Gleaning and FarmDrop Updates

Last month we held a lively community launch reception for FarmDrop.org farmers, customers and partners at Fairwinds Florist downtown Blue Hill. A beautiful assortment of delicious plates accompanied the festivities, including Quill's End Summer Sausage, Yknot Lamb Balls dipped in Goat's Milk Yogurt, Blue Hill Blondes Beef Liver Pate, Backstage Farm Kvas and Firestarter Kimchi, Four Season Farm Radish and Kale dipped in olive oil and sea salt, and sparkling grape juice made from gleaned grapes.

Customers who were picking up their FarmDrop order could spend a minute tasting some of the products available on FarmDrop.org and talking to farmers they don't usually get to interact with given the online nature of our marketplace. As we grow to include more farmers and customers our hope is that we can continue to hold occasional Meet-and-greet events like this to strengthen the FarnDrop community, discuss and new developments regarding the online platform, and continue to work together to build vibrant local food communities. This will be our third week open and we have hosted 30 online shoppers so far with more orders coming in every day. All proceeds go towards supporting the FarmDrop operations and the ongoing work of partners Healthy Acadia and Healthy Peninsula to get good food to all community members.

Guests at the FarmDrop Community Launch: includes Tina Allen(front left) of the Blue Hill Chamber of Commerce, Representative Ralph Chapman (front middle), and Janet Lewis (front right) of partner organization Healthy Peninsula and the Magic Food Bus.

To get involved in gleaning projects on farms and in your community, to share the bounty of the local harvest, get in touch with us at hannah@healthyacadia.org and visit our facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/thegleaningintiative/ or our website: http://www.healthyacadia.org/initiatives/gleaning.html 

Thank You!

Blue Hill Blondes - A FarmDrop.org Farmer Story

Blue Hill Blondes John and Betty Tyler sell over 1000lbs of grass-fed USDA beef every year, to restaurants and individuals in Blue Hill, and through www.FarmDrop.org These farmers choose to serve smaller markets in order to maintain a one cow per acre quality space ratio. The most important part of their work is keeping the hay dry, the grass healthy and the cows happy.

Consumers to the food rescue! by Grace Burchard

We all know food waste happens; we throw away last week’s leftovers or leave bananas on the kitchen counter until they are black. Wasting food is somehow condoned: “It’s not that much food I’m wasting, right?” The recently released ReFED report, A Roadmap to reduce U.S. Food Waste by 20%, shows that U.S. citizens throw away 27 million tons of food waste every year, which has a value of 144 billion dollars. 

(A Roadmap to reduce U.S. Food Waste by 20%, 2016, p.11)

Clean Girls & Dirty Carrots, by Catherine Nichols, Somerset Public Health

"As a brand new AmeriCorps Volunteer in Service to America (VISTA) working for the Anti-Hunger Opportunity Corps at Somerset Public Health I was excited to start working towards an increase in food security for Somerset County. My supervisor was really excited for me to create a volunteer gleaning program for the county, but there were two problems…

Carrot gleaning at Kate Mrozicki's Morgan Bay Farm