Dear Rebecca,

Each week during this season we are sharing a story about our inspiring members and how our work together is accomplishing our mission. It is your financial support that fuels and sustains the work we do across both North and South Carolina. Your support is more important now than ever. Please give today. 

You can donate at carolinafarmstewards.org/give, call us at 919-542-2402 or mail a check to CFSA, PO Box 448, Pittsboro, NC  27312.

Your gift to CFSA is one of the best ways you can
support local farmers and champion food
that is good for consumers, good for farmers and farmworkers,
and good for the land.

Thank you for being an important part of the sustainable food movement!

If you have already made your End-of-Year gift, THANK YOU!

Our vision . . . Good for the Consumer

Consumers (a.k.a. “eaters”) often share that they are confused by labels and terms like natural, cage-free, or grass-fed. They ask how their produce, dairy and meat was grown or raised.  And they want their food dollars to support local farmers and producers and their local community.

Swamp Rabbit Café and Grocery, in Greenville, SC, is filling the gap in the food chain between eaters and farmers who share common values: local, sustainable, organic, healthy, humane, and community.

Imagine a community gathering place where virtually all of the products are grown or produced within 150 miles. A place where the owners know by name and face the over 200 farmers and vendors. A place where farmers,producers and eaters are neighbors and friends. A place that in five short years is transforming the community and sparking a food revolution.

Mary Walsh and Jacqueline Oliver, co-founders and owners of Swamp Rabbit, imagined such a place and had the grit to make it a reality. It’s not easy to manage up to twenty different deliveries each day, and the individualized billing that goes along with these, instead of one big general food truck. It’s not easy managing several thousand unique products and providing signage so that customers can know which farmer or artisan grew or produced it. It’s not easy competing with the convenience, discount prices, and always-available products of the big box stores.

Mary and Jacqueline have often worked 80-hour weeks with their children in tow because they believe in their mission and in the intangible benefits of bringing a community together around food. “We have been delightfully surprised at the scale of which the community has supported us and how loyal our customers are,” said Mary.

Mary shares stories of customers volunteering to help during their events and expansion, customers donating furniture and bike racks and other items, customers who stick with them through the growing pains of a small, local business. Customers have learned what seasonal eating really means when there are no local eggs available because the chickens are molting. Customers experience along with their farmer the heartache when a predator ate a whole flock of Thanksgiving turkeys. Customers learn what it really costs a farmer to produce a product using the organic and sustainable practices they value.

CFSA staff have been customers and friends, as well as professional consultants since the very beginning of the store. “CFSA has built a network of resources and people in the Carolinas committed to a shared vision which has been invaluable to us,” Mary shares.

Swamp Rabbit Café and Grocery is a model of the kind of links in the food system that we need more of in the Carolinas.

Visionaries like Mary Walsh and Jacqueline Oliver can’t do it without you.

Your gift today help CFSA continue to build the network necessary to create the vibrant, sustainable, regional food system we need in the Carolinas.

Please give generously. 

You can donate online at carolinafarmstewards.org/give 

or mail a check to CFSA, PO Box 448, Pittsboro, NC  27312

or call us at 919-542-2402

To read more about Swamp Rabbit Cafe' and Grocery on our Sweet Potato Blog, click here.