About Me

I'm Brian. I work in industrial maintenance, and most of what I know about building things comes from fixing systems, not running a business. Rooted Local didn't start as a business plan. It started because I had 20 laying hens, more eggs than my family could use, and no easy way to make sure they went to people who wanted them instead of the trash. So we started giving the extra eggs to a local food pantry. That's still happening today and it's called Larimore Farms, it's the first listing on this map.

Somewhere in that process, I started wondering how many other people around here were in the same boat. Homesteaders with a few extra dozen eggs, a garden that produced more tomatoes than one family could eat, a hobby that had quietly turned into something worth sharing, and I started wondering how a buyer in Lafayette would ever find them.

Turns out, that's harder than it should be. There are bigger directories out there. Some list hundreds of farms across the whole state. I looked, and I'd never heard of any of them, even though I was already part of this world. That told me something: a list of producers only matters if people actually know it exists. Being big isn't the same as being useful to the person down the road from you.

Rooted Local exists to make it easy for people in North Central Indiana to find real food from real neighbors and just as easy for the people growing and raising it to be found.

It's still small, and it's still growing, one producer, one conversation at a time. If that sounds like something worth being part of, whether you're buying or listing, you're welcome here.

— Brian Larimore