Sonnewald natural food

Sonnewald Natural Foods:  The Oldest Natural Food Store in Pennsylvania

Sonnewald Natural Foods is a grocery store in Spring Grove, Pennsylvania.  It’s billed as the oldest natural foods store in Pennsylvania.  Sonnewald Natural Foods is unique in another way, too:  it has its own farm, where fresh, organic vegetables are produced year-round for the store.

Wait a minute.  Did you read what I just wrote?  Sonnewald Natural Foods gets fresh organic veggies year-round from its own farm.  In Pennsylvania.  Where you can’t grow fresh veggies year-round.  Steve and Carol Moore run the farm, and Steve is an expert on biointensive organic farming and in using solar greenhouses.  He grows those veggies year-round, even in the winter, in passively heated greenhouses.  He does not heat the greenhouses, except with the sun.

The man knows what he is doing, too.  In a recent nine-month period, he grew $25,000 worth of organic lettuce on just ¼ acre for Sonnewald Natural Foods.  People from all over the world come to the Moore’s farm to learn how he does it.  Steve and Carol teach workshops and host interns in order to share what they’ve learned.

One of the things Steve Moore is passionate about sustainable food systems that do not use fossil fuels and are energy efficient.  He believes we need to develop complete systems for producing food sustainably, and not pick and choose the organic methods that are easiest for us to do.

So, what kind of energy does Moore use to grow the vegetables sold at Sonnewald Natural Foods?  He uses people power.  He has the statistics and data to prove that hand farming is the most energy efficient way to do it; that hand farming produces the most food for the amount of energy used. 

Sonnewald Natural Foods is the oldest organic food store in Pennsylvania.  It’s also the place where Steve Moore sells the produce he grows through biointensive sustainable farming.