Carversville Farm Foundation donates 50,000 pounds of food

Carversville Farm donate most of theirs to kitchens feeding the neediest in Philadelphia

Direct approach about the problem of hunger and poverty

The Carversville Farm Foundation is a non-profit farm that combines ecological regeneration and agricultural production to serve our environment as well as our community.

The nonprofit farm was started eight years ago by Tony and Amy D’Orazio, a husband-and-wife team of entrepreneurs. The farm, which includes a lazily grazing herd of Angus cattle and a rafter of Bourbon Red turkeys, donates 90 percent of its produce and meat.

The farm functions more like a dedicated supplier for chefs at half a dozen emergency food providers, all of whom collaborate with the farm in deciding which crops to grow.

Instead of waiting for donations, nonprofit providers get to order what they want each week. Those orders are professionally processed, packed, and delivered to their doors by a dedicated team of 17 that includes two former animal husbandry experts from the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, N.Y.; a former rooftop gardener for a restaurant run by the chef Tom Colicchio; and Mr. Tomlinson, who was the vegetable farmer for Agricola restaurant in Princeton, N.J.

Carversville Farm Foundation is funded almost entirely by the D’Orazios, who has for 32 years operated Vertical Screen, a Bucks County business that conducts background screenings of job applicants for companies. Now those efforts go into the farm and the foundation, where they are co-executive directors.

Mr. D’Orazio, 60, who grew up in South Philadelphia, says the first seeds for the farm were planted in the 1980s, while he and his wife were attending college in the city. That’s when they first recognized the extent of poverty in Philadelphia, where according to the City Council, 24.5 percent of the population still has an income below the poverty level — the highest percentage of any large city in the United States.

They bought most of the land and started the foundation in 2013, after city officials didn’t show up to a meeting Mr. D’Orazio spent hours arranging on behalf of a local nonprofit. “I’m not sure this is the best use of my time,” he recalled telling his wife. “Let’s think about doing something more direct.”

The couple had already volunteered at soup kitchens and realized that struggle to manage donations and often use up what small budgets they have on the lowest-priced produce and proteins. They also discovered that organizations with missions similar to the one they were pursuing made it a point to treat those they served with dignity — a term gaining traction among those who work in emergency food.

The foundation now centers on that concept of dignity, as do the nonprofits it supports. At Face to Face, a community center in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, they serve hot from-scratch food in a formal dining room, with tablecloths and help from volunteer servers, five days a week. They used melamine plates and silverware before switching to disposables during the pandemic.

The environmental side of the work is following its core missions. All of the land they are working on has been farmed for nearly 300 years. The land was tired and damaged. They are striving to manage the land both to restore and maintain ecological integrity. Conventional or no land management invites erosion, watershed degradation, flooding, low organic content, and invasive species.

Sustainable land management is designed to restore soil health by regenerating organic matter, healthy perennial root systems, and extensive microbial activity.

They started their process by removing 45 acres of over-grown nursery trees, as well as restoring about 100 acres of conventionally farmed open fields with soil containing very little organic matter content and microbial activity. They established a very comprehensive cover crop and organic soil amendment program after all.

They practice multi-species rotational grazing whereby our goats, sheep, and cows graze together in one group, followed by their chickens and pigs. This type of management allows them to efficiently move each group of animals to fresh pasture every day keeping their animals healthy and stress-free while spreading their manure evenly on the land. These practices have begun to positively impact the biological activity of their fields, as well as increase the volume of topsoil and organic matter content.

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