Producer

This tight-knit group consists of about seven farmers from nearby as well as a few from further east in Big Valley, PA. Their manager, David Wengerd has been involved since he was a teenager and has achieved both USDA Organic certification as well as harmonized GAP certification making them one of the best in ethical farming and food safe practices.

They have a heavy emphasis on ingenuity for their farms and the centralized warehouse space where they aggregate, wash, and pack endless bins of beautiful produce. Examples were obvious. Each winter they flood their parking lot to create 12-inch thick ice that they cut and stack inside of their walk-in cooler areas, creating a reliable and very low-cost cooling system that they can use year-round. They also custom-built a produce washing assembly that allows them to float heavy items, like winter squash, out of picking bins and into a spray wash without having to hand touch the squash one by one. When you are growing and selling hundreds of thousands of pounds of produce, that automation is a big deal. To top it off, the water they use for their produce cleaning is filtered from a mountain stream that flows on the hillside behind their facility.