Category: Farming – Organic Farming

Fresno’s Freedom School is Changing the Narrative on Farming for Black Youth

Civil Eats

Fresno’s Freedom School is Changing the Narrative on Farming for Black Youth

The year-round vegetable farm and job-skills program in an investment in the city’s African-American youth.

Joan Cusick, Food Justice, Urban Ag, Young Farmers, February 13, 2019

 

At New Light for New Life Church of God in West Fresno, the well-tended backyard yields a colorful fall crop—green and purple cabbage, cauliflower, collard greens, and curly kale. A few stalks of okra are left, too, as a reminder of summer’s bounty. But this is not just any church garden. This is the Freedom School Demonstration Farm, a year-round vegetable farm managed by a core group of 37 children and their adult mentors.

“It’s very healing to get your hands in the dirt,” said Aline Reed, Freedom School’s board chair. “For African-American children, especially, we are changing the narrative of working outside—of planting, harvesting, and working.”

The church’s associate pastor, the Rev. Floyd D. Harris Jr. (pictured above), founded the Freedom School in 2015 based generally on the Freedom Schools of the 1960’s Civil Rights movement. This school is a wrap-around program for West Fresno youth, offering cultural, educational, and job skills programs to at-risk students in grades K-12.

The urban farming group meets on Saturdays during the school year and twice a week during the summer, including at least three farmers’ markets held at the church. Children also perform public service projects and give produce to seniors and others in the neighborhood. In addition to agriculture, the Freedom School teaches tangible job skills such as construction, landscaping, janitorial work, photography, journalism, and video production.

A flock of geese fly over Freedom School Fresno’s demonstration farm, located behind New Light for New Life Church of God. (Photo © Joan Cusick)A flock of geese fly over Freedom School Fresno’s demonstration farm, located behind New Light for New Life Church of God.

Dr. Ruth Dahlquist-Willard, a small farms advisor with the University of California Cooperative Extension Service in Fresno, occasionally works with community programs like the Freedom School. “It’s a small group, but they are filling an important role in the food security of our communities,” she said. “You’ve got projects like the Freedom School and the Sweet Potato Project [run by the West Fresno Family Resource Center] that are providing young people opportunities they might not have had in job development.”

Harris grew up in West Fresno and remains passionate about the need to lift up its low-income residents. One recent analysis rated Fresno, 8 percent of whose 527,000 residents are Black, the 10th-worst U.S. city for African-Americans to live in: the Black median income is $25,895, less than half the average white income in the city, and the Black poverty rate is 41.2 percent—one of the largest rates for any city—compared with a 13 percent white poverty rate. Fresno was the only West Coast metro area to make the list.

“When the children come [to the Freedom School], they see a sense of self, a sense of love, a sense of purpose, a sense of someone to care about me,” Harris said. “At the Freedom School, we are about character-building. We’re about discipline. We’re about having fun.”

Growing and Learning Year-Round

When Maria Else joined the Freedom School Board in 2017 as its secretary and curriculum coordinator, the urban farming program “was only supposed to be in the summer,” she said. But based on the children’s interest and enthusiasm, the demonstration farm extends year-round.

“Farming has so many parts to it,” Else said. “The kids all kind of gravitate toward different areas. And that’s what we want to teach them: Agriculture is not just planting. It is engineering and science and so many different aspects.”

Marie Else manages Freedom School's curriculum. (Photo © Joan Cusick)Marie Else manages Freedom School’s curriculum.

The curriculum covers a wide range of topics, too. In January and February, the Saturday classes focus on African-American culture and history. (While Fresno is a predominantly Latinx city, and the Freedom School is open to students of all backgrounds, its home in an African-American church guides much of its curriculum and student body.)

In the spring, several weeks of planting are followed by farm maintenance. During the summer, the program expands to twice a week, allowing time for harvesting, selling, and field trips. In September, the urban farmers prepare their entry for the Big Fresno Fair, where they’ll enter recipes such as watermelon chutney and craft projects like black-and-green potholders.

As the year winds down, the students plant and maintain winter crops while learning about nutrition and cooking. The young students have learned to prepare dishes such as stuffed peppers, black-eyed pea hummus, dill pickles, and their award-winning watermelon chutney. Healthy eating is a frequent topic.

“We talk to them about different diseases and illnesses that affect African-Americans, including high rates of diabetes and high blood pressure,” Else said.

They’re also getting exposure to the world of agricultural research. Last spring, researchers selected the Freedom School as one of three test sites to grow two types of black-eyed peas—one a U.S. commercial blend, and the other an aphid-resistant strain crossed with Nigerian lines from the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture. The project included researchers Bao-Lam Huynh and Philip Roberts of U.C. Riverside, plus Nick Clark and Dahlquist-Willard, both with the U.C. extension service. Freedom School students helped plant, maintain, and harvest the peas. Dahlquist-Willard is analyzing their results.

“The Nigerian blend did not get one aphid on it, and they were planted right next to the American blend, which was covered in aphids,” Else reported. “We don’t know what kind of magic is in those Nigerian black-eyed peas.”

Changing the Narrative of Black Farmers

Arogeanae Brown, who grew up in Fresno and now works for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), wrote her Virginia Tech master’s thesis about nine Black-led community-based agricultural programs, including Freedom School Fresno. She also devoted time to mentoring its students when she came home between semesters, talking with them about agricultural careers and introducing them to groups like 4-H and Future Farmers of America.

“It’s very healing to get your hands in the dirt,” says board member Aline Reed. (Photo © Joan Cusick)“It’s very healing to get your hands in the dirt,” says board member Aline Reed.

Although the ag programs Brown studied welcome children of all races, Brown concluded, the emphasis on Black history helped African-American children thrive. “[The school’s] major focus was allowing students to have a knowledge of their history—where they come from and how the land is managed,” she said. “To get students interested in agriculture overall, we really have to dig up our history and understand slavery.”

