Our Story

Some things about a region can be measured. The number of farms that remain. The acres still in agricultural production. The households that do not have reliable access to fresh food. The distance a pregnant woman on Medicaid must travel to find a vegetable that was not grown in another country and shipped to an Ingles or not be able to find a vegetable at the Dollar General.

Some things are harder to measure but no less real. The knowledge held by a family that has farmed the same hollow for four generations. The relationship between a mountain community and the land it depends on. What is lost when that relationship breaks.

WNC From the Ground Up exists at the intersection of both.

We are a regional food hub based in Sylva, North Carolina, operating from an 18,000 square foot facility in the heart of Jackson County. We work with more than 50 farm partners across the region to move locally grown food from the people who produce it to the people who need it. We run refrigerated distribution and cold storage. We operate food access programming that reaches households across Jackson and surrounding counties. We are building a food as medicine program that connects perinatal Medicaid patients with fresh, locally grown food through clinical partnerships with the health systems that serve them. And we are working, alongside farmers and county leaders, to ensure that the farmland that makes all of this possible is still here a generation from now.

These are not separate programs. They are one answer to one question: what does it take for a mountain community to feed itself?

The Land and the Farmers

Western North Carolina is not a region that lacks the capacity to grow food. It has farms, farmers, soil, water, and generations of agricultural knowledge. What it has lacked is the infrastructure to connect that production to local markets reliably enough to make farming economically viable for the families who do it.

When a small farm cannot find a buyer, or when the logistics of getting product to market cost more than the product is worth, farms do not survive. Jackson County has lost the majority of its farms and farmland over the past seventy years. That loss is documented. It is also ongoing.

Our farmer relationships are built on a single premise: the farmer is not a supplier. They are a partner in a regional food system that we are building together. That means we absorb risk so they do not have to. It means we show up consistently, we pay fairly, and we treat the relationship as infrastructure rather than as a transaction. Our markup model for the online ordering system and the future local grocer, 15% on retail and 10% on wholesale, is designed to keep food affordable for families while ensuring farmers are paid what their work is worth. No extractive middlemen. No corporate margins. Just food from farms to families.

In six months of peak operations in 2025, we paid over $600,000 directly to local and regional farmers while ensuring food access for over 1,500 families. That is what this model looks like when it has the resources to run.

Food Access

A region that grows food but cannot get that food to the people who need it has not solved its food problem. It has only relocated it.

Jackson County and the surrounding mountain counties are not food deserts in the traditional sense. But access is shaped by geography, income, transportation, and the near total absence of grocery infrastructure in many communities. The retail environment that many residents depend on was not designed to provide nutritious food. It was designed to provide shelf stable products at low price points.

Our food access programming works to close that gap by using the distribution infrastructure we have built for our farm partners to move fresh, local food directly into the communities that need it most. About 40% of the families we serve are children. Another 35 to 40% are families with children. The remainder are elderly and disabled adults. These are our neighbors. They are the families of the farmers in our network. They are the people who made this region what it is and who deserve to eat well in it.

We are also expanding access into schools and institutions, extending the reach of local food into the daily lives of the next generation of this region's people.

Nourished From the Ground Up

The connection between food and health is not a new idea. What is new, and what we are building in Jackson County, is the infrastructure to make that connection real inside the healthcare system.

Nourished From the Ground Up is a food as medicine initiative that begins with maternal health and grows from there.

Our first focus is perinatal Medicaid enrollees: the pregnant women and new mothers in our region whose health outcomes are most directly shaped by what they eat and who have the least economic access to fresh food. Through clinical partnerships with local healthcare facilities, we will connect these patients with locally grown food delivered directly to them, documented through a specialized platform and tracked as a clinical intervention. As the program matures and the clinical infrastructure is established, we will expand to serve patients managing diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and renal disease, conditions that are both prevalent in our region and profoundly responsive to food.

The logic of this progression is intentional. Maternal health is where the evidence base for food as medicine is strongest, where the downstream impact is longest, and where a single intervention reaches two lives at once. Building the program there first means that when we expand to chronic disease populations, we are not starting from scratch. We are extending a model that is already documented, already trusted by clinical partners, and already embedded in the community.

