Our mission to make the world a better place is not just for us in present day – we are committed to making it better for the next generation and beyond.
Healing The Land
When we bought our farm, it had been conventionally farmed with corn, beans, and harmful pesticides for many years. It had been relatively stripped of nutrients and the health of the soil needed much improvement. Once we learned about permaculture, we made it our goal to incorporate regenerative and sustainable farming practices to create thriving ecosystems on our farm. This continues to be a work in progress, but we are excited to watch the evolution take place as we convert cornfields into pastures, plant fruit trees and bushes, and utilize our livestock to work in harmony with each other to build incredibly healthy soil.
Ugly Food and Food Waste
Did you know that in the United States, food waste is estimated at between 30-40 percent of the food supply? A decade ago in 2010, the USDA estimated that we wasted 133 billion pounds and $161 billion worth of food.1 Meanwhile there are 41 million people in the USA (1 in 8 households and including 13 million children) that struggle with hunger. The disparity between those figures is heartbreaking. There are lots of great organizations who are helping to close that gap. We are on a mission to do it on a local level. We strive to accomplish this by:
- Educating Our Customers About Ugly Food: It’s what’s on the inside that counts! Ugly food is safe to eat and tastes great, yet it often goes in the landfill because it does not look perfect. We encourage our customers to buy ugly food, waste less, and donate more to those in need.
- Making The Most Of Our Food Waste: Whenever possible, we try to take our unsold produce and our ugly food to soup kitchens and food pantries. What doesn’t get donated gets composted to help build the soil and repeat the cycle by growing more great food.
- Working with our restaurant partners and local manufacturers to recycle their food waste into animal feed and compost.
Eating Local
We believe eating local is a crucial part in making the world a better place for future generations. Supporting local farms and restaurants is so important to affecting the economics in a local community, but it does not end there. Eating locally can have such an impact on carbon emissions and your carbon footprint. Eating seasonally is taking it to the next level. This is not something we are used to doing in the age we live in, when convenience is the new way of life. While it is delicious to eat strawberries off season during the winter, it is not sustainable. Nor is eating food that is produced across the world, even when in reason. We have included some articles about eating locally on our Resources page for you to check out. We try to practice what we preach and we try to eat locally and seasonally as much as possible. While it isn’t practical for everyone all the time, every little bit helps!
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
We do our best to be sustainable wherever we can. In addition to striving to eliminate food waste, we try to limit the use of plastics when possible. There are some uses with our packaging where plastic use is a necessity for various reasons, but we encourage our customer to recycle. We also reuse cardboard boxes for our packaging, transportation, and even as weed barriers in our growing operation!