Mission Arc 1:

Let’s be clear: Real food security is not only how much food we have in our basement or even our garden… why not? 

Because most people who live within 25 miles of us don’t have 5 years of food in their basement and they don’t have a garden. 

What does that have to do with us?  

If there ever is a food emergency and you have a garden and food stored, it means that you’re going to meet a lot of new people… hungry people! 

Do you have enough in your garden and or basement to feed all of them? 

Didn’t think so… We feel it’s important to create personal food security, and to plan with the rest of the community because in the end we’re all in this together. 

So what else can be done besides what you’re already doing?

Someone has to grow a whole lot more regenerative and organic food in all our communities… and our farmers are disappearing. 

• 100 years ago 90% of American adults were farmers. 

• 20 years ago it was down to 2% and many of those are already gone. 
• The average age of the American farmer is now 65 years old. 
• There are 10 times the # of farmers over 65 then there are farmers under the age of 35. 

So most of our current farmers will retire in the next 5-10 years.

We have one useful choice.
We must grow a new generation of at least 1 million organic farmers in the next 5-10 years. 

To actually do that and not just be aware of it we have to find out what’s still broken in our overall food system… what’s missing… and do the opposite of that.

So much good is being done! 

But obviously… if everything we need was happening we’d see a different result. 

What do most farmers need that they don’t have yet? 

What can we do differently in our relationships with them so that they will succeed and more will want to farm so that we can grow a million farmers asap?

We decided to ask the experts : ) So we’ve talked with hundreds of farmers all across the US. We ask them the same thing, right to the point because farmers like it that way:

“What will it take for you to grow a lot more food?”

The answer is always the same 2 words…

“Buy it”

So we keep asking that question and getting the same answer! 

And along the way we did another 10  years of economic thinking and systems design… and we’ve created a project we can bring into a community and be able to powerfully accelerate local organic and regenerative farmers and food systems as we:

• Buy as much as local organic farmers want to grow – up to about 7,000,000 pounds a year and more after that as this catches on in each community
• Pay a good price and contract to buy before they plant 
• Buy their seconds! (seconds are visually imperfect food not able to be sold to strict visual grocery standards) 25% > 40% of what we grow is wasted on the farm because it’s not pretty enough for the stores. We can buy it at a discount, elevate it’s value back up to Grade A and share some of the liberated food value with our farmers and the rest of the community : )

So how to do all this? 

The answer is a coordinated network of Gentle Drying Centers