About Fork & Shovel

Steering Committee

Jil Hales built barndiva five years ago with the intent of creating a dining lounge and green wedding venue that would source exclusively from the sustainable food shed that surrounded her barn & gardens in the heart of Healdsburg. She and her family have dry farmed nuts and fruit on a ridge above the Pacific for over two decades and her connection with food sourcing goes back to her tenure as president of one of the largest food co-ops in America.

It was not until she faced ongoing daily challenges trying to coordinate so many small batch purveyors with the growing demands of a busy restaurant that she saw a genuine need to find a way to connect the dots between sustainable food production and passionate chefs. Encouraged by a growing number of local farmers wanting to extend their reach to chefs that were committed to sourcing locally, she invited a talented group of friends, already hard at work seeking ways to protect and celebrate the food shed, to join her to create Fork & Shovel.

“I love, and am extremely proud, of the extraordinary dishes we serve at barndiva. But more important to me ~ a life goal if you will ~ is that I help in some small way to get the dining public not just to ask ~ but to care ~ about where their food comes from.”

Randi Seidner is an advocate for local sustainable food systems, a cause she has advanced as a Leader in the Russian River Convivium of Slow Food since 2005, and in the San Francisco Bay Area producing many special events that help raise awareness about the issues that threaten our local food security. Passionate about preserving agricultural biodiversity and gastronomic traditions, Randi has been a proponent of linking chefs and farmers for years and is honored to put that into action working with Fork and Shovel.

“Everyone deserves access to healthy food that is grown in nutrient rich soil less than 150 miles from their home. Local farmers supplying local chefs is just a first, and necessary step to them supplying local grocery stores, hospitals, corporate cafeteria’s, and schools.”

Susan Preston supports the goal of local food production in deeds as well as thought. Susan and her husband Lou have created Preston of Dry Creek, a destination farm and winery in Dry Creek Valley. From an early devotion to grapes and wine they have become producers of a diverse representation of the best that Sonoma County can grow, from sheep to nuts, with a variety of fruits and vegetables in between. Certified organic since 2001, they now ponder the spiritual and ecological fulfillment of biodynamics.

Susan’s concern for sustainable food systems shares space in her daily life with her passion for art. A Master in Fine Arts from Mills College, her paintings and mixed-media constructs strike a balance between the idiosyncratic and the familiar, between tension and harmony. Her hopes for Fork and Shovel are similar: to reconcile the individual agendas of chefs and farmers with the overriding and compelling need to build and celebrate a viable food community.

“Restaurant patrons are hungry for information about where their food comes from,” she says, “and chefs need to know too”.

Paula Downing’s life link to Fork & Shovel flows from her 15 years managing the Sebastopol Farmers Market and 6 years managing the Santa Rosa Farmers Market. Hers is an eating history that has always been connected to the farm. Her family was one of the first to move into a little suburban subdivision in a small farming community of Smithfeld, Rhode Island, where her playground was the peach orchards in summer and apple orchards in fall. Her first indelible food memory is of incandescent yellow waxed beans a traveling truck farmer would sell door to door.

“There is something about a farmer that inspires and sustains me – their concentration on the land, their hard work, their quirkiness.”

Cindy Daniel lives on a small farm in Dry Creek Valley where she and her family tend over 30 varieties of fruits and nuts, olives, wine grapes, chickens and bees, and most recently, a market garden for flowers and vegetables. In addition to farming she has spent the last 8 years pulling weeds at a school garden where she helped create a program to teach children the connections between food, health, and the environment. Her interest in education led Cindy to establish a community speakers’ series in which she produces county-wide events promoting critical thought about sustainable agriculture and food systems. Currently Cindy is transforming a shed in Healdsburg into her vision of a contemporary grange, including a café, market, and meeting space, where she hopes to bring people together to share food, stories, knowledge, information- and really good times.

“I believe that we ought to know where our food comes from, and feel connected to the land around us. Fork and Shovel can support our local farmers and help preserve the land that nurtures us all.”

Lukka Feldman, the youngest member of Fork & Shovels steering committee, is barndiva’s general manager and green wedding and events coordinator. He is currently president of the Healdsburg Restaurant Association (HRA), many of whose members are also chef-members of forks & shovel. (AKA ‘Forks’) Lukka spent all his summers growing up working on his parent’s farm in Mendocino, and traces his first understanding of the direct connection of farm to table from those years.

“The hardest thing, bar none, in running a restaurant that sources directly from the food shed is getting chefs and farmers to communicate. Fork & Shovel is not just a noble idea, it’s a very necessary one if we expect to support the careers of talented chefs who wish to source wholesale product from their local food shed, wherever that may be. ”

Kristee Rosendahl came onboard the steering committee after the initial fundraising launch in Oct. 2008, specifically to help build the online tools Fork &Shovel envisioned would help farmers across the county input an incredible range of products which busy chefs could easily browse and cross reference by vendor, variety, taste, ~ even proximinity to the restaurant. She has owned KR Studio since 1984, with a focus on strategy, product design and development of highly useful and engaging products, web sites and applications for a digital world with a conscience. She is also a dedicated beekeeper and farmer at Big Dream Ranch, her 300 acre forested homestead above Lake Sonoma.

“ I see Fork and Shovel as part of my ongoing commitment to creating online tools and experiences that help farmers, chefs, foodies, gardeners and their communities become more productive, successful and sustainable. The biggest challenge we face is to build online tools that truly help chefs and farmers run their business. If we can do that, everyone wins, because their success ~ from which we benefit immeasurably ~ is truly interconnected.”

Design development, user experience, and visual design of ForkandShovel.com. www.krstudio.com.
Website development and programming for forkandshovel.com www.webficient.com