Pictured here: Coleman Family Farm in Carpinteria, California, where farmer Bill Coleman was giving a farm tour.
If you are at all interested in farms and eating local, you undoubtedly know about LocalHarvest.org, the granddaddy of ALL food sites related to sourcing farms, farmers markets, restaurants, CSAs and more. Nobody even comes close: Guillermo Payet, my friend (my personal hero) and the founder/designer of the site, gets about 15,000 visits (90,000 page views) PER DAY!
Local Harvest is the greatest: you just plug in your zip code and you are instantly taken to a screen with a map and a list of names that fit your criteria. I'm a self-confessed map geek, and it's just the best.
If you've been reading my work for a while, you will remember that Guillermo was injured last year, and his recovery has been phenomenal. He is embarking tomorrow on his second "Bike 2 Barn" tour, traveling with his beautiful sweetheart, Amber, on motorcycle, visiting farms en route to San Diego and, ultimately, to Austin, Texas, where Amber is from.
On his first Bike-2-Barn, he visited the Colemans and had a great time—hopefully they will be able to hook up again.
They will be blogging about their trip, so you can stay up to date there.
I asked Guillermo some questions about the members—memberships are free to relevant businesses. I currently help maintain a handful of memberships, and I help create event listings for the "Keep Me Posted" newsletter, which goes out weekly to nearly 42,000 households across the country.
Here is a breakdown of the member numbers.
Farms: 6955
Markets: 3462
Restaurants: 351
Coops: 511
Others: 793
California has the most members, with 892. A close second is New York, with 822. The states with the fewest are Alaska, Nevada, and West Virginia. Nevada has only 29—one of whom is one of my clients, 4th St. Bistro in Reno. The chef there, Natalie Sellers, personally took me to two local farms who grow for and sell to her directly, which I think is pretty cool.
Hey, if you know restaurants who serve farm fresh food, please encourage them to create a free listing at Local Harvest. In doing so, they're joining a powerful ally, because LocalHarvest links pop up at the top, or near the top, of almost any relevant Google search. Because Google considers the traffic to, and links to, a website as part of its criteria for high rankings, LocalHarvest is the king of them all, sort of like Typepad. All the myriad blogs on Typepad—like mine—are considered to be part of a single website, which is Typepad itself. (Google "small farms" and see who's #1!)
I'd love to see more restaurants on there, personally: you people up in San Francisco, get on the stick, would ya?
Anyway, that's what my friend, Guillermo, is up to: in love, traveling, and doing the best kind of work in the world.
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And now, some personal good news from me: I was (unanimously) elected to be a new member of the Board of Directors for Friends of the UCSC Farm & Garden. I look forward to contributing my networking power and cyberskills to promote their work, and will be writing here about the great things that they are doing. I attended my second meeting last night, and just loved being there. Lots of clarity, lots of vision, lots of passion, and lots of laughing. And lots of fresh-picked fruit from the orchard. Man!
And speaking of the orchard, this Saturday, Orin Martin will be giving a free workshop on Central Coast Apple Growing, from 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM. Yes, there will be apples to taste.
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The apprentices of the UCSC farming program, as they are known, are graduates of the CASFS program: they live in tents and teepees on the periphery of the farm itself, for six months (March into October). Here is the CASFS group blog, for your enjoyment. It's hard to pronounce "CASFS," so everyone just calls it "the farm."
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And that's all the news for now from here.
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: ""You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance." — Ray Bradbury
Thanks for visiting.
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