I bet you’ve heard it before, the big 4 letters so important to farmers, food processors, and eaters: USDA, or the United States Department of Agriculture, which is responsible for the federal government’s policies on agriculture and food. You would be surprised at how much your life is affected by this department – everything from the food pyramid to food inspection policies to the cost and availability of food at the grocery store. The USDA’s main piece of legislation is called The Farm Bill. Let’s back up a few decades. The main ideas of the farm bill grew out of the great depression in the 1930s. There have been 10 official Farm Bills since 1965. Of course there was a USDA before that, but not a ‘farm bill.’ What makes this bill so special is that it is omnibus. Instead of a bunch of separate laws floating around, all (or most) of the USDA’s policies are grouped together into one bill, which is voted on as a whole. This helps create broad support to pass laws that otherwise would not have survived the legislative process. The omnibus farm bill is updated every five years or so, the current one is called the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008, which replaced the 2002 bill. Much of the legislation of the 2008 bill is set to expire in 2012 so we will be hearing a lot about changing policies in the upcoming year.

What exactly is there to change in this Bill anyway? On the current Farm Bill there are 15 titles, or separate policies. The bill has increased in size since 1965, when main titles of today, such as conservation and energy, weren’t even included. The latest titles are Horticulture and Livestock. Although the farm bill may seem like another large and distant part of our government, it has had effects in our own little Capay Valley. For example my parent’s farm applied for a grant to help pay for a solar installation. They received the grant, which paid 25% of the $140,000 total. Full Belly Farm and Haag Walnut Farm also applied and received the grant. The solar grant is under Title IX of the 2008 Farm Bill. This piece of legislation is constantly evolving, introducing new ideas and changing priorities. A new development in 2008 was the number of small organizations that lobbied congress for changes in the Farm Bill. Everyone from church organizations with soup kitchens to Capay Valley farmers wanted a say in how America eats. Did I say Capay Valley farmers? Paul Muller of Full Belly Farm went to DC in 2007 to help lobby for a different subsidies system. If you think that something needs to change in agriculture around here then follow Paul’s footsteps and bring it up with Congress in the 2012 debates.

Controversial matters relevant to our current and upcoming farm bill are:

• The 2008 bill increased spending to about $288 billion – thus increasing the budget deficit. 37 federal aid programs that are set to expire in 2012 will no longer have funding, cutting out programs that have been supporting people and farms.
• Subsidizing is a big part of the farm bill. The federal government has spent about $26 billion over the past 4 years on direct subsidies to farms. This means that the government pays farmers to grow commodities such as wheat and corn and to sell it cheaply. This has the general effect of lowering the cost of food in the US – our country has some of the cheapest food prices in the world! This seems pretty good for us right? Some people think so… like the huge monoculture growers who are pocketing thousands a year from the government. Other people have different ideas about the effects of subsidies.
• Michael Pollan, a UC Berkeley professor, wrote a book accusing the farm bill of endorsing the practice of raising livestock in small, enclosed areas and feeding them cheap subsidized corn.
• The crop subsidy system rewards production, meaning many farmers actually grow their crops for the payments, instead of what is good for their land, or what is actually needed.
• The main subsidized crops are corn, wheat, cotton, peanuts, and rice. The farms that produce these crops are generally big, monoculture, businesses. Some people argue that these farmers, who are already rich, should not be receiving federal money, which they can buy bigger equipment and more acreage with, decreasing competition and pushing small businesses out.
• Since farmers are getting paid for how much they grow, why not milk the system and get paid more? A joke about rice farmers, who have a cap of $50,000 subsidy money per farm yearly, is: “How do you increase your net farm income by 50 thousand dollars a year in rice country?” “You put up another mailbox.” (If you have another address, say for your wife or son, you can divide your farm, on paper, thus receiving the subsidy for each additional “farm”.)
• Another perspective on this is that under Title IX of the 2008 bill subsidies were created to support the development of renewable energy.

What do you think? Should the federal government be funding subsidized food prices? Or the development of renewable energy sources? If that looks confusing, the following is what the USDA says the 2008 farm bill is all about:

“The 15 titles include administrative and funding authorities for programs that cover income and commodity price support, farm credit, and risk management; conservation though land retirement, stewardship of land and water resources, and farmland protection; food assistance and agricultural development efforts abroad and promotion of international access to American farm products; food stamps, domestic food distribution, and nutrition initiatives; rural community and economic development initiatives, including regional development, rural energy efficiency, water and waste facilities, and access to broadband technology; research on critical areas of the agricultural and food sector; accessibility and sustainability of forests; encouraging production and use of agricultural and rural renewable energy sources; and initiatives for attracting and retaining beginning and socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers.”

