We are coordinating “buy local” efforts at the Geaux Local Community group on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/401785854225137/

Here are some options to shop local food in New Orleans. Please submit any other options to neworleans@harvie.farm and we’ll post them here.

For all of your grocery needs (produce, meat, cheese, seafood and more):

Harvie Farms New Orleans 

Each week Harvie Farms New Orleans brings a home delivered, customized box from local farms and vendors to bring you everything from produce to cheese, meat, seafood, and more:
https://www.harvie.farm/farm/harvie-farms-new-orleans/signup

Use coupon code SHOPLOCAL to get 25% off your first delivery.

Other great options for local produce:

Sheaux Fresh Sustainable Foods (Black-Owned Business)

Thaddeaus Prosper has served thousands of people including two Presidents of the United States. He is now applying those experiences to Sheaux Fresh Sustainable Foods, striving to provide the same level of quality in their products and services by pulling from aspects of multiple disciplines and experiences. Everything that they can provide locally they will in the season in which it is available locally. They understand that there are some things that are desired even when out of season. They will bring those things in and provide you the knowledge if it’s origins. You will find Produce, eggs, honey, seedlings, and garden help and much more!

Covey Rise Farm

Fresh locally grown vine ripened vegetables from Covey Rise Farms in Husser, LA. Expect a selection of seasonally grown produce.

River Queen Greens

The River Queen Greens Farm Share contains a variety of Certified Naturally Grown produce from our New Orleans farm along with some produce from additional local farms. Boxes include a robust selection of greens – salad, cooking, and microgreens – root crops, fresh herbs, and other seasonal favorites. Eggs, mushrooms, and other local products are typically available as add-ons.

For other specialty items:

Buttery Spell  (Black-Owned Business)

Buttery Spell works with local family-owned farms and food co-ops to bring quality products directly to you, guaranteeing the freshest tastes of home! All our nut butters are made with local products. You will find delicious flavored butters, nut butters, charcuterie boards and more!

Viola’s Heritage Breads (Black-Owned Business)

The great, entrepreneurial, and intentional Dream with Viola’s Heritage Sandwich Breads is to create a perpetual international business, rooted in honoring the contributions of unacknowledged people of color in food, that provides a high-quality, culinary-crafted and -flavored everyday quality sandwich bread option. Best enjoyed toasted and as a peanut butter and jelly sandwich!

We are happy to announce Harvie Farms New Orleans, a new service that brings together the best local farms in the New Orleans area, allows you to customize your farm box before each delivery and then brings the harvest right to your doorstep!

Madeline and Timothy, farmers at Compostella Farm in Picayune, MS who are suppliers for Harvie Farms New Orleans.

In the local farm community here in New Orleans and across the country, we recognize that food buying habits are changing.

We are a group of experienced local farmers, distributors, and farm technology folks who want to make it easy for you to get access to the most quality local food for your home kitchen. Think of Harvie Farms New Orleans as the ease of online shopping, Amazon, and home delivery meets the unique tastes and freshness of CSAs and farmers markets.

We are a national company with local roots in the New Orleans region: our distribution partner is JV Foods who has deep connections to the local food community in New Orleans.

Why Harvie Farms New Orleans?

• We work with multiple farms across the New Orleans region so your farm box can include vegetables, fruit, cheese, eggs, bread, meat, seafood, milk, and more!
• Home delivery to the New Orleans region.
• Customize your box each week so you get exactly what you want and nothing you don’t.
• Get your farm box on your schedule! When you are out of town, just pause your box or reschedule it for another week.
• Built in cooking and recipe tips plus connect with farm share members all over the world (literally!)

So how does it work?

1. Start at the sign up page:
   https://www.harvie.farm/signup/harvie-farms-new-orleans
2. Pick a farm box, small ($49), medium ($79), or large ($109) — plus a $6 home delivery fee — which will include a fully customizable product selection each week.
3. Choose a frequency of delivery: weekly, every-other-week, and every-four-weeks and remember you can schedule around your needs.
4. If you want pork, poultry, seafood, sausage and more, choose a meat and seafood box for delivery once per month.
5. Complete contact info and payment info.
6. (Optional) Set product preferences so Harvie knows what you like and what you don’t like and we’ll pre-customize based on your product preferences.
7. First deliveries start on December 1st
8. Each week, customize your box if you like and we’ll deliver it to your door on Tuesday afternoons.

