Why We Can’t Live Without Local Family Farms

What happens when faraway industrial growers can’t send us food?

When it comes to supplying safe food on a reliable basis throughout a crisis – not to mention maximizing nutrients and flavor – industrial agriculture can’t always deliver.

A few years ago, our founder and Head Veggie Fairy, Duane Slyder, visited California’s Tulare County (pictured above). He went with the Northern Neck Growers Association and 21 of Virginia’s finest farmers. They toured huge mono-crop fields, each one full of a single crop as far as the eye could see – almond trees or sweet potatoes or lettuce or you name it.

Tulare County is America’s top agricultural producing county, even though its natural state is desert-like. Average rainfall is just 7 inches. When intensive farming started there just 50 years ago, farmers relied on snowfall in the surrounding Sierra Nevada mountains to provide water for their summer crops.

But then came years of severe drought. There wasn’t much snow to be seen when Duane and the Virginia farmers were there.

Industrial-scale agriculture has its limits

While visiting one of those big industrial growers, a field manager walked with them through a 1,500-acre lettuce field. The field manager said that with the drought, he and others had been denied access to the mountain snow-melt water they’d always relied on. They were forced to get all their water from wells, which were drying up. With so little experience on the land, they didn’t know what they were going to do in the long term.

This is a company that ships its lettuce everywhere. Duane even remembered buying a couple of their lettuce heads at a Richmond Kroger once, during Seasonal Roots’ winter hiatus.

California’s long drought was a warning then and still is now: In the future, America may not be able to rely on faraway places like Tulare County to provide so much of the nation’s produce. Experts say California will be short of water forever.

The pandemic gave us another warning: global supply chains work great… until they don’t. When supply chains get hit with a crisis like a pandemic, the result is empty store shelves.

That’s why we need local sources for critical supplies like food.

Virginia farmer Joe Step was one of the local farmers who went along on that California trip. His family has been farming their 120 acres in Virginia for 130 years, growing broccoli, barley, and cucumbers. He plans to keep on farming.

Family farmers like Joe know how to survive droughts and grow produce sustainably with the future in mind. And because they’re local, we have no problem delivering their produce to you within a couple of days, dirt to doorstep®, while it’s still full of nutrients and flavor. Even during a drought or a pandemic.

Support local farmers today… so they’ll be here when we need them tomorrow.

This is why Duane founded Seasonal Roots: To make sure local farmers who know how to feed us can keep on farming… and make sure you can keep on getting the freshest food possible. That’s only possible when it’s local.

Thank you for making this important local food mission part of your life!