While damage varied from state to state and even within the same county, Tropical Storm Irene hit many farms from North Carolina to Vermont hard. Growers reported everything from flooded fields and broken trees to collapsed sheds and damaged fruit. Unrepaired roads, washed out bridges and power outages still occurring in some areas made it difficult to fully assess the damage.

Thankfully, several farms that The FruitGuys works with reported little to mild damage:

Three Springs Farm
Three Springs Farm in Wenksville (North Adams County) PA posted a video showing a row of their Honey Crisp Apple trees that were blown over in the storm.  Three Springs grows apples, peaches, cherries, apricots, pears, and vegetables on some 340 acres and is run by the seventh generation of the Wenk family. They told us: “Lots of damage on the farm, [but] only portions of it are really bad. In true Murphy’s Law fashion, the block sustaining the worst damage of any was our largest Honeycrisp block. Our market supply won’t be affected by this damage – great for most of you reading this, but we have wholesalers and packers who look forward to buying this fruit from us every year and those orders will be short. We also picked a barn full of ‘Honeycrisp’ before the storm.”

Landisdale Farm
Landisdale Farm is a family-run and certified organic farm in Lebanon County, PA. Here’s what they told us: “The seasons are changing on the farm. Talk about change! That was strange having a tremor shake us and a hurricane blow us! No extreme damage done here. One roof has some tin coming off and the lettuces weren’t so thrilled about withstanding that wind!”

The Pennsylvania Farm Bureau reported that some farmers who had not yet harvested their apples when the storm hit lost between 20 to 50% of their crop. “The largest and most mature fruit fell off the trees,” Brad Hollabaugh of Hollabaugh Brothers Fruit Farm and Market in Biglerville, Adams County, said in a bureau press release. “There is nothing more disheartening than looking at apples on the ground, after you’ve put your heart and soul into growing and nurturing the fruit throughout the season.”

Gasko’s Family Farm & Greenhouses, a nursery in Monroe Township, New Jersey, posted before and after photos showing extensively flooded fields.

Many upstate New York farms were underwater, according to the New York Daily News.  With many late-summer crops still unharvested, such as corn, carrots, spinach, and squash, the storm couldn’t have come at a worse time. New York senators are requesting federal aid for the worst hit farms.  NY Governor Andrew Cuomo estimates at least $45 million in crop damages and 140,000 acres of farmland lost.

In Vermont, a time-lapse photography video shows floodwaters coming in to cover the fields at Diggers’ Mirth Collective Farm in Burlington.  A portion shows farmers and volunteers moving through the fields to harvest what can be harvested before the flood.

NASA’s Earth Observatory posted a page showing the rainfall from Irene along the East Coast, ranging from 1.5 inches to more than 9 inches.  Though Irene was downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm before making landfall, extended rainfall proved too much for many areas with soil already saturated by rain from summer storms. Tropical Storm Lee made landfall in Louisiana Sept. 4 and was bringing another bout of heavy rain along the East Coast. Meanwhile, The National Hurricane Center reported that Hurricane Katia, a category 2, was on its way north from Bermuda.

By Pia Hinckle

New York has become a leader in urban green renewal. On a visit in June, I found that most of Broadway is now a bicycle path, Times Square is a pedestrian mall, and on the West Side, an abandoned elevated train track has become a garden.

The High Line is a New York City public park built 30-feet above street level on a 1930s era freight line.  The park runs from Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking district through Chelsea to West 30^th Street.  For 19 blocks, you can promenade above the cars and buses, over intersections, through buildings, and past old factories while experiencing architectural elements of the old rail line as well native plants and landscaping dotted with benches and view areas.

The park is open daily from 7am to 11pm to the public. While the park is fully wheelchair accessible, elevators are only present at a few entryways along the route. Concrete paths and cleverly laid out plants make each area feel unique in the design by landscape architects James Corner Field Operations and architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro .

