Friday, March 5, 2010: Enterprise Farm- Building a Regional Foodshed

One of the local farms we work with is Enterprise Farm in Whately. Besides growing organic vegetables and running a successful year-round CSA program, they also have relationships with small-scale organic growers up and down the East Coast. They buy their produce to distribute to their CSA members and others. Any non-local produce that you get in your box comes to us from Enterprise Farm. Here is some information about their vision of a regional foodshed.

“Our goal is a more sustainable food system. We’re accomplishing this goal by decreasing the distances that food travels before it arrives on your plate. By forging relationships with organic farms up and down the East Coast – our regional “foodshed” – we’re able to bring their produce directly to our customers in Massachusetts.

The concept of a foodshed is akin to that of a watershed. It describes the geographic area that food travels, from the land where it is grown, all the way to the people that it ultimately nourishes. The average American meal contains components that have traveled thousands of miles -- obviously an unsustainable system. We ended up with this system because it proved the cheapest possible model for huge grocery store chains and their distributors.

Our East Coast Foodshed model not only cuts the distance that food travels by sourcing from farms that are geographically closer to us (Florida is the furthest that we go to source our produce), but also decreases the time food travels in trucks and sits in refrigerators. Cutting out the food distributors, which often truck your food thousands of miles from distribution center to distribution center, provides you with you fresher produce from farms closer to home.

Food sourced from within our regional foodshed cuts down on the miles your food travels, increases the year-round viability of small organic farms in our region, and sustains those farms that we hope will continue to feed us as we decrease our reliance on the industrial food system.”