Join us for a conversation with PIE alum and Techstars alum Julia Niiro, founder of MilkRun.

See Julia's story about MilkRun at PIE Demo Day 2019 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbaIO9XltRg), her views on small local farms from TEDxPortland 2019, and the explosive growth MilkRun has seen due to the pandemic shared during Techstars Anywhere Demo Day 2020.

MilkRun works with farmers and producers in Oregon & Southern Washington to break down the access barriers to local food. The national average for how far food travels to get from the farm to your house is 1,500 miles. That’s wild! We’ve cut down our average to 35 miles and have designed a system that leapfrogs the industrialized food system. Less travel = less pollution. More access to food = fresher, healthier foods!

It’s not just about ditching the grocery store lines, it’s about keeping money in the community and supporting local producers. For farmers, we’re able to provide 6-7x what they’d make from a normal grocery store. It should be as easy (if not easier) to buy from local farmers as it is to order a cab or book a stay in someone’s house, right?

90% of the small farms in America right now are at risk of extinction. If mega-industrialized farming becomes our only option for food, we’ll have no more farmer’s markets, no more CSAs, no more farmers who are stewards to the land. Without radical new systems like MilkRun, the only options for food will be from huge corporations pushing profit over people, and we just don’t want to live in that kind of a world. We can do this, together!

RSVP / Submit questions: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/pie-founder-story-julia-niiro-milkrun