Freedom School also strives to change the Black farmer stereotype, which is often cited as a barrier to entry for ag-related careers.

“Most Blacks have an impression of farming based on our history in this country,” said Fresno farmer Will Scott, citing a history of slavery, sharecropping, and Jim Crow laws. “But we need to get back into it from a new approach. We need to get young people of color back to the farm not just so they can grow their own food but so they can participate in the food system.”

                                     A student poster for Freedom School hangs in the multipurpose room, where classes are held.

The challenge facing black farmers in Fresno are mirrored nationwide. In the 2012 USDA Census of Agriculture, Black farmers accounted for just 1.4 percent of the country’s 3.2 million farmers. California reported 526 Black farm operators—.7 percent of the state’s nearly 78,000 total farms—of whom only 345 were principal operators in charge of day-to-day operations. In Fresno County alone, only 42 out of 5,683 farms reported African-American farmers.

Harris sees the Freedom School as one way to give African-American children in West Fresno the extra help they need to avoid becoming another statistic. Of more than 100 students to complete the program, several have received college scholarships, and two have completed USDA internships.

“God has favor on us,” Harris said, “because when we look at the success rate of our students—the grades are going up, the behaviors are getting better, they’re eating better, and they’re winning competitions. This is self-esteem building.”

Board Chair Reed said the Freedom School shows kids that agriculture is not just a pastime; “This is something you can devote a career to and make it your future,” she said.

Harris agreed. “When we can see our children walking across the stage with a second degree and a $100,000 job waiting on them at the USDA, that’s what we want to see,” he said. “We want these children to grow into healthy Black men and healthy Black women, and to change society to be a healthy place for them.”

Montana Ranchers are trying to Bring Back Country of Origin Labels on Meat

 

A newly proposed bill would require COOL placards for beef and pork sold in Montana, and supporters want to see the return of a national policy.

By Twilight Greenaway, Food Policy       February 7, 2019

When Jeanie Alderson looks at the big picture of ranching in Montana, the numbers just don’t add up. For generations, it was a state where the owners of small and medium-sized independent ranches like hers could make a living grazing cattle on the wide-open prairie. But now, she said, “people have two or three other jobs to support the habit of ranching.”

Alderson (pictured above) and her family raise grass-finished cattle that they sell directly to consumers as well as calves that get shipped to feedlots in states like Kansas and Nebraska, where they are fattened on corn, and then sold into the conventional market. She’s also part of a coalition of ranchers and local groups, including the Montana Cattlemen’s Association and the Northern Plains Resource Council, that are working to bring back country of origin labeling (COOL) in Montana for beef and pork—with an eye toward impacting the national conversation about how cheap, imported meat is effecting the nation’s remaining independent ranchers.

A federal COOL law went into effect in 2013, but was revoked in 2016 after a ruling by the World Trade Organization (WTO) and a subsequent decision by the U.S. Congress after lobbing from the Big Four meat packers. Shortly thereafter, the market for domestic beef dropped for a number of reasons. But ranchers in Montana have tied the shift to the fact that consumers could no longer differentiate meat that came from animals that were raised in the U.S. from those that were imported. One reason is a loophole that allows beef and pork from outside the country to carry a “Product of the USA” label if it has been processed here.

“It’s really confusing to customers and it’s not fair,” said Alderson.

Earlier this week, Montana state senator Albert Olszewski introduced a bill that would bring back a modified version of COOL for beef and pork sold within the state. Rather than require labeling directly on the meat’s packaging, however, the lawmaker hopes to circumnavigate the original WTO ruling—which essentially said that COOL required too much paperwork, and thus violated free trade laws and discouraged American processors from buying foreign meat—by requiring a placard to be placed wherever the meat is sold in the state.

The hope, said Jim Baker, president of the Montana Cattlemen’s Association, is to “try to get the dust stirred up here, so we can get the conversation going about getting [COOL] back on a national level.” And while the odds of pushing COOL labeling forward—and providing more consumer transparency in the state—are looking good in the Republican-controlled state senate, the bill also includes language that could get pushback from some consumers. In addition to clarifying and defining many aspects of the production chain, the bill also seeks to define “meat” for marketing purposes, an effort to protect the livestock industry from competition from the emerging cell-based protein industry.

The Value of a Label

The United States imported over 3 billion pounds of beef in 2016, or around one-tenth of what the country consumed that year. Whether it comes from Canada, Australia, or Uruguay, imported beef tends to cost less than beef produced in the U.S. And yet, Alderson points out, most customers aren’t paying less for imported beef at the grocery store.

“It’s pretty clear that imports are undermining our market. If we had COOL labeling, consumers would be able to pay attention and choose a product that was born and raised in the U.S.,” Alderson said. “We’re not saying, ‘Don’t bring in those imports.’ Bring them in, but label them so people have the choice.”

Baker describes the dramatic drop in price he saw after the disappearance of country of origin labeling disappeared. “When COOL was in effect, you got like $2.15 a pound for your live animal; a feeder calf is 750 pounds, so he [was] worth about $1,500 dollars. Then it dropped to around $1.50 a pound, so he was down to just a hair over a thousand.”

Most cow-calf producers make all their income for the entire year on a single day—the day they sell their animals to the feedlot. When the price in the area dropped by a dollar a pound, said Baker, a semi-truck load of cattle—typically weighing 63,000 pounds—brought in around $60,000 less than the year before.

“In a little community like ours, in some cases that [price] difference would make [a difference in whether] people could pay their bills and stay on ranches—or not,” said Alderson.

What the Bill Would Do

The placards Senator Olszewski and his allies have proposed provide three options for labeling. “If you can verify that your meat was born, raised, and processed in the United States—that’s what the placard will say,” Olszewski told Civil Eats. The other two options are “processed in the United States” and “processed outside of the United States.”