Plaza areas and thoroughfares under buildings serve as stages for art shows, a soundscape, and dance and other performing arts. Food is available at points along the Line in the form of mini-gelateria, a café, and bakery.

The original freight line was built in the 1930s to get freight cars off the congested west side of Manhattan. The last train ran in 1980. The elevated tracks remained and were slated for demolition when a couple of neighborhood residents (Joshua David and Robert Hammond) in 1999 formed Friends of the High Line, a non-profit that advocated to save the structure and raised the seed money to renovate it. The company that owned the railroad tracks donated them to New York City in 2005 and groundbreaking on the park took place in 2006. The first section (Gansevoort to West 20^th Street) opened to the public in June 2009 and the second section (West 20^th to West 30^th street) opened in June 2011.

The High Line is part of a larger green Renaissance in New York that I noticed since my last visit about six years ago. Bike lanes and bike path/greenways have popped up everywhere. Nycbikemaps.com has detailed and interactive bike maps of the city. The subways and buses have new maps and displays that tell you how long you will wait and how many stops you have to go. Large pedestrian plazas at Times Square and Herald Square have transformed those areas. Much of this is part of PlaNYC, New York Mayor Bloomberg’s initiative to prepare the city for the next 100 years. One of its many ambitious goals is that all New Yorkers live within a 10-minute walk of a park. Another is to plant a million trees throughout the five boroughs in the next ten years.

By Judith Redmond, courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop

On June 17th, the House of Representatives passed its proposal for fiscal year 2012 agriculture spending. In the agricultural ‘discretionary’ budget, the House voted to cut nearly $3 billion from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the FDA. Combined with cuts already made earlier this year, that adds up to a 25 percent reduction. The House Bill is a proposal — the Senate hasn’t weighed in yet and when it does, the two versions have to be reconciled. The final step will be the President who also has to sign off.

On top of the 25% cut, the House took aim at funding for conservation programs on farms, with a cut of one billion dollars. This cut to resource conservation efforts, like the overall cuts, was on top of an already enacted cut of $500 million. Due to the size and timing of the proposed cuts, USDA would be forced to break or modify existing government conservation contracts with farmers if the proposal was enacted, which seems a particularly poor example of law-making.

Conservation efforts weren’t the only casualty. Aid to poor women and children was also out on the chopping block. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that the proposal, if enacted, could remove between 200,000 and 350,000 women and children from aid programs next year. These proposed cuts to our safety net for the poor added up to a 13% reduction — one of the most significant cuts in decades.

Singled out for special ire were USDA efforts to increase farm income and rural jobs by supporting the growth of regional food markets. The house voted to strip all funding for the USDA’s Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food program — an initiative that doesn’t even have its own budget. In another amendment, the House voted to prohibit any use of funds to plan for climate changes — the USDA was blocked even from conducting a basic assessment. (Against a backdrop of tornados in Missouri and Alabama, floods in Tennessee and Vermont, drought in Texas and hurricanes once again predicted ‘above normal.’) Finally, the House made sure that there wouldn’t be any sneak attacks by school kids and directed the USDA to ensure that there would be no increased costs for improved school food standards.

While weighing these important matters, our elected Representatives overturned all proposals to limit direct payments to farmers — the commodity programs that primarily support growers of corn, soybeans, rice, cotton, and wheat. For example the House voted down an amendment that would have limited farm commodity payments to individuals and entities with annual adjusted gross income of less than $250,000 (or $500,000 for most married couples and even higher for individuals with multiple business entities.) The House couldn’t even muster the sense of fairness to put an absolute limit on commodity payments, for example by requiring that they be no more than $125,000 per farm.

Commodity payments and other direct payments to farmers by the USDA, have played a huge role in U.S. agricultural policy. The USDA Economic Research Service has reported that those payments have been part of the reason for a shift to larger and more consolidated enterprises among growers of agricultural commodities. On the other hand, for the average farm household, and for smaller and mid-scale farms, income from government payments can be an important part of keeping the farm afloat. Note that while commodities are grown on a huge number of farms across the country and in almost every agricultural region, specialty crop growers like those in the Capay Valley do not receive these payments.

