CLG:  Tamales: Tuesday Reminder - Market Closes Tonight after 10pm.

Hello friends!
There’s still time to place your order for pickup this Friday, January 4th.

If you want to order Tamales, just text me what you want. 501-339-1039. Five freshly made Tamales for $7, Chicken, Pork, or Jalapeno & Cheese. Sold in packs of 5 of the same type.

The market closes TONIGHT after 10pm, maybe even midnight! Come early on Friday for the best selection from the Extras table. See you Friday!

The market is now OPEN for orders. Click here to start shopping:

https://conway.locallygrown.net/market

How to contact us:

DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL. Instead…

Phone or text: Steve – 501-339-1039

Email: Steve – [email protected]

Statesboro Market2Go:  Order Before Midnight!

Remember to place your order for this week before midnight tonight.

Click to order at Market2Go

Yalaha, FL:  Happy New Year

Order now through 5 pm Thursday January 3rd for Saturday January 5th Pickup, (or contact me if you want a different day, we do have some flexibility.)

Remember to tell me when you want to pick up!

I heard that maybe there could be some Mushrooms available so send me a message if you want some and I will look into it further.

Hi All, Just want to share that I have been getting back into fermenting again. Let me know if you are interested in getting fresh cultures for Kombucha, Milk Kefir, or Water Kefir. My Kefir grains especially have been growing fast. The Kombucha scoby is a little slower about it and my Jun scoby has been a bit resistant to the idea of replicating (which I understand is kinda common for that particular culture.)

Please let me know what micro greens or shoots you are interested in and I can start growing enough to make them available (most take less than 2 weeks.)
Also, if you want me to list super foods like Purslane, let me know, I have it volunteering wild here and I will likely also have nettles come winter/spring season.

Send me a message if you are interested in Getting Channel Catfish.

If you have any particular requests, let me know I’m happy to grow to order.

Sign in to order. https://yalaha.locallygrown.net/market

You have to sign in to see the add to cart button. Then click the add to cart button on the items you want to buy. Remember you need to check out before your order will be placed.
Remember to let me know when you want to pick up on Sat or maybe even Friday late afternoon or on Sunday. (If I don’t send you an e-mail confirmation of your order and pick up time, please make sure you checked out and completed your order.)

Siloam Springs, AR:  Online Market is Open!

Green Acres Atkins:  Opening bell...happy new year!

Good morning

Hope this email finds you all preparing for a great New Years party

Please place your orders by Wednesday at noon

Thanks
Tom and Kami

Athens Locally Grown:  ALG Market Open for January 3

Welcome to 2019, and another year of Athens Locally Grown! This will be our eighteenth year in operation (I had to double check to make sure I had that right) and we are looking forward to many more. Many of our growers are have slowed down for the winter, delivering every other week or otherwise reducing their availability. Many others, however, are still going strong thanks to greenhouses and other season-extending methods. We’ll be going every single week from now until our next week off — Thanksgiving.

I saved a link to an essay I ran across couple years ago that wonderfully illustrates why I run ALG, and why I started my own little vegetable farm back in 2002. It uses the simple dish that’s traditionally served on New Year’s Day, Hoppin’ John, to show how much our food supply has changed in the last several decades, and how much flavor, nutrition, and diversity we nearly lost forever along the way. Small farms like those who sell through ALG, with the support of people like you who are wanting locally grown, fresh, flavorful foods, have started to turn the tide and have just barely managed to keep some of the old foods around. Many people eat Hoppin’ John and wonder why the bland mix of mushy beans and rice became a tradition and the truth is that’s not what became a tradition, it’s just what we were stuck with when the food system changed around us. Have a read of the full article — I think you’ll enjoy it: http://www.seriouseats.com/2014/12/southern-hoppin-john-new-years-tradition.html.

