Seed Time Harvest Farms collective delivers produce to your door | Sustainable Tallahassee

In 2012, there was a career change that made me take a hard look at what was important and what my next step would be. Being married and having two young daughters at the time, I resolved to do something temporary that would keep me close to home yet provide extra income. Thus, Seed Time Harvest Farms was born.

Entrepreneurship runs in my blood, and it was hard to just sit and wait for the next job opportunity — so I created one.

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Everyone likes to eat, and with the abundance of food I found growing in my community, there was a strong incentive to connect the dots between the food that was wasting in the fields and the consumers who desired to have it in their kitchens.

The consumers were moms like me who wanted to give their families the best food possible but are juggling too many balls to think through that extra step of getting those farm fresh items from the farm into their kitchens, let alone cook them once they got there.

Together the farmers and I found a niche and filled it.

We started by reaching out to families we knew and through social media blasts found a few families we could serve by bringing a selection of produce grown in our area to their doors. While moms were most of our participants, we had a few gentlemen who ordered on a regular basis too.

Seed Time solutions

We took a liking to the concept of Seed Time Harvest Farms and each harvest season, we’d again offer those items found in the farmer’s field to our neighbors, friends, and family. Each season we end up with repeaters plus many new customers.

Seed Time Harvest Farms, located in Monticello, Florida, is a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), composed of many farmers, that identified a community need, assessed that need, and developed a solution that works season after season. While my immediate family owns a 14-acre property where we grow some of the produce we provide, most comes from other farms.

As a collective, we are blessed to work with wonderful small- to mid-sized farms throughout the Big Bend and South Georgia region that grow more than enough produce to meet local needs.

The challenge was (and remains) how do our smaller-scale farmers distribute and sell their fresh produce to more people in a manner that allows them to compete with the ‘big-guys’ yet still make a profit?

Locally grown, locally delivered

Seed Time Harvest Farms is one of the links between just eating to get full and eating for nourishment. Much research and information has been published that indicates that many of today’s health issues are linked to our diet.

Eating more locally grown fresh fruits and vegetables gives us access to a wholesome selection of items that arrive fresher and with a higher nutritional value than offered at the grocery store, plus eliminates the environmental impact resulting from food that travels long distances.

This year we launched our website, seedtimeharvestfarms.com, which allows you to purchase not only our monthly or seasonal subscription but a few special items on a continuous basis as well.

For now, our monthly subscription gets you two bi-monthly deliveries and our seasonal subscription get you six deliveries. There is also our “Hit Me 1 Time” bag which allows you to test our services to see if its right for you.

If you need to skip a week, we’ll just catch you up on the next go round. We have enough farmers in our cohort to keep going many weeks beyond our segments. In fact, we plan to go year-round this year.

Supporting farmers

We can’t do this work without also supporting our contributing farmers. By making recommendations relating to alternate items to grow, farming best practices, soil amendments, and assistance with farm funding, we work along with other entities to make it happen for our farmers too.

When you support Seed Time Harvest Farms, you support a group of local farmers in Madison, Leon, Jefferson, and Gadsden Counties and South Georgia. We appreciate those of you that do.

The farms we work closely with are Rocky Soil Family Farms, Seven Hills of Thomasville, Parkway Farms, Bradley Farms, Mike Brown Farms in Gadsden, Barnhart Farms (the whole family), and Legacy Greens just to name a few. Seed Time Harvest Farms, itself, has fruit trees and other items grown in-ground and in growing towers that glow in the night, lighting up the I-10 corridor.

As we continue to grow and expand, we hope you join the food movement of eating fresh and local. Our next step will be “Cooking with Fresh Food’ sessions that will be conducted around Tallahassee. The focus is on getting back the family table. Watch for announcements. Visit us on Facebook.

Cetta Barnhart is the founder and owner of Seed Time Harvest Farms and an Agricultural Business Consultant. She can be reached at seedtimebiz@gmail.com. This is a “Greening Our Community” article, an initiative of Sustainable Tallahassee.   

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This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Seed Time subscriptions delivers fresh produce to your door