Taken together, the disproportionate share of the cuts made in the House proposal would fall on poor people, rural communities and the environment, while leaving direct payments to farm entities of all sizes untouched. Note that the bulk of these commodity payments (3/4) go to ten percent of the largest farms, so a cap on the payments would have affected some powerful and wealthy individuals, in fact more than a dozen of the members of the House themselves are happily receiving the very payments that they refused to cap. This is not a case when all parts of the agricultural sector would share the pain, no — the House is hoping to protect farmers and businesses with means.  The chance of being a millionaire in the U.S. is 1 in 22, but the chance of being a millionaire if you are in the U.S. Congress is 1 in 2. This is no way to make policy. We think that the House proposal is an appalling example of short-sighted government at its very worst.

P.S. Surely our Senators can come up with a better proposal! It’s easy to call and tell them what you think. Go to Congress.org and type in your zip code.  Type in the name of your congress member and then choose the contact tab.  You can also call the Capitol Switchboard and ask to be directly connected: 202-224-3121.

Judith Redmond is a farmer at Full Belly Farm in the Capay Valley in northern California.

Every five years the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Agriculture update their guidelines for healthy eating. The 2010 dietary guidelines, released at the end of January 2011, offer more of the same advice as past ones: drink water instead of soda, cut back on salt, and eat more fruits and veggies.

Oh, and exercise a lot more. Enjoy your food, but eat less.

About one-third of adult Americans are obese. Obesity can lead to heart disease, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, and some cancers. “The obesity epidemic carries a really steep cost,” said Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services at a Washington D.C. news conference announcing the new guidelines. “About three-quarters of our health care costs are connected to chronic disease.”

The guidelines have specific suggestions to improve your diet, including:

• Increase fruit and vegetable intake
• Eat a variety of vegetables, especially dark-green, red and orange vegetables, beans, and peas
• Increase intake of fat-free or low-fat dairy products such as milk, cheese, yogurt, or fortified soy beverages
• Increase the amount and variety of seafood consumed
• Avoid oversized portions
• Check the sodium in canned, frozen, and processed foods and choose the foods with the lowest amount

The Department of Agriculture offers a MyPyramid Meal Planner, to help get a sense of your diet and how to reach the goals set in the guidelines. The MyPyramid website has numerous resources.

- Pia Hinckle

Jack LaLanne was a typical teenager. He ate fast food and candy, loved soda pop, had acne, and didn’t exercise much. But at age 15 his mother took him to hear a lecture by health food pioneer Paul Bragg. Bragg asked LaLanne what he had eaten in the last 24 hours. After hearing “cakes, pies, ice cream,” Bragg told him he was “a walking garbage can” but that he could become healthy, fit, popular, smart, and happy if he exercised and ate right.

From that day forward, LaLanne said he never had sweets again. He dedicated himself to studying nutrition, exercise, and the body. He studied anatomy and chiropractic medicine in school, and bodybuilding. This was in the 1930s, when most doctors believed that weight lifting and running for exercise would give people heart attacks and erectile dysfunction. In 1936, at age 21, Jack opened his first gym/health spa in Oakland, CA, one of the first in the country. He invented the first weight pulley systems for working out and preached a low-fat diet rich in fruits and veggies, with no refined sugars. People thought he was nuts.

But LaLanne was a visionary. For more than six decades, LaLanne proved that fitness and diet were the keys to health and wellness, and that such things could be both manly and American. He had the first syndicated fitness TV show, which featured a buffed LaLanne in a one-piece pantsuit with bulging biceps and black ballet slippers doing exercises that could be done at home with a broom or a chair. He also offered meal plans, recipes, and pep talks. “Good nutrition, exercise, and positive thinking—it’s that simple!” he told his viewers. He preached that women, the disabled, and the elderly all needed exercise to maintain strength. He formulated and sold supplements, vitamins, and exercise equipment.

To show naysayers otherwise, in his 40s he began to do publicity feats of strength and endurance such as swimming from Alcatraz to Fisherman’s Wharf in handcuffs and swimming the Golden Gate towing a boat. At age 60, he repeated the Alcatraz to the Wharf swim, this time in handcuffs, shackled, and towing a 1,000-pound boat. At age 70, handcuffed and shackled, he towed 70 row boats with 70 people from the Queen’s Way Bridge in Long Beach Harbor to the Queen Mary. “Why do you think I do these incredible feats? To call attention to my profession!” LaLanne said. “To me, this one thing — physical culture and nutrition — is the salvation of America.”

