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Farm-to-Community: Critical Elements of a Successful Farm Mutual-Aid Program
Accessibility continues to be the Achilles’ heel of regenerative agriculture, the farm-to-table movement, sustainable agriculture, and whatever other labels we want to wrap around doing food and farming the “right” way. Our products are inordinately expensive and our industry has largely responded to this with silence and resignation to segregating consumers between “those who care and those who don’t.”
Fortunately there’s a growing contingent within the movement that’s dedicated to bringing good food to everyone, and they’re coming up with lots of solutions. One immediate measure that my farm has taken is the creation of a mutual aid program in 2021 that raises money from all over the country to purchase food made available for free to people dealing with food insecurity and apartheid in the communities my farm serves.
It’s a fairly successful program, raising over $125,000 in the last 15 months and giving away literal tons of eggs, poultry, pork, and beef raised with regenerative methods to various networks of food aid organizations in the Washington, D.C., Richmond, VA, Charlottesville, VA, Baltimore, MD, and Norfolk, VA areas. Our success, unfortunately, appears to be an outlier, and other farms attempting to replicate our model have run into difficulty doing so. The other day I turned…
