Smith said the platforms contain key ideas like advocacy for domestic family farms, improving access to fresh produce and educating people on simple preparation to make produce less daunting to the inexperienced.
Smith’s Farm participates in some initiatives locally, such as donating product to food banks and sponsoring a garden at area schools. While those are notable on a micro level, Smith feels more can be done.
“I’m asking our team to look at the programs we are doing to see if we can work with our partners to do more,” she said.
Smith said she is looking for where first step impacts drop off. For example, produce donations are great, but what is happening beyond the larger scale food bank?
“Many food pantries that pull from food banks lack refrigeration to properly store fresh food and/or lack resources to help those served know how to prepare it,” she said.
Smith said the IFPA Global Produce & Floral show seemed like a good place to take this fun idea out of the box because she credits the association for having strong leadership on nutrition and advocacy, which are both part of the Campaign for Produce platform.
“I am looking to our team at Smith’s Farm to come up with next-level ideas,” she said. “We want everything from small, internal company-wide culture choices to a wider net in the communities in all of the states we produce crops.”
Smith said the “real nuts-and-bolts” of the campaign starts at the farm level, with growers facing myriad challenges each year to produce a crop.
“Farms need to be sustainable, but it is getting more difficult each year,” said Smith. “It’s hard to produce fresh food. We have issues with labor, land and regulatory compliance that must be addressed every year, and as an industry we need to be aligned on those issues. Family farms in America need loud voices and strong leaders who are not afraid of a fight. A lot of us have our heads down working hard for our own companies, but sometimes we have to look up and see what needs to be done in the larger industry. It’s not about us showing up at a convention and meeting with our own customers, though those partnerships make the rest possible. We want to support the whole industry as a health provider.
“It’s difficult to see Americans so much less healthy than they were 10 or 20 years ago, and if we could help people eat just one more piece of healthy food each day, that would represent progress in this fight.”
Smith doesn’t claim to know all the answers, but she urges her own team, as well as the industry at large, to keep these goals in mind as they interact with their own customers, vendors and even competitors on a day-to-day basis.
“We really need to be advocates at every level,” said Smith. “We need to make increasing access and consumption of produce more of a priority. We don’t just want a chance to meet customer demand, we want to explode that demand level and blow sales trends wide open. It takes new ideas to do that.”
At the IFPA Global show in Atlanta, Smith’s Farm will promote the 2024 Campaign for Produce at its booth by handing out custom t-shirts for both the Broccoli/Cauliflower and Kale/Collard tickets. Smith said there will be a social media component to the campaign and there are plans in the works for a mock vote to decide a winner, though plans are still evolving.
“This is all about getting the conversation started and having some fun,” Smith said of the initiative. “It’s easy to think our little company is too small to move the needle on a challenge this big, but dad [Lance Smith] says, ‘farmers are the eternal optimists, the job demands it.’ So, we at Smith’s Farm won’t resign to do nothing just because we can’t do everything. We’re going to run this campaign and put our products front-and-center, and we’re going to find new ways to get them noticed and consumed so that my family can stay in agriculture for another 100 years.”
This is not the first audacious promotion for Smith’s Farm, which famously took on kale at the height of its popularity earlier this century. It held retail demos for broccoli, touting it as the “Alpha Vegetable,” and handed out “Respect the Tree” t-shirts in support of its broccoli crop. But a familial love of the trendy Kale has grown for Smith through its close ties with Georgia greens producers like Baker Farms, which works with Smith on Southeast broccoli crops.
Smith said she hopes those who visit the Smith’s Farm booth, which is located within the Fresh from Florida pavilion, have fun with this promotion while also taking the message seriously.
“The IFPA show is all about networking and camaraderie, and it’s an ideal place for the industry to meet and exchange ideas,” she said. “We have the USDA recommendations on our side, telling people to fill half their plate with fruits and vegetables, yet there is still a gap between the recommended number of servings and the number of servings people actually eat. I want to try to help close that gap. Even slight progress is good progress, and I know that we can do more as an industry if we work together.”