Sometimes support for food security is just around the bend

Sometimes they can be just around the bend, as is the case in Central Oregon where Around the Bend Farms is looking to change the landscape of what accessible food means. We caught up with Co-Founders Benjiman Marsh and Chris Fasan recently to learn more about their organization whose mission is to help create a future where fresh produce is accessible to all.

Around The Bend Farms is a non-profit organization that is working to build an urban agricultural community. The organization invests its time and resources into working with community members and other non-profit organizations to create small growing hubs interspersed throughout the city where people shop, eat and play. They want to remove barriers for those who have little or no access to affordable healthy fresh and nutritious produce.

The city of Bend, Oregon is located in the high desert, rain shadow side of the cascades mountain range, and in the early days the business model was to offer support in the form of traditional outdoor community gardens. 

"One of the challenges with operating an outdoor community garden long term is that there is an incredibly short growing season" explained Benjiman.

In 2018 they collaborated on a project with engineering students at Oregon State University on a hydroponic system. "From there we realized that there was this whole hydroponic world we didn't know about," said Chris. This ignited a spark to do more research on hydroponics and controlled environment agriculture (CEA) and they looked at various options from container farming and various forms of hydroponic systems. It was at that time they stumbled across ZipGrow Inc.

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Pictured: Makena Whitaker-Co-Founder Around the Bend Farms

Source: ZipGrow