Good News: Urban Farm in Detroit Donates 9K Pounds of Produce

This is Derrick.
He's very excited about 🌽
He's also very excited that the volunteer shifts for next week are...
Posted by Pingree Farms on Friday, August 28, 2020

What do you do on a farm during a pandemic? Harvest all kinds of food for local food banks!

Pingree Farms is a small urban farm in Detroit that normally has the city's only "goat yoga" classes. It's a family-run establishment that started in 1993 as a way of getting food out to underserved communities in the Detroit area. Recently, they started offering goat yoga classes, and the trend exploded.

And I'm not kidding - I did it back in 2018. Pics below. It was a riot.

Unfortunately, because of the pandemic, their classes had to be canceled. So, in their spare time, they started partnering with local high school STEM programs to get over 9,000 lbs of food out to families in their surrounding areas.

Did you know that when we started talking with a group of students wanting to be a part of our farms community we had harvested, sorted, packed and donated 7000+lbs of produce with the help of 150+ volunteers and 10+ community partners!?
Can you believe now at this very moment we are over 9000lbs!! AND, there are #harvest hands and hearts out in the fields picking oh so much more #organic fruits and veggies to provide for 53 families tomorrow, a free produce farmers market this weekend, a #WorldFoodDay event on Friday and our other regular daily deliveries as we speak!

We have just 3 days left to reach our fundraising goal of $6000! This project led entirely by those high school #STEM student innovators @uofdjesuit taking on the task of reviving our greenhouse to be qualified for a $100,000 grant from the Gannett Foundation!

If you'd like to donate to their fundraiser, you still have time - click HERE. And, when it gets back up and running, I can't recommend their goat yoga classes enough.