Farm Fresh

Work starts early on White Gate Farm in East Lyme, Connecticut, and on a recent fall morning it involved more than putting on gloves and preparing for a day of harvesting acres of vegetables. By 7 am, farm manager Dan Wood was at the East Lyme Post Office dropping off a box of fresh produce that later in the day would be delivered by mail to Chelsea Gubbins, who lives across town.

White Gate Farm is a charter member of Farmers Post, a pilot program that enables smallholder farms across eastern Connecticut to ship fresh produce and other farm products to local households through the United States Postal Service (USPS). The brainchild of WWF’s Markets Institute, Farmers Post aims to reduce food waste—a top priority in the fight against climate change.

Each year, an estimated 10 million tons of crops—a third of what’s grown in the US—never get harvested or make it off the farm, accounting for about 16% of total US food loss and waste. Food remains in the fields because either market prices are too low or the cost of labor is too high, or because the size and shape of the produce make it unappealing to grocery stores.

“Food that is wasted has a much larger impact than just the loss of the food itself,” says Julia Kurnik, the senior director of innovation start-ups for the Markets Institute. “Everything that went into growing it goes out the window as well—the water, the land, the energy. And as the food degrades, it releases greenhouse gases, mainly methane. The bad effects multiply.”

Wood understands that Farmers Post can help to eliminate that waste. “Farming is kind of like cooking for a big group—you’re always overshooting a little bit,” he says. “This is helping us get right on the money, using almost 100% of what we grow and harvest.”

Cloverleigh Farm, in nearby Columbia, also participates in the Farmers Post pilot. Owner Susan Mitchell coaxes a variety of foods out of several acres that until recently had been used for hay. “We’ve given [this land] a new life,” she says, pulling a Hakurei turnip out of the ground, wiping away the dirt, and offering it to a visitor to taste.

Spreading the gospel of eating locally produced food is important to Mitchell. “We’re trying to feed ourselves here, where we are,” she says. “We can’t rely on California anymore.”

Both Cloverleigh and White Gate raise livestock—including chickens, turkeys, and lambs—that could be offered through Farmers Post if the program expands into a greater array of products. So does Muddy Roots Farm in nearby Wallingford, where Kirsten Marra—who owns and tends the 8 acre farm with her husband, Chris Wellington—plans to start shipping vegetables through Farmers Post this year.

“As a farmer, I want to get the best possible product arriving at the consumer’s door,” Marra says. “To do that, it has to get there as fast as possible.” Currently, vegetables are shipped in a box lined with a special plant-based packing material that looks like Styrofoam but dissolves in warm water. Expanding the program to include meats and other products that spoil quickly would require additional shipping logistics, like putting ice packs in the boxes.

At Fishers Island Oyster Farm in New York, just off the coast of Connecticut, Steve Malinowski is considering how he could use Farmers Post as another distribution channel. Currently, Malinowski ships boxes of up to 250 farm-raised oysters to individuals and restaurants from southern Maine to Delaware by United Parcel Service, which meets the Fishers Island Ferry at New London, Connecticut, to pick up the boxes on shipping days.

Malinowski’s daughter, Molly, who runs the farm’s shipping operation, says the benefit of Farmers Post for her family’s oyster farm would be in the low shipping rates. “We want to do more local business, and we see great potential. I’m hoping we get to a place where I can drop boxes off at one postal center, and they are delivered to many zip codes.”

Jim Sauber, chief of staff at the National Association of Letter Carriers, which represents more than 250,000 postal workers across the country, says he could see the program expanding to use regional distribution hubs to reach multiple zip codes. And, he says, “if we get a lot of volume, we could be doing pickups as well,” rather than requiring farmers to drop boxes at the post office.

Sauber thinks the additional revenue and the excitement of those who participate in the program bode well for expansion of the Farmers Post effort. “We think the program has tremendous promise,” he says. “A lot of people love to buy locally and support their local communities.”

The USPS hasn’t yet committed to expanding the service, but in a statement, it noted that the program “leverages the Postal Service’s vast, unmatched regional and last-mile network to provide consumers with the next-day delivery they expect.”

The project has also drawn the interest of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, which recently sent a representative to visit participating farms. “Now more than ever, Canadians need access to fresh, affordable foods, and postal workers can deliver,” the union said in a statement. “Farmers Post is exactly the kind of creative solution Canada’s food system needs.”

Drew Burnett, owner of Drew’s Honeybees, maintains 12 apiaries with about 120 hives. He ships one-pound jars of eastern Connecticut honey to subscribers through Farmers Post. “There’s real value in connecting people and communities to their food producers,” Burnett says. Congressman Joe Courtney, an early champion of the program, echoed that belief during a recent visit to a Drew’s Honeybees apiary in Norwich, expressing enthusiasm for community-supported agriculture while taking in the brightly colored hives painted by local middle school students.

But perhaps the greatest value, and promise, of the program flows to consumers—especially those living in areas suffering from “food apartheid,” where limited access to healthy, affordable food is exacerbated by geography or systemic injustices. In the US, 53.6 million people are considered low-income with low access to food. Improved access to fresh produce could bolster public health, thereby strengthening communities. Eating just a single additional serving of fruits or vegetables daily decreases the risk of all-cause mortality by 5%.

Sarah Magee, who lives in Old Lyme, has ordered Farmers Post boxes from both Cloverleigh and White Gate farms through Healthy PlanEat and says she is a big fan of the service. “I love supporting these local farms. I get a box every two weeks, and I use everything in it,” she says—stir-frying vegetables, making salads, roasting potatoes and turnips. “The convenience of this is what I really like. Anything that makes my life easier.”

When White Gate Farm’s box shows up later in the day at Chelsea Gubbins’s door, she is thrilled. “Oh, it’s awesome,” she says, lifting a head of broccoli and “the cutest little container” of cherry tomatoes from the box. She says sometimes she gets produce she hasn’t encountered before, like the celery bulb in a recent delivery: “That’s the fun part, getting things that I usually wouldn’t buy and getting to try them out,” she says. “I added it to a broccoli and cheddar soup that I made.” And it comes with a bonus: Gubbins says the plant-based packaging that dissolves in water makes a great bath toy for her kids.