing bottlenecks, cold storage needs, aggregation and distribution gaps, market access, and the systems that move food through North Dakota.

Confidentiality

Individual responses are held in strict confidence and results are reported only in aggregate. This is not a regulatory effort, and no individual business data will be published or shared; public reporting will be de-identified.

Control

You’ll have a secure link that lets you start when you’re ready, pause when you need to, and come back later. You’re not committing to a perfect set of books or a certain “type” of operation. The goal is to reflect the real diversity of local food work in North Dakota.

Reciprocity

This shouldn’t be a one-way ask. We will share results in a format people can actually use - through a public report and an online dashboard built to make findings easy to access, search, and understand.

Why your voice matters

One of the biggest risks in statewide studies is that they end up measuring only the people who are easiest to find, or have the most time to sit and complete a survey.

But North Dakota’s local food economy includes so much more: 

It includes tribal producers and food sovereignty work. It includes families who grow primarily for themselves but sell extra produce to a child’s school. It includes New Americans forming cooperative community gardens and launching their own farmers market. It includes fifth-generation beef producers who have shifted toward local processing and direct sales to North Dakota restaurants. It includes indoor growing operations inside shipping containers supplying greens, herbs, and microgreens year-round. It includes shared-use commercial kitchens incubating dozens of food businesses, from hot sauce to cocktail syrups to baked goods to small catering companies.

And that’s just a small slice of what’s happening.

If you’ve ever wondered whether you “count,” you’re exactly why this matters. Because when people are missing from the baseline, the picture gets distorted and decisions get made from an incomplete story.

A gentle invitation 

In the coming weeks, producers and food businesses across North Dakota will receive a secure survey link from the NDSU research team.

If you receive that invitation, I hope you’ll consider participating.

FARRMS and our partner organizations will help spread the word, share updates, and encourage participation, but the survey link will come from NDSU as part of their confidentiality and data-handling process. The survey starts with a few quick qualifying questions, so even if you’re not sure it applies to you, you’ll be able to find out right away.

North Dakota’s local food economy isn’t one tidy category. It’s a living, evolving set of relationships, businesses, and community efforts across a rural state.

That’s exactly why it deserves to be measured well and handled with care.

Felicity Merritt is an Economic Recovery Corps Fellow working with partners across North Dakota to strengthen the local food economy through practical, relationship-based strategies. With experience at FARRMS and the North Dakota Local Food Development Alliance, she focuses on community engagement, partnership development, and turning on-the-ground realities into tools communities can use. She brings a science background and a love of clear, useful data to projects that support producers, expand food access, and build local infrastructure. Felicity lives in Fargo with her husband and their dog, Dipper, and can usually be found at the farmers market, on a trail along the Red River, or mid–DIY project.