Max Kane was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease after years of eating the standard American diet high in salt, fat, and sugar. While it’s not clear whether his poor diet brought about this autoimmune disease, what is clear was things changed when he began working with his dietitian.
Kane’s health flourished, he gained 50 lbs. of lean-muscle mass, and the catalyst was a new eating program consisting solely of foods grown and made on farms in his area.
Along with his diet and health, Kane’s attitude changed as well, and he took up the torch as a proud member of the farm-to-table, small farm movement by creating FarmMatch.com—the simplest tool desirable for those looking to support small farmers in their area, and to increase the quality of the contents of their fridge.
FarmMatch.com couldn’t be simpler to use. Just enter your zip code, choose from the list of farms, fill up your basket with their products, and then choose whether you want to pick it up, or receive it at your door.
Best of all, because many of these small farms provide foot to restaurants and other city locations, those living in the hearts of large cities can get farm-fresh produce and meat without needing drive an hour outside of town for the produce.
“There’s just tens of thousands of small farms that are making deliveries into the city already, and they have these drop locations, or pickup location food distribution models where they go to all these different neighborhoods around the city and you meet them at the pickup location and get your food,” explains Kane in a podcast interview.
While FarmMatch is as simple a tool as you like, Kaane hopes to build an application where locals buying from the platform can upload their orders to a community database. If there are people in low-income areas that maybe don’t have means of getting to a pickup location, neighbors driving there will have the opportunity to lend a hand.
This, Kane says, not only builds community relationships—it keeps the cost of products low, since the small farmers don’t have to expedite each and every home delivery.
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“In a effective, tangible way it [FarmMatch] really addresses the fragileness of our food system,” says Kane, noting the bare supermarket shelves that typified the early months of COVID-19 lockdowns.
For those who just read a four-page feature article somewhere on “adaptive multi-paddock rotational grazing strategies” for livestock, or on permaculture and agroforestry, but then realized they had no access to any of this superior quality food, there may be a farm waiting for you, and your dollar, closer than you expect.
More than 40,000 small farmers are already coordinating with Kane to make their product available to people in their area, which as of December 2020 had facilitated 600,000 orders.
(WATCH the great FarmMatch explainer video below.)
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