Farm Fresh Rhode Island blog

December starts tomorrow but you wouldn’t know it by the bounty of events that are highlighting local foods this weekend…

Project Apron – Friday 7-9pm
Fighting Hunger through Fashion. See our very own Jess K on the runway sporting RISD student designed aprons, with proceeds going toward our Fresh Food Drive and the RI Food Bank.

Wintertime Farmers’ Market opening – Saturday 12-3pm
6 farmers + a cheesemaker + a chocolatier + a coffee roaster + a jam maker. A first for Rhode Island, plus your first chance to sample Narragansett Creamery cheese and snag a copy of the Edible Rhody winter issue.

Local Foods Cook-off – Saturday 8:30pm-12:30am
Featuring Matt from Chez Pascal and Matt from Farmstead Cheese / La Laiterie. Live music, raffles and prizes at Brown’s Faunce House.

50 Mile Meal – Sunday 3-9pm
From local cheeses, berries, and vegetables to scallops and lobster cultivated off Rhode Island’s coastline to locally raised free-range chicken. The three-course meal changes weekly depending on availability and the creative mood of Local 121 Chef Julia Moore.

Narragansett Creamery Cheese Cutting – Monday 4:30-6pm
Mayor Cicilline slices into the first RI artisan cheese on the market. Try their signature cheeses: Divine Providence, Salty Sea, Renaissance, Queso Blanco or maybe happen upon a few surprises.

Fox Point Community Garden Fundraiser – Monday 7-10pm
The startup garden with 100+ plots ends the season with music, contra dancing and lots of homegrown food.

This is the time of year for giving, and there’s no better way to give than to come to Project Apron: Fighting Hunger With Fashion!

On Friday, November 30, from 7-9pm, you can join RISD Dining for a fashion show and auction. 50+ RISD students and faculty have designed unique aprons that will be displayed and auctioned off. The event will raise money to fill the shelves of The Rhode Island Community Food Bank.

Half of the proceeds will be used to purchase fresh fruits and veggies from Rhode Island farmers through Farm Fresh’s Holiday Fresh Food Drive. The participating farmers have agreed to match the donations with an equal amount of food from their harvest, to be donated throughout the coming year.

Get in the giving spirit and join us for an evening of fashion at RISD’s The Met, 30 Waterman St. in Providence on Friday, November 30.

(Check out this Providence Journal article for more about the event.)

Tune in on Wednesday morning from 9 to 10 to hear Karla Simmons on Jen’s Dish on WNRI 1380AM. Jen and Karla will discuss winter growing and this Saturday’s kick-off of the Providence Wintertime Farmers’ Market. As usual, you can expect to find the Simmons Farm table filled with fresh organic veggies, eggs, ground beef and pork from their Middletown farm. You can listen to the interview live online.

Also, don’t miss the article “Urban farmers take root” in today’s ProJo Metro section. It features Catherine Mardosa and Matt Tracy of Red Planet Vegetables. You may already be familiar with their Providence-grown produce from the Armory Park Farmers’ Market or countless restaurants across the city.

Besides the new Wintertime poster, we’ve been lucky to work with 4 other Providence artists on farmers’ market publicity in 2007. Packed with info about every market on every day of the week in the Providence area, Arley-Rose Torsone silk-screened a basket overflowing with market veggies held firmly in the clutches of a big-biceped arm. And necessarily so, it’s quite the load of veggies!

Gordon Fitch designed and screened a pepper-y print to let Central Falls customers know about the Sunday Pawtucket Farmers’ Market.

Winsor Pop crafted the plate-themed posters that found their way into storefront windows around each of our neighborhood farmers’ markets. Winsor also helped us design invitations for the Local Food Fest in August.

Kandyce Groesbeck created the five-dollar Fresh Bucks coins used by credit card and EBT customers at our summer farmers’ markets. She also helped us with a one-dollar coin that is at the mint for use this winter (more on that soon!).

Core to our work at Farm Fresh is re-valuing local producers. We bring that spirit to our farmers’ market posters as well. Rhode Island has its own visual signatures, and over the past few years local artists have offered their take on the fresh flavors of Rhode Island veggies. We’re always excited to see the visual panoramas inspired by a bite of a roasted purple-topped turnip set amid a bustling dinner table.

Speaking of seasonal panoramas, we just printed the first round of Wintertime Farmers’ Market posters. A one-time resident artist at AS220 – home to the market – Mark Pedini was in a prime position to craft a visual vibe for wintry market meets downtown. You’ll see the posters popping up around Providence over the next few days.

A followup to our earlier report on the Fresh Food Drive. Back in August, Mel at Farm Fresh coordinated a corn-gleaning effort at Cook’s Valley Farm. Enthusiastic Gordon School middle schoolers accompanied by two teachers and a Fox Point Community Garden member spent a Wednesday morning picking 1,100 pounds of corn for the RI Food Bank.

Putting the event together was simple, harvesting was hard work, being on the farm was educational, the day was fun, and the amount of good was enormous. Exactly the kind of event that should happen more often. Hence October’s Fresh Food Drive was hatched!

