Olds resident and musician Dustin Farr is spearheading a campaign to collect vegetables for the Calgary Food Bank at the Co-op parking lot on Aug. 22.
Farr says the Calgary Food Bank shares food with smaller food banks, so he's pretty confident some of that produce will end up at the Mountain View Food Bank.
He and his wife Jody Farr are urging residents to bring any spare vegetables they have to the Westview Co-op parking lot between 8:30 a.m. and 9:30 a.m. on Aug. 22.
Also on that day, they're collecting vegetables at the Crossfield Community Hall between 10:30 a.m. and 11 a.m. and at the Airdrie Town and Country parking lot between 11:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m.
After that, they'll deliver everything they've collected to the Calgary Food Bank at 1:30 p.m.
Farr says the project is part of a challenge among musicians to do as much as they can for the charity of their choice.
The Farrs are asking that those donating produce:
* Harvest them as close to delivery as possible; so the night before or the morning of the donation.
* Store them in a cool place before delivery.
* Remove the leafy, green tops from root vegetables.
* Leave the dirt on them because that helps preserve them.
* Package each kind of produce in cardboard boxes or paper bags and label them separately.
Farr says he and Jody decided to launch the campaign in Olds because they live on an acreage just outside of town and he works as an instructor at Olds College.
"I instruct in the ag management program, so plants and soils are kind of my area of expertise," Farr says.
They decided to arrange for produce drop-offs in the other locations listed because they have family in Airdrie-Crossfield area.
"If you've got fresh vegetables in your garden and you've got extra that you're trying to get rid of or they were just going to go to waste, that's what we're wanting," Farr says. "We're wanting people to bring them in and donate them and hopefully we can kinda get a truckload built up and donate it, kind of thing."
The Farrs have been organizing this project since about the beginning of July.
"We've got a big garden at home and just being from a small-town community, if somebody's going through a rough patch or whatever, a lot of times, you take food over, you take meals over, just to help lighten the load on whatever they're going through," he says.
"So we kind of looked at it that it kind of ties in that ag background that I've got, and that donation of food and fresh food that you've kind of raised on your own and raised from home.
"That's the goal at the end of the day, is to bring awareness to the fact that the food bank actually takes in fresh produce and fresh veggies because that's something that I think is kind of important ñ that people who are using food hampers aren't always having to eat just canned goods; they can actually get some fresh vegetables."
"That's something that I think is kind of important ñ that people who are using food hampers aren't always having to eat just canned goods; they can actually get some fresh vegetables."DUSTIN FARR
