On March 6, 2024, The Leadership Tampa Class of 2024 experienced a program day around Agriculture and Sustainability.
The day started out with a trip to Fancy Farms Market in Lakeland to hear from members of the Grooms family who have owned Fancy Farms since 1974. They shared some of the challenges facing the area’s strawberry and other produce farmers, but also shared the innovative ways they are trying to bring their produce directly to the consumer through Fancy Farms Market. Visitors can enjoy lunch options, strawberry cookies, strawberry vinaigrette dressing, or the clear favorite of LT’24 – the strawberry milkshake.
Next, the group got to visit Wish Farms new headquarters in Plant City, hosted by Owner and Head Pixie, Gary Wishnatzki. In addition to the home office, the campus features a blueberry farm, a 125,000 square foot warehouse with a 20,000 square foot solar array, walking trails, a lake, and some rather large wooden cutouts of former employees that you may have seen driving east on I-4. As impressive as the grounds and facilities were, many members of LT’24 were enthralled with the whimsical treehouse conference room.
After Wish Farms, the Leadership Tampa bus pulled into The Florida Strawberry Festival where the group got to hear from local FFA students talk about their steer and swine projects. The students, Gabby Howell and Tregg Aguero told the group how they got started with FFA and the opportunities that had been afforded to them over the years, then took the LT’24 team on a tour of the cattle barn. The group later enjoyed some real Plant City strawberry shortcake while hearing Bart Arrington from Day Sponsor, Mosaic talk about some of their more interesting projects around the area including turning Clay Settling Areas into agricultural producing sites.
The team ended the day with City of Tampa representatives learning about recycling and sustainability, including a demonstration of the City of Tampa Litter Skimmer. Shelby Lewis and Edgar Castro Tello remined the team that recycling is real and really important, but there are also many even better ways to reduce waste and pollution such as composting, reusing, refusing, reducing and rethinking. City of Tampa Sustainability and Resilience Officer, Whit Remmer painted a vivid picture of how far ahead Tampa has historically been in areas like solid waste and waste water management, but also made it clear that there is a tremendous amount of work yet to be done in the area of sustainability. For example, Tampa was one of the very first cities to have a “waste to energy” program opening up the McKay Bay Waste to Energy Facility back in 1985.
Overall, the team learned a great deal about the importance of agriculture in the Tampa Bay area and left with a purpose to help others understand the sustainability needs of the Tampa Bay area.