What is Context?

At the core of it all, context is everything that influences and matters in your operation. At The Chef’s Garden, our context looks different than the context of a conventional farming operation. With regenerative agriculture at the forefront of all of our decisions, everything we do is rooted with deeper intention and care.

While context varies for everyone, a few notable key components the Noble Research Institute share that follow us in our every day farming practices are:

• Soil health parameters
• Climate, region and environment
• Our individual backgrounds, educations, experiences and knowledge bases
• Family and employee dynamics
• The history of the property
• Influence of neighbors and others
• Willingness to learn something new
• Our belief system

While these components shape our daily practices, they are themselves shaped by an overarching factor in our operation at The Chef’s Garden: sustainability.

Sustainability as our Foundation to Context

We work hard to provide chefs with the best in-season vegetables and we consider our produce to be at a higher standard than most not just because of what we’re growing, but because of how we’re growing them.

The Chef’s Garden treats sustainability as the foundation, not the finish line. While many think sustainability as being “green” and “eco-friendly”, we see it as something broader and more holistic.

For our farm to be truly sustainable, we believe that it must meet three essential criteria:

1. Environmentally Friendly
2. Socially Responsible
3. Economically Viable

CEO and Co-Owner of The Chef’s Garden, Bob Jones Jr., often compares these three pillars to three legs of a stool. Keep all three strong, and you create a stable foundation that can support long-term success.

We take pride in caring for the land, but we take even greater pride in caring for the people who live on it as a direct impact of our work with the land. When we work with nature rather than against it, the Earth responds in kind—with healthier soil, more nutrient-dense vegetables for our customers and a farming system that supports over 150 dedicated team members.

Sustainability isn’t just part of our context—it is our context. It’s how we grow, how we think and how we ensure that both our farm, our food and our community has a future.

Context Matters in your Kitchen

Those who understand the care and intentionality behind their ingredients create dishes with deeper flavors and meaning. Having the context behind your ingredients allows you to respect and highlight the ingredient, not just cook with it. This context can include anything from the importance of sustainability to your business or home, how or where your vegetables are grown, or seasonality of your produce.

Take, for example, a carrot. To some, it’s just a humble root vegetable, pulled from a bin at the grocery store. But to the cultured cook, it’s a product of living soil, nurtured through regenerative agriculture not just for flavor, but to restore the health of the land itself. These carrots are grown in ways that deepen the richness and sweetness only truly healthy soil can offer. They aren’t grown just to fill shelves or pack boxes—they’re grown to nourish people, steward the earth and preserve the story of where our food comes from.

This context brings purpose into your craft, a connecting conversation with a guest and a flavor that’s remembered well after the meal has been served.

Context Shapes Everything We Do

Context makes every farm and kitchen unique. When bringing context into the picture it forms a lens through which your actions gain meaning. For a farmer, it guides the choice of methods to nurture soil for exceptional vegetables. For a chef, it informs the selection of produce, prioritizing the best for guests and the environment. Regardless of your role, The Chef’s Garden remains committed to working in harmony with nature, providing kitchens everywhere with vegetables that are full of meaning and purpose.

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Regenified’s mission is to facilitate the widespread global adoption of regenerative farming, addressing critical environmental challenges and ensuring the production of nutrient-dense, regeneratively grown food. Designed to move entire supply chains toward regenerative agriculture, its 6-3-4 Verification Standard™ creates consistency and protocols to track progress in the regeneration of agricultural systems.

“Growing as close to nature as possible has long been a driving motivation for us here at The Chef’s Garden. Working with the team at Regenified has been a great experience as we learned a lot during the auditing process that has helped us advance our efforts in growing healthy soils and healthy plants. Nutrient density only comes when the entire ecosystem is in tune with nature, and that cascades into our local community as well,” said Bob Jones, CEO. “Healthy soils, plants, people, and planet are not just words to our team here at the farm. We live it and are honored to be working with the team at Regenified to move agriculture forward in our little corner of the world.”

The Chef’s Garden is committed to growing exceptional vegetables, caring for each other and the land, and inspiring a vegetable-forward future. Being Certified Regenified allows the farm to show with transparency the regenerative practices it has implemented, by measuring the impact of its efforts to rebuild life in the soil and the health of its ecosystems.

“Salar Shemirani, chief executive officer at Regenified, says, ‘When consumers buy from farms that have achieved Certified Regenified status, they can be assured of supporting positive change for the planet that has been measured, verified, and validated through extensive on-field and in-lab testing, and data collection.”

For more information about The Chef’s Garden Regenified Certification and its commitment to sustainable agriculture, please visit chefs-garden.com.

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At The Culinary Vegetable Institute at The Chef’s Garden, trying to find ways to eliminate food waste is a way of life. Products from the farm that are not quite perfect are transformed and given new life through vinegars, pickles, syrups, misos, and countless other products.

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