The original draft of the bill included the phrase, “origin unknown” for the latter, but Olszewski said it met pushback from the Montana Stock Growers Association and the Montana Farmers Bureau. “The big gorilla in the room are packers and the feedlot people,” said Olszewski, who added that the current draft required negotiation with both groups.

Whether or not consumers will register or understand the difference between the proposed labels is a lingering question. Olszewski acknowledges that some consumers will want more information. But he sees the labels as a worthwhile first step in a longer-term effort. “The goal is to take a very diverse group of stakeholders—people who are very passionate about this—and find some way to create an infrastructure that everybody can learn to develop confidence in and to trust it,” he said.

Gilles Stockton, another cow-and-calf ranch operator and member of the Northern Plains Resource Council, worked to get a state-level version of COOL passed in 2005 that ultimately expired before it went into effect because the federal bill took hold. And he’s back at it, in hopes of bringing back a set of rules that had wide-ranging appeal in the state at the time. “We’re going at it again,” he told Civil Eats. He also thinks the bill has a chance of moving forward and becoming law again.

“Most rural Montanans vote Republican, but not necessarily corporate Republican,” he said. “And that’s reflected in the Montana legislature. Ranchers across the board understand the history and see [COOL] as important to their livelihood.” The larger challenge, Stockton adds, has been reaching consumers, who also have a big stake in seeing their meat labeled by country of origin, but often have a hard time wrapping their brain around the complexities of the global supply chain.

Gilles Stockton in Montana

Gilles Stockton

For Jeanie Alderson, selling grass-fed beef direct to sustainability-minded consumers has really brought that fact home. An estimated 70 percent of the grass-fed beef sold in this country is imported, and many consumers appear to prioritize what they see as the nutritional benefits over supporting domestic producers.

Both Stockton and Alderson also point to the fact that everything else Americans eat is currently labeled by its country of origin. “If labeling beef and pork is trade illegal, then what about the labeling of all of these other things?” asked Stockton. “Why isn’t there a big push from other global corporations to eliminate all country of origin labeling? They don’t seem to be concerned about it, they’re living with it just fine.”

Defining Meat

Part five of the proposed Montana bill includes a definition of meat as “edible flesh of livestock or poultry” and proposes calling cellular meat replacements “cell-cultured edible products.” Both efforts, advocates say, are part of an effort to promote truth in labeling.

As the first cellular meat is expected to hit restaurants by the end of this year and both the USDA and U.S. FDA are working on a plan to regulate its commercial sales, several states have begun crafting similar policies. The first of such bills passed in Missouri last May, and another was withdrawn in Nebraska last month.

“We’re trying to be proactive in pointing out that cellular-based proteins need to have their own special name,” said Stockton. “If you take beef cells and grow them in a culture in a vat of liquid, you shouldn’t probably call it beef.” Olszewski echoes this sentiment. “I’m sure we’ll be able to come up with a name that sounds just as tasty as meat,” he added.

According to Jessica Almy, director of policy for Good Food Institute, a nonprofit industry group that promotes both plant-based and cellular meat alternatives from both the animal welfare and environmental perspectives, keeping terms like “meat” and bacon” off labels of cellular products will cause consumer confusion and could be dangerous for those with meat allergies.

GFI is one of several plaintiffs in a lawsuit that challenges the Missouri bill on the basis of free speech. “We oppose restrictions on cell-based meat that would censor food labels and make it an unlevel playing field. Our goal is to make sure that these products are able to compete against the products of conventional animal agriculture so that consumers are the ones who are deciding the winners and the losers in the marketplace,” said Almy.

And while ranchers like Stockton and Baker oppose the development of cellular meats, Almy points out a number of the people making decisions about the meat industry upstream don’t have a problem with it. Both Cargill and Tyson, for instance, have invested in Memphis Meats, a cell-based meat-industry darling. “Many conventional companies are positioning themselves as protein companies and trying to ensure that they can feed a growing world population,” said Almy.

Of course, ranchers like Alderson, Baker, and Stockton are less interested in the big meat company’s bottom line than they are in their own ability to compete and stay afloat.

“This is a story about beef, but it’s also about our democracy,” said Alderson. “If we’re going to have economic prosperity, if we’re going to take care of our land and our water and our farmers and ranchers, we need to know where all of our food is really coming from.”

Stockton adds that while country of origin labeling is an important part of restoring competitive markets in the livestock industry, there’s a real danger that its benefits have been oversold in many people’s minds. “COOL alone won’t reform the markets—to really do that, we’ll really need antitrust actions,” he said.

The Montana bill is expected to come up for a vote later this spring.

“The Garden of Eden is No More!”

EcoWatch
January 24, 2019

‘We have changed the world so much that scientists say we are now in a new geological age, the Anthropocene – the Age of Humans.’

World Economic Forum #wef19

David Attenborough says 'The Garden of Eden is no more'

‘We have changed the world so much that scientists say we are now in a new geological age, the Anthropocene – the Age of Humans.’World Economic Forum #wef19

Posted by EcoWatch on Thursday, January 24, 2019

Feeding the Bees!

Natural Beekeeping Trust

January 12, 2019

Father: What are you feeding them
Daughter: Pollen
#beelove in Kuwait

Come and eat, sweet bees

Father: What are you feeding themDaughter: Pollen#beelove in Kuwait

Posted by Natural Beekeeping Trust on Saturday, January 12, 2019

Food is Helping Flint, Michigan Recover

Civil Eats

Food is Helping Flint Recover and Reimagine Itself

Addressing the water crisis head on, multiple healthy food initiatives are working to improve health, nutrition, and food security while jump-starting the local economy.

