People often ask what we do with the food we grow. Step onto one of our farms during the summer and you’ll understand that while Youth Farm’s primary focus is on youth and leadership development, we grow a ton of food. While we sell some of the food to local restaurants or at the farmer’s market, a much larger percentage either goes home directly with Youth Farmers or goes directly into our summer lunches.
In Hawthorne Neighborhood, we’ve already harvested over 900 lbs of vegetables and fruit as of today with just more than half of that going directly into summer lunches. Accordingly, we’ve only had to purchase a very small fraction of vegetables for our summer lunch program.