We are looking for 400 families to join us for this first season to make Harvie Farms New Orleans fly!

To encourage you to join us, use the coupon code FIRST400 to get 25% off your first box. Sign up here:
https://www.harvie.farm/signup/harvie-farms-new-orleans

This coupon code will be valid until 11/25. We expect to sell out quickly, so we welcome your sign up as soon as possible!

-Simon Huntley
CEO, Harvie
harvie.farm/neworleans

Harvie is seeking a talented and driven PHP/Symfony lead who enjoys working collaboratively to deliver useful solutions to complex problems. We are looking for a candidate with vision, but also somebody who rolls up their sleeves and becomes a can-do executor, driving features to success and routing around roadblocks in a pinch.  You will take on a leadership role in our group’s efforts to improve the performance, maintainability and code quality of our applications.  You have equal parts interest in coding standards, execution and testing, with the background to prove it.

Responsibilities

• Develop new features and assist in their design
• Work with all teams and senior management  on product strategy, design and user experience
• Maintain high code quality standards
• Implement best practice automated testing systems and continuous improvement processes for development

Requirements

• A strong point of view who can communicate their opinions to the team, as well as senior management
• Expert in PHP7 with strong knowledge of Object Oriented concepts
• Experience in Symfony, or another PHP framework (Zend, Laravel, etc.)
• Excellent relational database skills with MySQL
• Experience with building restful JSON web services
• Experience writing automated tests with PHPUNIT, Codeception, or another testing framework
• Passionate about code optimization

Why Work at Harvie?

• Health benefits, retirement plan, and paid vacation
• Office in Pittsburgh, but remote work is fine 
• Harvie farm share paid for by the company
• Flexible, relaxed, but fast moving environment

About Harvie

Harvie, founded as Small Farm Central in 2006, is a Pittsburgh-based company that helps local farmers sell to local consumers and compete in a changing food-buying marketplace by making it simple and customer-friendly to buy local food from local farms. We are a small team of 20 smart, dedicated individuals. We are an innovative, fast-moving, and fast-growing company.

How to Apply

Send resume and cover letter in PDF format to kyle@harvie.farm with subject line “Symfony at Harvie”.

Harvie is seeking a talented and driven ReactJS lead who enjoys working collaboratively to deliver useful solutions to complex problems. We are looking for a candidate with vision, but also somebody who rolls up their sleeves and becomes a can-do executor, driving features to success and routing around roadblocks in a pinch.  You will take on a leadership role in our group’s efforts to improve the user experience and code quality of our applications.  You have equal parts interest in coding standards and user experience, with the background to prove it.

Responsibilities

• Develop new features and assist in their design
• Work with all teams and senior management  on product strategy, design and user experience
• Maintain high code quality standards
• Implement best practice automated testing systems and continuous improvement processes for front end development

Requirements

• Design oriented developer with a passion for elegant code. 
• Understand of object oriented CSS, LESS and/or SASS
• A strong point of view who can communicate their opinions to the team, as well as senior management
• Expert in React
• Typescript
• React Native and experience developing native mobile apps is a plus
• UI/Component Library (blueprintjs.com, bulma.io)

Why Work at Harvie?

• Health benefits, retirement plan, and paid vacation
• Office in Pittsburgh, but remote work is fine 
• Harvie farm share paid for by the company
• Flexible, relaxed, but fast moving environment

About Harvie

Harvie, founded as Small Farm Central in 2006, is a Pittsburgh-based company that helps local farmers sell to local consumers and compete in a changing food-buying marketplace by making it simple and customer-friendly to buy local food from local farms. We are a small team of 15 smart, dedicated individuals. We are an innovative, fast-moving, and fast-growing company.

Apply

Send resume and cover letter in PDF format to kyle@harvie.farm with subject line “ReactJS at Harvie”.

