Farm to Family boldly goes where no farmers market has gone before.
By Laura Kitchin Greenleaf • Photos by Laura Merricks
This isn’t your grandfather’s milk truck. Unless your grandfather was a Merry Prankster. Bearing deer antlers, lanterns, American flags, and slogans for every taste, the tricked-out Farm to Family school bus is the scene stealer of Richmond’s local food movement. Anchoring a street full of vendors at the city’s recent Earth Day celebration, the bus offered customers a different kind of produce aisle with apples, potatoes, sweet potatoes, squash, greens, bread, maple syrup, and dairy products displayed on built-in shelves constructed from reclaimed barn wood or stashed in coolers by the emergency exit door. “Everybody relates to a school bus,” laughs “F2F” founder Mark Lilly, who explains that he chose one for his mobile market because it’s “the most utilitarian space.” The bus is equal parts general store, huckster’s wagon, and 1960s throwback. Embodying both tradition and revolution, it is setting a new standard for making fresh, locally sourced food accessible throughout communities, even those as stratified as Richmond.
Think Global, Act Mobile
Lilly knows that food insecurity threatens both rich and poor. While studying for a master’s degree in Disaster Science and Emergency Management at the University of Richmond, he focused on food-shortage projections in Western countries. Lilly was disgusted by a fossil-fuel dependent food system “set up for failure.” He points to California’s San Joaquin Valley, “the nation’s salad bowl,” where years of drought and decades of runaway growth have fomented a crisis of water shortages, plunging productivity, and rising unemployment.
The more Lilly learned, the more restless he became with the status quo—worldwide and in Richmond. In February 2009, he and his wife bought an old school bus that they saw on Craigslist, with the glimmer of an idea of how to rebuild a local food economy. A few months later, Lilly was in the audience at a showing of the film Food, Inc., sponsored by Tricycle Gardens, a Richmond nonprofit that supports urban agriculture. During the panel discussion that followed the film, he heard a woman ask, “What am I supposed to do? I can’t get food like that.”
Lilly had an answer. He had recently lost his job, but now he had found his cause. He gave up grad school, started F2F, and got behind the wheel of the old bus—because, as he says, “Change does not come from the top down. Change comes from the bottom up.”
Direct Delivery
In less than a year, Lilly has put more than one new twist on central Virginia’s food distribution system. F2F is a farmers market, but the only one on wheels. It’s a CSA (community supported agriculture), but the only one that provides home delivery. And 40 years after the near extinction of the milkman, F2F provides dairy and meat delivery directly to customers’ homes on a monthly payment basis. “Feeding the Community One Stop at a Time” isn’t just a motto. It’s a mission.
Every week, Lilly loads up the bus at the Shenandoah Produce Auction in Dayton, near Harrisonburg, his one-stop veggie shop, and Polyface Farms in Swoope, outside Staunton, which provides him with meat, poultry, and eggs. To this bounty he adds milk, butter, cheese, and yogurt from Mountain View Farm in Fairfield, north of Lexington, and more produce from his parents’ farm in Louisa County, his and his wife’s own greenhouse and garden, and the gardens of friends. Loaves from Bread for the People, mixes from Wade’s Mill, and pastries baked by the Lillys’ foodie friends fill baskets and line shelves edged in chicken wire to keep them in place on their bumpy ride.
No Boundaries
F2F is able to reach customers wherever there’s enough parking space. Lilly establishes regular CSA pick-up locations, but he also spends his days “going here and there to see what works.” Blackberry in hand, he alerts F2F’s 2,500 Facebook friends and Twitter followers to his whereabouts. Sometimes, he says, he just “picks a spot to park and sees what happens,” with passersby becoming customers.
Richmonders board the bus from Fulton Hill to the tony West End and everywhere in between. F2F has a reputation for targeting areas without grocery stores or farmers markets in a city with poverty levels more than double what they are statewide, yet critics have dinged F2F for being spotted in well-heeled neighborhoods. Lilly points out that without the support of his more affluent clientele, he wouldn’t be in business at all. His egalitarian approach takes him to the Federal Reserve Building as well as the Neighborhood Resource Center, to high-end restaurants as well as housing projects. F2F’s pricing system, refined from Lilly’s 20 years in the restaurant industry, uses grocery stores and farmers markets as benchmarks. What is a steal to some is a shock to others. F2F accepts EBT cards (aka food stamps) and WIC vouchers (part of a federal food program for low-income women, infants, and children), and Lilly admits he has sometimes sold food at cost.
Next Stop
On Mechanicsville Turnpike just outside Richmond, the F2F bus is parked in front of what was formerly a florist’s shop. Out back are a greenhouse and a second bus, destined to become F2F’s traveling café—with a kitchen in the back and family-style seating up front. The flower shop will soon become a general store called All Things Local, sourcing its products from within a 150-mile radius of Richmond and offering classes in canning and preserving.
The Lillys do it all without capital, investors, or marketing. Volunteers and interns help shoulder the burden. While the F2F style may seem haphazard, its whimsy conceals savvy and the very self-sufficiency Lilly is seeding in his community. To those who feel like they can’t possibly make such a difference, Lilly has one thing to say: Come aboard!
