Student startup to connect local farmers with city dwellers

A new student startup at University of California, Berkeley, is working to connect farmers at San Francisco Bay Area with urbanites who want a taste of rural living and are willing to pay for it.

The startup, known as Farmcation, grew from a UC Berkeley innovation course called "Eat. Think. Design," at a time when demand for local food in the Bay Area is on the rise, but most small farms struggle to stay afloat.

It is founded by Grace Lesser, a business and public health master's student, and Caitlyn Toombs, who graduated in May with a master's degree in business.

"To both of us, food is so much more than sustenance," said Toombs. "It's a means of creating community, and a way to foster connectedness with the world around us."

While its business model is expected to be finalized this summer, the seeds of Farmcation began to sprout last summer, when Lesser and her then-fiance moved to her family's farm in western Massachusetts, where they grew an acre of vegetables and raised 65 chickens to serve to their 240 wedding guests later that August.

Through the process of growing and providing their own food to guests, Lesser saw firsthand how powerful food can be in building community, and also realized just how much work small-scale farming takes.

When Lesser returned in the fall to Berkeley in Northern California, on the U.S. west coast, she and Toombs set out to create a platform that linked food-curious consumers to local farmers seeking extra revenue. Although it is a mutually beneficial relationship, it is a connection they say doesn't always happen on its own.

At a recent test event for Farmcation, now in beta, visitors traveled to an organic family farm in California's Central Valley, where they took a tour with a farmer, picked strawberries and ate a picnic lunch prepared by chefs from a San Francisco restaurant.

These are the types of experiences, Toombs says, that will bring people closer to the food they eat, the land it's grown on and the people who produce it.

"Ultimately, we seek to make our cultural relationship with food less transactional and more relational," said Toombs. Endit