The availability of veggies at food banks is often directly related to local agriculture. Food banks can often negotiate discounts on canned and non-perishable items from supermarkets. (So while we salute buying and donating cans, your dollars would be better spent going directly to a food bank or pantry.) They also often receive significant donations of aesthetically damaged goods. But it is much harder to obtain fresh foods from these stores. So the options available to those who rely upon food pantries are often only as healthful than the center aisles of the supermarket. That’s why the Fresh Food Drive is so important.

Also of note: A recent Washington Post op-ed about food banks and a NY Times video about a NY farmer’s relationship with a city food bank.

This Saturday, volunteers from Brown’s Sustainable Food Initiative harvested beets and squash at Cook’s Valley Farm in Wrentham, MA, capping off a Thanksgiving-timed delivery to the RI Food Bank. It’s the culmination of a Fresh Food Drive that we ran this October at our farmers’ markets at Brown, Hope High School, Armory Park and Downtown Providence. Thank you to the dozens of market patrons who donated a few bucks toward the gleaning of:

• 1,000 pounds of sweet corn
• 1,100 pounds of beets
• 600 pounds of butternut squash
• 140 pounds of tomatoes
• 60 pounds of peppers
• 30 pounds of eggplant

Between your dollars and many volunteer hours, 2,100 pounds of food from local farms were delivered to the plates of those who wouldn’t necessarily otherwise be able to afford fresh foods.

Thank you also to Farris at the RI Food Bank and to the Hope High School Farmers’ Market farmers that participated:

• Amy at Woodstock Farm
• Al at Bettencourt Farm
• Warren at Cook’s Valley Farm

We’re lucky to live in a community where our harvests are abundant and our farmers generous.

We jumped into uncharted territory for Rhode Island when we introduced EBT and credit card purchasing at 5 of our farmers’ markets this summer. Three market managers juggled one wireless machine between Brown (Wednesday), Armory Park (Thursday), Downtown (Friday), Hope High (Saturday) and Pawtucket (Sunday). We educated hundreds of customers about these new payment options and taught dozens of our farmers how to accept and be reimbursed for Fresh Bucks, the $5 coins that people received after swiping their cards at the Farm Fresh table.

For people who forgot to bring enough cash, Fresh Bucks were a no-brainer, not any different than an ATM. We were thrilled that credit cards bought 5,000 additional dollars of RI grown foods for the 20 weeks between June 15 and October 31. (If it seems small, consider that farmers’ markets are extremely cash-oriented and this was year one.)

The big unknown was how Food Stamps / EBT customers would respond. Some were already farmers’ market patrons through the WIC program. But the $15 in WIC coupons that low-income mothers receive per season (yes, that’s all) are dollars restricted to farmers’ markets. Could we convince these customers to spend their EBT dollars here, too? EBT can be used at supermarkets, which may not offer cheaper produce but do offer aisles of industrial processed foods that deliver many more calories for the buck than fresh vegetables. (It’s questionable whether maximizing your caloric intake per dollar is necessary or healthy in this country.) How would we reach the remaining EBT customers? Most do not receive WIC, and so may have had no previous reason to come to a RI farmers’ market. They have never before been able to spend their dollars here.

We publicized the markets at Food Stamps offices and through Food Stamp nutrition outreach programs. Word travels fast and the love of fresh foods knows few boundaries. Unfortunately, the EBT machine’s pinpad and cables didn’t get the memo; repeatedly defective equipment nixed our ability to accept EBT for the early summer and almost all of October. Despite that, we did $400 in sales in September!

In the end, there were more problems with the EBT machine malfunctioning than with generating interest from EBT customers. Hopefully the machine problems didn’t deter customers from coming back. We’ll see what happens when EBT and credit card sales resume at the Wintertime Farmers’ Market.

Find a Rhode Island bird for your Thanksgiving table. (Among other reasons, there’s a decent chance a local turkey from a family farm was healthily raised and can actually support its own weight.)

And if you’re looking for fixings to fill out the meal, many farm stands are still open and so are a handful of  Saturday farmers’ markets. We’re also building our list of retailers and grocers that buy direct from local farms.

If you were busy trick-or-treating this Halloween, you missed a roundtable chat about some very scary American agricultural policies. RI Senator and farmer Sue Sosnowski, Robert Swanson of the USDA, Larry Matlack of the American Agricultural Movement and food author Anna Lappé gathered for “Action Speaks” at AS220 in Providence to discuss the state of farming in Rhode Island and across the country. The evening was broadcast on WRNI and is available online as an MP3 stream.

Also not too long ago, a trio traveling the country making short films about sustainability stopped in RI to explore some of our farms. The project is called Your Environmental Road Trip and first on their agenda was chatting with Rich at City Farm in Providence (video). A second episode starts with farm tours on Jamestown with Don at Watson Farm and Joe and Jessie at Dutra Farm, and wraps up in West Kingston with Anj at Paradise Hill Alpacas (video).