Before daybreak every Tuesday morning, Tenley Weaver winds down the mountain curves from Floyd to Roanoke, delivering local foods to the Roanoke Co+op, The LEAP Hub, plus numerous other restaurants, caterers, and wholesale buyers, bridging the distance between rural providers and urban consumers. As a farmer and aggregator, Tenley has been a constant and dedicated player in the expansion of the local foods movement for the past three decades, working tirelessly to create more resilient food systems in Roanoke, Floyd, and Blacksburg. From her “understudy” of many older produce farmers who sourced this area’s enthusiastic appetites from the '50s through the '80s, Tenley and partner Dennis Dove motivated a small group of farmer friends to cooperate with sales, marketing, and distribution, thus encouraging their success in a hard-knock career notoriously dominated by the global food industry. Although the group began quite humbly from tailgate meetings in 1995, it quickly gathered steam, supporters, and sourcing of delicious products to become a significant food supplier throughout the region.  

After several seasons of “back-pocket” business, Good Food-Good People (GFGP) officially emerged in 1998, boasting an enviable list of edibles from dozens of fruit and vegetable farms, pastured meat/egg/cheese suppliers, apiaries, and diverse processed food businesses, on their weekly menus. GFGP stepped up to meet the bounty of their suppliers, and soon found itself with a successful regional CSA program that numbered over 400 shares in peak years. An online ordering and home delivery program were soon added to the wholesale venues, and GFGP helped to establish multiple area farmers markets, including LEAP’s Grandin Village and West End markets, to cultivate outlets for the cascade of local foods that flowed from a 100-mile+ radius. Quite a few employees (14 to be exact) manned the markets, drove delivery trucks, packed the CSA shares, kept accounting books, and managed the online market (long before dedicated programs and apps were available!), and Tenley worked year ‘round and nearly ‘round the clock to load trucks and direct the complicated operation.

A modicum of common sense and several tired vertebrae in Tenley’s back finally spoke loudest when she woke up to the irony that, at 55, “Good Food was killing her,” and that her own truncated dream of farming had long been drowned in the flood of duties to keep the distribution boat afloat. Thus 2016 became the Year of Big Change and the company was significantly downsized in scope and outreach and reducing staff to Tenley alone. Roanoke-area CSA opportunities, including the Carilion Clinic CSA, were passed on to LEAP’s management to continue for the benefit of all local farmers.   

However, Tenley had formed not just business relationships but longstanding friendships with the suppliers who supported GFGP’s sales for over 25 years, and derailing the entire GFGP train would have pulled the rug out from sales of dozens of local farms, including Tenley’s own fledgling farm, TruFood Growery.  Thus a compromise was reached in the formation of a new company, Loca-Motive Aggregator, which continued with the majority of sales via wholesale outlets, while allowing Tenley an improved quality of life and a chance to finally farm again. Loca-Motive continues to be quite active among wholesale customers in Roanoke, still sourcing from numerous food suppliers of all types in a 100-mile+ radius, and still delivering weekly to LEAP’s Farm Share, Mobile Market, and Community Store.

The “engineer” and all the local food producers on board the Loca-Motive hope you’re still enjoying the ride!!