The Birth of the Farmlink Project

I remember thinking, and like, I talked about, like, I don't even know if I want to share this because it sounds so naive and even misplaced, but I really thought that the pandemic was going to bring people together. I thought that the partisanship, the divide, the hate, that that was going to go away and people were going to come together to help each other, because that's what I had seen time and time again in a crisis. And instead, as we were, like, watching the world through our phone screen, it looked like we were seeing the opposite. The mass, the no masks, the debate, food supplies hoarding, dwindling. It really felt like this crisis was unfolding, and it didn't seem like there was a lot that we could do about it. In addition to the health crisis that was unfolding, to make matters worse, there was also an economic one. First, millions of families were forced to flood a charitable food system that was never really designed for a crisis. And at the same time that that was happening, farmers were being forced to throw away millions and millions of pounds of food every single day as a result of closures to schools, hotels and restaurants. Pictured here is a line at the Greater Pittsburgh Food Bank. I know it's a really grainy image, which almost even adds to the eeriness of it. The line stretched for seven miles and blocked the freeway. Nearly all the families were turned away that day. Pictured here is a pile of onions where a farmer had to dig a ditch to bury millions of them because they had nowhere to go. And I think in seeing both of these problems sort of side by side, and at some point, and it was probably just frustration and a little bit of naiveness, we said, we're going to do something about it. We said, we'll connect one farm to one food bank. We started calling hundreds of farmers, like hundreds of them. And to our surprise, I don't know if it was maybe the 30 or 40th, we keep getting hung up on, but none of them had surplus.

We had this list of hundreds of farmers that we put together, and we were just calling them one by one, and it was. Didn't pick up, didn't have surplus, didn't want to talk to college kids.

Call back and I'll call the police. It was not going well. And maybe we're like, days into this. I think at this point we've stopped going to class, and it's maybe the 200th farmer that we call. I think it was the 201st farmer that we called. We picked up the phone and he says, hey, Yeah, I have 10,000 eggs. I don't know what to do with them. If you can come pick them up, they're yours. We had no way to get this, but this was the exact item our local food bank was looking for. So we rented a U Haul truck, we drove to the farm, we put those 10,000 eggs in the back, and we literally like bumbled down the 405 Freeway. Honestly, not trying to tip over. Like, I've never been honked at more times in my life than driving in this U Haul.

I'm at home thinking about Aiden and James making omelets in the back of their truck. And it was, it was not the start of a 100 million pound nonprofit.

No. And we ended up delivering it to the local food bank. And maybe that's all. All farmlink would have been. But someone. I think it was Stella, actually, one of our other co founders. She started painting this bed sheet and she wrote the words Farmlink on it. And we had this idea, well, just, why don't we just strap that onto the U Haul truck? And we took this photo. And the photo sort of became this like, visual symbol. We didn't need words to describe it. It was like, oh, this is something to do with people coming together. We posted it online, and pretty soon friends and then friends of friends were reaching out saying, how could I help? Eventually, strangers were even reaching out saying, hey, I have a pickup truck. I'll go 10 hours anywhere, just tell me where to go. Pretty soon we'd moved more food and the news started covering this phenomena. We'd put up this clunky little website and like, to our surprise, one day we wake up and we have thousands of donations from all across the country. I mean, five and $10 donations, but at this point, it's like hundreds of thousands of dollars in our friend's bank account. And that's the public side of the story. But this is etl, so we're going to take you behind the scenes here for a second. Because behind the scenes, if you're listening to anything I'm saying, this solution does not make a lot of sense. Students driving a U Haul truck to farms, to food banks, that is not scalable. It is definitely dangerous. It is borderline illegal.

That's for sure. Illegal. It's not. You can't do that.

As for the next presentation, if it's not clear that this solution isn't exactly perfect, check this delivery that we tried to do of £40,000 of potatoes. We put the pallets in the truck backwards, which Meant when they got to the food bank, we could not get the pallets out. The pallet jack did not fit underneath. So what did we do? We got a big rope. We tied it around the boxes, hooked it to another semi truck, and tried to pull the pallets out. The box exploded, spilling thousands of pounds of potatoes onto the ground, which we then spent basically the next 10 hours picking up by hand. I remember sitting in this pile of potatoes with my hand on my head and like, honestly feeling like I'm going to throw up because you have all of these people who are counting on us, and we have no idea what we're doing. We don't know anything about agriculture. We know even less about shipping, and we sure as hell don't know anything about leadership. At this point, the largest thing that I've led is a high school football team to a 2, 8 season.

I led an improv group in high school, and we didn't win anything.

And that's the amazing thing about a crisis, is that you're way under qualified, but it's better to do something than nothing in that situation. And so at some point we said, we just need to get going. And we started to recruit a team. We called friends and friends of friends, and pretty soon we were making sub teams. The farms team would call farms to identify surplus. The food bank team would call food banks to figure out which food was needed where. And the deal team would do all the logistics. So they'd actually schedule with professional truck drivers to connect the farm to the food bank.

To be clear, we stopped driving U haul trucks. We started working with professional truck drivers, and we were the ones coordinating point.

A to point b, which turns out is really, really hard to do. And we called it deal team 6 because that team was basically up 24 hours a day coordinating trucks because shipping never stops, which is a lot to ask in for students. Within a couple weeks, we were calling thousands of farmers a day, talking with hundreds of food banks and coordinating a bunch of deliveries. And within a month, and we'd set like this goal, we were going to say, we're going to move a million pounds of food in a year. We'd moved a million pounds of food in a month. And I think we all started to realize that this was actually something much bigger and we really wanted to get to work.