Brightbox Farms
Kodiak, Alaska | EST. 2020
Farmers
Siene Allen & Gideon Saunders
No. of Farms
One
Business Model
Grocery, CSA, Farmers Market & Restaurants
Area served:
Kodiak Island, Alaska
Main crops
Lettuce, Kale, Pac Choi, Rainbox Chard, Arugula, Parsley, Cilantro, Dill, Sage, Thyme, Microgreens
About BrightBox Farms
A Self-Sufficient Community
Siene Allen and Gideon Saunders were inspired to bring a farm to Kodiak, Alaska as a way to further the remote island's already strong independent nature. With a booming fishing industry, Kodiak is used to taking care of its own, but with short summers and a vulnerable supply chain, fresh produce is hard to come by.
“The indigenous cultures have been fishing for thousands of years”, says Gideon, “so there’s a rich history of taking care of ourselves, and providing for ourselves. That is mostly in the way of protein, and then in the summer there’s the hoop houses and gardens…Things grow big, they grow fast, but it stops in the fall.”
BrightBox Farms is changing all that with its Greenery, bringing the community local and sustainable food year-round.
“[Our food] comes out of Seattle and comes all the way up through the chain, it goes to Anchorage, and then it comes to us...it’s a long journey for our produce after it’s gotten to Seattle. So we don’t often get the freshest stuff in the grocery stores.”
Creating Year-Round Access
Siene oversees much of the farm’s day-to-day operations in addition to her full-time job as Community Health Director for the island’s local tribal health organization–the Kodiak Area Native Association. Her work has given her first-hand experience of how important access to healthy and nutritious food is for the community. That, paired with other first-hand experience of walking into Safeway, the largest grocery store on the island, and seeing the produce shelves empty of everything except lemons, strengthened her resolve to bring her neighbors a reliable source of food.
“The ability for us to use the Greenery to create an environment that is conducive for growing food in all seasons, especially in for a place like Kodiak, is huge,” Siene shares, “now–while we can’t feed everyone on the island, we can certainly help provide many, many families with access…something that can add nutritional value to what they’re putting on their table.”
Local = Sustainable
Both Siene and Gideon are passionate about growing food locally to make the island’s supply chain more sustainable. Siene explains: “If I can run my farm extremely efficiently not using fossil fuels, and my neighbor who purchases from me can walk to me to pick up their bag of greens and walk half a mile home, or ride their bike, or–even if they have to drive their car–that’s maybe at most 15 miles that they’re going to have to drive, versus the thousands of miles of fuel that was used to truck [food] from the farm that’s burning fossil fuels to power the equipment that’s being used to farm.”
BrightBox customer, Dian Million agrees. Without her BrightBox supply, the areas unpredictable food chain would leave her without any fresh food options, forcing her to use canned or frozen vegetables. She believes BrightBox is an important part of a more sustainable future on the island. “If we didn’t have to rely on things being shipped in, we could just sustain ourselves here,” says Diane, “…[BrightBox provides] me the vegetables, I provide them to the rest of Kodiak…and we rely on each other, it’s fantastic.”
BrightBox Farms customer Diane Million, Owner of Million Recipes Food Truck
“As people become more concerned about climate change and…the activities that we do as humans on an everyday basis which impact not only our local environment but the global environment, [we start to see that] the more we can keep things close to home, the better off we’re going to be.”
Want to hear more from BrightBox Farms?
View our full-length interview with Siene and Gideon.
On May 21st, 2021 we released the second installment of our Grow Food Here series, focusing on Greenery farmers who are doing amazing things all around the world! Our first stop? Visiting BrightBox farms in Kodiak, Alaska.
Explore Grow Food Here, Season 2
You can grow food anywhere using Freight Farms technology, and we’re going to prove it. BrightBox Farms is just the first customer we’re profiling in the second installment of our Grow Food Here series, focusing on Greenery farmers who are doing amazing things all around the world! Check out the other exciting places we will be taking you!