This month, a group of physicians and medical students will step out of their normal lives, walk our pastures and fields, crouch down to look at our soil, and ask questions most of them have never had reason to ask before. What's actually in the plants our animals eat, or we eat? Why does it matter that the cattle move every day instead of staying in one field all season? What does managing to improve soil health do to the vegetables and crops that we eat? How does any of this connect to the prescriptions we write?
That is not a hypothetical. On September 11 and 12, Caney Fork Farms will host an accredited two-day training in partnership with Vanderbilt University Medical Center and The Climate Farm School, and it is one of the clearest examples I can point to of what Food is Medicine actually looks like when it moves off the page and onto the land.
The Movement Is Bigger Than Any One Farm
We have said this before in this series, and I want to say it again here, because I believe it matters. Caney Fork Farms is not the authority on Food is Medicine. We are one small part of a much larger conversation happening at every level, from individual farms like ours up through non-profits and regional hospitals, and also national philanthropy.
The scale of this conversation is local and national. The Rockefeller Foundation released a report this spring, From Farm to FIM: The Economic Impact of Local Food is Medicine, that puts real numbers behind what those of us on the ground already sense. At full scale, Food is Medicine programs represent roughly $50 billion in annual demand for healthy food nationwide. Right now, they reach an estimated one to three percent of the patients who could benefit. When I first read that figure, it felt like a depressing disparity. The need for this is so obvious, and because there are macro-level challenges at every corner, it can feel like we are swimming upstream to achieve something that is a basic human right. But the challenge is the opportunity, and the 97% gap is not only our duty but an economic opportunity as well.
The report's central argument is one I find genuinely useful, because it names something that could easily get lost in the excitement around Food is Medicine as a concept. Scaling these programs does not automatically help farms like ours. It only does that when states and health systems intentionally design programs around local providers and local sourcing. Absent that intention, the money flows toward large national distributors, the same consolidated supply chains that have squeezed small and mid-sized farms for decades. With that intention, the same dollars can generate over $45 billion in economic activity, support more than 300,000 jobs, and put an estimated $5.6 billion in new annual revenue directly into the hands of small and mid-sized family farms, the kind of farms that make up ninety percent of American agriculture.
On a local level here in Tennessee, we are talking about $61 million in additional market share for local farmers, $1.2 billion in statewide GDP, and an estimated 8000+ jobs created. If I were a state legislator or a governor, I would be seriously considering this type of opportunity over many other areas we look to for economic growth!
I bring this up not to turn a blog post into a policy brief, but because it reframes what a training like the one happening on our farm this September actually is. It is not a nice gesture or a marketing opportunity (even though we hope to be nice, and I will take the marketing points). It is exactly the kind of local infrastructure the Rockefeller report says the whole system depends on. Relationships between farmers and the people who write prescriptions. Trust built in person, on the land, before it ever shows up in a policy document. Seeds of thought planted that will hopefully grow into doctors being required to learn nutrition in school, prescribing as such, and being able to answer basic questions like "what should I eat based on my diagnosis" without feeling like they are going rogue or swimming off into a pond of 'woo woo' waiting to be ostracized or questioned by the institution.
What's Happening At Caney Fork Farms This September
Vanderbilt Medical School and The Climate Farm School are bringing physicians and medical students to Caney Fork Farms for two full days of hands-on learning. Climate Farm School has built its national reputation on exactly this kind of work, giving medical professionals an immersive, farmer-led education in regenerative agriculture, so they can understand the soil and agro-ecosystems behind the food they increasingly recommend to their patients, all while tying it back to our climate. This is their first time bringing that model to Middle Tennessee, and we are proud that Caney Fork Farms is the site for this inaugural program.
Over those two days, participants will move through our fields and our thinking at the same time. They will see organic produce, holistic planned grazing in practice, and our soil, not as a slide in a lecture, but in an immersive experience into our natural ecosystem. They will ask the kind of questions that come from people who spend their careers managing chronic disease and are starting to wonder, seriously, whether the food system upstream of their exam rooms deserves more of their attention. Or whether or not nutrient-dense food, and the culture that surrounds the way we eat, can play a proactive role in healing. I expect some of those conversations will be uncomfortable in the best way. That is usually a sign that real learning is happening.
This training also does not exist in isolation. It joins a growing web of food and health work already underway in Nashville. Vanderbilt's Rooted Community Health Initiative has spent years working to connect the university's medical resources with the communities of Middle Tennessee. Vanderbilt medical students and dietetics interns through the Shade Tree Clinic have trained alongside Second Harvest Food Bank on food as medicine cooking education. Our farm is not introducing this idea to Nashville. We are becoming one more node in a network that already exists, a network that exists from our local community to a national and global community of practice, and I think that matters more than if we were doing this alone.
The Region Is Already Doing This Work
Zoom out from our farm, and you find a region full of people already living this conversation. The Tennessee Local Food Summit has convened farmers and food advocates from across the state since 2010, building the kind of statewide relationships that make a regional food system possible in the first place. Think Regeneration, a national nonprofit with Nashville roots, runs an annual Advancing Food is Medicine conference and works directly with farmers and clinics to build these prescription pathways from the ground up.
And this work is not confined to Tennessee. The Rockefeller report I mentioned earlier features a quote from Michelle Howell, a farmer at Need More Acres Farm in Scottsville, Kentucky, about an hour north of us. The future of Food is Medicine, she said, is not just about quantity. She's right, and I would go further. It is about the quality of the relationships underneath the food, the trust built between the people who grow it and the people who prescribe it, and the care that only shows up when both sides know each other by name. A national report finding a farmer an hour from our gate to make that point tells me this conversation is not abstract. It is regional, it is close, and it is already happening around us.
Your Part in This
None of this works without customers who choose to be part of it or citizens who lean into their civic duty to share the importance of this with their local and national legislators. Every Whole Diet CSA share purchased is what makes it possible for us to keep hosting trainings like the one in September, to keep supplying nutrient-dense food to this region, and to keep building the kind of local relationships the Rockefeller report says the entire Food is Medicine movement depends on. When you sign up, you are not just securing a box of vegetables and meat for your own table. You are investing in the infrastructure of a healthier regional food system, the same infrastructure that national economists and Vanderbilt physicians are increasingly recognizing as essential. Resilience comes from strong networks of regenerative farms and supply webs that support strong and healthy communities.
If you have been sitting on the fence about joining us this season, this is your sign. The people behind your plate, on this farm and across this region, are already doing the work. Come be a part of it with us, and if you don't choose us, no worries, but do go choose another farm in our region (or yours) that is doing the same thing.