By Brian Allnutt, Health, Local Eats, Nutrition   January 16, 2019

Flint Farmers Market

 

It’s a cold, snowy Thursday in Flint, Michigan, but business is more than steady in the Flint Farmers’ Market where Clinton Peck runs Bushels and Peck’s Produce. Locally grown micro-greens, beets, Brussels sprouts, and cabbage cover the booth, along with tropical fruit and other items he picked up at the produce terminal in Detroit. Elsewhere, the late lunch crowd is enjoying the offerings at the nearby restaurants. Later in the day, a group of kids from the city will participate in a cooking class in one of the market’s industrial kitchens.

It’s probably safe to say that this sort of diverse, foodie environment isn’t the picture most people conjure when they think of Flint—a town that is now synonymous with industrial decline and one of the worst public health crises in the nation’s recent history. Yet this market is booming—more than half a million people visited its 45 year-round and 30 seasonal vendors last year, according to farmers’ market managers.

What’s going on behind the scenes here is just as interesting. Peck’s produce stand operation is supported in part by a primary care pediatric facility called the Hurley Children’s Clinic (HCC), located in the same building. Through an initiative called the Nutrition Prescription Program, sponsored by the Rite-Aid Foundation, caretakers of children visiting the clinic receive a $15 voucher for fresh fruits and vegetables to spend at the market. Peck says he gets about $200 to $250 worth of business from these vouchers every market day.

The prescription program parallels other investments in the Flint food system designed to mitigate some of the worst effects of the water crisis. Programs like Flint Kids Cook—also coordinated by the HCC—as well as Double Up Food Bucks, Flint Fresh, and investments in community businesses such as the North Flint Food Market are helping Flint residents access fresh fruit and produce, as well as milk products, that are a proven to lessen the effects of lead on the body. For the most part, the produce that Peck sells and Flint Fresh distributes comes from outside the city proper, but Flint Fresh has a specific program of soil-testing and post-harvest handling for growers within the city limit to address lead concerns.

Double Up Food Bucks has grown since 2016, when it was used by 9 percent of SNAP households, to its present reach of over 50 percent. Other promising signs of growth include the facts that Flint Fresh is developing a regional food hub for food processing that could help area growers, and the North Flint Food Market just received a large grant from the Michigan Good Food Fund. In addition to getting healthy foods into the hands of more people, these initiatives are creating openings for the development of sustainable local businesses—and laying the foundation for radical change by giving citizens more control over their health and livelihood.

“Flint is a city like Detroit that is essentially having to re-imagine itself and rebuild itself from the ground up,” says Lisa Pasbjerg, market manager for the nonprofit Flint Fresh. “We want to get fresh produce to our community, but of course we also need to build and have a sustainable local economy.”

Balancing these two efforts hasn’t been easy. Although many nonprofit initiatives have expanded in the city and benefitted small businesses, 42 percent of Flint’s population lives in poverty, according the U.S. Census Bureau, and much of the development is clustered around a gentrifying downtown.

Increasing Access to Nutrition—With a Focus on Children

In 2014, the Flint Farmers’ Market moved to a new location next to the Mass Transportation Authority Transit Center—the source of 80 percent of Clinton Peck’s customers—and also near the YMCA and other amenities. The move preceded the water crisis, as did the co-location of the Hurley’s Children Clinic, but these changes took on a prophetic quality as the fallout from the disaster hit the city.

Since the water crisis, various programs have effectively helped residents—especially young ones—access the fresh food for sale in the market.

When the Nutrition Prescription Program launched in 2016, it gave patients small bags of fresh produce or $5 produce vouchers. As it continued, Amy Saxe-Custack, an assistant professor at Michigan State’s Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition, who runs it along with other researchers, realized their clients weren’t just using these benefits to supplement their diets, but to meet basic food needs. With additional funding from the Rite-Aid Foundation, the HCC was able to increase the amount of the vouchers from $5 to $10 dollars later in 2016 and then from $10 to $15 in 2018.

This effort is groundbreaking for its focus on children and preventative medicine. Saxe-Custack says that most of the food prescription initiatives in other parts of the nation focus on low-income adults with chronic conditions like high blood pressure or diabetes.

“From a dietary perspective, there is tons of evidence to suggest that dietary patterns are established early,” she says, and the attendant research she’s doing for the program may provide some data that could establish it as a model.

A cooking class at Flint Kids Cook. (Photo courtesy of Flint Kids Cook)A cooking class at Flint Kids Cook. (Photo courtesy of Michigan State)

Families using the center also expressed a desire to teach their children how to cook. This inspired Flint Kids Cook, which launched in 2017, sponsored by an anonymous family foundation in New York City that wanted to do something about the water crisis, says Saxe-Custack. Initially the program had trouble attracting enough young people to participate. But now the class at the market has a waiting list and is expanding to other sites in the city.

Saxe-Custack believes the success of the classes stems from the fact that it’s not just a nutrition class or cooking demo: “They’re measuring, they’re mixing, they’re cutting, they’re over a stove … It’s actually hands-on cooking,” she says.

And chefs from the market, such as Ian Diem of Chubby Duck Sushi, help teach the class. “The kids are enamored with the chefs,” as Saxe-Custack puts it. The class could also prepare kids for jobs in a sector that appears to be growing in the city.

Food System Investments Putting Power in Residents’ Hands

The economic benefits of charitable investments in the food sector have grown thanks to programs like Double Up Food Bucks as well. Administered by the Fair Food Network, a national nonprofit that has been using federal, state, and philanthropic funding to match SNAP benefits spent on fruits and vegetables for a decade. At the Flint Farmers’ Market, the effort has translated into more than $110,000 of additional sales annually, according to market manager Karianne Martus.

After the water crisis, the Fair Food Network set out to grow the program by stepping up their outreach to the people of Flint, where they had already established a strong base for the program. They also allowed people to use Double Up Food Bucks on dairy products because calcium has been shown to decrease the absorption of lead in the body.

