Brunch On The Farm to Celebrate 20 Years of Community Farming in Waltham

20th ANNIVERSARY BRUNCH ON THE FARM

CELEBRATING TWENTY YEARS OF FOOD ACCESS, FARM EDUCATION, AND SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 20TH 2014

11:30 - 1:30 PM

TICKETS ARE LIMITED ~ RESERVE AT COMMUNITYFARMS.ORG

Waltham Fields Community Farm invites the local community to celebrate our 20th year of farming at our site at 240 Beaver Street. This location, at the site of the former UMass Agricultural Extension Station (located across the street from the Girl Scouts, next door to the Cornelia Warren Field at Waverley Oaks Rd), will be our setting for an on-farm brunch hosted by Chef Dan Stokes of the new Moody Street restaurant Red Bird. We are very excited to have Chef Stokes and his team preparing a feast using our own vegetables and served overlooking the fields! Tickets are limited, for more information www.communityfarms.org

Waltham Fields got its start in the early nineties when a group of volunteers formed Community Farms Outreach and spent their first years gleaning leftover produce from area farms to donate to hunger relief efforts. This gleaning effort on other farms gave way to leasing and growing crops on the fallow fields at the UMass Extension Station, dubbed Waltham Fields Community Farm. (Ten years later, the gleaning effort would be reborn anew as founder Oakes Plimpton starts Boston Area Gleaners, now celebrating its 10th year of gleaning local farms and whose offices are located upstairs from Waltham Fields!) Waltham Fields Community Farm soon started a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share program. In the CSA model, people who buy farm shares at the beginning of the year receive a share of the farm’s produce throughout the season. They make weekly visits to the farm to pick up their produce and to experience first-hand the ever-changing seasonality of farming in New England.

We were one of the first farms in eastern Massachusetts to introduce the CSA model, and this endeavor raised money to hire experienced farm management, resulting in much higher yields - enough for the CSA shareholders AND for donating tens of thousands of pounds a year to local neighbors in need, via food access and nutrition programs in the area. We also started our Learning Garden and began offering educational programming for children to learn about where food comes from. Every year, hundreds of children experience our farm-to-table education programs, over two tons of fresh vegetables are distributed to local food banks and other emergency food programs, and hundreds of people come for volunteer and service learning opportunities annually. Just a sampling of what we offer:

• formal farmer training program
• half-price CSA shares and our Outreach Market for income-eligible households
• workshops for children and adults in our outdoor, solar-powered kitchen in our quarter-acre Learning Garden
• teen summer job opportunities with our Youth Crew, learning about the local food system from growing to distributing to all community members
• summer and winter CSA shares
• events open to the public, such as our free, family-friendly Waltham Farm Day every September

JOIN US AS WE DINE IN THE FIELDS! Your ticket purchase supports all our work offering opportunities for children and adults to learn about growing food in an environmentally sound manner and to work together to provide food for all community members. Our mission is to encourage healthy relationships between people, their food supply, and the land from which it grows. We invite you to join us at your local community farm!

For more information and to purchase tickets, please visit our website at www.communityfarms.org