In over 15 years working on farms and around farms, I’ve never seen anything like the last few weeks in the local food market. As restaurants close and cities shut down, the local food market is booming.

Our farmer’s sales at Harvie are up almost 200% in the pandemic crisis. If you are in the business of selling local food to consumers, you know how in-demand your products are right now!

It seems like a convergence of factors: people want to be closer to their food producers for perceived safety; they realized that maybe the grocery stores won’t always be full of food; they want to support their immune systems to fight this virus; they are cooking at home a lot more so they want great ingredients to cook with.

It all has resulted in a surge of demand for our food.

To be fair, this is also a difficult time of change. For farms that relied on restaurant or wholesale sales, there is a lot of pain ahead. Some farmers market are shutting down or requiring online pre-orders — many farmers are using Harvie for this. Many farmers are starting to do home delivery, which comes with many challenges — and Harvie is also built for this.

I have put everything on the line — financially, emotionally, and professionally — to build Harvie over the last 5 years. So to have worked on this problem of direct-to-consumer farm sales for years and now to have Harvie be part of the solution, it is gratifying to me. In times like these, it feels good to be useful.

One question I have: how long will this surge of demand last? Once we get beyond the crux of this crisis, will the demand continue? I think to an extent it will continue, but it is important to build systems on your farm that are habit-forming for these new customers, like building a subscription/membership program into your business like Harvie is built on. I think this is really important for long term business sustainability.

I wrote up a press release about the surge in demand which I will paste to the bottom of this email or grab it here:
https://www.harvie.farm/blog/press-release-demand-for-local-food-skyrockets-in-pandemic-crisis/

Please share this story with anyone you know in the media so we can get some press about what is going on in our industry.

I also want to put a huge shout-out to the team here at Harvie that has been working long hours since the beginning of this crisis to on-board new farmers, support new consumer members, set up pop-up farm stand sales, and build new tools into the Harvie platform. They have shown their commitment to this work and I couldn’t do it without them.

I’m interested in your stories. Are you seeing demand spike in your neck of the woods? What factors do you think are contributing to this increase in interest?

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 3/29/2020

Contact

Simon Huntley
CEO, Harvie
412-352-9673
simon@harvie.farm
http://harvie.farm

Demand for Local Food Skyrockets in Pandemic Crisis

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Demand for local food on Harvie’s farm-to-consumer platform is up over 200% in COVID-19 crisis.

“It’s a convergence of factors,” says Simon Huntley of Harvie, “all of a sudden as grocery stores have been emptied, restaurants are closed, people are cooking at home more, and people want to take care of their health. In response, they want to secure local food directly from their local farmers.”

Harvie works with over 150 farms across the United States and Canada helping farms run a farm share which is a farm membership program (inspired by Community Supported Agriculture – CSA – programs) where local consumers can buy a flexible, customizable membership from a local farm and get deliveries throughout the growing season direct from their local farm. Consumers also have the option of purchasing one time orders through the farms.

“We’ve never seen demand quite like this for food from our farmers. We sent out an email to a few hundred people offering a home delivered farm box and ended up receiving more than an order per minute until we had to shut down sign ups. We originally weren’t planning to make deliveries until May, but circumstances have changed. For now the demand is outstripping the infrastructure for deliveries. We are working to expand our capacity to meet the expanded demand,” says Neil Stauffer, General Manager of Harvie Farms Pittsburgh which organizes home deliveries from multiple farms in the Pittsburgh area.

Buying a Harvie farm share or a CSA box from a farmer is a concrete way to support individual health, support a farmer, and ensure high quality food in the kitchen all season long.

Lisa Duff from Oak Spring Farm in Freeland, Maryland says, “There is an outburst of demand by customers who’ve never purchased from us before. People are grateful, thanking us for selling food direct and earlier in the season than we ever have. First time customers are marveling over the beauty of our fresh harvested greens, beets and radishes from our high tunnels. It feels good to provide our healthy, nutrient dense food in these uncertain times. It feels good to be part of the solution. Food is medicine!”