Since October 2016, the number of residents using the Double Up program has grown from 4,000 to over 13,000. And Holly Parker, senior director of programs at the Fair Food Network, estimates that over 50 percent of SNAP recipients in the city are using the program, which brings more business to people like Peck at the farmers’ market, who says it has boosted his sales by between 8 and 12 percent.

Clinton Peck of Bushels and Pecks at the Flint Farmers' Market.Clinton Peck of Bushels and Pecks at the Flint Farmers’ Market. (Photo courtesy of the Flint Farmers’ Market)

Flint Fresh was also created to respond to the water crisis and is aimed at improving nutrition and food security while supporting local business. Along with mobile farmers’ markets, they deliver around 300 boxes of fresh produce to local families and individuals every month. Both platforms accept Double Up Food Bucks and Nutrition Prescription vouchers, as well as prescriptions from other programs. In the summer, 50 percent of the produce comes from local farms, some of them in Flint itself.

Flint Fresh’s Pasbjerg says that her organization is in the initial phases of building a regional food hub that would help the organization distribute produce. “The idea is that, long term, we would be able to process stuff for local farmers,” she says, “and then use that in the school systems and for local grocery stores.”

In addition to Double Up Food Bucks, the Fair Food Network is partnering with Capital Impact Partners, MSU’s Center for Regional Food Systems, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to invest in Flint as part of the Michigan Good Food Fund, which provides financing and counseling to organizations promoting healthy food access, economic development, and other goals. Among this year’s award winners is the North Flint Reinvestment Corporation, which will be receiving $40,000 to help create the city’s first member-owned co-operative grocery store, the North Flint Food Market.

The co-op is another example of the way the water crisis—as well as the disappearance of two large grocery store chains—engendered the desire for radical change. “The conventional food system isn’t going to come back into that neighborhood,” says Rick Sadler, assistant professor of Family Medicine at Michigan State and a member of the store’s steering committee. Starting the co-op was, in Sadler’s words, a way of “putting the power of the investment in the hands of the residents.”

The Challenges of Radical, Food-based Change

Despite all these positive changes, however, the city still faces structural problems caused by overall disinvestment in most of its neighborhoods and the clustering of new investment around Flint’s small downtown.

For these reasons, Flint businesses will still face a lack of a customer base for the immediate future, Sadler says. “It’s just so hollowed-out, and the momentum of getting investment back into the city has been so slow-going,” he added.

There’s also the fact that most grant-based initiatives don’t offer permanent funding. Double Up Food Bucks, according to Emilie Engelhard, senior director of external affairs for the Fair Food Network, seems to be secure after the Senate voted to protect healthy produce incentives in the most recent farm bill. And the Nutrition Prescription Program is funded through 2019 at the farmers’ market and through May 2020 at a second location. But relying on grants for economic stimulus will always be an uncertain proposition.

The exact potential of food businesses as an economic driver in Flint is also unknown. One study based in Detroit, which is 60-some miles away from Flint and dealing with similar structural issues, found that food was the third-largest employment sector in the city and could soon move to second.

Similar research hasn’t been done in Flint, but the city’s master plan projects that “food and hospitality” jobs in the county will be increasing 51.9 percent by 2040, second only to “health care and social assistance.”

Given this projection—and the progress these initiatives have made so far—Flint’s ability to use some of its current nutritional programming to bring investment back to the city could then be a very important for Flint residents. Although Pasbjerg emphasizes that in one of the nation’s poorest cities, “there’s a ton that needs to be done still.”

Edible Landscapes

Civil Eats

Edible Landscapes Are Un-Lawning America

These 12 businesses are among many nationwide ready to turn sterile, water- and chemical-intensive lawns into food forests.

By Stephanie Parker, Local Eats, Urban Agriculture    January 15, 2019

Lawns are ubiquitous in the United States and according to a 2015 NASA study, they take up three times as much space as the next largest irrigated crop, corn. These familiar patches of green require 9 billion gallons of water per day, around 90 million pounds of fertilizers and 75 million pounds of pesticides per year. Plus, the lawnmowers that maintain them largely use gas and emit pollutants. All for a crop we can’t eat.

A growing group of people and businesses are trying to change that. For over a decade, “unlawning,” or the act of turning sterile lawns into fertile, edible landscapes, has been gaining popularity in the United States. These edible yards aren’t just backyard garden plots with a few squash and tomato plants, rather they are landscapes that incorporate edible native plants, like paw paw trees or bush cherries, along with fruit trees, pollinator habitats, medicinal herbs and water features.

One well-known proponent of edible landscapes is Fritz Haeg, an artist who in 2005 began a years-long project called “Edible Estates,” during which time he traveled the country and turned ordinary yards into edible masterpieces. In the years since Haeg’s project, there has been a steady growth in awareness of edible landscapes in the U.S.

“When we began, there was very little ecological literacy,” says Sarah Kelsen, an ecological engineer and co-owner of Land Beyond the Sea, an edible design firm founded in 2010 in Ithaca, New York. But now, she says of ecological awareness and her own business, “It feels like there’s been a completely exponential increase.”

Ben Barkan, an edible landscaper who started HomeHarvest LLC 10 years ago in Boston, has also seen the difference. “Not a lot of people were used to the idea of replacing parts of their lawn or ornamental landscapes with edible landscapes,” Barkan says about the first years of his business. Now, he says, there is more interest and his business has grown a lot.

“The trend toward planting food is on the rise again,” says Fred Meyer, who started his edible landscaping organization, Backyard Abundance, back in 2006. Meyer believes that the chaos and insecurity that the U.S. has been experiencing since the 2008 recession contributed to unlawning’s rising popularity, since people tend to fall back on growing food in times of insecurity.

