A Bit Further Afield
We're always on the lookout for unique local cocktail ingredients—even in the winter when they are harder to find. Through Happy Dirt, we can source ingredients from a bit further afield, like winter tunnel strawberries from the coast, apples from the mountains, and South Carolina prickly pears.
Simply put, Happy Dirt in Durham, NC connects farmers to eaters. Happy Dirt fills an often-missing link between farmers with an abundance of crops and buyers interested in locally grown products, including produce department managers and restaurant chefs.
Sandi Kronick founded Happy Dirt in 2004 with the objective of helping organic farmers find more buyers for their crops. Fiona Matthews, who currently curates Happy Dirt’s selection of grains, legumes, and pantry items, explains, “Our farmers are smart business people, but it is a lot to ask one person to do.” The Happy Dirt team assists farmers with many tasks that could otherwise be overwhelming: Organic certification, grocery store compliance forms, labeling, packaging, and marketing.
“Farmers are navigating a pretty complex system,” Taylor Holenbeck, Happy Dirt’s Grower Services Coordinator, explains. He visits Happy Dirt’s farms in person and provides resources to support their decision-making on questions like whether to sell a crop wholesale or directly to a restaurant. By visiting farms, Taylor can make observations that are helpful to farmers, such as noticing a crop in the field that the farmer has been too busy to communicate and sell. Having worked on small farms himself, Taylor understands that time is one of the most limited resources on a farm and he helps farmers find buyers for produce that would have otherwise gone to waste.
“The more we can plan with farmers, the more efficient they can be,” Taylor reflects. He began working with Happy Dirt on the warehouse team in 2018. In his new role, Taylor and Happy Dirt’s purchasing team work with farmers to develop an annual production plan. This helps farms create more revenue and save time, money and energy by finding the best uses of their land.
By committing to purchasing specific volumes of crops, Happy Dirt provides security to their farmers, 16 of whom are also owners in the business. “So often people go back on their promises with farmers,” Fiona shares. “The production plan is an eagle eye view that the farmers can build on and have expected income.”
Fiona finds that being a mid-size company makes Happy Dirt particularly impactful. The supply chain is short, with most farmers delivering their own produce to Happy Dirt’s loading dock. In turn, smaller produce purchasers, like co-op groceries and restaurants, can meet Happy Dirt’s minimum orders, which are lower than what is required by large produce distributors.
Fiona and Taylor draw motivation from the powerful stories of Happy Dirt’s partner growers and food-makers. Taylor is interested in food cultures as a way of learning about who someone is and where they come from. He spoke about visiting Butler Family Farms in Roseboro, NC, a North Carolina Century Farm founded in 1909. The family’s ten siblings have always farmed without pesticides, but recently obtained Organic certification, opening access to new markets for their produce.
Fiona has been particularly impacted by the opportunity to talk with founding members of New Communities, a farm in Georgia with a storied history and a mission of community empowerment. She recounts that the farm’s leaders were also civil rights heroes, one of whom was a field coordinator with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s. New Communities was born as a farm collective to provide a haven for the Black community in 1969. They lost their land after being refused federal emergency loans in a drought in 1985 and were eventually granted partial restitution in a landmark court case. This enabled them to purchase a former plantation, which happened to be planted with hundreds of acres of overgrown pecan trees. These pecans are now a revenue-generating crop that supports New Communities’ ongoing agricultural and educational mission.
Around ninety percent of the produce Happy Dirt sources is from North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland and Georgia. They also source a few specialty crops, requested by buyers like Weaver Street Market, from further away geographically, yet still from growers with aligned sustainable agriculture values. One of the farms they partner with is ALBA in California, which is a 100-acre incubator farm that was built to enable immigrant workers to grow their own food and start their own farms through education and land access.
For Fiona, helping these farmers and food producers succeed in their livelihood is the most rewarding part of her job. “It’s so cool to be involved with someone else’s dream,” she says.