Organic Gardening Info from Peaceful Valley

On Tuesday I got the opportunity to go up to Andrew Meyer’s farm, Wild Grace Organics. Andrew is the very first participant in Peaceful Valley’s “Freshman Farmer” program.

Andrew Meyers at Wild Grace Farm

Freshman Farmer is an initiative that Peaceful Valley took based on our understanding that farmers not only aren’t getting any younger, but younger people aren’t looking to farming as a valid career move either. So we’re “sponsoring” Andrew’s farm this year, giving him the equivalent of an employee discount on supplies that he needs to get started, and to grow a CSA for the season.

I’m making short videos to go along with his website, which is freshmanfarmer.groworganic.com. (as of this moment, March 13, there is not yet content, but keep on the lookout, an intro video is coming real soon!)

We will be checking in with him throughout the season to see how things are coming along, and what challenges and successes he is facing.

He will also be keeping a blog, regularly letting everyone know what is happening up at Wild Grace.

It’s such a cool program, one I’m really proud to be a part of. Each year we will be giving a young farmer a boost and interacting in a very positive and long term way, not just with the organic community, but with the community as a whole.

Other great things are coming out of this too, some I can’t talk about yet as they are not written in stone, but some, such as our retail store’s cooler being a drop off point for his boxes of veggies, that could really assist in making local food available and affordable for this community. Perhaps we will learn enough to be able to pass lessons we learn along to others.

Let us know what you think, if you’ve heard of anything similar regarding CSA’s, and if you have any questions!

Tags: Andrew Meyers, CSA, farm, farming, Freshman Farmer, grower, local, new, store, veggies, Wild Grace Organics

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 2:16 pm and is filed under Around The Valley, Community. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.