He likens the trend to that of the Victory Gardens during World War II, which grew an estimated 40 percent of produce consumed in the United States. Today, America grows less than half of its own fruit and just over two-thirds of its fresh vegetables. But home gardening is becoming more popular, with a 2014 study showing that one-third of Americans currently grow food at home, an increase of 17 percent from 2008. “I see it continuing as long as things continue to be unpredictable,” Meyer says.

parents and children in an edible gardenThe trend toward turning yards into gardens is a win for biodiversity as well. A recent study published in Landscape and Urban Planning found that lawn maintenance was responsible for a lack of biodiversity in sites around major cities like Baltimore, Boston, Miami, and Phoenix. It also found that “well-maintained” lawns were strikingly similar nationwide: A person’s maintained lawn in Baltimore would have more in common ecologically with a maintained lawn in Miami than it would with their neighbor’s unmanaged yard.

Edible landscapes, on the other hand, increase the diversity of insect populations, create habitat for birds and other wildlife, and provide ideal conditions for the millions of microbes that make up healthy soil, which is critically important for their ability to store carbon and slow climate change.

All that being said, lawns are still as American as apple pie, and not everyone is rushing to turn theirs into a productive landscape. “Houston is a tough market,” says Josh Reynolds, owner of the Houston-based Texas Edible Landscapes. “I am trying to educate Texans through the use of workshops, but interest remains low.”

And sometimes there can be resistance even from local government and rule makers. Homeowners associations (HOAs) are known for being sticklers about the appearance of one’s yard in a neighborhood. Successful edible designers take this into account, however, creating landscapes that are not just productive, but pretty as well.

Whether you want a consultation, a small raised bed, a full overhaul to turn your yard into an edible forest, or just to chat with someone about ecology, below are 12 businesses and groups around the country that can help.

Northeast/Mid-Atlantic

Earthbound Artisan
Located: Lancaster, Pennsylvania
Serving: Pennsylvania’s Berks, Chester, Dauphin, Lancaster, Lebanon, and York counties
Details: Earthbound Artisan was founded in 2014 by Garrett Book and Tim Seifarth after Seifarth, who has been a landscaper now for over 20 years, became disillusioned with “conventional” landscaping that included installing lawns and ornamental trees as status symbols. Earthbound offers traditional native gardens and designs based on permaculture, or what they call “design with a purpose.”

Ecologia Design
Located: Frederick, Maryland
Serving: Maryland, northern Virginia, and the Washington, D.C. area
Details: Owner Michael Judd started Ecologia Design in 2010 after working for 18 years in Nicaragua on tropical and edible landscapes and food security. Ecologia offers services from consultations to full-service installations. Judd also has a nursery and a permaculture site at his home in Frederick, where he leads talks and demonstrations. He also wrote a book, Edible Landscaping with a Permaculture Twist, to help people create these edible landscapes on their own.

HomeHarvest LLC
Located: Boston, Massachusetts
Serving: Boston and the Greater Boston Area
Details: Founded by Ben Barkan a decade ago when he was 18 years old, this business has grown from a kid on a bike towing a trailer and a shovel to a full-service edible landscaping company with five employees and a truck. Barkan is a licensed landscaper offering full-service edible landscaping with features including custom stonework, pollinator gardens, and medicinal herbs.

Land Beyond the Sea Ecological Design
Located: Ithaca, New York
Serving: New York’s Finger Lakes region
Details: Founded in 2010, Land Beyond the Sea offers planning and implementation for a number of services including site planning, landscape design, arborist consultation, and forestry and urban forestry. The eight-year-old design firm is owned by Miguel Berrios, the lead landscape designer, and Sarah Kelsen, the ecological engineer. Berrios is New York State’s only technical service provider certified to write Pollinator Habitat Plans for the National Resource Conservation Service (NRCS), which allow clients to install pollinator habitats fully funded by the NRCS.

South

Bountful Backyards

Located: Durham, North Carolina

Serving: The Triangle area

Bountiful Backyard founders Kate DeMayo and Keith Shaljian in front of their peach tree.

Details: Owners Kate DeMayo and Keith Shaljian began Bountiful Backyards in 2007 as an alternative to starting farm, which they say was out of reach due to the cost of land. They offer design and installation services of low-maintenance gardens that use permaculture principles and comply with HOA requirements. Some of the installations they provide include vegetable gardens, fruit trees, herbal and tea gardens, pest management, water catchment and rain gardens. They also teach classes and give workshops in the community.

Fleet Farming
Located: Orlando, Florida
Serving: Orlando
Details: Fleet Farming is a nonprofit urban agriculture program that also offers edible landscaping services. After an initial consultation, the Fleet Farming team will install raised beds fitted with timed drip irrigation. They provide soil, seeds, plants, and a gardening guide. In addition, they offer edible forests that include perennial vegetables and fruiting trees that include such tropical plants as bananas, mangos, and avocados. The non-profit also has educational events and demonstration plants in a number of Orlando neighborhoods.

Texas Edible Landscapes
Located: Houston, Texas
Serving: Southeast Texas
Details: Started in 2016 by Josh Reynolds, who says his specialty is suburban landscapes where Homeowner Associations (HOAs) discourage the planting of anything besides pretty, ornamental lawns. “I like to design food-producing ecosystems that disguise themselves as typical ornamental plants that fit in with the neighborhood,” he says. The company is a design and consultation firm that contracts out to trusted associates if a client wants an installation.

Midwest

Backyard Abundance
Located: Iowa City, Iowa
Serving: Iowa City and surrounding areas including parts of Illinois, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Wisconsin
Details: Started by Fred Meyer in 2006, Backyard Abundance creates edible landscapes to meet their clients’ lifestyles and habits. Before he designs a landscape, Meyer does an in-depth consultation to understand what his client is looking for. “We want to create a positive beneficial relationship between the homeowner and their landscape,” he says. Meyer also focuses on aesthetics so that none of his clients will face problems from their HOA. In addition, Backyard Abundance has established edible classrooms, forests, and parks in Iowa City.