Born Francois Henri LaLanne (he was nicknamed Jack by his brother) in San Francisco on September 26, 1914 to French immigrant parents, he grew up in Bakersfield and Oakland. His father, a dance instructor, died of a heart attack at age 50.

Some of LaLanne’s favorite sayings included, “You eat everyday, you sleep everyday, and your body was made to exercise everyday;” “Inactivity is the killer and, remember, it’s never too late!” and “I can’t die, it would ruin my image.”

Into his 90s, LaLanne maintained a two-hour daily workout of weightlifting and swimming and ate at least 10 raw vegetables and 5 fresh fruits a day. He died at age 96 of respiratory failure from pneumonia on January 23, 2011 at his home in Morro Bay, CA.

- Pia Hinckle

The law will give the Food and Drug Administration sweeping new powers to order food recalls, increase inspections and recordkeeping, and institute new food safety protocols on farms.  The US Department of Agriculture would still oversee meat and poultry products.

Obama’s pen ended a legislative saga that included two trips to the senate, three visits to the house, filibuster threats, and multiple amendments, including the Tester amendment which exempts small farms, which sell less than half a million dollars of produce locally, from some requirements.  (See the December Almanac.) Small farms will still have to follow state food safety guidelines.

Judith Redmond, from Fully Belly Farms in California’s Capay Valley, says the law still doesn’t address the larger problems that have arisen from industry expectations for long shelf lives and worries about a chilling effect on sustainable agriculture. “FDA oversight of farms growing fruits and vegetables could require a significant new level of paperwork and administrative burden for farmers,” Redmond told the Almanac.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention said last month that about 3,000 people die and about one in six Americans get sick from food-borne illness each year.

Before the law takes effect, the FDA will first have to write the law’s rules and regulations and train inspectors. The law’s $1.4 billion cost in the first five years left many to wonder whether it might become yet another unfunded federal mandate if House Republicans who opposed the law make good on a threat to withhold its funding.

- Pia Hinckle

If it becomes law, the Food & Drug Administration’s power and oversight of food and farm production would increase nationally and overseas, where an increasing percentage of American food is grown or processed. U.S. growers, processors, and sellers will be required to institute new food safety regimes as well as intensive record keeping and tracking of produce and products.

The 73-25 vote had large bipartisan support. The House passed its own food safety bill, HR 2749, last year. That version did not distinguish between large and small growers and treated produce processors (for example, bagged salad producers) and whole produce sellers, such as apple farms, the same. But the bill’s future is already uncertain. On Dec. 2^nd, opponents said the bill is unconstitutional because it contains provisions for fees and taxes on food safety violators that are supposed to originate from the House. This means the bill will need to be modified and voted on again in the Senate before it can even begin a reconciliation conference between the House and Senate versions. Supporters had hoped the House would adopt the Senate bill and then send it to President Obama to sign in to law before the holiday recess. If it dies, the next Congress would have to take on the food safety issue from scratch.

Sustainable agriculture farmers have been wary of the bill.

“FDA oversight of farms growing fruits and vegetables could require a significant new level of paperwork and administrative burden for farmers,” Judith Redmond, a principal of Fully Belly Farm in Capay Valley, CA, told the Almanac. “While some of the regulations will be common-sense and basic, they do not address what many believe are the root causes of food safety problems: co-mingling of products from many different farms during processing; conditions that are stressful and unhealthy for animals resulting in increased levels of pathogens in their manure; the long shelf-life that the industry has insisted on for their bagged processed greens; and our corner-cutting mentality about food that treats it like a cheap commodity.”

Small and sustainable farm owners worked hard with representatives from California, Colorado, Vermont, Michigan, Ohio, Montana, and North Carolina to include amendments in the Senate bill that would address some of their concerns.

“As a result of grassroots mobilization and much negotiation this bill now provides scale-appropriate food safety rules for small farms and mid-sized farms and local processors that sell to restaurants, food coops [sic], groceries, wholesalers and at farm stands and farmers markets,” wrote the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition in a press release after the bill’s passage.  Included in the final Senate bill are six amendments that NSAC worked on:

