Hawaii's Share Your Table

 It started with Dan Nakasone and me driving over the Pali for a meeting at a Waimanalo egg farm. In our hour-long, ag-geek conversation, it dawned on us that all the farmers we were talking about are women.
 
We had to take a closer look. And what we saw was pretty amazing, a large number of farms are being run by women. Daughters who stayed back on the farm to care for aging parents, women who lost their partners and are now running their farms alone, women who came back to keep their family farms alive and independent women pursuing a lifelong dream
of working the land.

Women-run farms are the only growing segment in the U.S. agricultural landscape.

Deeper research shed light on an interesting fact: women-run farms are the only growing segment in the U.S. agricultural landscape. Not only are women responsible for maintaining existing farms and starting new farms, they’re also a driving force behind the burgeoning local farm to school and farmers market movement.  Economic topographers report that 70% of the U.S. economy is driven by consumer spending.  Guess who controls 80% of that spending?
 
We couldn’t help but smile and think that if these two feminine forces unite, we’d have a lot more control over the future of our local food systems.  The women's movement is not a thing of the past.  It’s vibrant, evolving, redefining the world as we know it.  And it’s powerful enough to kick the local food movement into overdrive.
 
With this in mind, Dan and I have officially teamed up to create a web-based effort to bring these two forces together.  We call it She Grows Food. We instigate action projects that give people a way to directly assist farms, send out alerts on legal issues that need public pressure, profile women farmers, explore issues that affect our local food systems and journey into rural farming communities to find ways to help preserve them. If you can, please join us and be a part of this adventure!
 
Share Your Table cares about these issues as much as we do.  This is why we stay up conspiring till the cows come home and why we’re looking forward to collaborating on projects that make our hearts sing and our stomachs growl.