Cutters of barbadosmenu

Congrats Simon on the new distribution center and great to see Secretary Redding out visiting Western PA again. Wishing you and the Harvie team continued growth and success.

Cutters of barbadosowner

Wow Simon! Great remarks, and what a testament to your work to have Sec. Vilsack present. I know it has been a bumpy road at times, but very proud of the work you’ve done and will continue to do!

Executive Leadership | Enterprise Innovation | AI/GenAI | Cloud | Robotics | Early Stage Investor | Navy Veteran | Sustainable Farmer

My opening remarks from our day hosting the US Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack and the PA Secretary of Agriculture, Russell Redding as well as many other stakeholders in ag, Harvie staff, and Harvie members! -- "We are honored to host the secretary and the rest of you. Thank you to the secretary and the usda for supporting the agricultural infrastructure that builds resilient and robust local food economies, that supports small farms, and builds prosperous urban and rural communities. I believe that food can be a connector. Food unites all of us: rural or urban, regardless of race and political affiliation – through sharing food and feeding each other we build genuine communities and we can heal our divides. My name is Simon Huntley and I’m the founder and CEO of Harvie: we are a food delivery company based here in Pittsburgh that works with 100s of local farmers and delivers direct-to-door to 4000+ local consumers to make the local food economy easy for both farmers and consumers. You are sitting in our new distribution center that we are working to get set up over the next few months. This is the future home of local food in western Pennsylvania! We need this kind of infrastructure to fulfill the bold dream of a robust and resilient local food economy. We’ve slowly and carefully built a scaleable model that can be rolled out in every community across the country, using our hometown of Pittsburgh as our test market. But why does a local food economy matter? Over the past 50 years in American agriculture we’ve broken the connections between each other in the name of a national and international food system that prioritizes efficiency over the well being of consumers, workers, and our land. We don’t know the people who feed us, the people who feed us don’t know us, so corners are cut on both sides of the food economy – it’s a race to the bottom. This system has destroyed so many rural communities, including the one I grew up in. I grew up on a small Appalachian farm 70 miles south of here, the son of a coal miner and a farmer. It was never a question for me growing up: I would leave that rural community to find opportunities in an urban area that didn’t exist where I grew up. As I left the farm to study technology at Penn State University, I started working on farms in the summertime and cooking more and I had this question that hasn’t left me for the last 20 years: why don’t local farms feed local people? It seems so simple and obvious to me. I’ve spent the last 20 years in business trying to figure out how to get an answer to this simple question. I demand a world and an economy that can allow local farms to feed local people and won’t stop until our food economy supports farms like the one I grew up on, so a farm kid in my shoes now sees a future on the farm – that is rural prosperity to me." ..there's more, hit the character limit