What is “A Dollar More”?
“A Dollar More” was instituted at Franciscan Family Farms in 2009 in order to partner with our customers in order to provide healthy, sustainable food to the poor. From the beginning, our goal has been to sell our artisan food at prices that are accessible for nearly everyone, while charging enough to sustain and grow the farm without government subsidies. However, our community has a sizable population that can’t afford meat at all, even at subsidized supermarket prices… much less quality meat that isn’t industrially grown.
Ok, so far, so good – how does it actually work?
The program is pretty simple – we are asking every one of our customers to seriously consider paying “A Dollar More” per pound for their meat products in every order. Franciscan Family Farms will then match that dollar in donations to the poor. Together, we can use this program to offer a tremendous amount of food to the poor for every purchase. And even with this donation, our prices are still much less than you’ll pay for quality meats from organic stores like Whole Foods.
So how much meat are we talking about?
Let me give you an example… if a customer buys 100 pounds of beef at our current pricing, that would be $499. If the customer chose to participate in the “A Dollar More” program, they would instead pay $599. Then we would kick in an extra $100 as well, meaning that $200 would go toward food for the poor. This would buy a little over 40 pounds of beef for the poor. So paying just a dollar more means that the poor will receive 40 pounds of beef for every 100 pounds purchased! Wow.
Why are you doing this?
There are a multitude of reasons. We strongly believe that sustainable farming should be for everyone, but that can’t work without a program like this, because producers like us will never be able to provide food as inexpensively as subsidized junk food and industrial competitors. We also believe that being a “local” farm means taking on local issues and becoming a part of the solution to problems in the community. We believe that helping each other out is a part of what put the “culture” in agriculture, and one that shouldn’t be lost. Last, but certainly not least, our farming efforts are inspired by St. Francis and his special love for both nature and the poor in our world.
So who gets the food?
Our Congressional District (Missouri’s 8th) is the 11th poorest district in the nation (out of 435) based on HHI, so the need is very real in our primarily rural area. All donations of food will be handled through local charities or given directly to individuals in serious need, with a focus on the rural poor. We will be completely transparent about the amount and destination of our donations (obviously, we won’t give out the exact names of individuals – something more like “family of 5 with unemployed father”). If donors would like to direct their gifts to a particular group, family, etc., we’ll do our best to accommodate that. We will ship the food out as soon as is practical after receipt of the funds, and we will document the donations on the website, along with the donor’s name (unless they’d rather remain anonymous).
Thank you
Thanks for helping us put some good food on the table for some needy folks. We couldn’t do this without the support of our customers.
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