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Agriculture secretary visits Carversville Farm

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With hands deep in the soil, Agriculture Secretary Russell Redding and his team joined volunteers at the Carversville Farm Foundation to reap the investments of the state’s charitable food system.
“Food is a basic human right,” said Redding, “and having access to that is critical.”
At the Carversville Farm Foundation, a nonprofit that grows organic food to donate to those in need, volunteers and staff are harvesting potatoes. Secretary Redding arrived with representatives of organizations that get the fresh food into hands across Bucks.
Though a small amount of what they gather, around 10%, is sold through the farm’s website to local consumers, the foundation said it has donated over 100,000 pounds of produce to food pantries and soup kitchens across the area.
“It’s a simple premise. We have food in the state; let’s get it into the hands of those who need it,” said the secretary.
The foundation has several partnerships, with those of note being the Ronald McDonald house, and is looking to grow more each year – expanding its roots to more in need.
Jayne Clements, executive director of Feeding Pennsylvania, said, “Our food banks help serve the nearly 1.3 million Pennsylvanians who are struggling with hunger, about half a million of whom are children.”
“From a state boasting 53,000 farms,” she said. “That’s just completely unacceptable.” Clements pointed out that the states can’t have charitable food without a charitable food system.
On the local level, Bucks has a community ready to meet that challenge.
“I am humbled to represent the people who eat the food,” said Madelaine Burgess, food pantry coordinator for the Doylestown and Penndel food pantries. “When you go to the grocery store, you probably go around the edges – and traditionally, food pantries gave out the middle.
She said, “What people want is fresh food, and we are proud to guarantee it week to week.”
Sen. Steve Santarsiero said that though the farm is in a place that has so much to offer, there are still pockets of poverty. “It should never be the case, in an area with such a robust agriculture sector, that we have people going hungry.”

Stephanie DeLucia, the farm administrator, watched on as volunteers carried full baskets of potatoes to the collection bin. It was eight years since Secretary Redding had been to the farm, at that time in its infancy.
“We’ve been donating for about six years now,” she said, explaining that the farm has been donating across the greater Philidelphia area and New Jersey. “Even with the impact of COVID, we were able to donate over 100,000 pounds this year.”
During the height of the pandemic, when lockdown orders were in effect, the Carversville farm continued to stay tight-knit and keep the show going—relying on double masking and keeping outside as much as possible. Stephanie says they’re super lucky in 2021 with volunteers, especially since they had to pause accepting them in 2020.
The Bucks County Opportunity Council supports programs like this. They act as a distributor under the PASS act – known as Pennsylvania Agricultural Surplus System-- which acquires surplus and other agricultural products and distributes them to those in the state with food insecurity.
Against all odds, Secretary Redding looks over the field covered in dirt up to his forearms and sees the fruits of that labor – literally.
Tony D’Orazio, the co-executive director of the farm, grins widely and discusses soil with him, happy to see the place they started several years ago brought to new heights. Steven Tomlinson, the farm manager, gestures to the germinating crops of carrots behind them – a future donation to the cause.
Heather Foor, food program manager at Bucks County Opportunity Council, will see the distribution of those crops firsthand as the council delivers food to those in need. She said the farm donation is one of the the council’s most viable programs.
“We hear from our clients all the time, who are on fixed incomes, that they would just bypass the produce section at the grocery store,” Foor said. “So by getting the Fresh Connect (the council’s free fresh food market) with us, they don’t have to worry about food – we provide it.”
Through that partnership with the council, the farm committed over 50,000 pounds of produce to the council for this year. Through the PASS program, the BCOC can now get meats to meet the communities needs.
In 2015, Gov. Wolf passed Executive order 2015-12, better known for creating the Governor’s Food Security Partnership, which strengthened the relationship between farmers and consumers. Pennsylvania is the first to have a state-sponsored farming program akin to this.
Over the past five years, funding for the initiative has grown by $2.5 million a year. The CARES act gave them another 10 million in the past year – and has skyrocketed the ability to donate over 16 million pounds of food to all 67 counties through the PASS program.
And there is nowhere else to grow, but up.


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