A great big warm thank you to everybody who has taken the journey with us and helped us in our transition towards food-sovereignty work. In the words of international farmers organization Via Campesina we want to be a part of the movement in which “the people who produce, distribute, and consume food control the mechanisms and policies of food production and distribution”. In a bold step towards this movement: We are driven by the question of how to pivot our farming more towards a place of thriving while we seek to raise $100,000 to fund our food-access work in 2021!
The current public health crisis illuminates the failure of the government to isolate the spread of Covid-19 and that our current food supply chain is not sustainable. While we have lost 50% of our business this past season, food banks continue to be exacerbated with demand to a point of running out of food.
This disparity signifies that plenty of food and resources are available but structural inequalities bar lower-income households, and Black, Indigenous, People of Color from basic human necessities. It also points to the extreme disconnects between the consumer, the distributor, and the producer in our food system - restaurants will continue to close, chefs will continue to lose work, while farmers will struggle to find new markets for their products.
Yet we are humbled and thrilled by the support shown from our community in support of our food-access work. Thanks to all of you we will continue donating our produce to community-based organizations including: Heart of Dinner, Bushwick Ayuda Mutua, and upstate food pantries. We are asking for your continued support this year while we search for grants, and larger foundational donations, as to not depend on our community in perpetuity!
Please read this new website to learn more.
Proceeds from the online store fund our food-sovereignty work.
Consider helping us spread the word by:
Telling friends and family who might be interested in our project by sharing starroutefarmny.com and https://www.gofundme.com/f/star-route-farm-food-access through social media and email!
Email us and tell us how to get the coin to feed the people. Share with us ideas for fundraising, food-access based grants, and community based organizations who are doing good work please!
We also wanted to share some exciting and inspiring news:
Thanks to the support of our community, as of Dec. 18, 2021, we have already raised $17,573 through our GoFundMe campaign. We are humbled and extremely grateful for this love. Special thanks to so many of you, including Ben Fain, Dave Gould, John Fox, GoFundMe, Peter Dowling, the Newbergs, Fan Hon & Sam Wong, and the Aggar Family for their generous contributions! Love to 607 and Marc Aggar for delivering our food to Bushwick Ayuda Mutua and Heart of Dinner.
Ricki Dwyer donated $1,190 he raised through a raffle campaign on Instagram. 150 people donated $5-10 to win one of Ricki’s sewn fabric flags!!
Our retired subway conductor neighbor Roy Shulman donated $1,000 to support the farm!
We held an outdoor event at Brushland this last fall and raised $1,500 from selling soup! We sent napa cabbage and mustard greens to Heart of Dinner with this money and they were thrilled. Special thanks to Sohail and Sara for donating their space, Jordi Wheeler for playing music, Alison Roman for the hype, Kara Lewis for making apple cake.
Last weekend, Kitty’s Hudson warmly opened their space for us to sell fish sandwiches, radicchio salad, and farm merchandise. Thanks to MAYB TMRW (who donated 450 silkscreen totes) and Super Glou (who donated boxes of wine) and chef Lauren Schaefer and her kitchen crew, Amiel, Kelly, Pruitt, Ben, Belle, and Anna we were able to fundraise $5,000!
Catskill Harvest has donated time in their kitchen for us to create our value added products.
This amounts to $25,000 towards supporting our food sovereignty work and sending our food to donate to pantries and mutual aid groups. We would not have been able to do this work without the generosity of our friends and family and without the continued support of the grocers and customers that continued to order with us this past year!!
Your support feeds people but also enables us to do more.
Your solidarity makes farming more viable for us:
Tianna Kennedy - A long time farmer/organizer/artist who has dedicated her life to bringing economic prosperity to the Catskills mountains and distributing healthy food across New York State. This past year the 607 CSA employed sixteen people, supported forty farms and food businesses in the 607 area code, and fed 600 CSA members.
Walter Riesen - farmer/former glass artist/soil-nerd who taught himself how to farm while researching farming for a television series he was writing. His endless curiosity coupled with his desire to address problems in the food system led to a collaboration with Dr. Carli Ficano. Their Future of Foods project will be a class at Hartwick college with a 10-week subsidized CSA for 10 families in Otsego county in 2021. This project inspired Star Route’s transition into full time food sovereignty work.
Amanda Wong - An artist/graffiti writer/farmer who is so inspired by frontline communities of color fostering food security in New York, that she wants to farm in affinity with the mutual aid movement. She will be spending these winter months crop planning and volunteering with the community groups we are working with.
Danny Newberg - A kitchen-less chef/farmer who expresses care and love through cooking and sharing fermented, healthy, and tasty meals. His transition out of the restaurant world and motivation to learn is responsible for growing the cultural emphasis on food at Star Route. He will lead take-out fundraiser events next year to support the farm and is planning to grow flowers and make teas available at next year’s market.
Carl and Bleue came to take care of Amanda and harvest parsley
