When Perry Wellness Center praises the value of farm to table dining, its market goes to any length to ensure the availability of local, fresh produce. Meeting this assurance sometimes means that market staff may personally go to the farm and select the best vegetables to sell.

Rudy’s Happy Patch Market also takes its customers’ taste for Chase Corn seriously, so it is business as usual when its truck arrives early in the day to Chase Family Farms in Oglethorpe. Stuart Perry is proud that the Chase family has selected Happy Patch as the only Americus outlet for its choice corn.

“The Chase family is all in for freshness and goodness,” Stuart explains. “They must start harvesting the day’s orders at the crack of dawn. We have a truck in line and get only the freshest from their fields.”

But the effort doesn’t stop there. After the corn is harvested, it is sorted into 6 and 12-ear bags, Many staff and peers rush to bag and store the corn in a market cooler.

“I have had to load the cooler when we are later in the day with our corn transport,” Stuart says with a smile, so the earlier it arrives, the better!

In the photo above, market staff leader Debbie Bissaillson prepares to check the count on freshly picked bags of Chase Corn before she transports them to cooler quarters.