Custom Foodscaping
Located: St. Louis, Missouri
Serving: St. Louis and the surrounding area
Details: This two-year-old company creates custom edible landscapes. “I was inspired to start the business because I hope to help communities reimagine the places in which we grow food,” says owner Matthew Lebon. In the last year, he’s done around 40 consultations, five designs, and 10 installations. He also is a “garden coach” for a handful of clients. His focus is on planting perennial food crops—pears, chestnuts, asparagus, and others—in the hopes of creating a regenerative system based on perennial food crops.

West

Foodscapes Hawaii
Located: Honolulu, Hawaii
Serving: Honolulu and the rest of Oahu
Details: Foodscapes Hawaii offers a number of products and services to easily turn a patch of yard into a productive garden. After an extended site visit, owner Fran Butera and her Foodscapes Hawaii team designs a garden based on the client’s budget and builds it. Once the garden is planted, Foodscapes Hawaii offers other services, like a monthly subscription plan to weed and maintain the garden a few times a month. They also offer other services like gardening workshops, compost station or worm bin set-ups, and green home consulting.

The team from Foodscapes Hawaii after installing a new garden in Manoa Valley, Honolulu. They designed and built the raised redwood planters and planted a variety of edibles in their custom organic soil mix.

The team from Foodscapes Hawaii after installing a new garden in Manoa Valley, Honolulu. They designed and built the raised redwood planters and planted a variety of edibles in their custom organic soil mix.

Portland Edible Gardens
Located: Portland, Oregon
Serving: Portland metro area and surrounding suburbs
Details: Portland Edible Gardens was founded in 2013 by Ian Wilson to help people who wanted to grow their own food but don’t know how. “Portland has always had a reputation for valuing sustainability and fresh, local and organic food,” Wilson says. “But even in such a ‘green’ city I became aware that people had very few resources for actually learning how to grow their own food at home.” The business offers consultations and installations of raised garden beds, fruit trees, and berry bushes. They also do garden maintenance and one-on-one garden mentorship, bringing everything a client needs to start a garden.

Urban Plantations
Located: San Diego, California
Serving: San Diego County and Orange County, California
Details: Karen Contreras began Urban Plantations in 2008 at the height of the Great Recession. However, her risk paid off as San Diego families turned to growing their own food as a way to cut costs. Contreras stepped down in 2016 and the company is now run by Paige Hailey and Mat Roman. The business has around 20 employees and install roughly 50 new gardens and orchards each year.

Don’t worry if you don’t see a business near you on this list, there are many more out there that you can find online.

This article was updated to correct the spelling of Mat Roman’s name, and the area that Urban Plantations serves.

Can We Feed the World Without Destroying It?

Civil Eats

Feeding the World Without Destroying It

In a new book, Food First Executive Director Eric Holt-Giménez argues that responsible, truly sustainable food production will require a convergence of diverse social movements.

By Eva Perroni, Agroecology, Food Justice      January 10, 2019

For more than four decades, Eric Holt-Giménez has been at the center of food movements across the globe that are seeking progressive social and economic change. From documenting the rise of the farmer-led sustainable agriculture movement in Central America to growing the food justice movement in North America as the executive director of Food First, Holt-Giménez’s work brings the perspectives of struggling communities to broader development and policy debates.

His new book, Can We Feed the World Without Destroying It?, is a three-part essay addressing the agronomy and ecology of farming, as well as the political economy of food. It covers the way resources, value, and power are distributed across the entire system—from farm to fork.

Feeding the world without destroying it will not simply require better food waste redistribution or climate-smart technologies, Holt-Giménez argues. Instead, it will also take social movements to create the political will for food system transformation. “How we produce and consume determines how our society is organized,” he writes. “But how we organize socially and politically can also determine how we produce and consume.”

Civil Eats recently spoke with Holt-Giménez about his new book, prevailing food system myths, and how a powerful food movement might catalyze society to demand the deep systemic reforms upon which he believes our collective future depends.

The book opens with the assertion that the global food system is subject to a whole new set of problems related to overproduction and over-consumption. Isn’t it counter-intuitive to produce more food than we could possibly consume?

Overproduction is a chronic problem for capitalism—and for our food system. Though hunger and malnutrition are actually getting worse, we’ve been producing one-and-a-half times more than enough food to feed everyone on the planet for half a century. The glut of food keeps prices low for grain traders and processors of animal feed and junk food. Competition drives these companies to out-produce each other, each coming out with cheaper and cheaper processed food products. We end up with lousier food than the market can absorb and with a lot of grain-fed meat that hungry people can’t afford. Prices drop and margins shrink, but cheap food hasn’t ended hunger, and it comes at a tremendous social and environmental cost.

On one hand, 40 percent of food is wasted, so we are throwing away precious water, energy, and nutrients and producing a lot of unnecessary methane. Driving the land to produce more than its soils and aquifers can naturally sustain degrades and erodes not just farms, but the surrounding environment.

Our food system is a major source of greenhouse gases, and the over-fertilization of crops results in contaminated aquifers and massive “dead zones” in our lakes and oceans. Our bodies have become toxic dumps for the chemicals and antibiotics used in industrial food production, and we have at least as many people suffering malnutrition and diet-related disease as there are from hunger.

Overproduction results in monopolization up and down the food chain, giving agri-food corporations tremendous economic and political power to continue doing business as usual. These unregulated firms pay for none of the “externalities” they produce—we do.

Yet there are repeated calls for the need to double food production by 2050 to feed the world. Why does the scarcity myth prevail?

Scarcity serves several important functions in a capitalist economy, especially with food. Because capital can’t expand when markets are saturated, scarcity must be constantly created, both materially and ideologically. Corporations perpetuate the myth of scarcity because if the real reason for hunger was revealed, then society would begin to question the efficiency and the moral foundation of the capitalist food system.

