Local Area Food
Food and Farms
Enjoy fresh local produce and support local agriculture in and around Harvard.
The goal of the Local Foods Directory is to help residents of Harvard and neighboring towns locate and patronize local farms and food producers.
Click here to go to the Local Foods Directory.
Some Background
At the same time that we enjoy an abundant and varied food supply, we are diminishing the resources that will ensure that supply for the future. In Massachusetts most of our food comes from large national and international agricultural enterprises. This is made possible by cheap energy sources for fertilizer, farm machinery and transportation. As these energy sources decline and become increasingly expensive, we will once again depend more on locally produced food. However, the same forces that have encouraged imported produce have decimated the number of local farms.
Local farms have been unable to compete with the wholesale prices of large agribusiness farms found in more temperate parts of the country or from the cheap land and labor in places like South America. Harvard, once considered the "Apple Capital of the Country", finds its few remaining orchards competing with orchards not only in the Northwest, but increasingly with international imports from South America and China.
The rise of suburban life, made possible by an automobile society, created enormous economic incentive to sell farmland for residential development. We are now at a point in Massachusetts where the available arable land would feed only 5% of the population. We cannot afford to lose a single additional farm.
Harvard Local believes that the best way to preserve our rich, but rapidly diminishing, agricultural heritage is to help local farms be profitable. Many of us want to support our local farms, but don't know how. Buying from local farm stands, small independent producers, and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farms is enough to make many of our remaining small farms economically viable.
Background: See My Saudi Arabian Breakfast, by Chad Heeter, and Threats of Peak Oil to the Global Food Supply, by Richard Heinberg.