Local Food Week Begins in Area
Published: Friday, July 24, 2026
Jeff Hawkins wasn't trying to start a movement when he began. He'll tell you he was just trying to keep the place running.
When he started farming his family's land back in 1988, he didn't even know that a farm-to-fork movement existed. He was looking to rent a farmhouse and raise some decent food for his table on a property that had been reduced to nothing but commodity corn and soybeans.
As the Northeast Indiana Local Food Network gears up for its seventh annual Local Food Week from July 24 through Aug. 2, Hawkins' story serves as the blueprint for an ambitious regional lineup.
Karen Petersen, executive director of the Local Food Network, said the week is a necessary course correction.
"People love the idea of local food, but the mission this year is to show the work behind the curtain. The business viability," she said.
For her, success hinges on producers treating their farm as an enterprise rather than a lifestyle.
"We are showing producers that you can be profitable if you treat the logistics with the same reverence you treat your soil."
This year, the movement spans 117 events across Adams, Allen, DeKalb, Huntington, Kosciusko, LaGrange, Noble, Steuben, Wabash and Whitley counties. Petersen explains that this calendar is meant to take the mystery out of farming for everyone.
"When we bring people onto these farms, we want them to see the technology, the organization, and the planning that makes the food possible," she said. It's about more than just a farm visit; it's about seeing how the whole thing works.
By moving past the "hobby" label, the network is pushing for a shift that Hawkins made decades ago. He'd tell you to accept that the spreadsheet is just as vital as the tractor.
It's easy to look at the Hawkins Family Farm and assume it was a planned enterprise from the start. But the reality is grittier. The property was a patchwork of absentee-managed plots, stripped of the diversity that sustains a modern local farm. Hawkins wasn't so much a visionary as he was a tenant-turned-manager. He was reacting to the immediate necessity of keeping the bills paid while trying to improve the health of his soil.
"The hardest part was coming to terms with the fact that we had to be businessmen," Hawkins said. He didn't have a playbook to guide him toward direct-to-consumer sales. He had to learn the trade of marketing and staff management on the fly, often while dealing with the physical exhaustion inherent in manual agriculture. It was a process of trial and error, a long series of lessons where the farm either adapted or went under.
Petersen, who is a producer herself, knows how hard that transition can be.
"I've been in the field at 4 a.m. and at the computer at 9 p.m.," she notes.
"When I look at what Jeff has done, I see someone who stopped waiting for the market to come to them and started building the infrastructure to reach the market."
She said that while most farmers are experts at growing things, the logistics can be a struggle, and Local Food Week is here to help bridge that gap.
The pivot from soil to spreadsheet is where most operations encounter their biggest hurdle, and it is where Hawkins eventually found his footing. He discovered that without a direct-to-consumer pipeline, the farm was at the mercy of commodity cycles that favored a scale he didn't possess. The birth of the "Farm Club" wasn't a philosophical choice; it was a logistical one. He needed a way to consolidate orders, manage inventory, and guarantee a customer base before a single seed was planted.
Hawkins calls the technology behind the Farm Club "indispensable,"noting that for his members, ordering is as easy as using Amazon. He moved his operation into a digital space that allowed him to scale his reach without necessarily increasing his acreage. It allowed him to provide a reliable product to the local community, effectively cutting out the middleman and keeping the revenue on the farm.
"It's a system of predictable relationships," Hawkins said. "We aren't just selling produce; we are managing a loop of supply and demand that keeps us in business."
Petersen sees Jeff's approach as the blueprint for the region.
"Jeff did the heavy lifting," she said. "He turned a personal grind into a system that makes buying local as simple as clicking a button."
She's blunt with other farmers: you have to treat office time like real farm work.
"You cannot out-farm bad math," she said. "You have to be as precise in the office as you are in the field."
The goal here isn't just one farm; it's a network. By helping farms work together, the goal is to build a food economy that can actually handle the ups and downs of the market.
"We aren't just cheering for farmers," Petersen said. "We're cheering for the systems they've built. If we want to keep our agricultural heritage in Northeast Indiana, we need to back the people who are actually building these pipelines to your table."
For the best look at this, Petersen suggests a tour of North Manchester farms—starting with the fields and ending with Friday night pizza at Hawkins Farm.
"It's the capstone," she said. "You see the operation, you eat the pizza, and you finally get it. 'Local food economy' isn't just a buzzword; it's on your plate."
For Hawkins, the goal is straightforward: remind people that food is more than a transaction.
"Good food is, in a word, sacred," he said. "It deserves reverence." But that reverence doesn't last without a paycheck. As Local Food Week kicks off, the message is plain: the most radical thing a farmer can do today is actually make a living.
For more information, visit www.NILocalFood Network.org.
Return to Top of Page