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Farm fresh: Shoppers can now order straight from growers
Miami Herald – February 7, 2011
Whole Foods offers help to Community Supported Agriculture programs. Consumers can now pick up their pre-ordered produce from local farms at stores.
Geane Brito has to wait until her two kids get out of school before going to Whole Foods in Miami Beach to pick up their box of vegetables for the week from Teena’s Pride in the Redland.
Magnus and Isadora Kron, ages 8 and 10, dash immediately into the store, eager to take inventory of the seasonal vegetables just picked from a local farm: broccoli leaves, heirloom tomatoes, poblano peppers and carrots with the tops still attached.
Brito’s family is part of a growing group in South Florida and around the country embracing Community Supported Agriculture. For $20 to $40 a week, they buy ultra-fresh food straight from the farm at prices similar to the grocery store. And their contribution helps small farmers remain in business.
“I want my children to have the experience of knowing that fresh vegetables don’t grow at the supermarket,” said Brito, who lives on South Beach.
While the CSA concept historically has cut the grocery store out of the equation, Whole Foods stores in Florida are aiming to change that. The chain is kicking off a program to offer local farms free use of Whole Foods stores throughout the state as drop-off and pick-up points for the weekly deliveries.
Whole Foods – which began testing the idea late last year at five Florida stores with two farms – is now ready to roll it out as a long-term program across the state. Any farm can participate as long as the store has room to hold the boxes.
Russ Benblatt, spokesman for Whole Foods in Florida, says the program is a natural extension of the chain’s efforts to support local agriculture. Each Whole Foods store already tries to ensure that at least 20 percent to 30 percent of the produce is sourced locally.
“We know that more and more people are embracing eating local and we want to provide them with more alternatives,” Benblatt said. “There are a lot of small farms in Florida that really can’t supply our stores because of the size of the farm or space.”
The partnership is a significant boost for farmers like Jodi and Darrin Swank. Until they started the trial program in November with Whole Foods, they had been spending hours each night driving produce from their farm in Loxahatchee to customers’ homes as far south as Fort Lauderdale – 100 miles roundtrip.
Other farmers use drop-off locations at members’ homes or community facilities. But given the far-flung locations of most South Florida farms in South Dade or Palm Beach counties, that’s still a time-consuming and costly arrangement. The Swanks could no longer handle making individual deliveries to their 50 CSA members.
“For us to continue driving to homes was not sustainable and there was no way to grow the business,” Darrin Swank said. “If you had to pay somebody to do what I’m doing you would lose all your profits. You can’t run a business like that.”
Although the CSA concept is relatively new to Florida, its history dates to the 1960s in Japan and Europe. The first community supported agriculture in the United States started in 1986 in New England.
The idea is that the consumer buys a “share” in the farm. They prepay at the beginning of the growing season for their weekly produce. The farmer uses that money to help plant and grow the crops. If the farmer has a good harvest, the consumer reaps the rewards. But if bad weather or pests interfere, the consumer’s share suffers.
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