Fruit World is famous for its extraordinary Sky Ranch Mandarins, a clementine grown on farmer Bianca Kaprielian’s grandfather’s ranch, which sits atop one of the area’s tallest foothills and is named …
Farms
Farm Grantees Make Progress Despite Pandemic
The FruitGuys Community Fund 2020 grantee farms have sent us their interim updates, and in spite of the pandemic, these farms and organizations have done some incredible work! These 15 small farms and …
The 2020 FruitGuys Community Fund Grantees
During the COVID-19 crisis, small farms are showing once again just how essential they are to keeping our local communities fed, healthy, and functioning. The FruitGuys Community Fund is excited to …
Eat the Endangered Gravenstein Apple
“Farming is a complex math problem,” sighs Dave Hale as he looks sadly at piles of wood chips that had been Gravenstein apple trees in the lot next to his thriving Sebastopol, CA, orchard. He tended …
From Seed to Need
The FruitGuys Community Fund, a nonprofit fiscally sponsored project of Community Initiatives, will award small American farms and agricultural nonprofits a total of $35,643 in 2015 for sustainability …
Hungry for Farmland
Clear Spring Farm, PA. If you live in an eco-conscious region fighting to preserve its local family farms, chances are you’ve seen bumper stickers such as “Know your farmer, know your food.” “I …
Buy a Box; Save an Apple
Like the snowy owl and the snail darter, foods can be endangered too. If farmers stop growing your favorite variety of tomato because it’s too hard to ship or too prone to pests, we come that much …
Save The Gravenstein
“Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” —Martin Luther (1483–1546, a German monk and church reformer) In a world awash with Red Delicious …
Durst Organic Growers
Farming with Heart By Heidi Lewis The main ingredient in good vegetables, says farmer Jim Durst, is soil: “Feed the soil, and the soil will feed the plants." Jim and his wife, Deborah, have been …
Subsidizing Big Ag
Small Farms Left Out of Farm Bill By Charlene Oldham When the first “farm bill” was created in the late 1930s to help family farms, horses and hand plows were as common on farms as Model …
FruitGuys Donations are Backbone of Some Food Pantries
In a year when more people continued to struggle with less, The FruitGuys GoodWorks program responded to the realities of the continuing hard economy by making micro-loans to farmers; increasing …
Irene Hits Farms
By Pia Hinckle 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 …
Getting Back Up
I’ve always been a pretty active person—something that made coming down with a random medical condition all the more humbling. About a month ago I had an acute onset of achalasia, an uncommon disorder …
