Homegrown Foods
A food forest needs ground before it needs anything else
An empty lot, a corner of a property, a parcel you are not going to build on. Give it to Homegrown Foods and it becomes a community orchard that feeds the neighborhood around it.
Why land
We can bring the design, the trees, the water and the volunteers. We cannot bring the ground.
Homegrown Foods is a 501(c)(3) with one aim: communities in the Phoenix Valley that feed themselves from their own gardens and food forests. Backyards get us part of the way. A neighborhood needs a place in common, where the trees are everyone's and the harvest is too.
Every one of those places starts with someone who had ground and let it go to work. An infill lot nobody is building on, a church's back acre, a retention basin that already catches the water, a corner of a farm. The land is the hard part. The rest is what we do every week.
What we do with it
Plant it, steward it, and feed the people around it.
Plant
We design it the way we design a yard: basins and berms to catch the rain, mulch over bare soil, desert-adapted fruit and shade trees in guilds. Volunteers plant it in a workday or two.
Steward
Watering, mulching and pruning through the first years, then lighter care as the canopy closes. A neighborhood crew learns it alongside us so the place outlasts any one of us.
Feed the neighborhood
The harvest goes to the people who live around it, and the surplus moves through Homegrown Foods to pantries and partners across the Valley.
Ways to give
A gift of land can take several shapes. Which one fits depends on what you want to keep and what you want to let go.
An outright gift
You deed the land to Homegrown Foods. The simplest route, and the one with the clearest tax picture.A bargain sale
You sell it to us below its appraised value. The difference between the two is treated as a gift.A conservation or agricultural easement
You keep the land and give up the right to develop it, so it stays growing food. A gift of the easement, not the ground.A long lease at no cost
You keep title and let us plant and steward it for a term long enough for trees to matter, usually twenty years or more.
The tax side
Homegrown Foods is a 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 92-3311736. A gift of real property to a public charity is generally deductible at its appraised fair market value, and for a gift above the IRS threshold a qualified appraisal is required to claim it. A bargain sale is deductible for the gift portion, and an easement for the value it gives up. A lease at no cost isn't a deduction, but it costs you nothing either. By IRS rules the value of an in-kind gift is set by the donor, with the appraisal, not by the charity, so we never put a figure on it. What any of this is worth depends on how you file, so talk to your tax preparer about your situation before you decide on the shape of the gift.
What happens next
Three steps before anything is signed, and no obligation at any of them.
A conversation
Tell us about the land below. We call to hear what you have in mind, what you want to keep, and what the neighborhood is like.
A site walk
We visit, look at the soil, the water, the sun and the access, and tell you honestly whether it can grow food and what it would take.
Our board's review
Homegrown Foods' board looks at the site, the costs of stewarding it and the shape of the gift, and we come back to you with a yes and a plan, or a clear no.
Start the conversation
Where the land is, roughly how big, and what you have in mind. We read every one and call you back.
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