• “Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) providing FDA authority to either exempt farms engaged in low or no risk processing or co-mingling activities from new regulatory requirements or to modify particular regulatory requirements for such farming operations.
• Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO) to reduce unnecessary paperwork and excess regulation required under the preventative control plan and the produce standards sections of the bill, including instructions to FDA to minimize the number of different standards that apply to separate foods, to make requirements scale appropriate, and to prohibit FDA from requiring farms and other food facilities to hire outside consultants to write food safety plans.
• Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) to provide for a USDA-delivered competitive grants program for food safety training for farmers, small processors and wholesalers, with a priority on small and mid-scale farms.
• Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) to strip the bill of wildlife-threatening enforcement against “animal encroachment” of farms and require FDA to apply sound science to any requirements that might impact wildlife and wildlife habitat.
• Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) to exempt farmers from extensive and expensive traceability and recordkeeping  requirements  if they sell food directly to consumers or to grocery stores, to allow labeling that preserves the identity of the farm through to the consumer to satisfy traceability requirements, and to in most cases limit farm recordkeeping to the first point of sale when the product leaves the farm.
• Senators Jon Tester (D-MT) and Kay Hagan (D-NC) to give very small farms and food processing facilities as well as direct-market farms who sell locally the option of complying with state regulation or with modified, scale-appropriate federal regulation.”

The exemptions for small farms have infuriated large processors who claim all food growers should be required to uphold the same food safety standards. Many large scale produce trade groups such as the Produce Marketing Association and the United Egg Producers, withdrew their support for the senate bill after the amendments were included.

Small farm advocates say that produce processing (intensive washing, cutting, packaging, and shipping) done by large growers creates additional avenues of contamination not present for farmers selling single commodities such as whole apples, citrus, and the like.

“There are almost no documented cases of people being hospitalized or dying from fresh whole produce. Most of the cases associated with produce are processed products, such as unpasteurized apple juice or salsa,” the Community Alliance with Family Farmers wrote in its policy statement on food safety. “A series of cases of serious illness associated with leafy green vegetables are documented by the government to be from fresh-cut greens in sealed plastic bags.”

At least 5,000 people die each year in the U.S. from food-borne illness, another 325,000 are hospitalized, and about 76 million people become sick from eating tainted food, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Noted food author Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) and Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) called the senate legislation “by no means perfect. But it promises to achieve several important food safety objectives, greatly benefiting consumers without harming small farmers or local food producers,” they wrote in a Nov. 29 opinion piece in the New York Times. “By one estimate, the kinds of farms that the bill would exempt represent less than 1 percent of the food marketplace. Does the food industry really want to sabotage an effort to ensure the safety of 99 percent of that marketplace because it is so deeply concerned about under-regulation of 1 percent? The largest outbreaks are routinely caused by the largest processors, not by small producers selling their goods at farmers’ markets.”

- Pia Hinckle

SlowFood Victory Garden Crate
Learn more and order at www.fruitguys.com/slowfood.

The FruitGuys have partnered with Slow Food San Francisco in a fundraising project to benefit the Schoolyard Gardens project.

What Do I Get?
Each monthly box features:
• Locally sourced artisan food items
• Fresh, ready to use heirloom and Ark of Taste fruits and/or veggies
• Materials for a fun and easy project you can do yourself
• Recipes and instructions

The July Victory Garden Crate includes:
• Heirloom Tomatoes, Avocados, Corn on the Cob, Onions and Jalapenos – everything you need to make your own salsa! Or if you prefer a sweeter version, add in the Peaches and Nectarines found in the crate as well.
• Specialty Vinegar from Chaparral Gardens.
• Fresh cabbage, a delicious sauerkraut recipe and a jar to make your own!

How does it work?
From July through October, a new delivery is made on the last Wednesday of each month.
Order one time for $59 or the entire Slow Food series for $236.
Available for delivery in the West Coast.

Who benefits from this fundraiser?
Your purchase of the Slow Food Victory Garden Crate generates a $20 donation to Slow Food San Francisco and their programs, including public school gardens.

Order now at www.fruitguys.com/slowfood.

Questions?
Call us at 877-FRUIT-ME (877-378-4863) or email info@fruitguys.com.

West Coast customers, get a box of 25 refreshing Black Amber Plums from our crop farmed in Exeter, California. They have a smooth, crème colored inner flesh and tart purple skin. Put them in your refrigerator and pull one out for a cool and light-sorbet like treat on a hot summer day, or try one of the included Plum recipes.

Order now!

We’re dedicated to small family farms, the stewardship of land through use of organic farming methods, helping farmers fund a season so that they weren’t betting their business to the bank each year and having farmers share in the financial fruits of their labor.