Organic Growth: The Carolina Farm Trust and Trane Technologies

Zack Wyatt

Over the last 80, 90 years, as humans, we have pretty much given the entire responsibility of feeding ourselves away. The Carolina Farm Trust is all about building systems and we are, really using food and agriculture as the backbone of this vision of regional resilience.

The thing that we're really trying to accomplish is how do we make supporting a regional local food economy easy?

Michael Bowling

This project isn't just about healthy food. Healthy food is part of it, but it's also bringing something to the, this community, connecting people with where their food comes from is important.

Mariah Henry

So today we are at the urban farm at Aldersgate. This is a location where you get nutrient dense foods that are grown with farmers that you know, and so we're building that connection and that community where they will come and support us. I would love to provide this model where farming is not just for profits. It can be profitable, but it serves the people.

Zack

Trane Technologies has been one of our largest private funders since the very beginning. The greatest thing about our partnership with Trane Technologies is that it's a relationship.

Deidra Parrish Williams

We have a number of partnerships with nonprofit organizations around the world that they are the ones that help us to execute our corporate citizenship strategy. The work they're doing is on the ground in the trenches, providing critical support to people.

We ideate with them constantly. We're brokering relationships across the region together. So it is a true partnership

Mariah

That is exactly what we're looking for, is not just one time partners that come just do a transactional deal, but someone who will walk alongside us, see where we can grow and have areas for improvement, 'cause there's a lot of things that we can gain from Trane Technologies.

Scott Tew

I think the vision of Carolina Farm Trust is to continue to evolve, to make impact in a lot of areas throughout the community. Much like Trane Technologies began as let's save a farm, as moved into how do we work together to increase access to fresh food, and that is a much bigger purpose.

If you can attach what you do with a greater purpose, that's where impact begins.

Michael

I envision this whole campus being almost a live work play type of setup. You'll be able to come here and get fresh produce, fresh meat, dairy. It's adding jobs to the community.

People be able to live and work in the neighborhood that they live in. It's gonna be amazing for the community,

Zack

And that's kind of what CFT market is all about, is getting wholesale retail. Our commercial kitchen event space, teaching kitchens, our meat processing facility is developing kind of a new system that we can participate in that actually works for us.

It works for our natural environment in a positive way.

Scott

I mean, sustainability is about a systems change. Their approach was not a linear approach to solving an issue. They recognize that we solve problems in a community, in a company by looking across the system of things that need to be adjusted. That's how you make huge change.

Scott

Whether it's for a community through Carolina Farm Trust, or whether it's a company like Trane Technologies, we have to go deep to make big change.

Deidra

There are limitless possibilities to where this could go. We are proud of the work they're doing and really happy to support them moving forward.