Farmer Leo Chapman created Blue Bird Farm on a local landowners’ property and began hosting farm potlucks to build community around food and farming.  These events later evolved to include dozens of farms across Western Nevada County.

The Nevada County Public Health Department held a community wellness summit and formed a coalition to address the growing obesity epidemic.  The working group, Live Healthy Nevada County, forms and began to assess nutrition education in schools.

Living Lands was formally developed by Leo Chapman, Masie Ganz, Tim Van Wagner, and Vince Booth with a mission to create a collaborative model for successful ecological farmers and farms.  Farmer Willow Hein joined the team to help grow the vision

Living Lands Agrarian Network, through collaborations with local landowners, now has five farms in its network.

The Farm to School program started at Hennessey Elementary School as a group of volunteers revived the school garden, took kids on farm field trips, made fresh sushi with garden veggies, and taught nutrition lessons out in the garden.

After completing a Living Lands Farm internship, farmer Amanda Thibodeau starts The Food Love Project as a community resource for nutrition and farming education. It continued to grow, becoming the Food Love Farm, and hosts school field trips, summer camp, community potlucks, u-picks and more.

To provide farmers more access to land, Living Lands created an online Land Bank, where community members can offer a portion of their property to be cultivated by a local farmer.  It is the foundation for Sierra Harvest’s Land Match program.

Live Healthy Nevada County received a $300,000 grant to expand the Farm to School program to twelve schools, serving 48% of the county’s elementary and middle school students. The program had a full array of offerings including produce stands, farm field trips, classroom visits by chefs and farmers, and Harvest of the Month tastings.

After many years of working collaboratively on common goals, Live Healthy Nevada County and Living Lands Agrarian Network merged to form one organization, Sierra Harvest.  Sierra Harvest became a 501c3 non-profit organization.

Sierra Harvest expanded the Farm to School Program to serve 6,400 students and their families. By 2015, 30 young farmers have been trained and 30 Sierra Gardens built for low-income families so they would have direct access to fresh food right in their backyards.

Sierra Harvest introduced Foothills Fresh, a pilot scratch-cooked school lunch program for the Nevada City School District.  In collaboration with Nevada Joint Union High School Nutrition Services, the program demonstrated that scratch-cooked school meals featuring fresh produce are not only possible, but profitable and widely popular among students and teachers.

In 2017, Sierra Harvest also launched the Farm Institute to help beginning farmers develop and sustain successful farm and ranch businesses in our region.  The institute’s educational programs were designed to meet the critical needs of beginning farmers: farm production skills, marketing and business planning, access to land, and mentorship.

Gold Country Gleaners merged with Sierra Harvest, bringing more resources and organization to this volunteer-run community program.  In the first year of partnership, the Gleaners harvested over 5 tons of excess produce from local farms and delivered it to Interfaith Food Ministry, a Western Nevada County food pantry where it is distributed to those in need.

“Putting Local on the Menu” was launched to address institutional procurement. Sierra Harvest began working with Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital, Interfaith Food Ministry, restaurants, and other institutions to put more local food on the menu.

The Forever Farms partnership – between Sierra Harvest, Bear Yuba Land Trust, BriarPatch Food Co-op, and the Tahoe Food Hub – formed and protected 37 acres of threatened farmland leased by Mountain Bounty Farm, Nevada County’s largest vegetable producer. Through a collective community campaign, the funds were raised that allowed the Bear Yuba Land Trust to purchase the land.

With Sierra Harvest’s support, the Nevada County Food Policy Council published a food system assessment, highlighting strategies to create more local food resiliency.   This comprehensive publication, 5 years in the making, provided an initial roadmap for increasing the amount of local food we grow and eat each year.

‘Foothills Fresh’ builds momentum with all eight Western Nevada County School Districts working collaboratively with Sierra Harvest and the Chef Ann Foundation to transform school meals from heat and serve to scratch-cooked lunches.

The ‘Foothills Fresh’ pilot becomes an official program of the Nevada County School Food Services Agency JPA and gets the new name of ‘Community Roots.’

Sierra Harvest is awarded $750,000 in support from the USDA Beginning Farmers and Ranchers Development Program Grant to grow its Farm Institute programming and extend wraparound services to farmers and ranchers in Nevada, Placer, El Dorado, and Yuba Counties.

Sierra Harvest launched a partnership with the Nevada Joint Union High School District to facilitate high school career technical education (CTE) programs on real working farms at their new District Ranch.

Sierra Harvest is proud to be a driving force behind the creation of the Sierra Nevada Farmer Cooperative, working alongside the California Center for Cooperative Development and BriarPatch Food Co-op. The Cooperative will allow farmers to pool resources, expand access to institutional and retail markets, and build shared infrastructure that reduces costs and increases efficiency.