Replication Instead of Scale

The Next Stage at Forage Farms

We created Forage Farms to build a model other farmers could actually follow: a way to run a farm differently, restore a landscape while doing it, and form the second half of a relationship that food production has been missing for a long time.

Tarwyn Park Training works with farmers, teaching them how to manage their landscapes properly. Forage Farms works with the consumer, helping you understand more about food, about landscapes, and about how the choice you make with your wallet is what actually holds the whole thing together. Two businesses, two halves of the same relationship.

A business like this isn't easy: there are far more skills involved than a typical farming operation ever needs, and far more areas to work across at once. What we've learned, nearly ten years in, is this: if we want to produce more food, feed more people, and look after the landscape and the animals properly while doing it, the traditional model of scaling our own operation, buying more land, running more animals, doesn't work. You can only push a single business so far before quality starts to slip in one area or another.

That's how we landed on the thinking that changed everything for us: what if we replicated instead of scaled? What if we built a community of farms, all working toward the same goal, all producing the same high standard of food? It's actually why we're called Forage Farms, not Forage Farm, we always wanted this to be a community bigger than just our customers, a community of farmers too.

We understand that doing everything at once isn't easy: starting a business, growing a product, building a brand, selling it well. That's exactly why our model doesn't ask a farmer to do all of it alone. We work directly with farmers in our region to help them produce to the same high standards we hold ourselves to, and they're paid properly for that quality and for the practices they carry out. Rewarded for doing better, because they should be.

We're working with first-time farmers just getting started, and with generational farmers looking to diversify what they run on land they already know well. Either way, our job is the same: help them build a real business, grow good food, and become part of a community of farmers and consumers who all want the same things, a healthier landscape, better-treated livestock, and nutritious food on the table.

This is just the beginning. We expect plenty more learning ahead, the same way there has been across the last ten years of building Forage Farms.

We also want to make sure the connection to the actual farmer never gets lost as this grows. Over the coming months, you'll start to see a few refreshes across Forage Farms giving you clearer ways to know exactly where your food came from and who grew it.

Putting a face and a name to the food on your plate matters. It's how people actually understand why supporting farmers is worth doing, and it's how we push forward on real solutions to the problems we hear about constantly, and we mean actual solutions, not the usual dreary messages about everything falling apart and how little time we've got left. We'd rather work toward fixing things than keep talking about what's wrong. A lot of that starts with who you choose to support at the dinner table, and where the money behind what's on your plate actually goes.