Building more than a shed.

How a pack shed can boost our efforts at the Urban Ventures Farm.

Before the harvest comes the planting

Every week during growing season, food from Urban Ventures Farm makes its way to families in South Minneapolis. Tomatoes, peppers, greens, cucumbers, beans. It shows up at our pay-as-you-are-able market. It ends up in the kitchens of our neighbors and tables of our families.

Between the field and the kitchen, though, there's a lot of work that has to happen. Produce needs to come out of the sun. It needs to be washed, sorted, and cooled before it starts to lose its freshness. Boxes need to be packed. Orders need to be weighed. Volunteers and staff try to work side by side without stepping over each other.

Right now, that work happens wherever we can make it happen. Outside. Under a pop-up. In spaces that were built for something else. The people doing it are good at making do. But making do has a cost. We lose produce to heat. We lose time to disorganization. And the harder it is to process what we grow, the harder it is to grow more.

That’s why we're raising money for a pack shed at our Lakeville farm.

Students helping prep the farm

A pack shed is a simple building, but it changes how a farm operates. Clean water. Washable surfaces. Cold storage connected to the workspace. Room for bins and scales and packaging. Purpose built infrastructure to maximize our effeciency and increase the impact of our work.

It means the food we grow reaches families at its best. It means less waste. And as the farm's production grows, it means we can keep up.

If you'd like to help us build it, you can make a gift on this page. But if you want, you can do even more.

A volunteer helps at Lakeville farm

Here's something we're trying out. When you visit the page, you'll see an option to create your own fundraising page. It takes a few minutes. You set a goal, share it with your people, and they can give through your page. Like all of our work, it’s best when we do it together.

We don't know yet how far this can go. That's part of what makes it fun. If ten people set up pages and each one reaches five or six friends, we're a lot closer to a pack shed than we are right now.