Locally Grown - Availability for February 25th, 2015

Hey Local Food Lovers,

This last week was pretty exciting! First, there were lots of questions from both farmers and customers about whether we would carry on with Locally Grown in the freezing cold ice and snow. The answer was Yes! As long at the roads aren’t horribly dangerous we keep the Local Food moving from the farm to your fridge to your bellies nearly every week all year long. We do REALLY appreciate it when everyone works with us the way you did this past Wednesday by picking up in just a one hour time frame so we weren’t freezing to death. We had 100% support on that and we really THANK YOU. Everything went well and hopefully you enjoyed getting good fresh local food in the dead of winter.

There were some other exciting developments this last week. The first I’ll offer as a teaser. Andrew and I went to visit a farm that’ll be joining Locally Grown in just a few weeks that will have some excellent BEEF, PORK and EGGS produced on a farm that just relocated to north Hall County. It was a frigid day on our visit, but we were very impressed with what we saw and can’t wait to welcome a new MEAT producer to the market. Since they’ll be joining us soon enough I’ll save lots of other details including their name for their grand entrance coming quite soon!

Georgia Organics had their huge annual conference this past weekend in Athens (about 1,000 in attendance) and Chuck and Andrew and I had the privileged opportunity to go down and give a presentation on the role of FARMERS NETWORKS in building Local Food Systems as one of the conference sessions. Many of you may not yet be aware of the Georgia Mountains Farmers Network (GMFN) that we started back in January 2012 and how important that has been in creating regional collaboration amongst sustainable farmers. To give you an example of how important, the GMFN is the reason that Locally Grown expanded to Gainesville this past year. Our little group would vote every year on our top priority projects to collaborate on, and every year COLLABORATIVE MARKETING to get more products to more customers was voted as a top priority. The more we discussed how to do it, we realized that 1) We wanted to reach URBAN customers to increase our sales potential and; 2) We wanted to continue to sell RETAIL (as opposed to Wholesale). We discussed many ways to accomplish that goal, and eventually discovered that expansion of the Locally Grown market to Gainesville was our best possible opportunity.

It’s taken a lot of effort, but our collaborations have paid off in just the 3 years that GMFN has been around. We have a board of directors, our FARM TOUR (mark your calendar now for June 27-28) is a huge event promoting local food farms regionally with over 500 people attending last year. And in less than a month our little group (it’ll be about 50 people) will have our annual meeting at Harvest Habersham, enjoying a really good meal of food grown from their own farms to discuss what we want to accomplish in 2015 and onward.

Rather than try and re-give the whole talk here, feel free to take a look at the SLIDESHOW

If you’ve got an hour to kill and would enjoy plugging your headphones into an MP3 describing how our local farming community has grown over the last 3 years here’s the AUDIO from the talk.

That’ll do it for this week. Our item count is a little low this week. Obviously the coldest week of the year stifles the growth of fresh veggies, but order big of what we do have and get ready. We are just days away from the beginnings of spring crops. I can feel the excitement in the air.

EAT WELL,

Justin, Chuck, Teri and Andrew