Seeds of Sustainability

Throughout a 10-year career as a financial advisor, one-time chef Denise Muir never stopped dreaming of opening her own restaurant. After saving some money, she decided to take the leap. “I left my job and started working on a business plan, working with a realtor and looking at properties. But the numbers would never work,” she says.

No matter what she did, she couldn’t come up with a plan that showed she’d make money. So she started thinking about what else she could do with her love of food, and that’s how she wound up establishing Rabbit Run Farm almost two years ago about three miles east of I-75 outside of Fort Myers. “I have never had a job where I’m ready and looking forward to coming to work like this everyday,” she says.

Muir’s not alone. The last few years have seen a substantial growth in the number of small farms in Southwest Florida. And those farms are supplying local restaurants with all kinds of produce at the peak of freshness, resulting in creative, seasonal dishes that are also environmentally friendly.

An oft-quoted statistic is that the average fresh food item travels about 1,500 miles from its point of production to final purchase. That’s not the case when a business buys food grown in its own backyard.

“When local restaurants patronize local farms, the carbon footprint of the food is much, much smaller,” says Roy Beckford, agriculture and natural resources agent for the Lee County Extension Office of the University of Florida/Institute of Food and Agriculture Sciences. “There’s no involvement with transportation. The food is fresher, and if it’s fresher, the quality is higher and the shelf life is longer. So the cost per unit of a food item that’s purchased locally is much, much lower.”