Keeping Northeast Land in Agriculture

Back in 2010, Annie Myers was working at Pete’s Greens, a year-round organic vegetable farm in Craftsbury, Vermont. She could see how challenging it was for growers in Northern Vermont to sell to customers outside their immediate delivery area, particularly to urban buyers within the region. Annie had previously worked in the food industry in NYC, and she had friends in the city who wished they could buy the food she was growing.

In November 2013, Annie started driving a refrigerated van back and forth between Craftsbury and Brooklyn every week, filling the van with vegetables from a handful of growers, and selling to a dozen customers. For those first several months, she was compiling customer orders while making deliveries, emailing and calling farmers to order food while on route, finishing up delivery in Brooklyn, and then driving the six hours back home in the same day.

Myers Produce now serves over 175 growers and producers in six states, and delivers year-round to customers in NYC, Boston, Providence, the Cape, the Hudson Valley, and throughout Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Vermont. We employ a staff of twenty, we operate a fleet of six box trucks and three vans, and we occupy a 10,000 sq ft warehouse space in Hatfield, MA. We source exclusively from vendors in the Northeast, and over half of the food we sell is grown or produced in Vermont. We offer distribution, refrigerated freight, and warehousing services to businesses throughout our region.

From the beginning, our goal has been to increase farmers' access to markets within our region, in an effort to keep land in agriculture in the Northeast. Every time we reach a new customer, start working with a new vendor, start a new route to a new region, or offer a new service to our network, we are working to expand the functionality of our regional food system.

Read Annie’s Ten-Year Letter