Round the Bend Farm manifests love one seed at a time

For the past five years, Round the Bend Farm has been growing and distributing food to local non-profit organizations as part of their Manifest Love program. 

Now, Manifest Love is growing, with the farm set to expand distribution into the winter for the first time by offering food shares biweekly. Originally, the program ended around the third week of December when the growing season ended.

“It’s a big lift for us because you’re sort of short staffed in this time because our season with help is gone,” said Desa Van Laarhoven, executive director and co-founder of Round the Bend Farm.

Round the Bend Farm established Manifest Love in March 2020 at the beginning of the covid pandemic when they noticed an uptick in people buying into local food shares, which are programs that provide food to people in need. 

“I communicated with a lot of different farmer friends that I have, and they … had never had as many shares [before],” Van Laarhoven said.

After speaking with friends and holding a team meeting, Round the Bend Farm employees realized they had the necessary land to grow food and the means to give the food away to nonprofits to feed their program participants.

“It was a perfect time for us to get to help,” Van Laarhoven said. “We were raising food and giving it away."

In 2017, the farm bought the property neighboring the farm, which opened up opportunities for them to begin Manifest Love and grow more food for the program.

The majority of the food goes to residents of New Bedford, distributed to the YWCA, Youth Opportunities Unlimited, and the Sacred Birthing Village, which services women across the South Coast, for free. These organizations then distribute the food to program participants.

In November, several partners from these organizations approached Van Laarhoven concerned about what would happen to the people who receive food through Manifest Love in the new year.

“They came to me, and I was like, ‘Oh, we got to figure this out,’” Van Laarhoven said, explaining that they had asked her if there was a way to do shares during the winter.

Through the help of a Dartmouth donor, this idea became a reality.

During the normal growing season, the majority of food donated in the Manifest Love program is grown at Round the Bend Farm, but now that the program is being expanded, there has also been more outside help.

“We’ve been able to buy in some food,” Van Laarhoven said, including from a farm based in Hadley, Massachusetts that recently dropped off black beans and acorn squash.

Round the Bend Farm has also received from various farms cabbage, turnips, sweet potatoes, onions and more that will all be given away this winter.

Van Laarhoven noted that the farm doesn’t track how many people the food feeds, but gave a conservative estimate that in the peak season 400 people can be fed in a week, with 150 shares going out to organizations each week and then given to residents.

Van Laarhoven called the partnerships between Round the Bend Farm and the New Bedford non-profits as “trusting relationships.”

“I trust these organizational leaders, and I know that they take this very seriously, and they’re making sure the food is getting to where it needs to go,” she said.

She said that these organizations are then able to decide internally who to give food to that week.

“It’s static mostly through the year, and then they make choices internally, and they’re like, ‘Oh, you know, this family, we know that they’re going through a hardship,’” Van Laarhoven said.

The majority of food is grown chemical free at Round the Bend Farm, with other Dartmouth farms pitching in when the farm isn’t able to grow enough of a certain product.

The Flying Carrot, for example, has given eggs to the program and Paradox Acres has given pork and beef. Farms outside of Dartmouth have recently started selling food as well.

“We don’t just have a Sysco truck pull up and buy a bunch of things,” Van Laarhoven said. “We buy very intentionally.”

This was made possible through a grant from Coastal Foodshed, as well as Round the Bend Farm’s own money.

“Everything is organic that we’re putting out there and healthy and nutritious,” Van Laarhoven said.

With each bag of food that is distributed is photo identification for each type of crop and a recipe written in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

Van Laarhoven said that each year she questions whether Manifest Love is still needed and that every year partners ask whether the program will continue.

And with high food prices, scares about what would happen to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and the Healthy Incentives Program, she said Manifest Love may be more important now than when the program began.

“I think we all sort of thought maybe in a few years it would be different and it’s almost become more entrenched and more and more needed,” Van Laarhoven said.