Away in a Basement

Good Afternoon!

I’m always impressed with the story of humble beginnings as I celebrate Christmas. As a farmer with an old barn and feed troughs, and as a woman who experienced natural childbirth three times, I imagine what it would be like to have a baby out in my barn and place him in a feed bunker.

Wholesome Harvest has humble beginnings as well, and businesspeople have sometimes considered those beginnings with derision. "Wholesome Harvest is just an inconsequential little enterprise located in the basement of a farmhouse in Colo, Iowa." Their idea is that if you are
located in a humble place—not only in Colo Iowa, a rural town of 700, but also below ground on a gravel road— well, that proves you ain’t much.

Every work day, four of us gather together in a couple rooms of my farmhouse to work for Wholesome Harvest. I can’t think of a better place to have our "world headquarters" than in an old farmhouse in Iowa, can you? While it would be nice to have a few more colleagues, I embrace our humble beginnings here, because to effect change, it takes gumption, not glitz.

We are earnestly trying to start a grassroots effort to bring about higher standards in organic meat, more traceability in the meat system in general, and domestic fair trade standards for American family farmers. Not a very big agenda for four or so people, eh?

We wrote our mission statement to help people "eat well. . . save the earth. . .and the small farms on it." We are here five years later, still working towards these ends, and I would like feedback from you.

With the start of a New Year, please tell me how you believe I can best serve you here in 2007. You can write back to me here. I hope we can build community and momentum, as we are all interested in safe and healthy food.

Your Friend,
Wende Elliott

Answers to some comments

Good Morning Friends!

A couple people wrote in anonymous questions and I wanted to answer them here, hoping that I understand blogging, and that they will get a prompt to return here for the answer!

An organic consumer from Muscatine Iowa wrote asking how to get our products there. Please request the items that you wish from the Hy-Vee meat manager. He can special order you anything you want, including our full pork, beef and lamb line. It is in his computer in the "PDI" warehouse. If you have problems please do call us at 641 377 7777 x105 and we will work with your local store to get the products you wish to eat. We really need your business, to tell you the truth, and we are reliant on customers to push the meat managers who are reticent to make room for yet another product in their cramped shelves.

Another person wrote in, wondering what to give a friend for Christmas. I would suggest either the "gourmet variety package" or a sampler package that is single type of meat, such as the "beef sampler package" or "chicken sampler package". You can find these on our website on the tab on the left ("products") and then scroll down to "variety assortments". We can put in a gift card if you email us to let us know it is a gift.

Check out at this beautiful photo of the northern lights in Iowa. It was taken last week by Stan Richards and is on the NASA website:http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap061218.html along with a bunch more cool celestial photos.

I wish you a great day!
Wende