Each January, I devote the first few mailings of the year to the behind the scenes operation of ALG. This week, I’m going to talk about the many legal issues surrounding our market. Even though many people call us “the co-op”, ALG is legally a market owned and operated by me, so I can have a place to sell items I occasionally offer from my own gardens. There’s no board of directors, no shield corporation, no pot of grant money. It’s just me, and while that keeps things very simple, it also exposes me and my family to a ton of potential liability. It’s never really been an issue (except when the whole raw milk thing erupted several years ago) and there are several things I do specifically to minimize that risk:

• The growers list their own items and set their own prices. When you buy from them, it is from them, not from me, and not from Athens Locally Grown.
• Athens Locally Grown never takes ownership or possession of the food. The growers drop it off, and you pick it up.
• Everything at the market has a customer’s name attached to it when it arrives. ALG does not repackage any items, or buy in bulk for redistribution.
• When you pay, you’re paying into a shared cash box for all of the growers. This lets you write a single check or swipe your card once for convenience, but you are really paying all of the growers directly and individually. Your money goes in, and the software I wrote to keep everything going spits out checks for each of the growers you buy from.
• The growers give a small percentage of their sales, generally 10%, back to the market to cover the many expenses of keeping the market going. I’ll cover the details of finances another week.
• ALG never buys from a grower and resells the items to you. Never.
• When a grower sells items that need licenses from either the state or the federal government, ALG verifies that the proper licenses have been obtained.

The ownership issue is key. It’s one of the reasons why we don’t offer delivery, and why we usually can’t hold items for you if you aren’t able to pick up your orders. Delivery might be a good business for someone (if they could figure out all the legal requirements), but it’s not at all what I personally want to be into. I think it would be a valuable service for you, and I’m hoping someday someone will be able to partner with me for this. Many food co-ops and even some farmers markets aren’t as careful with keeping ownership as straight as I try to be, and that has gotten other groups similar to us into serious legal trouble (deserved or not) over the years. There are so many grey areas in all this, and the written regulations still don’t even consider that something like Athens Locally Grown might exist. We’re so firmly in the grey areas with most everything we do that it’s just too risky for me to bring us into the areas that are clearly black.

So, these are the sorts of things that guide my thinking as Athens Locally Grown has grown over the years. Everything we do has legal ramifications, and the state of Georgia has a reputation for being no nonsense when it comes to enforcement — with the little guy, anyway. That has became extra obvious in recent years, and the FDA is also putting pressure on groups like us too. I’m not a lawyer, but every time we enter those grey areas, I make sure we follow the intent of the laws, don’t flaunt anything, and have a good defense and a paper trail should we need it. And when that doesn’t work, the good folks at the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund are behind us. They have consumer memberships, too, and I do encourage everyone who is able to become a member of the FtCLDF.

The FtCLDF was my legal counsel in the federal lawsuit against the FDA I (and one of our members) was a plaintiff on. The lawsuit was in response to the seizure and destruction of 110 gallons of South Carolina milk purchased by ALG members in October 2009. During the pre-trial phase, the FDA moved to dismiss the suit, and went so far as to claim that the milk dumping, filmed and placed on YouTube, with an FDA agent clearly identified, never happened. The judge refused to dismiss, and gave the FDA six months to give a yes or no answer to whether what we did is really considered illegal. Exactly six months later, they responded that it was illegal, but also claimed that even though an FDA agent was at my house giving direction, they had no hand in the dumping. They also went on record stating that individuals were legally free to cross state lines and buy raw milk to take home with them (something that the FDA agent at my house said, on camera, was completely illegal under all circumstances). After that, the judge dismissed the suit without fully ruling whether ALG was also free to facilitate our members collectively ordering and picking up milk across state lines. In any case, the state of Georgia still says what we were doing was illegal and even tightened the rules right afterward, so raw milk is still rather hard to come by.

And there in a nutshell is the legalities behind ALG. In the following weeks, I’ll get more into the nuts and bolts of finances and other aspects of how we work.

GFM :  New Year

A New Year is just a few short hours away. 

Our Vendors are already busy planning  their gardens, making their special one of a kind gifts and looking for new recipes and planning on making their special ones for our market(s) both online and when the physical market opens again in May.

Please  keep us in your hearts and thoughts as we prepare to bring you the best of the best local goodness. 

Dawson Local Harvest:  HAPPY NEW YEAR from Dawson Harvest!

Dawson Harvest for January 4th

HAPPY NEW YEAR from Dawson Harvest

HI EVERYBODY

We hope you all have had a wonderful Holiday Season. Kinda funny, isn’t it, how quickly it passes? Still we had some nice memories, and we hope you did too.

The Dawson Harvest is entering our 5th or 6th year, don’t really know, and at this time of year we look to see how well we’ve done (?) and where improvements can be made. I expect some significant changes including “new blood”, new ideas, new web look, expanded selection, the whole she-bang. This will happen over the next couple of months, and we hope you’ll be excited with what you see!