###

Last time I was in touch, I announced our new Harvie Farms Pittsburgh service and the response has been overwhelming!

We are over 60% sold out for the home delivery program already! So we are going to sell out well before the deliveries start in late May. We will add more spots in the program through the season so even if you miss out on the first deliveries, you will have a chance later in the season to join us.

If you would like to join, visit the sign up page: http://harvie.farm/pittsburgh

In this email, I am going to introduce you to one of our founding farms, Who Cooks for You Farm in New Bethlehem, PA.

Chris and Aeros are in their 12th season of farming and you can find them at some of Pittsburgh’s busiest farmers markets, including Bloomfield on Saturdays and Squirrel Hill on Sundays. They always have an amazingly diverse, beautiful and fresh display. This is the kind of farm and produce that I am so excited to connect you with via Harvie Farms Pittsburgh.

Extra bonus, they are certified organic!

I asked them a few questions about their farm, you can view the video here or read below:

What’s going on at the farm this week?

This week on the farm we are building a large greenhouse, it’s an unheated structure. We are planning on extending our seasons both this spring and fall, so that we can take greater advantage of that market when a lot of people don’t have a lot of fresh produce very early and late in the season. We will be growing lettuces, beets, carrots, some herbs, late tomatoes, and fall greens. So we’ll have greens further into the winter, fresh greens!

Is there anything specific you’re excited about growing this year and getting into boxes and getting to the market?

I’m always excited about everything because it seems like the longer we do this the better we get at being able to harvest and grow really nice produce. I’m really excited to be able to bring that produce to market and have everybody just come and buy it. It’s really, really satisfying.

As far as this new addition of the home delivery and Harvie Farms Pittsburgh, how does that fit into your plans this year?

It changes the game for us. We can reach more people because we want to grow food for people. It’s really exciting to be able to have food in someone’s house, right to their doorstep grown locally and being a part of that local network of growers is exciting.

What we find is that probably our greatest challenge is market access. Access to people that want to buy our product. We think that being able to partner up with Harvie is going to help us get that food out. Because we grow the food and we get the food ready to go to market. It always seems like the hardest part is getting that food to people that want it. It’s just that we need that middle person and we’re really looking forward to making this model work. I’m really excited about.

What is the biggest challenge about being a farmer in Western Pennsylvania or generally?

I think market access is. We can grow a lot of food but getting it in people’s homes is hard.

It’s tough and there’s a lot of farmers out here and a lot of them can do a really good job. It seems like that is the greatest bottleneck. There are other bottlenecks out there such as land and access. However, if the market demand is there then you’re in a good spot. You could be in a really good spot. That seems to be the biggest challenge we think.

Harvie offering delivery to someone’s door allows us to reach people that can’t even go to a local pickup center. They can’t go up to the store, they can’t make it to the farmer’s market. You’re a very busy person you could still eat locally. You don’t have to go to the farmer’s market if, at that certain time in the week, you can’t make it.

It’s huge. A really big deal.

Is there anything you’d like to see change in local food in the Pittsburgh area?

We would love there being greater access and more convenient access to local products in general. We would love to see those products be offered in a more convenient style. So that the farmers, local producers, local entrepreneurs, everybody, that this can all grow. We’re leaning in that direction all the time and oftentimes just coming up against the wall. So we would love to see Pittsburgh really bloom and flourish. That includes the rural parts around Pittsburgh. To make Pittsburgh a sustainable city like they say it is. This could reach rural parts of the Pittsburg area and supports Pittsburgh growing food and bringing food into the city.

—

We look forward to serving you this season with produce from Who Cooks for You Farm and the rest of our talented group of growers and local food producers!

-Simon Huntley (CEO, Harvie) & Neil Stauffer (General manager, Harvie Farms Pittsburgh)
https://www.harvie.farm/signup/harvie-farms-pittsburgh

P.S. If Harvie Farms Pittsburgh sells out or you want to check out another option, we have a farm in the Pittsburgh area who has been using the Harvie platform for the last few years, Cherry Valley Organics, so please check out their sign up page and consider signing up with them: https://www.harvie.farm/signup/cherry-valley-organics