Work focuses on developing local food system in Illinois

CHICAGO — In addition to growing food organically, Marty Travis works with numerous Illinois farmers to provide marketing and distribution services that connect them to numerous buyers.

“In four more years, our farm will be a bicentennial farm,” said Marty Travis, who is a partner in Spence Farm. “My son, Will, his wife and my three grandkids live on the family farm and my grandkids are the ninth generation to be there.”

Spence Farm is a 160-acre operation.

“We grew to 1,000 acres, but families like to have pieces of things, so it has diminished back to the original 160 acres that was purchased for $1.25 per acre,” said Travis during a presentation at The Chicago Farmers meeting.

His grandparents farmed, but he did not grow up being a farmer.

“After high school, I built Shaker furniture for people all over the world, including Oprah Winfrey and the Smithsonian gift shop,” Travis said.

“But through all those experiences there wasn’t anything I built in 35 years that anybody really needed; they were all wants,” he said.

About 20-plus years ago, Travis decided to start farming.

“When we started our farm, we realized very quickly there was no way we were going to supply even one restaurant with what they needed,” Travis said.

“We kept seeing young people in our community graduate from high school, go to college and not coming home,” he said. “So, we did a challenge to parents to give their kid an acre to get them started and I had kids making $20,000 to $30,000 on their half-acre garden, selling to Rick Bayless.”

Today, Travis works with 120 farmers and there are over 1,000 people on an email list that he sends out every week that includes information about food products that are available for purchase.

“We sell to restaurants, co-op grocery stores, schools, nursing homes, corporate kitchens, non-for-profits, food pantries and food banks,” he said. “We have nearly 2,000 items on our product list and we deliver every week of the year, except Christmas and New Year’s.”

When Travis started growing organic crops, he said, there were only a few hundred acres of organic production in Livingston County.

“That number has increased to nearly 60,000 acres, so now our farm is nearly surrounded by organic crops,” he said. “Many of us are certified organic, but we do not require everybody to be; we just ask them to grow it that way.”

Travis is quite involved with mentoring and adding new farmers into the system.

“We work with all our farmers to help them understand good soil and plant health,” Travis said.

“We do testing of plants and crops as they are growing and also the finished product so we understand the level of nutrient density and how quickly our food can bring about change,” the farmer said.

“The biggest piece I’ve been working on in the last year is designing a food as medicine program with OSF Hospital in Peoria, through their Cancer Institute,” he said. “That one revenue stream alone has the potential to eclipse everything else because we have a lot of unhealthy folks dealing with health issues.”

Travis is working with the chief medical officer at the hospital.

“We are trying to understand what foods our farmers can provide to help support folks in their treatment protocols to support their nutrition,” he said. “This is very exciting and really impactful for our farmers.”

There is still a lot of work to do with the local food system, Travis said.

“In this next year, we will probably need another $3 million to $4 million worth of local food from our farmers,” he said. “And in 2027 we are scheduled to start another iteration that will need at least another $3 million of food on top of that.”

In the next couple of months, Travis will probably add about 20 farmers to his group to fill specific gaps.

“This year for sold outs, we left about $200,000 on the table of items that folks wanted to order, but we did not have enough of,” he said. “That’s what we’re trying to continue to do — build a food system in ways that can partner with folks from throughout the state.”

Roadmap To End Hunger

Connie Spreen, co-founder and executive director of the Experimental Station, also provided information during the meeting about work involving local food.

“The Experimental Station is a cultural organization on the South Side of Chicago,” she said. “We were founded in 2002 to bring together a lot of different cultural practices under one roof.”

In 2008, the Experimental Station founded the 61st Street Farmers Market.

“The idea was to bring food to an under resource neighborhood,” Spreen said. “Right from the very beginning it was apparent we had to make it accessible and accept SNAP, which is called Link in Illinois, so we set up that system.”

In addition, she said, it was important at the farmers market to make the food affordable, so the Link Match program was developed.

For the Link Match, customers take their Link card to a central booth at the farmers market and they get tokens or vouchers that match the amount of money on the Link card.

“Those vouchers are for fresh fruits and vegetables only and we matched the purchase up to $25,” Spreen said.

“All that money goes into the pockets of the vendors at the markets,” she said. “We are now at 160 locations throughout the state, including about 100 farmers markets along with grocery stores and food co-ops.”

During 2025, the Experimental Station created an Illinois Food System Roadmap task force to address food insecurity in the state.

“We need to create a plan to increase the amount of food produced here in the state and Marty is one of the leaders on that task force,” Spreen said. “People don’t know what other people are doing so that is part of the work of this roadmap.”

The project featured a series of meetings across the state to gather information for the roadmap.

“There was a real mix of people who participated and a big chuck was non-for-profits and the next biggest chunk was farmers,” Spreen said. “Others include people representing finance, philanthropy, labor, government agencies, manufacturing, public health and retail.”

The vision for the roadmap, she said, “is to build a diverse, sustainable and resilient Illinois food system that will grow the local food economies of the state and provide equitable access to nourishing food for all residents of Illinois.”