Locally Grown - Availability for January 22, 2014

Hey Local Food Lovers,

I just had the good fortune to spend this past weekend in Asheville, NC and of course while we were there we took in just a little bit of the local food scene. We visited the smaller of two farmers markets that goes all winter long and were impressed by how cozy and familiar it felt talking to each of the growers. The market wasn’t exclusive to organic, though most farms were. There were apples from a nearby orchard (those were not organic), whole grain sourdough breads as well rye, goat cheeses (I tried a fig and rosemary that was really yummy). Most fun of all was finding some purple sweet potatoes that I bought not to eat but to grow next season. Wish I had bought more now.

One thing I often think about when I visit other local food communities is that we’re not that different from any other place, and we’re growing fast. It’s easy to think that we’re a million miles behind in our production and consumption of local food. One thing that I really like here in our community is our collaboration across the region. That’s important when space and distance is our biggest challenge in the most food reaching the most consumers. We’re a rural area so being spread out just comes with the territory. The sweet potato farmer I met had actually driven an hour into town for market that morning.

That’s probably the thing that makes Locally Grown most special. Because either Chuck or I run a shuttle every week between Clarkesville and Tiger that makes it possible for each farmer to reach customers that would be 23 miles further away for each and every one of them if they had to make those deliveries themselves.

We actually did the math on this earlier this year to see what kind of savings our simple shuttle system saved. On average each farm drives 14 miles roundtrip for their Locally Grown delivery, but that would go up to 37 miles if they had to deliver to two locations. As you might imagine most farms just couldn’t make that work. Altogether this system saves 18,523 miles of farmer driving time each year. In gas savings alone that’s $2,904. In driving time that saved farmers 402 hours on the road. If you valued farmers time at $10 an hour that’s another $4,026 in savings.

It is the pooling of customers, farms, products and travel miles that create the efficiencies necessary to make the market worthwhile to all that are involved including you guys. If it was just the farms located within 14 miles of you I guarantee there would be a lot less food on the market each week.

All this said, now is probably a good time to announce our hopes to add a new drop off / pick up location to Locally Grown in the Gainesville area sometime this year. Each year we have had new farms starting up in our area and the need for a larger and larger customer base is inevitable. Rural areas are always where most of the farms will be and urban areas are always where most of the people will be. Somehow we have to bring those two together and Locally Grown seems to be a great distribution model for how this can be done.

We are currently talking with the leadership of Grace Episcopal Church in Gainesville as a possible host for the market, (very similar to the relationship we have with Grace Calvary here in Clarkesville). If you have any friends and family connected with Grace in Gainesville, please let us know as a good word here and there will probably be very helpful as we get to know each other. This is our first idea, and if doesn’t work out we’ll be very interested to pursue other potential partners in Gainesville. They don’t have a year-round market there so that’ll be one major appealing aspect of us expanding there.

In terms of how this will affect how Locally Grown works now, we don’t think it will change a thing, thought it should be a huge benefit in the long run. We’re planning to invite farms in the Hall County area to start listing which will likely add brand new products and farms to buy from. It may be a tad more competitive for those hard to buy items, but we’re working out some ideas already on how to handle that which I’ll save for a later discussion.

This is all just in the earliest planning stages now, but that’s why we’re mentioning it. We consider each of you to be full participants in how Locally Grown evolves and we could use your input and your help. We are a pretty intimate group of growers and customers and the more we work together the better we think the market will become. Hopefully this will all help set the stage for collecting some good survey info from you very, very soon. We’re writing the questions now.

I think that about covers it for tonight. Thanks so much for the support you’ve given to us so far, and we hope you’ll continue for many meals and many years ahead. There’s lots of good stuff even here in the dead of winter so eat up and…..

EAT WELL,
Justin in Habersham
and
Chuck in Rabun