The motto of Pennypack Farm & Education Center is Grow. Give. Teach. We want to highlight one piece of that motto by sharing some details of our Produce Giving Program.
Each year we GIVE approximately 25,000 pounds of produce to local food pantries. Our partner pantries include Manna on Main Street, Family Promise, Willow Grove SDA Church, and Jenkintown Food Cupboard. We also work closely with Rolling Harvest Food Rescue, an organization that brings volunteers out to the farm to harvest excess produce in the fields.
We start out the farm mornings on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday harvesting for CSA, and on Tuesday and Thursday mornings we begin with packing up our food donations. The first step is taking inventory of the produce and deciding what we will pack up for each pantry. We are familiar with what types of vegetables are preferred by each pantry’s clients and make our selections to match these preferences. We know that for a majority of these pantries the farm veggies will be their only source of fresh produce and therefore we donate as much as possible each week. This becomes easier once abundant crops like tomatoes, cucumbers, and squash start coming in. In the summer we often are able to send several hundred pounds to the pantries each week.
The food donation program is an important piece of our crop plan from seeding to harvest. Last year approximately 25% of the harvest went to our food pantry partners. As we are planning what to grow we focus on high production varieties that will produce enough to supply both the CSA and our pantry partners. We also make sure to plant staple crops like potatoes, tomatoes, and winter squash in fields that have adequate soil health from cover crops and organic fertility practices. In recent years we have especially focused on expanding our winter crop yields so as to continue supplying our donation program even in the colder months when there is less available. Thankfully with good yields we have been able to run our donation program 11 months out the year (we take a break in May while the new crops grow).
Your support of the farm helps to make this program possible. Thank you for being a part of the farm and to all those that have volunteered to harvest or drive to the food pantries!