Food for Local Benefit: Civic Agriculture at the Wea Creek Orchard

Th is project is a case study on Wea Creek Orchard, an intergenerational farm in the greater Lafayette area. Because this was an ethnographic project based on grounded theory, I did not have a set research question upon entering the field. After spending a few months volunteering on the Wea Creek Orchard, however, I noticed that this farm operates in a community-oriented way, prioritizing community engagement over the pursuit of profit. With these observations as a base, this project reviews the ways in which Wea Creek Orchard runs its business as a civic agriculture operation. Civic agriculture refers to locally embedded farms with direct-to-consumer sales that benefit their communities in some capacity. Th is project is significant in that it underscores the benefit that local farms bring to their communities, building upon a body of scholarly work that analyzes community benefit and local economies