Farm Partner Highlight: Early Morning Orchards

Kaye Davis is a career chef with a passion for supporting local, sustainable, eco-focused farms. However, in 2019, she found herself facing a unique opportunity to be on the other side of the food production line when she was asked to take over operations at Early Morning Orchards in Palisade, Colorado. “I just happened to be the closest thing to a farmer that was here in 2019. Skip [the owner] was like ‘let’s see what you can do with the farm.’” 

Kaye is no stranger to working with farmers, though. “I come from a long background of farm to table, working as a chef with local farms,” she says. “I was fortunate enough to be able to call on a lot of my friends in farming who really helped me get through that first season.” 

Following that first season, Kaye was approached by Kasey Weingarten, who had recently graduated with her degree in Culinary Arts and Sustainable Agriculture and had a passion for food security. “I didn’t have the actual growing experience, so we learned that year,” Kasey explains. “I went to culinary school thinking that that was the route I wanted to go to feed people, and then I realized that growing the food was more important. ”We decided at that point that it gave us an opportunity, without having to pay attention to peaches so much, that we could expand our vegetable operation,” says Kaye.

And with that decision, opportunity followed. LIFT-UP, a nonprofit food pantry supporting communities in Garfield and Pitkin counties, gave Early Morning Orchards a $2,500 forward contract, meaning the organization paid ahead for produce. “We were able to finish that contract in three weeks, so I reached out to the organization and asked if there was anything else we could do,” Kaye recalls. At the time, Early Morning Orchards had grocery stores in Basalt and Silt, which meant the team was frequently on the road. “They asked us if we could do aggregation for them, basically meaning collecting from other farmers, aggregating it all together, and delivering it as one delivery to the food pantry,” she says. 

That decision lead to unexpected, but much welcomed growth. “We took the models we created with LIFT-UP and in the last four years we’ve gone from administrating and aggregating for one program to now we take care of 12 across the state.”

The biggest customer? Community Food Bank of Grand Junction, which was also Early Morning Orchards’ first client in Mesa County. “In the last three years of doing business with them, Community Food Bank now accounts for 20 to 25 percent of our business and they're our biggest client,” Kaye happily states.

Over the last four years, Kaye and Kasey have fine tuned their approach to sustainable agriculture with a focus on food security and equitability. 

“We’re so committed to quality here.The head team comes from culinary backgrounds, so we're really focused on what people do with food afterwards,” Kasey says. “And you see so much in the high end restaurant industry that good food, good quality food is for the people that can pay for it. And that's just not what we believe in. We think that everyone deserves access to good food and good meals, and that's why we have an intense drive to feed people here, and that includes all people, not just people with a lot of dollars in their pockets.”

Kaye and Kasey said that 2020 really helped bring food security and food equitability into the forefront - which included their farm. “We really made the conscious decision to make this shift from being a truly production farm to a purpose driven farm,” explains Kaye. “Everyone deserves access to good food.”

They also took into account the unique ability of Early Morning Orchards to grow fresh produce year round. The farm has an array of greenhouses which allow the team to cultivate foods from winter squashes to spring lettuce no matter what season it may be. “We can address hunger any time of the year,” says Kaye.

So why not sell these high end products to restaurants? The answer was easy for Kaye and Kasey - “There’s a lot of requirements that they want everything looking the same,” Kaye states. “That’s just not how food is. We had the opportunity to really pivot and move our food to a place where it was really needed.” That place? Those in the community struggling with food security and access to fresh foods. 

Currently, Early Morning Orchards aggregates with 45 farms across the state. The team regularly travels across Colorado to collect food to be able to provide food pantries, like Community Food Bank, with fresh, local food year round. 

“Focusing on food security and aggregation has the added benefit of letting us support our fellow farmers,” Kasey says. “It’s hard to be a small farmer producing good food. It’s hard to find your market in any setting.”

Kaye explains that though she and her team are asked frequently, “how do we fix the food system,” she says that is up to the industrialized food system to figure out. “I’m here to create a more localized, sustainable, and efficient food system that supports the communities that we and other farmers are operating in.”

Kaye and Kasey focused on bringing back their operations and impact to Mesa County. They wanted to find ways to truly affect change in their communities before tackling the big picture. And they found that with Community Food Bank of Grand Junction.

“The reciprocal relationship we have with Community Food Bank is really creating a food ecosystem,” Kaye says. When Community Food Bank purchases fresh produce and eggs from Early Morning Orchards, most products come from EMO but many come from EMO aggregate farm partners. The purchase not only supports the operations of Early Morning Orchards and the 14 team members who make the farm run, but the purchase also supports farms across the state.

“I mean, they do wonderful things in this community and to support this community, but also, by supporting us, they’re able to support things like beginning farmers, they're able to support a situation where 50% the employees on this farm, including both of us, identify as queer, which we're not really provided a space in agriculture. They're able to support us to be able to do education programs,” Kaye says.

Early Morning Orchards runs a culinary arts program on the farm in partnership with CMU Tech, headed by Kaye. “They come on the farm, they learn the whole process from seed to community, and they’re able to do things like cook for the Community Food Bank fundraiser dinner in September,” she says.

For Kasey, working with Community Food Bank and food access expansion has been more than she expected. “It’s an incredibly rewarding thing to be involved with because we can say our food is making a difference here,” she says. “We do grow high end products, but those same high end products that might be ending up in the hands of restaurants and grocery stores that we deal with are the exact same products that are ending up on the shelves of the Community Food Bank and our other programs that we work with.”

Kaye gets a bit emotional about her connection with Community Food Bank. “I haven’t worked with anyone - and I might cry about this - I haven’t worked with anyone who is as passionate about what she does as Alisha is.” Alisha Wenger is the Executive Director of Community Food Bank and has taken the organization from one full time employee to seven. 

Together, Early Morning Orchards and Community Food Bank piloted a Mobile Marketing in the summer of 2023. Using a farmer’s market trailer donated by Early Morning Orchards, Community Food Bank was able to reach communities and neighbors that otherwise would not have been able to reach the Food Bank. The program is set to start in April with hopes of expansion.

“I feel like joining with and working with Community Food Bank, we finally got that first, like look into how we were having an impact and how we were affecting our own community right here at home,” Kaye says. “It's very hard when you ship your food elsewhere and you don't see the end user of all of your food. But here we can see that they're getting their eggs in their produce and they're just so happy to have something that's not only fresh but identifiable to them that they'll be able to use and they're thrilled to be able to be using.”

And for Kaye, Kasey, and Early Morning Orchards, this is just the beginning.

“I think the Community food bank has allowed us to grow and has really created this food ecosystem that will continue to grow and take care of the community, not just here in Palisade, but in the entirety of the Grand Valley. There is infinite potential here, and I think we've just barely scratched the surface of what we can do.”