This Week on The Market: Lettuces, Spinach, Bok Choi, and several varieties of Turnips are still available, along with the full Menu of Sourdough, Yeast Rolls, and all the other Baked Goods from MY DAILY BREAD.

Next weekend will be a big Football event. Make sure you have lots of Beer-Buzzed and Buffalo Blue Cheese Dips, the Hot Pepper Peach Cheese Log, and more. In the Salads, Cheese Dips, and More section.

Leg of Lamb is still available, so are Eggs and Milk.

Hope you all have a HAPPY NEW YEAR!

THE MARKET IS NOW OPEN!

REMEMBER! You can now order until Tuesday night at 9 pm. Pick up your order at Leilani’s Gardens Friday afternoons from 4 to 6 pm.

You’ll find the DAWSON LOCAL HARVEST at http://dawsonville.locallygrown.net

We thank you for your interest and support of our efforts to bring you the healthiest, the freshest and the most delicious locally-produced foods possible! We guarantee your satisfaction with all products in the DAWSON LOCAL HARVEST.

If you like what we’re doing please tell a friend!

Alan Vining
Market Manager

Fresh Harvest, LLC:  Fresh Harvest Big News! Please Read!!

Hello Fresh Harvest Customers and Friends,

This is Tally writing you with some news I want to share. I am writing to let you know of some changes happening for Fresh Harvest starting this January, 2019.

I have decided to take a full time, off farm job.

The job is with The Nashville Food Project, a non-profit organization in Nashville. I will be the Education Manager for their Growing Together program. The program works with refuges resettled in Nashville that have agrarian backgrounds and want to farm, with the goal of increasing financial security and creating community and conversation through the cultural exchange of growing food.
The Nashville Food Project is an organization I really love and admire. The team I will be working with is inspiring and motivated.
The work is something I feel ready for and am interested in. All in all it feels like a really good fit, and if there ever was to be a job I would want outside of farming this is it.

Fresh Harvest will continue on without me! For many many years now, John Drury has been an amazing business partner and friend. His kindness, good humor, sense of fairness and well-grounded common sense has been the steady guiding force behind Fresh Harvest and all of its success. John has been extremely supportive and understanding of my decision, for which I am eternally grateful.

John will continue Fresh Harvest on his own. There are many unknowns at this point as to how this will all play out, but for now John is committed to keeping the structure and protocol of the business very much the same, so you should not expect any big changes that will affect your participation .

All communication will now be with John only. You will see his name on the email and all phone communication will be through him. You are certainly welcome to contact me with any immediate questions or concerns, and I will be as helpful as I can in making this transition as smooth as possible!

The first delivery of the new year will be next week. The customer email will go out Sunday, January 6th and the new sender address will be from John. Delivery will be the same place and time, Wednesday January 9th.

It has been an amazing pleasure and privilege to work with you all over these many years. Getting to greet you every week, seeing your smiles, getting hugs, and hearing your news has been a constant source of joy for me. You all have been my support network, my cheerleaders, and my family, and I am so grateful to each of you. Together we have shared much – new jobs, weddings, babies, kids leaving for college, illness, accidents, and the passing of loved ones. You have been my community and you – through your dedication to a local economy and your support of local food – have enabled me to do what I love in a sustainable way for 15 years. Thank you with all my heart. You have made my life richer.
It is my hope that someday soon I will see each of you in person and we can once again share hugs and news of the day!

Until then, please be patient with John as he valiantly forges ahead. He deserves any credit you may give him.

And, also, please have a very healthy and happy New Year, 2019. I wish you all the very best!

With much love and sincere thanks,
Tally

Foothills Market:  Start the New Year with Foothills Market!

If one of your resolutions for the New Year is to eat a more healthy diet, Foothills Market is here to help. Although it’s winter, we have a good selection of fresh greens and cabbage-family vegetables, as well as meats grown with none of the hormones or antibiotics that commercially-produced meats may have.

The market is open for shopping between now and Wednesday at 5:00 p.m. Browse the products, fill your cart, and click the “Place my order” button. We’ll have the items ready for you to pick up Thursday afternoon between 4:30-5:30.

Here’s to a happy, healthy New Year! Eat something fresh this week!