“This is our wall of Lady Moon produce,” says Ben Perkins, our Goodness Greeness Produce Buyer. We’re standing in the “F” cooler, also called the citrus cooler, bowled over by pallets of boxes printed in midnight blue and the silhouette of a kneeling woman reaching for a crescent, yellow moon. In this cooler, they’re held at 45 degrees. And while I’m bundled up in a down-jacket, Ben’s without—a mark of his trade and the hours he has spent in refrigeration, well-preserved.
Flipping open lids of these Lady Moon cases reveals flawless zucchini in some, firm cucumbers in others, and glossy green peppers in boxes bigger than the others. Their origin? 1250 acres of family farm sprawled about three different states, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Florida. For a family farm operation, it’s quite extraordinary—a sort of year-round California farm, East Side.
Of course, the story of Lady Moon Farms doesn’t start out this way—pallets of perfect produce, primed for stores, restaurants, hospitals, and co-ops around the Midwest. It first entails major characters, a setting, a vision, and a prerequisite of time and hard work. And the whims of weather. Tom Beddard grew up in Pittsburg. His wife Chris was born next door, in New Jersey. Neither grew up as farmers but in 1987 they set out to till twenty-two acres in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, with a core philosophy to give back to the earth what they take. The Beddard’s were going to farm organically.
Over the next ten years, Chris and Tom established accounts with area health food stores and major grocery chains whose demand quickly escalated. Tom delivered trailer loads to Jersey, Philadelphia, and D.C. Later on, they found distributors, like the Scaman brothers, whose Goodness Greeness organic warehouse was just starting. With their boxes of produce, they helped Goodness Greeness open organic markets in the Midwest. Soon they grew until they could no longer fit in Selinsgrove. In 1996, Lady Moon Farms migrated two hours southwest, just above Pennsylvania’s border with Maryland. Three-hundred acres of dirt became theirs to take from and give back to without end.
Year-round availability for their customers became a reality three years later. In 1999, Lady Moon Farms acquired 400 acres in Punta Gorda, Florida, an area cushioned by a wildlife preserve and the Gulf of Mexico, just a half-hour north of Fort Myers. That’s when they became the largest certified organic vegetable farm on the East Coast. In 2004 more acreage obtained in Bainbridge, George created a transition between growing time and year-round availability that was without hiccup.
There was a time in the story of Lady Moon Farm when Chris and Tom, with their three children, organized a tomato line in an oak grove, without a roof. Now state-of-the-art post-harvest processing takes place at each of the farms, under constant communication with Chambersburg where all sales operations are centralized. When asked how the three locations are controlled, Sheryl Brown, the Sales and Office Manager, chuckles a little before answering, “Tom travels constantly. We never quite know where he is at any certain moment. He has core management groups at the farms and supervisors who travel like he does.” She adds, “Tom is a shrewd businessman who can handle a lot of projects at one time and that’s how this has happened.”
On average, Lady Moon Farms employs eighty-five people. Brown first started working with them seven years ago, through a temp agency. She helped Chris in the office and over time her position has evolved. When she first started, she had no opinion about organics. But on organics today, she says, “I think it’s amazing. At home, we eat organic 90% of the time. From working here, I began to pay attention to it and understand what it really meant and the more I knew, the more I could not not buy it.”
I also ask Ms. Brown to confirm that the model lady reaching for the moon on their blue boxes is Chris. She tells me, “Yes, which makes our logo extra special.” Two years ago, Chris Beddard passed away. Seeing her form on their logo, Brown says she sees: “A very strong woman who could do anything she set her mind to. And there was a focus of energy around her.”
The name of the farm is also especially familial. When Tom and Chris’ oldest daughter, Carla, was three, she would catch sight of the daytime moon and call out, “There’s the lady moon.” When Tom was trying to find a good name for their farm, his daughter’s chime struck a special chord. So the name was adopted, the farm expanded under their stewardship, and the land thrived.
“The Native American sentiment, ‘We are all related,’ is more and more evident in the connections between us and the results of our actions down the road,” writes Tom on his farm’s website. One exemplar of this fusion between actions and results and the people making, taking, and giving them, stands in our warehouse. Their sustainable investments into soil, water, and food looms large like our wall of Lady Moon. It’s a big piece of a story whose value cannot be fully told. Listen and marvel if you will, but not too long if it stands in a refrigerator—you’ll turn blue unless, of course, you’re a produce buyer.
Mercedee Renz, Goodness Greeness
