Kale and community

Last spring break, Los Altos School District computer science teacher Sheena Vaidyanathan spent her vacation building a website for a new grassroots effort she had formed to support local farmers.

Ten months later, that homegrown project has become a volunteer-run nonprofit that delivers fresh, organic produce directly from Bay Area farms to more than a dozen cities throughout the Bay Area, as far south as Monterey and as far north as Oakland.

Vaidyanathan, a Los Altos resident, started Tera Farm after realizing how small, independent farmers were suffering due to the pandemic shutdown, with restaurants closed and the entire food supply chain disrupted. She reached out to a local farmer through Kitchen Table Advisors, a nonprofit that provides business advice to farmers, and asked if she could buy a box of kale from him directly. She shared the kale with friends and sent their pooled payment to the farmer. The next week, her friends asked what other produce she could get from the farmer. The model quickly took off, spreading through word of mouth.

Fostering that direct relationship between consumer and farmer — no wholesaler or grocery store in between — became the driving purpose of Tera Farm.

"The money was going directly to a farmer we knew and we could put a face to. It was actually going to where the food was coming from," Vaidyanathan said. "This was something positive we were able to do during these months that were otherwise so difficult."

Tera Farm works primarily with Maria Ana Reyes of Narci Organic Farms and Bertha Maga