Farmer Friends: Galpin Farms
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Anthony and Lisa Galpin. High school sweethearts and amazing tree farmers!
When high school sweethearts Anthony and Lisa set out for college 20 years ago, they had no idea their love and farm would upset the apple cart. Both Lisa and Anthony are second-generation farmers, specializing in tree fruit. Located in beautiful Reedley, California (about 3½ hours from both San Francisco and Los Angeles), their farm is the home of a small revolution! Breaking the mold of conventional mainstream farming they created a tree-to-counter technique.
This little technique allowed fruit to go straight from tree to customer – touched only once by the farmer. Traditionally, farmers gather fruit all together in one bin to be sorted later. Lisa and Anthony realized that by placing a single layer of selected fruit from the tree to the final box, never risking it getting bumped or bruised. From the tree, they’re brought straight to GrubMarket, picked, packed, and perfect! Which, considering NPR reports conventional produce is touched over 20 times before you buy it at the grocery store, this is quite the feat! Watch more in our video from our recent visit!
This method of farming definitely takes more time and resources for the Galpins. There is a reason that bigger food corporations cut these corners and costs. But for Lisa and Anthony, the satisfaction of knowing they’re farming the highest-quality fruit possible, is worth it. Lisa told us that “all that work” is there for a reason.
Anthony and Lisa on their farm in Dinuba, CA.
“We see the smiles on our customers’ faces when they bite into our fruit and that makes it all worth it.”
In commercial farming, companies pick fruit long before they are ripe, hoping they ripen on the long journey to your kitchen. However, this is robbing you, the customer, of 50% of the essential vitamins and nutrients in that fruit.
“The fruit needs all the time it can get on the tree to develop that sweet flavor”, says Anthony.
Commercial farmers will pick all the fruit off the tree, regardless of the stage of ripeness. You can’t blame them. Attention to detail is always one of the first things to go when farms become huge operations. That’s why we’re so privileged and honored to eat fruit from small local farmers like the Galpins. These farmers take pride in every fruit and veggie. In fact, Anthony and Lisa will return to a tree 4-5 times, as they’ll only pick the best fruit that’s ready that day.
Anything that falls to the ground or doesn’t make the cut is picked up and fed the farm animals or transformed into one Lisa’s amazing pies, making Galpin Farm’s nearly zero waste!
Besides being awesome farmers, Lisa and Anthony are just simply awesome people. We’re glad to have become friends with them over the year and we hope that you liked learning about them and continue to support their hard work! See what they’re growing right now!
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