Mission and Story

Tera Farm is a California nonprofit on a mission to support small farmers while helping us build connections with the food we eat. It operates in the San Francisco bay area connecting farms in the Salinas Valley to consumers in the Silicon Valley.

Tera Farm’s ‘Farm to My Neighborhood’ service helps farmers sell directly to the local neighborhoods near them.

100 % of the proceeds go to the farmer. Farmer receives all payments few days prior to harvest.
Tera Farm provides the online store set up and runs it at no cost to the farmers.
Tera Farm’s volunteers manage the pick up locations, known as neighborhood sites and help with marketing and the e-commerce platform.
Consumers can order fully customizable produce boxes of fresh local organic vegetables and fruit, with no delivery fees or subscriptions.
All produce is local, organic, packed on the farm and delivered to neighborhoods on Saturday morning

Tera Farm does not grow, harvest, pack or deliver the produce - that is all done by the farmers. Tera Farm helps the farmers by providing a digital platform, help with technology, marketing, customer service questions etc.

TERA FARM’s MISSION

Empower limited -resource and small-scale farmers by building connections with their local communities and providing access to shared resources.

The Amazing Women Farmers we support

Farmer Bertha and Farmer Maria work with their friend farmers to supply organic fresh vegetables and berries each week.

**Farmer Maria**

Maria’s resilience and hard work has made it possible for her to go from working in the strawberry fields to owning her own business and even helping her two daughters to go to college. She is a graduate of the nonprofit ALBA’s 4 year organic farm incubator program. Maria’s husband Don Jose and their adult children help her with the farm and business operations related to the farm. Farmer Maria recently moved to a 4 acre farm in San Juan Bautista and grows a variety of row crops.
Farmer Maria’s daughter Angelica coordinates with Tera Farm on the online service and works with her brother to deliver the produce boxes to Palo Alto, Los Altos, Saratoga, and Sunnyvale.

**Farmer Bertha**

Bertha is a former farm worker who decided to strike out on her own to support herself, her husband Heriberto and their three children. Magaña Farm is a nine acre certified organic farm located in Aromas, California, and specializes in strawberries and mixed vegetables.
Today, the operation is a family affair, with Heriberto joining Bertha in the fields and their now adult children supporting the business side of the farm including the running of the Farm to My Neighborhood service through Tera Farm. Farmer Bertha’s daughter, Amalia coordinates with Tera Farm on the online store , and drives up with her husband to deliver produce to San Jose, Cambrian, Fremont and Oakland.

The Tera Farm Team

Site Hosts, Tech advisors, Writers, Ambassadors, Food Bloggers and more -
the amazing volunteers that makes this work

Neemun Anand (Founding Site Host, Food Blog Coordinator)
Vaishali Khandekar (Founding Site Host, Site Coordinator)
Nita Sharma (Founding Site Host, Tech Advisor )
Seema Varma, (Founding Site Host)
Jessy Berg
Meena Dsouza
Deepa Iyengar
Heather Frambach
Neeti Kochhar
Rebecca Lowell
Erin McCool
Lisette Narragon
Elizabeth Parker
Meera Saxena
Rupa Krishnan
Jacque Rupp
Aimee Tsang
Tracy Fowler
Brittney Buffo
Laura Murphy
Dionne Ybarra
Jennifer DeJesus
Dalila Epperson

THE TERA FARM BOARD

Sam Earnshaw
A former organic farmer for 15 years, Sam installs hedgerows and other conservation plantings on farms. He continues to make a difference in the farms in our area through his work at https://hedgerowsunlimited.com/

David Mancera

From a first exposure to life in agriculture at the young age of 8 , to multiple degrees and jobs in Agriculture, David today helps small farmers as a director for Kitchen Table Advisors. See http://www.kitchentableadvisors.org/staff-bios//david

Sheena Vaidyanathan

From a career in tech, to now 14 years in public education, Sheena is the founder of Tera Farm. Sheena currently works as a middle school teacher in Los Altos School District, Los Altos. She has been a lifelong ‘wanna-be-farmer’ and her weekend farming adventures and involvement with nonprofits like Kitchen Table Advisors, led her to start Tera Farm. Since her first love is teaching, she sees her work with Tera Farm as an educator - a place where she is always learning while also helping others learn how our food is grown.

About the name TERA FARM

Tera (pronounced with a soft ‘T’ ) in Hindi means 'Your' - so it is Your Farm. TERA also sounds like TERRA - the earth which sustains us. The name Tera Farm for the nonprofit comes from a vision where each one of us is vested in our own farm, something we can call our own, and know where our food comes from. We want you to connect with the small farmers in our area, and make this effort, ‘Your Farm’ .

Tera Farm does not refer to an actual piece of farm land and it does not grow, harvest, pack or deliver any of the produce through its Farm to My Neighborhood online store. Instead it refers to the nonprofit group that helps small farmers by providing them support in the areas of technology and marketing by providing a digital platform to sell directly to consumers.

The story behind Tera Farm and the Farm to My neighborhood service

Tera Farm started because of the Covid-19 pandemic. When the pandemic disrupted everyone’s way of life, it further increased the challenges faced by the small family farms in our area. Family members that supported the farms with their off-farm income were no longer able to offer the usual financial support on the farm, since they had lost their jobs in failing retail stores and restaurants. In addition, farm inspections and procedures necessary to sell produce were delayed, causing loss of sales as fields ready to be harvested went waste. Buying patterns of wholesalers shifted as the food system changed with schools/restaurants/offices closing down, slowing down the farm-to-wholesale sale process.

Tera Farm was started with the idea of helping small-scale farmers sell directly to consumers in the Bay Area, and give them an additional sales channel besides wholesale. The farmers supported by Tera Farm are small-scale farmers who are too small to even sell at a farmers’ market and rely completely on wholesale distribution. Sheena, who is a public school teacher, with a background in technology had been involved with agricultural projects in the San Juan Bautista area for some time. She was inspired by the nonprofit Kitchen Table Advisors that worked in the area, and the resilience and entrepreneurship of the farmers she met. She decided to help the farmers at the start of the pandemic making use of her technology, education and entrepreneurial backgrounds. Sheena was helped by her friends, Neemun, Vaishali, Nita and Seema - an incredible group of women - moms, techies, organic and local food enthusiasts. They set up a volunteer run program to facilitate the delivery of fresh organic produce straight from the farm to homes in the Bay Area. At first, it was a simple text message to their group of friends, then as interest grew, it evolved into an online order form, and then finally to an e-commerce site. The founding group of volunteers were the first site hosts for the Farm to My Neighborhood service. The group has grown a little bigger in the last few months with the addition of passionate volunteers who believe in helping local farmers so we can have access to fresh organic food . 100% of the money spent on the store goes directly to the farmers, since it is run by volunteers - Tera Farm does not use any of your shopping dollars for operational costs.

CONTACT INFORMATION

info@terafarm.org

Our mailing address is:

Tera farm

171 Main St # 298

Los Altos, CA 94022-2912