The case for this program is both moral and economic. Improving nutrition during pregnancy reduces adverse birth outcomes. Reducing adverse birth outcomes reduces downstream healthcare costs. Addressing the nutritional roots of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and renal failure reduces hospitalizations, emergency interventions, and the compounding costs of unmanaged chronic illness. Routing the dollars that pay for all of this through local farms strengthens the regional agricultural economy. Every dollar spent in this program does more than one thing at once.

But the number that matters most cannot be calculated in advance. It is the child born healthier because their mother was better nourished. It is the neighbor managing a diabetes diagnosis who finds that food, not only medication, gives them some control back. It is the farm that stayed in production because the program provided a reliable market. It is the healthcare system that begins to understand local food as a clinical resource rather than a charitable afterthought.

We are building the documentation infrastructure to show that this works. We are also clear that some of what makes it work will never appear in a data table, and that preserving the dignity of the women and families at the center of this program is not secondary to measuring outcomes. It is the whole point.

We are building this model to work here. We are also building it so that other communities across Appalachia can learn from it.

Farmland Preservation

You cannot have a regional food system without regional farmland. This is not a philosophical statement. It is a physical one. The flat, fertile bottomland along the Tuckasegee and its tributaries is finite. Once it is developed, it does not come back. A mountain county cannot manufacture more land suited to food production.

Farmland preservation only works if farmers can make a living. That is why our distribution work and our preservation work are not separate efforts. Local farms stay in production when they have reliable markets that pay fair prices. When local food systems work, agricultural land stays in production instead of being sold for development. This is land conservation and food access and economic development at the same time.

We work alongside farmers, county leaders, and conservation partners to build the legal, financial, and policy structures that make it possible for farm families to keep their land in production. This means working on voluntary agricultural districts, conservation easements, farmland protection plans, and the state and local policy frameworks that either support or undermine a farm family's ability to stay on the land. It means documenting what has been lost and making the case, in county commission chambers and in legislative hearings, for what must be protected.

The farmers who are our partners today are farming land that in many cases has been in their families for generations. The question of whether their children and grandchildren will be able to say the same is not separate from the question of whether this region can feed itself. It is the same question.

Policy Leadership

The work we do on the ground and the work we do in policy are inseparable. One feeds the other.

At the national level, we were invited to the National Sustainable Agriculture Lobby Day in Washington, DC, one of only a handful of organizations in the country asked to represent this work, to advocate for permanent Local Food Purchase Assistance funding alongside approximately 150 small farmers.

We are one of only three organizations in the country highlighted by the Wallace Center and the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition for our Local Food Purchase Assistance implementation.

We were selected for the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond's Rural Investment Collaborative and recognized by the Appalachian Regional Commission's READY Nonprofits program.

At the state level, we are working to reform agricultural tax policies to better support small farmers who earn significant incomes on smaller tracts of land. Regionally, we serve as fiscal agent for Jackson County's Cost of Community Services study and are leading the development of a Farmland Protection Plan through the Jackson County Agricultural Advisory Board. Locally, we successfully changed a Jackson County ordinance in 2022 to allow small scale meat processing, opening new market opportunities for livestock farmers, and we serve on the steering committee for the Jackson County Headwaters Conservation Plan, approved by County Commissioners in October 2025.

This is what it looks like when a food hub understands that its job does not end at the loading dock.

What We Believe

· We believe that the people of this region have the right to grow food, eat food, and be connected to the land in ways that the current economic and policy system does not adequately support.

· We believe that local farmers are part of the healthcare system, whether that system recognizes them or not yet.

· We believe that the knowledge, relationships, and landscapes that make this region what it is are not renewable resources, and that the work of protecting them is urgent.

· We believe that a food hub is not a warehouse. It is infrastructure for self-determination.

· The foundation is solid. The infrastructure is here. We are not in survival mode. We are building something meant to last.

We would be glad to have you be part of it.

How You Can Help

Donate. Every contribution supports farmers, families, and the infrastructure that connects them.  Give at givebutter.com/wnc-from-the-ground-up

Partner with us. If you are a business, institution, healthcare provider, school, or community organization interested in sourcing local food or collaborating on food access, we want to hear from you.

Support our farmers. Buy local. Spread the word. Show up for the people growing your food.

Follow our journey. We are at a turning point. The story we are building together is worth following.

Get It Touch

Lisa Kelly, Founder and Executive Director 

lisa@wncfromthegroundup.org

828-305-3077 ext. 101

Thank you for believing in local food, local farms, and local families.