By: Jessie Monsivais Photos by: Rachel Benavides
With a firm belief in the benefits of small-scale urban farming, Dagon Produce is offering a new service that delivers fresh local produce to your doorstep. Working for the local farmer, Joel Trevino produces baskets with fruits and vegetables harvested directly from local farms here in the Coastal Bend. Now the owner and curator behind Dagon Produce, Trevino began his journey while working for Grow Local South Texas. By helping out with the Farmer’s Markets, Trevino said he got to know a number of the farmers very well. Noticing a need for an outlet allowing farmers to share their produce with restaurants to avoid throwing away large amounts of produce that didn’t sell, Trevino created Dagon Produce to help farmers out.
What started out as a vision of making local food more accessible to prevent waste quickly expanded into a farmhouse delivery service. The business rapidly proliferated to producing 40 to 50 baskets a week, meeting the needs of both local restaurants and residents.
“December was the first time I started making baskets. Since then, it’s picked up a lot. People have come to know that this is going on,” says Trevino. “I think that as Corpus progresses, the whole farm to table movement is far from over. Speaking with some local chefs, they would love to be able to have local produce in the restaurants. I’m hoping to provide that outlet for farmers to continue growing and deliver their food to the local restaurant scene, which helps out the farmers and the local economy.”
Dagon Produce offers three different sizes of baskets for small, medium, and large families. The Regular, Double, and Chef basket provide seasonal produce, proteins, and fruits sourced from at least seven local farms. The Double, Dagon’s original basket, includes plenty of food for families of four to last for the week. The Regular basket provides half that amount, making it feasible for families of two. Lastly, the Chef basket contains culinary ingredients that resemble those seen in network cooking competitions. In fact, Trevino shared, Chef Tony from The Exchange picks up two Chef baskets and does a live Facebook challenge on Thursdays with other chefs in the community, to cook using the local ingredients.
“I think it’s important because this stuff is grown here in our soil. We get a lot of the nutrients from everything that’s around us. Also, you can look at it environmentally, too. It’s not taking 18-wheelers driving across the country to bring products to us. You can grow a lot of the stuff that the farmers grow here in South Texas,'” says Trevino.
Trevino said his goal is to encourage locals to order baskets or shop at the Farmer’s Market. “It’s more of a community thing. If it wasn’t for the community accepting this and wanting farm-to-table produce, farmers would just do the same old thing; just growing enough for the farmer’s market, and that’s it.”
Eager to help locals cultivate a deeper understanding of local food and empower them to be a part of the process, Dagon Produce looks forward to partnering with other groups to focus on educating the community about local gardening and offer local farm tours. With Dagon Produce, you can feed nutritious meals to your family with confidence, knowing that all the products were grown, raised, and produced right here.
Contact:
dagonproduce.com | @dagoncctx
