Between Harvest and Market: Notes from the Midstream

A reflection on leading the research behind Bridging the Midstream Gap: Unlocking Capital and Infrastructure for U.S. Specialty Crop SMEs

Between harvest and market, livelihoods are protected or lost.

One night near the end of the project, I found myself back at my desk long after everyone else had logged off, rereading interview notes. My coffee had gone cold. The house was quiet. I kept coming back to something one of the midstream operators had said:

“We had the quality. We just didn’t have storage. We lost everything.”

I couldn’t shake that word: everything.

Not inventory. Not margins. Everything. A season’s work. Income. Stability. Hope.

That was the moment the report stopped feeling like an analysis and started feeling personal. We weren’t just mapping systems anymore. We were carrying people’s stories.

I’ve spent years working in food security and agricultural systems, so I’ve always understood that the midstream matters. Anyone who studies food systems knows that what happens between harvest and market often determines who thrives and who doesn’t. But leading this research brought me closer to that reality than any framework or policy discussion ever could. It wasn’t theoretical anymore. It was tangible; visible in a cooler that never got built, in a truck route that didn’t exist, in a small processor trying to keep a business alive with duct tape and faith. The “middle” wasn’t an abstract segment of the value chain. It was where livelihoods quietly rose or fell every day.

As we gathered data, the numbers started to feel heavier than they looked. Billions lost. Tons wasted. Produce that never makes it to families. At first, they were just figures in a spreadsheet. But after speaking with growers, aggregators, and small business owners, those numbers began to carry faces and voices. I could hear the fatigue. The frustration of doing everything right and still falling short because the infrastructure around them simply wasn’t built to support them. It made me more careful with every sentence we wrote. Each claim represented someone’s lived reality.

What surprised me most was how something as ordinary as infrastructure began to feel deeply human. Cold storage. Aggregation hubs. Processing units. On paper, they’re technical assets. In practice, they’re protection. They buy time. And time is often the difference between loss and survival: time to store a harvest, time to negotiate a fair price, time not to panic. I started seeing infrastructure less as equipment and more as a source of dignity. When people have breathing room, they make better decisions. They plan. They grow. They stay in the game.

This work feels urgent because the system itself feels fragile. Climate shocks are more frequent. Supply chains are brittle. Food is wasted in one place while families struggle to afford groceries in another. It doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t have to be this way. Strengthening the midstream isn’t flashy work; it’s foundational. It’s about making sure food can move, small businesses can endure, and what farmers grow reaches people. Sometimes resilience isn’t built through big breakthroughs. It’s built through the quiet reliability of things that simply work.

Leading this report changed me in subtle ways. It made me slower. More attentive. More deliberate with my words. It reminded me that the way we frame a problem shapes what people choose to act on. Writing about food systems means writing about people’s livelihoods. That responsibility stays with you. You learn to handle every story with care.

But alongside that weight, there’s hope. Because these gaps aren’t inevitable. They’re structural. And what is built can be rebuilt. If neglect created these weak points, intentional investment could strengthen them. If the middle has been overlooked, it can be prioritized. None of this requires miracles, just alignment, attention, and the will to act.

When I look back on this project, I don’t think first about the charts or the models. I think about the people who trusted us with their experiences. I think about that sentence, “we lost everything,” and how many times it’s probably said quietly across the country. More than anything, I hope this work helps make that middle visible. Because once you see it clearly, you can’t ignore it. And once you care, you can’t help but act.

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Read the Full Report Here