[ Originally published on: Wednesday, January 13, 2010 ]
It's one thing to savor locally grown Deerfield sweet corn in August and Whately peas in July, but what about in January?That's the vision behind a push to look at freezing locally grown vegetables and fruits in a pair of studies, in Greenfield and Deerfield. Could local farmers make more money by freezing produce and selling it in the valley during the winter months?
About 100,000 pounds of snow peas, snap peas, string beans and corn beans were all frozen by the Western Massachusetts Food Processing Center last summer in a pilot project that may help see how viable it would be to freeze food in the Greenfield-based shared commercial kitchen as a way of extending the market for area growers.
Now, John Waite, executive director of the Franklin County Community Development Corp., which owns the center, is looking at whether to add an affordable freezing component to the CDC's 8-year-old processing center on Wells Street.
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