Our Food Forest

Not just any trees - You're helping build food forests!

For every hat sold on this site, we give back to support people, trees, ocean and animals. We also invest profits in our very own Food Forest in St. Augustine, Florida.

For part of our give back program we partnered with Trees For The Future (trees.org) and thanks to your purchase, we are able to provide trees to a family farm in a part of the world that desperately needs to end hunger, end poverty and end deforestation. We realize that the whole world is connected and by helping families even as far away as Sub-Saharan Africa, we are also helping ourselves.

A recent study published in Science magazine states global tree restoration is our most effective climate change solution to date. We’re not waiting on a debate, its time to roll up the sleeves and get to work, helping people and the planet the best way we can.

The Problem.

We lose trees at a rate of 50 soccer fields per minute as our food systems destroy our ecosystems. Most of this degradation occurs in the developing tropics of Africa, Latin America, and South and Southeast Asia where hundreds of millions of chronically-hungry, smallholder farming families use destructive and short-sighted agricultural practices that further degrade their communities trees, soil, water and biodiversity, making them even more likely to migrate and more vulnerable to the climate changes that lie ahead.

OUR SOLUTION

The Forest Garden Program is a simple, replicable and scalable approach with proven success. By planting specific types of fast-growing trees, fruit trees, hardwoods and food crops in a systematic manner over a four year period, families can positively change their lives forever. Forest Gardens consist of thousands of trees that provide families with sustainable food sources, livestock feed, products to sell, fuel wood and a 400% increase in their annual income in four years. Modern farming practices in every country need to be changed in order to feed the world’s population with small scale local production taking a much larger role. Regenerative farming and Permaculture principals can drastically increase yields and increase biodiversity, soil health at the same time.

THE GOAL

We see converting degraded and denuded farmland into Forest Gardens one of the planet’s best ideas for eliminating hunger, extreme poverty, deforestation and for lessening humanity’s contributions to climate change. Trees.org has a goal to break the cycle of poverty and eradicate hunger for their first 1 million people by planting 500 million trees in 125,000 Forest Gardens by 2025. This will entail working with approximately 125,000 families to revitalize a quarter of a million acres, coupled with interventions at different levels of the value chain (related to inputs, credit, water and marketing) to ensure the long term sustainability and continual spread of Forest Gardens.

If we can grow a movement by convincing massive numbers of farmers across any given landscape to plant Forest Gardens, we can, first and foremost, eliminate chronic hunger and extreme poverty on that landscape, but even more, at scale we will have a program that can reverse deforestation and meaningfully begin to mitigate climate change.

WHAT IS A FOOD FOREST?

Watch this video from our friend and mentor Geoff Lawton

GEOFF LAWTON DESIGNED OUR ONGOING FOOD FOREST PROJECT IN ST. AUGUSTINE, FLORIDA

Even manufacturing hats from responsible materials and all of our efforts to tread lightly still cost the environment. With that in mind, we decided to turn the adjacent acre of land at our original warehouse in St Augustine, Florida into an abundant food forest using permaculture principals. We hope this will be an example to other companies and anyone wanting to learn about food forests, food security and the abundance that can be created by working with nature, instead of against it. Modern agriculture is degrading our soil and is unsustainable. Permaculture and regenerative agriculture are examples of how we need to move forward producing food for the future. This will be an example of how we can localize food production without the use of harmful pesticides and with good design will increase production and nutrient level dramatically per acre. The St Augustine Food Forest isn’t open to the public yet but please stay tuned for updates.

october 2018

 

october 2019

 

October 2020 - Follow @staugustinefoodforest on Instagram for more updates.