- You know, of course there are days that we get discouraged and days where we'd like to have a rain when we don't get it.

Farmers are eternal optimists.

The most famous saying that a farmer says is we're gonna get 'em next year.

(upbeat music) Hi, I'm farmer Lee Jones from The Chef's Garden.

It's a family owned business right along the shores of Lake Erie, in Huron, Ohio.

Our family has been farming here for over 50 years.

I had the privilege of getting to work with my father.

From the time I was five or six years old on, I knew that I wanted to work with my dad and growing vegetables.

This is a vegetable growing community.

It's in our DNA.

It's what we do.

It's what we love.

I just can't think of doing anything else.

We've hung on like some of the other small farms here and it's been a bumpy ride.

And certainly March and the COVID pandemic has certainly created some interesting developments for all of us.

It's a tough one.

A hundred percent of our business has been direct to restaurants over the last 35 years.

As you know, the restaurants have been in trouble.

Many of them closed.

And we hurt and feel for all of those workers and servers and chefs and owners.

There's been a ripple down effect to us in our, our team here on the farm as well.

We felt like there was a real need to be able to reach out to people that were afraid to get to a grocery store or couldn't because of the pandemic.

And so we offered a nationwide home delivery program early on in March we pivoted.

We felt there was a real demand for people to have safe, healthy vegetables delivered at home.

Hey guys, my name is Sarah Burchfield and I am the home delivery manager here at our family farm, The Chef's Garden.

This is actually my favorite box because we are a seasonal farm.

So we take our cues from nature on the availability that's gonna be in the box.

So currently we do have lettuce, toy box tomatoes, bell peppers, our mixed carrots, baby cauliflower.

And one of my favorite arrowhead cabbage - But the home delivery, it did start off by us sending them out to our chefs because those are our friends and extended family to us and told them that we were starting this program.

And they shared that information with their customers and with their friends.

And it really kind of took off.

- This past summer, we've had a great time changing the boxes, coming up with new ideas, working with chefs all over the world to collaborate with them as well and have some specialty boxes.

- I think it's that kind of explorative, creative thought process that helps us to be able to keep going at a difficult time.

As horrible as this whole situation is, we've got to look for those silver linings in it.

And eating at home and cooking together and being able to sit down together at a table.

I think there's a lot of benefits to that.

We've never done this for the money.

We love growing good vegetables.

You know, if you help enough other folks around, good things will come for you.

And that's just sort of a philosophy we've always lived by.

And I just think we carry that on our heart and on our sleeve every day on the farm.

(upbeat music)