We recently visited three of our farms to chat with the growers and spend some much needed time outdoors. The end result was our latest farm tour. Our primary goal was to help you, the customer, see the impact your purchases are making. How you are supporting local organic agriculture, creating jobs, and furthering a local food movement. To see this local food movement progress, it has to be something that’s shared across different sectors. It’s a communal effort: the grower, the distributor, and the consumer all have to work together to see this ethical food hub realized in Atlanta.
The Grower
We visited Woodland Gardens in Athens GA, Red Earth Farm in Zebulon GA, and Atlanta Harvest in Atlanta GA. They’re each doing their part by growing food in a sustainable and ethical way. There is no use of chemicals, crops are rotated, high tunnels provide for winter growth, and multiple varieties are grown within season. Atlanta Harvest is growing on an abandoned parking lot in South Atlanta and each of these farms is creating jobs in their community. Thanks to FH customers, Red Earth has grown from 4 employees to 14!
The Distributor
Thats us! We’re growing a bit of food ourselves but thats for another post. Are we perfect? Absolutely not. In a perfect world I suppose we would all grow food in our front yards and that would be it. In our modern, 21st century, we’re trying to find the best way to serve a lot of people AND keep things local and sustainable. To do that, we’ve partnered with several local farms like the folks in this film. As you’ll hear from them, they may not have the time and resources to market their product and deliver their food to you, but we do. Rather than growing food and hoping it sells, we can plan ahead with them to reduce food waste. We’ve also kept a relatively small delivery area around Greater Atlanta – you’ll never see FH shipping food around the country or driving for hours – thats the opposite of a local food hub. Thats not to be exclusive, its just to say, “somebody else in your area can serve you better than we can”.
The Consumer
Thats you! You are the engine behind this whole thing. Without the consumer choosing to buy local and organic, there is no Woodland Gardens, Red Earth, or Atlanta Harvest. We each get 3 votes a day, as Michael Pollan says, on where our food comes from. It may not seem like it, but thats a lot of votes! At FH, we look at every basket we deliver as one more vote for food grown and distributed the right way – a way that heals our bodies and the ground it came from. It doesn’t just take, it puts back and provides for the future.
Working together, we’re recapturing the way food should be grown, distributed, and consumed. Less than .1% of agriculture in GA is certified organic so this movement must happen, quite literally, from the ground up.
See the one minute farm tour trailer here
