Growing Forward

Last year we were given a bag of sweet corn seed from Monsanto's Grow Forward program. Due to the drought and changes in our crop plans, we had to wait and use the seed this year.

The idea behind this program is to grow an acre of sweet corn to share. Share it and do some good in your community. Monsanto offered to provide the seed if the farmer would take care of the rest and do some good with it.

Beautiful baby corn plants!

The sweet corn seeds we planted and grew are GMO. They enable us to grow with limited herbicide and no pesticide sprayed. I'll try to do a post on why that works awesome. But today I want to tell you about how awesome this experience has been, in ways I didn't really expect.

The GMO sweet corn is on the left.

The sweet corn ripened pretty quickly and was delicious (seriously awesome)! We only have one food bank in our community and they are only open two days per week. So we had plenty of corn to share with them and more to share in our neighboring community. We made a total of four deliveries to our local food bank with my car full of corn. I also made a delivery to a soup kitchen in a neighboring community.

Fresh picked corn headed to the food bank

We have donated to food banks before and helped with food drives. But usually all non perishable goods and done when the food bank isn't open. In this case the food is fresh and needs to be delivered as they open (which is an interesting logistical challenge in providing fresh produce to those in need). I'm a mom and busy so usually I arrived a few minutes after they opened. This meant that for the first time I was seeing the people who are using this important service. Not only did I see the faces and the children, I saw the quantity of people who needed this food.

Check out this interactive map by Feeding America to see what food insecurity rates are in your back yard. http://map.feedingamerica.org/county/2013/overall/california.

1 in 7 Americans turns to the Feeding America Network for food assistance

Seeing the level of need in our community was striking. Almost every time I made a drop off there was a long line for people waiting to use the service. People of all ages and both genders and plenty of children. And as some of the volunteers noted, many people from working families.

It was so rewarding to get to drop off fresh food to people who need it!

Some friends stopped by to get corn and helped pick some extra boxes for the food bank.

This project was also a great way to visit with friends and neighbors. We invited people to come and pick and pick some extras for us to take to the food bank. We even had people bring boxes because we were quickly running out of containers! We also delivered sweet corn on the days the food bank wasn't open. Keeping up with an acre of fresh sweet corn is a challenge!

This was a really rewarding project. We are thinking about doing it again. We have friends in other parts of the country who are selling fresh corn and donating the proceeds. This allows the food banks to use the money for whatever their needs may be. With our food bank only open two days a week, this may be the better option. We have almost a year to decide but it sure has us thinking about hunger in our community and how we can help.

We really thank Monsanto for providing the corn seed!