January is always a funny time for me. In December I am pretty laid back eating green chile stew, humming the occasional Christmas tune, and enjoying fermented grape juice. Fast forward into January and the Honey-Do list seems pretty dang long. I must say that I love it though, and it is an exciting time for us and all farmers.
January is normally crazy as a flood of new members get on board, old members remember they have a cooler still in their kitchen, and seeds need to get ordered to fill the fields this spring. But there is an added bonus of fun we are adding to the mix this year—Arizona. Let me lay this out.
About 5 years ago I met Philip, a great grower in the Southern Tucson area. He is a fired up dude; not only about his farm, but also the local Organic food movement as a whole. It is good to meet someone from a different hood, but feel that you speak the same language and both with a huge passion for food. You can only talk about how awesome a grapefruit is for so long before most people start looking at you a little funny. Most growers get to talk in a judgment free zone fortunately. Go ahead and dork out on salad mix. It’s ok, you’re in good company.
So we started to get citrus from him and he started to get green chile and a roaster from us. Like I was mentioning last week, this has been a great partnership to see grow over the years. You, amigos, have been the beneficiaries of some amazing citrus and other produce that has come from our neighbors to the west.
As we began to bring more and more support to his farm, Philip started to introduce me to other growers in the Arizona food scene. With each farmer we added, the “food miles” to your plate melted away. The 1,200 miles that everyone talks about became less than 450 miles. And that is during the coldest months out of the year; obviously closer than that during our growing months.
After working with all of these growers and selling as a united front, the vision became so clear to me. I honestly feel like I saw the transformation of the local food movement play out right in front of my eyes—the unattainable, unrealistic 100% local food movement would morph into a regional collaborative of growers, dairies, producers and ranchers. It is a beautiful sight.
We are living through the death of the “Buy Local” pins and banners that mean nothing except for that you had enough time and money to print baseless merchandise. Out of the ashes of that funeral, we are seeing a birth of something better and more sustainable than the mindless “Buy Local” mantra. We want to (and will) be the advocates for conscientious and educated consumers who see the future of this regional food system that we are putting into place and fine-tuning right now.
As we have worked with these growers in Arizona and they have seen and understood our distribution model, they have all said basically the same thing, “That is cool, I wish we had something like that.” Now even a thick-headed Nordic kid like me can have a light bulb flicker in the cranium after I hear something repeated dozens of times. So the question became, what is holding us back from bringing food to the front doors in Arizona?? We already do it throughout New Mexico and El Paso.
As we began to examine the logistics behind the idea, we realized quickly that there is no good reason why we cannot work with the communities in Arizona like we work with the growers. So beginning this upcoming Friday, we will be launching home deliveries in the greater Tucson area and will be into Phoenix later this summer.
This addition will give all of our members (You) better and fresher access to our regional food partners every week of the year. I am also confident that this will represent a cutting-edge, collaborative food distribution model that will shape the way that growers and producers work together symbiotically across the various regions in this country. I have seen firsthand over the last 13 years that we are definitely stronger as a team than we are as individuals.
Farmer Monte