Looking for local berries, meats or produce? Finding it in Washington just got easier

If you’ve ever been on the prowl for locally raised pork, organically grown peppers and a place to pick your own lavender, the Washington Food & Farm Finder promises to make your complicated online search as simple as using Google Maps.

Eat Local First, a new statewide food and farming collaborative, offers a one-stop shop to connect you, the eater, directly with farms in your backyard — just in time to capitalize on renewed interest in local food as the pandemic laid bare flaws inherent to the commercial supply chain.

“It’s been a really wild time,” said Micha Ide, co-owner of Orting meat farm Bright Ide Acres and program manager of Pierce County Fresh, one of many regional food resources that has merged under the Eat Local First umbrella. “With COVID, it was all at once what everyone wanted to do again. Now we’re trying to ride this wave and hope that it sticks.”

Through the Farm Finder map, you can search more than 1,700 listings in 37 counties for everything from farm stands selling the Pacific Northwest’s famous berries to restaurants that buy beef from Washington cattle.

Ide described it as “one of the main ways that we can get consumers shopping locally, and make it convenient and easy to find what they’re looking for.”

The online tool also serves as perhaps the simplest and most effective tool yet to join a farm subscription known as a CSA, or Community Supported Agriculture. You pre-pay the farmer directly for regular “shares” — boxes of seasonal produce, cartons of eggs, wheels of cheese, packs of meat and bushels of flowers — that are delivered straight to your door or a nearby pickup point.

Whether you want to support women-owned businesses or eat better meat, the map points you in exactly the right direction — something that might seem straightforward in our digital era but has often proved elusive for local food advocates. Farmers, you see, are frequently busy — quite literally — digging in the dirt, with few leftover hours in the day to develop a website or promote their first asparagus crop of the season.

“We need things to be convenient,” Ide said. “By creating something that’s consumer facing and consumer focused is also going to be a farmer benefit.”

Eat Local First grows in WA

Before she and her husband bought their Orting farm in 2017, Ide worked in sales and marketing. She knows firsthand how time-consuming and headache-inducing advertising can be when you’re busy in the field every day.

“To be a farmer, it’s an entire entrepreneur,” she said. “You have to do everything, not just growing food. Most of us don’t have a lot of time or resources to hire out.”

Eat Local First is an amalgamation of similar established “local food finders” and a culmination of decades of oft-fragmented grassroots efforts to, shall we say, put local food on the map.

Its name derives from an initiative of Sustainable Connections, a Bellingham nonprofit dedicated to furthering an environmentally sound future for food and waste to housing and electricity. That organization, founded in 2002, offered a regional “food atlas” for its corner of the state. Meanwhile, Tilth Alliance, a coalition formed in 2015 of several Seattle-based local food groups — one with roots in the “back to the land” movement of the 1970s — had developed a statewide farm guide.

What started in 2003 as 24 pages of addresses and quick facts about farms in three counties ballooned into 72 pages of farms across the state, according to Sheryl Wiser, outreach director of Tilth Alliance and a local food advocate of 10-plus years.

“We all share a firm belief that our food sheds do not exist in isolation from one another, and neither do our communities,” said Wiser. “We all want to nurture ourselves, our communities. We want to be supportive of local business, local farms — and we’ve learned a lot about that in the past year.”

She, Ide and others emerged from a series of 2019 conversations with the idea to build a statewide platform. By early 2020, they were “getting serious,” she recalled this March.

“What really kicked everything into gear — it took off to the races — was COVID,” she said. “There was this fierce urgency of consumer demand, and then you had the collapse of institutional markets — that really, seemingly, happened overnight — coupled with a mutual desire to create something that could be used statewide to connect Washingtonians with local food.”

The foundation was there. To solidify the notion of local food in the eye of the broader public, they decided the time was now or never.

Through modest funding from the Washington State Department of Agriculture, Eat Local First posted a landing page online last summer, as the team pitched the idea to farms and aggregated data from several regional guides. The map went live in November, in time for a holiday campaign that reached 300,000 people, Wiser said.

“The beauty of having a platform like Eat Local First: It’s a mix of user-generated content, plus curated content,” she said. “It’s not a static site.”

Eat Local First is able to offer listings for free through 2021. In addition to produce and animal farms, the map also features other food and drink businesses, including seafood purveyors, breweries and wineries. Grocery stores and markets with a commitment to purchase at least 10 percent of goods from local sources, as well as restaurants that work with at least two local producers, can also join. Food banks and other food-access resources can also list on the Food & Farm Finder map.

Businesses manage their own listings and can make themselves searchable through an array of categories and descriptors. Farms can choose, for instance, dairy and eggs, meat and poultry, seeds and starts, and features such as CSA, home delivery and U-Pick; a grocer can select curbside service, locally owned and food access (approved for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits).

“How do I find blueberries, or how do I find local tea?” asked Wiser. “Everything fits together. It really is like a beautiful Lego model.”

With summer approaching, farms are gearing up for seasonal markets and another sell-out year of CSAs. Ide said her farm had only a few meat shares left as of mid-March, and she expects them to be snagged any day now — as she does for most every farm’s CSA this year: “It’s a very exciting time for local agriculture.”

EAT LOCAL FIRST - WASHINGTON FOOD & FARM FINDER

▪ Find where and how to buy local food near you at eatlocalfirst.org, and search the map at eatlocalfirst.org/wa-food-farm-finder

▪ For CSAs, search beyond your immediate backyard, as many farms deliver to dozens of zip codes. Complete this online survey by March 31 to be entered to win $100 toward a CSA of your choice.

This story was originally published March 26, 2021 at 10:00 AM.