Local Isn't a Marketing Word. It's an Address.

Every grocery store says local now. The word shows up on packages that have traveled further than most families do on vacation. So let me tell you what local means when we say it.

It means Leicester, NY. 5700 Gibsonville Road, at the north entrance of Letchworth State Park. You can drive here — people do, every Friday afternoon for farm pickup.

It means that when you ask what the chickens ate, the person answering is the person who fed them that morning. Our feed comes from County Line Feeds in Dalmatia, PA, and I can tell you what's in every bag: peas, oats, Western alfalfa hay, sesame meal, linseed meal, fish meal. No corn. No soy. It means our poultry is processed at HLW Acres and our pork and lamb at Timberline Meats, and we know the people at both.

A few years back, everyone got a good look at what happens when food travels a few thousand miles through a few dozen hands and something snags along the way. We don't think about that in dramatic terms. We think about it practically: a region with more working farms selling directly to its own people is a region where less can go wrong at dinnertime. Western New York used to have that. It can have it again, one farm at a time.

That thinking is also why our Farm Supporter Program exists. It isn't a subscription. It's how a community keeps a farm running through the seasons, and this year both levels sold out by spring.

If you want food with an address on it: we're at the Brighton Farmers Market on Sundays in season, the farm is open for pickup on Fridays, and we deliver monthly to Rochester and Buffalo.

Brian, Sarah, and George