Mass Audubon's Drumlin Farm Feeds the Hungry

It all started with a half-ton of carrots. 

In late March, with the world closing down around us from a global pandemic and all of our staff except farmers working from home, it soon became clear that Mass Audubon’s Drumlin Farm Wildlife Sanctuary in Lincoln had more vegetables than customers. News stories from other parts of the country spoke of farmers plowing under their spring crops in response to the near standstill in sales due to shuttered restaurants, schools gone virtual and closed farmers markets. 

At the same time, the Greater Boston Food Bank was beginning to report what would end up being more than twice the demand of their normal operations. With a root cellar stocked with a bumper crop of carrots, and a new hoop house in the crops field starting to produce fresh greens that needed to be harvested, we knew that we needed to get our food out to where it was needed most. 

Drumlin Farm has long called our approach to agriculture “Community Based Farming,” and we felt strongly that our ties to the community should drive our food distribution strategy, particularly at this time when food insecurity was rising in our region. 

With the practical reality that there are only so many deliveries we could make in a week, it also felt important to continue working within the communities in which we already had relationships in order to maximize our impact. When we learned that the Cambridge-based nonprofit Food for Free had taken on grocery delivery and daily school meal preparations for families in their city, it immediately felt like a natural fit; in ordinary times, we would have already been making weekly deliveries to the Cambridge Public School’s farm-to-school program. 

A few emails and phone calls later and we were connected with a weekly drop-off to Food for Free’s refrigerated lockers, getting those carrots (along with fresh eggs and greens) out to many of the same children who would have been eating Drumlin Farm food in the salad bars of the Cambridge elementary, middle and high school cafeterias. 

Similar ties drew us to a partnership with the Lincoln Food Pantry, in our home community of Lincoln, where their board felt strongly about including fresh produce from local farms in their bi-monthly distributions. One of our regular restaurant customers decided to do a Meal Day for health care workers; that became another easy fit for a donation that strengthened our ties with the people who understood and valued our approach to sustainable agriculture. Through these and other meaningful local partnerships, we quickly got to a point where we were donating about a quarter of what we produced each week in April and May. 

While the root cellar supply dwindled, the costs of running our farm of course did not. The demand for local food definitely increased enrollment in our CSA program, but our major distribution channels—restaurants and farmers markets—remained at minimal levels compared to our target annual budget. We wanted to keep donating whatever we couldn’t sell, but we also faced the same harsh realities of every small business during these challenging times.

Enter the community. 

Our entire food donation program would not be possible without the incredible generosity of a growing group of individuals who see the value in investing in their local farms while simultaneously doing good in their community. By supporting Drumlin Farm with their charitable donations, these donors are keeping our farm going and helping ensure the food they know and love out gets to the families and individuals who need it the most. The response to this outreach has been steady and inspiring, allowing us to continue meeting Drumlin Farm’s commitment to local partners while keeping our farmers employed. Some donors have made major gifts, while some have chosen to add $5 or $10 onto their weekly CSA orders. One has even made an extraordinary offer to match every donation, doubling the impact, up to a total of $25,000. Each and every person has made a difference. 

The root cellar is empty now and some of our regular sales channels have rebounded. But as the bounty of our fields grows each week during the summer and fall, we will continue to donate a significant portion in order to help alleviate hunger in our region. The pandemic crisis has led us to closely examine how our model of sustainable community farming can do even more to sustain our neighbors facing food insecurity, and we hope to be able to continue this program even after the pandemic has subsided for good.

***

To learn more about the Drumlin Farm hunger relief project, including a matching challenge that will double the impact of your donation, please visit the Drumlin Farm Food Donation Program.