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Ozarks Food Harvest improves Food Bank Farm with grant from Musgrave Foundation

The Ozarks Food Harvest Food Bank Farm outside of Rogersville.
Chris Drew / KSMU
The Ozarks Food Harvest Food Bank Farm outside of Rogersville.

Ozarks Food Harvest addresses hunger across the region. Some of the thousands of pounds of food they share are grown on their own plot of land. Thanks to a $200,000 grant and recent improvements they are growing and sharing more food than ever.

Birds, bugs, a light breeze and the chatter of a small crowd set the stage for Ozarks Food Harvest as they cut the ribbon Tuesday on updates to its Food Bank Farm outside of Rogersville. The farm is part of OFH’s Full Circle Gardens Program. It sits on property donated a decade ago by Dr’s Meera and Alan Scarrow. Community connections and support are essential to the program.

Now with a $200,000 grant from the Jeannette L. Musgrave foundation awarded last year Ozarks Food Harvest has been able to purchase a new van with double the capacity of their previous vehicle, they use it to collect and distribute produce from local farms. They’ve also added a new irrigation system that can be controlled remotely, and they’ve replaced the falling apart raised beds original to the property with 78 solid cinder block beds.

“We're already outpacing last year,” Director of the Full Circle Gardens Program Alexa Poindexter said, “and it's an incredible gift to be able to have a fresh new space.”

She added, “I think our volunteers would love to point out that they get to sit on the beds again."

She says the new beds were ready at the end of winter, and they’ve already harvested cabbage, radishes and greens. Tuesday morning, they were full of potatoes, peppers, carrots, beets and cucumbers.

OFH reports that the farm generates 12 to 14 thousand pounds of food annually on average. It also educates the public on and supports ecology and gardening in the community, through corporate and school field trips, workshops and by sharing seeds and starter plants. Poindexter says that beyond just growing food, collaboration and education is essential to the program’s bigger mission of changing the way people think about food systems and access.

She sees everything fitting together and coming together on the farm.

“All of the different things that we do kind of feed in together,” Poindexter explained, “and this is our home base, this is our launching site. So, to have this in the condition that it is, is phenomenal.”