Organic Growth: The Carolina Farm Trust and Trane Technologies

Over the last 80-90 years as humans 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? 

So today we're 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 in 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. 

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. 

We have a number of partnerships with nonprofit organizations around the world. 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.  

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 because there's a lot of things that we can gain from Trane Technologies. 

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 - has moved into how do we work together to increase access to fresh food. That is a much bigger purpose. If you can attach what you do for the greater purpose that's where impact begins. 

And that's kind of what CFT market is all about is getting wholesale, retail or 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, that works for our natural environment in a positive way.   

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

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