Home Grown Produce Picked and Processed for Community Members in Need

We have a food bank here and there is a need for it, you know, it might look like a pretty solid community, and we are, but we also have a lot of people who are living below their means and need the services of the Food Bank, but they also can now get coupons for the even healthier food. Right? That’s grown here. And we have a program called Harvest Share which is a community-based, community-volunteer program, although there’s a head point, but the volunteers, the you'd and me’s of town, go out and pick fruit. Or vegetables or whatever beyond what your own needs are. So if you get a crazy crop of corn or potatoes or apples or cherries or plums or peaches or apricots, all of which grow here in – prolifically, then a group of people will come out at your convenience, pick all of the fruit, take it back, process some of it. The rest of it, you know, they’ll divvy up and put out but the stuff that’s kind of windfall or whatever, they’ll process it. There’s a community juicer so that you can make fresh juice and that’s given out to the community. The kinds of innovative things that our community has come up with to just – and it makes us more bear aware too – so it protects us in another level. Right? In our community, we grow grain. The grain is processed, ground, the bakeries here use that in making their breads. We grow every kind of fruit and vegetable you can possibly imagine in North America. Shy of pineapples and bananas, we grow it here. We have four wineries, we have a big, major beer brewing thing – Columbia Brewery – which is Kokanee and Alexander Keith’s primarily. And so we’ve got – and we have a huge organic dairy farm which produces milk and cream and cheese for Creston to Cranbrook to Nelson, kind of in a localish circle because it has to be refrigerated. But we get it all right here at the farmers market or in town and we’ve got people who raise chickens and we’ve got people who raise beef and people that raise pork and all of those things and many of our restaurants are reaching out and saying, “We serve local produce whenever possible. We use local meats or vegetables,” and we’ve got a butcher who – you know, and so it’s pretty – Is huge. [The] Harvest Share [Program] and the juicing program are huge.