Growing Practices

 

One of the things that folks ask us is, "Are you organic?"

Are we USDA certified organic? No, but read on...

Around 2000, the government saw multiple organizations using the word organic, and in their finite wisdom, put together a national organic program with lowest-common-denominator standards. It also forbade anyone to use the word organic unless they filled out reams of paperwork and paid $1,000+ in fees to get “certified”, even if you had only $5000 in annual sales.  

Well, we all know what the government does to anything they get their hands on…within a few years, the program started showing problems, and now we’ve seen a major corruption of the once pristine word, and falsely labeled food to the tune of billions of dollars. CAFOs could get certified, while small farmers struggled to undergo the rigorous certification process. 

We’re currently not certified organic. We could be, and we have been. Actually, our standards are stricter than theirs. 

But in the end, it’s just a green-and-white sticker. The sticker is a mental shortcut. People don’t ask questions, they don’t come on a tour, see how we raise their food, learn about nutrient density, and understand why it costs a few dollars more than the wilted, sad, week-old produce that comes from who knows where, handled by who knows who.

And that's not why we're here. We're not here to meet government standards so we can put a sticker on our food.

We’re all about educating our community on what real food is all about, the true costs of raising healthy, nutrient-dense food, and the marketing tricks that Big Food and Pharma go through to convince you that their empty calories are “good for you.”

We want our customers to be empowered to ask the right questions about what they put on their table.

We’re here to heal our community. To raise our kids around nature, and to feel comfortable with them running around the farm, helping daddy spread fertilizer or picking herbs straight from the greenhouse. It's not just about getting a price premium for our food, but protecting the most important little people in the world and giving them the best chance at life, a healthy, strong body, not compromised by anything that is harmful to the human body.

I think we’ll all agree, with billions of dollars paid out in class action lawsuits from harm, that toxic chemicals are something we don’t want to mess with. We avoid using things that kill, such as herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, etc., … all of which end in “-cide” (the Latin word for "a substance that kills").

When you shop the Farm on Central, you know the farmer who grew the food, who tucked every plant into its home, who harvested those strawberries, who fought the bugs, cold, heat, bureaucrats and government agents to feed you and your most cherished possessions. Who goes to sleep every night exhausted… but knowing that they put in an honest day's work, doing the most important job possible, feeding our next generation.

Our goal here is, not just to live on a farm, but to farm "life" - to grow living food in living soil.

And that’s why we’re 100% certified kid-safe. Because that’s a bit more important than a sticker.

 

Sourced Products:

Although many of the products we sell online are grown on Farm on Central, we also sell many products that are sourced from partner farms we trust.

Our partner farms are divided into two categories:

Conventional: These are non-organic farms that use conventional growing methods. We thoroughly vet them to make sure they are using regenerative growing practices and meet our kid-safe guarantee, but they are not certified.

Non-Conventional: These farms ARE (shh...Certified BLEEP) but we're not allowed to label them as such since we are not a certified organic handler and the USDA threatened to fine us. So if you see one of our products labeled as non-conventional in the description, that's what it means.