DEERFIELD — With folks confined to their homes in the early days of the pandemic, but still looking for local produce, Julia Coffey and her team at Mycoterra Farm branched out to bring products to their doors in the form of Mass Food Delivery.

While she had no experience in food distribution, Coffey set out to create a connection between the then-closed farmers markets and local consumers. The result? A resounding success that eventually morphed into a way for elderly, immunocompromised and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) customers to safely receive food throughout the latter stages of pandemic.

But after four years of operating Mass Food Delivery, Coffey, the owner of the mushroom farm at 75 Stillwater Road, has decided to end the service due to falling sales. Mycoterra Farm faces $100,000 in debt to 26 vendors.

With a farm dedicated to local resilience and innovative food systems, Coffey said her goal is pay that money back to her partners. To do so, she has launched a crowdfunding campaign alongside several new business initiatives.

“I started Mass Food Delivery to sustain Mycoterra Farm and to support the local food system through unprecedented times,” Coffey said. “The decision to close Mass Food Delivery was not taken lightly. While we succeeded in helping our farm and partners through the pandemic, we now face the challenge of repaying our vendors in the wake of Mass Food Delivery’s closure. These are local businesses, many family-owned, that are vital to our food system. This campaign is not just about helping Mycoterra — it’s about helping those who kept food on our tables when we needed it most.”

Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture (CISA) interim Executive Director Kelly Coleman said the years of success of Mass Food Delivery are a “true testament to the passion that Julia and the whole team over there brought to their task of serving the community.” Coffey serves on CISA’s board of directors.

“The story of Mass Food Delivery highlights how, even when there is a real need for a service and plenty of demand, it can be very challenging to keep a small business solvent — especially when the business is serving lower-income people,” Coleman said. “Mass Food Delivery got up and running almost immediately during the uncertain early days of the pandemic, and kept going to meet the needs of people who have limited access to local food for a host of reasons, most notably because of limited mobility, transportation challenges or low incomes.”

While it was difficult to shut down Mass Food Delivery, Coffey said there is an opportunity to grow Mycoterra Farm using the things they’ve learned from running the program, as well as make use of the space it needed. One example of that is the commercial kitchen, which can be leased out to folks looking to start up a food business.

“Mass Food Delivery gave us a whole warehouse worth of space to open up to more potential kitchen users,” Coffey said. “That will add income that will then go back to my vendors. I feel like with Mass Food Delivery losing money, the space was kind of underutilized and now we’re getting the space ready to bring in more people and become a food hub.”

Other work Mycoterra Farm is undertaking — both to pay off debt and to expand the business for future growth — include increasing the number of value-added products, such as mushroom-growing kits or extracts. She is also looking at improving digital purchases and looking into more digital marketing.

“I really just went on a food mission for the past four and a half years or so,” Coffey said. “It’s been an evolution. Honestly, Mass Food Delivery took away some of the bandwidth that we could have invested here, you know? It ran its course and it’s giving an opportunity for new growth to emerge.”

For more information about Mycoterra Farm, visit mycoterrafarm.com. For more information about the crowdfunding campaign, visit bit.ly/492AfqY.

Chris Larabee can be reached at clarabee@recorder.com.