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Tony Pavelko, who recently started the Twin Cities company Food4Thought with Gina DiMaggio, recently sent me an email describing the service:

We are a little bit different from most CSA programs in that we are working with four farms (one of them being Harmony Valley! [this is the CSA I am part of]). The reason we do this is so that we can pool the resources of the different farms together and offer a wide variety of fruits and vegetables.

For example, we are getting a lot of our vegetables from Harmony Valley, berries from another farm, and about 50 varieties of heirloom tomatoes from another. Another reason we work with more than one farm is that we can minimize the risks associated with farming. For instance, if one of our farm experiences bad flooding, then we will hopefully have 3 others that don’t. So it basically spreads the risk out among the different farms. So we are essentially the brokers, working with several farms. I really wanted to become involved in CSA and promote it, but I am not a farmer. So this is one way to be involved without actually growing the food.

Food4Thought offers another service to sweeten the deal: delivery to your home or office (in the Twin Cities area). In short, the company is looking for all sorts of new ways to make it easy, affordable, and risk-free for families and businesses to buy local, sustainable foods from nearby farms.They also plan to host events and to look for ways to help people connect with the farms that grow their food - and with the food itself.

The website features information about the various farms Food4Thought works with and a useful FAQ related to joining a CSA. I'm impressed with the idea, and I have to say that I'd absolutely consider it if I hadn't already signed up with a CSA. Tony seems like an entrepreneur with a great idea, a desire to affect change, and the perfect approach to make it happen. I'm sure we'll be hearing from him more in the weeks and months to come. This post has been shared on Food Renegade's Fight Back Fridays.