Come hell or high water, Piccalilli Farm is moving into a new building on Monday October 12th. The Earth behind our barn will groan slightly as we uproot our cluttered, over-worked pack shed after 5 years of washing every vegetable we sold, every micro green we cut, and every order we packed almost since the inception of Farm to Porch from our quickly aging 3 sided pole barn and drive it about 100 yards up the road to our new building. At the same time we will unhook the food truck, pull it up the road and move our current bakery infrastructure into our large new kitchen space as well. Movers will assist here - in a huge and helpful way, thank you Flint Hills Moving - but also 10 years of our rapidly growing bakery and catering business will be boxed, moved and re-sorted into a newly built 300 square foot kitchen space with so much potential, I’m still bashful standing in the middle of it.
And while there is so much from 15 years of our farm that we will move into this space, there is so much more Piccalilli Farm needs as we make this transition. While 75% of this building’s construction has been funded by a generous grant from the USDA, the remaining 25% is coming out of pocket for us. That 25% includes the pieces of this kitchen and this pack house that will allow us to build a stronger local food community in all the ways we have always done, but also in so many more new ways. That 25% includes everything from big ticket items like a 30,000$ deck oven that can be filled with truly artisan breads from locally milled grains produced by Stone and Sparrow and Hoffman’s Grist Mill, to shelving to fill a 24x10 foot walk-in where we can stack bushels of locally grown produce, to a market vehicle that could be big enough and cold enough to allow us to go to market anywhere in the Flint Hills and gather all those ingredients. That 25% covers everything from dunnage racks, to a true bread proofer, to an industrial salad spinner that would allow us to grow more greens for the Flint Hills. Our new building not only will build out our regional food economy by giving us space to take raw ingredients from so many farms and turn them into value added products for all of Northeast Kansas, but this building also will strengthen our own farm’s production - giving us the infrastructure to grow our production in a way that is bigger then ever before.
That 25% will be financed by a second mortgage on our farm. Hard Stop. Alison and I believe very strongly in what we are doing, and as first generation farmers trying to build all this up from the dense clay-loam and creaky old barn that we bought in 2013, we have had to borrow again and again to grow, and we will make our biggest gamble yet as we transition to this new building. And so it is with so much pride in the work we have done, and all the work we want to do, that I ask you to join us with a contribution towards where we want to go. We want to raise 50,000$ to help in offsetting some of the borrowing costs we are about to incur as we outfit our new building and transition to our new space. For the first 3 years of our farm I washed all our vegetable on our back deck between restaurant shifts, we borrowed the BCS tiller from Master Landscape after hours, we weeded till after dark when Ali got home from work, and then we built a bakery business out a small farm house kitchen with a mixer by our fire place and more grit then I can fathom now. We didn’t hire an employ till year 3 and now we employ upwards of a dozen people who believe in what we do and help support Piccalilli in so many ways. We can use this building to build an even stronger local food community then ever before - its a place where seasonal prepared foods grown and raised in Kansas will be the foundational rule, a guiding principle that we hope will take us far as we support the local food system, keep money inside our community of local farms, and little by little change the food world here in the Flint Hills.
And, Ali and I believe that we can be that change because eating is a delicious agricultural act. But to get there we need your help. We are going to run a “Go Fund Me” style campaign for the entire month of October from the homepage of our website and from our social network where we will show you all the ways you can help build out our new space and build out a better food future for this community. We step boldly into this transition because we have always felt buoyed by the community of friends, family and customers that see value in our work and believe in its importance. We are setting out with these ambitious goals because we believe in the ambition of our community. Now is the time we need your financial help to buoy us in the transition to our new building and help us take our next leap forward. Please join us in this very important moment.
