Reconnect

At Living Heritage Farms, we believe there is a fundamental disconnect with food.  Every day at each meal we eat food without knowing where it comes from and how it was grown and processed. In our affluent society we don't need to know, we simply trust the system.  It wasn't always so. For thousands of years humans have been wholly consumed and preoccupied by food – trading it, sourcing it, gathering it, growing it, preserving it, processing it, and preparing it.  In the 1800s, a single farmer on average could only support 3-5 people with food.  Yet by the 1990s the USDA reported that the average farmer can now support over 120 people alone.  Looking back, we observe it was in the early 20^th century when this dramatic shift in food production and distribution began.  The industrial revolution ushered in higher levels of productivity with machines, infrastructure, and improved transportation and logistics.  Productivity improvements were compounded further by technological advances of hybridization, synthetic chemical applications, and most recently precision agriculture.  The result is an abundance of food.  In spite of the urgent desire to feed the world, today US farmers are overproducing and the food that doesn't get consumed is re-purposed for non-food purposes or just wasted.  Studies of food "intended for consumption" have shown that only 60% of that food actually makes it to a human mouth (instead of a landfill) due to waste in processing, distribution, retail, food service, and households.  These inefficiencies should drive consumers to source local food direct from growers instead of supporting the wasteful, inefficient, monopolized and centralized commercial food system.

70% of consumers say that their purchase decisions are affected by knowing how food was grown or raised, yet 72% of consumers know nothing or very little about farming.  We believe that the consumer's disconnect with food is the result of the confusion between where consumers wish our food came from and the often polar opposite reality.  Today, just .05% of our population lives on a farm today; a stark contrast from less than 200 years ago when 90% of the population lived on a farm.  Yet, the lore and idealized notions of the family farm lives on in children's books, songs, movies and romantic portraits of "simpler times" and "days gone by".  We have the opinion that the one-third of consumers that actually do wonder where their food comes believes that their food comes from a storybook farm.  However, the reality is that the food we eat is produced and processed at a scale that is hard for a consumer to even understand. 

At Living Heritage Farms, we want to reconnect people to their food and show them how their food purchased from us is produced and minimally processed.  Complete transparency is important to address the questions that consumers have.  The next generations are looking at food in a different way.  They aren't simply buying the cheapest items on the shelf. They are questioning the "food system" and using their discretionary money to purchase food that aligns with a different set of principles.  We believe that as we communicate our principles of nutrition, taste, and stewardship we can close the gap and help remove the disconnect between consumers and their food.