Farm Fresh Rhode Island has a radical idea: The first step in creating access to fresh food is to support local farmers.
As Lucie Searle of Farm Fresh explains, “When we were founded 16 years ago, you couldn’t buy an apple grown in Rhode Island at a Rhode Island grocery store — even though we grow a lot of apples. A lot of our early work was connecting people to fresh produce: Creating farmer’s markets, telling people where they could find fresh produce.”
The Farm Fresh Saturday winter farmer’s market attracts 3,000–4,000 people in four hours. They also manage 10 summer farmer’s markets statewide. Both give Rhode Island farmers a direct outlet to consumers, and both accept Bonus Bucks, which doubles the spending power on fruits and vegetables for families using SNAP.
In addition to farmer’s markets, Farm Fresh runs Harvest Kitchen, a job-training program for system-involved youth, which helps prevent food waste by making soups, applesauce and other comestibles from farmers’ excess produce. They also operate Market Mobile, a program that generates over $2 million annually for local farmers by distributing their wares wholesale—including stops at food pantries desperate for fresh produce.