The thing about the myth of scarcity is that it both manipulates and obscures the difference between need and demand. Nearly a third of the world’s human population needs more healthy food to meet their daily nutritional requirements than they can afford to buy.

The real market demand for food is for cheap meat to meet the appetites of the expanding middle class, so much of the investment in “food” is really an investment in the cultivation of feed for grain-fed livestock and poultry. This doesn’t feed the poor at all, but under the guise of “feeding the world,” it expands the markets of the seed, chemical, grain, and livestock industries.

Corporations invite us to believe that if we just produced more cheap food, poor people would be able to afford it, and we’d end hunger. But even the cheapening of food hasn’t lowered the ratio of hungry people in the world, because most of the world’s hungry are poor farmers who actually produce over half the world’s food on less than a quarter of the planet’s agricultural land. Essentially, poor people feed the poor.

Why do you feel that those trying to change the food system need to understand capitalism?

If we want to change it, we need to understand how it works. This seems straightforward, but because capitalism is so ubiquitous, it is invisible to many people in the food movement. On the other hand, those who do recognize it often feel as if it is so powerful the only thing we can do is accept it and work for minor reforms and safety nets to mitigate its damage to people and the environment. There is talk about a “food revolution” that has somehow taken place without affecting the power of capitalist food monopolies.

Because our global food systems respond to the logic of capital, problems like hunger, malnutrition, and global warming are viewed as opportunities for profit. Therefore, technological innovations that can be bought and sold on the market as commodities take precedence over other proven redistributive approaches such as land reform and agroecological diversification.

It’s fashionable these days to talk about “disrupting” the food system with clever apps, but in reality, technical solutions are carefully selected to fit into the existing system in ways that enhance rather than fundamentally challenge the power of agribusiness monopolies or the industrial model of production. Since the capitalist model is at the heart of the problem, this leads to some remarkably contradictory approaches.

For example, virtually none of the proposals to deal with food waste (composting, feeding pigs, selling “ugly fruit,” etc.) address the cause of food waste: capitalist overproduction. Farmers are competing with each other—ramping up production—to sell to the new “waste market”. Simple supply management quotas coupled with fair price floors for farmers could eliminate overproduction, but these well-known measures are ignored in favor of inventing new commodities. The food waste industry is in its infancy right now, and there is a lot of excitement about how this can help poor communities. But these start-ups will be eventually taken over by the retail monopolies. Then prices to farmers will drop, and prices to consumers will rise.

Another example is “climate-smart” agriculture. Giant soy, maize, and wheat plantations in the U.S. and Latin America are celebrated for using “precision agriculture” and “big data” to make efficient use of fertilizers and pesticides. But these plantations are displacing diversified small farms, grasslands, and forests at an astonishing rate in order to supply feed to confined animal feedlot operations (CAFOs) in China and the U.S. As researcher Marcus Taylor of Queens University in Canada quipped, climate-smart agriculture is really “climate-stupid consumption.”

What specific policies should members of the food movement come together to change?

Now is the time to push for transformative reforms that address overproduction, poverty, exploitation, and climate change by rolling back monopoly power and creating favorable conditions for a more localized, resilient, and equitable food systems worldwide.

We need strong antitrust laws, especially for the retail, grain, and chemical monopolies. The financial sector needs to be regulated to stop speculation with our food. Agricultural land should be de-commodified and made accessible to family farmers and to young farmers who want to prioritize local markets and regenerate local watersheds. Issues of equity and reparations should be addressed through redistributive policies. These farmers need to be supported by fair, parity prices conditioned on sustainable, regenerative practices that build resiliency and guarantee fair labor practices for farm and food workers.

We need supply management programs that stop overproduction, and we need to level the playing field between family farms and monopolistic corporations by using a “polluter pays” principle and demanding fair, living wages for all workers. Grain reserves should be re-established to help keep prices stable and hedge against shortages. Local, cooperative banks and credit associations need to be supported and guaranteed by the federal government to make local loans in agriculture, housing, and local businesses.

We need to ensure good health, education, and welfare policies in the countryside through investments in the “social wage”– i.e., public investments in the health, education, and welfare of rural and peri-urban communities. The countryside needs to be a good place to live, and farming should be desirable work. This would go a long way to a real food revolution.

Do the U.S. food and farm justice movements have an opportunity to drive some of these transformative reforms by getting behind something like the Green New Deal?

Much like the era of the Great Depression, today, our farm, food, and climate justice movements are calling for sweeping reforms for a Just Transition to shift from an extractive economy to a resilient, regenerative, and equitable economy. While these alliances are coming together, they have yet to articulate a clear agrarian vision for a just climate transition. I’d say that is high on the list for a powerful convergence.

On the crest of the recent “blue wave” in the U.S. Congress, new leadership proposed a Green New Deal to address the climate crisis. But the initiative faces political obstacles in Congress, and it is not clear just how a Green New Deal will ensure the participation and equity demanded by social justice movements.

As expected, the corporate wing of the Democratic Party is resisting the Green New Deal. Nevertheless, I think we need to take advantage of the present political moment. If farmer, farmworker, climate, and racial justice leaders come together to envision a New Deal for a Just Transition, whatever happens, we can advance the broad-based, multi-racial, working-class alliance we need to reverse global warming and transform the food system.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

‘Freedom Farmers’ Tells the History of Black Farmers Uniting Against Racism

Civil Eats

‘Freedom Farmers’ Tells the History of Black Farmers Uniting Against Racism

In her new book, Monica M. White details the cooperative practices of Black farmers in the Deep South and Detroit who played a key role in the Civil Rights movement.

By Cynthia Greenlee, Food Justice, Local Eats      December 20, 2018

When Monica M. White was growing up, her family would travel from Detroit to visit her grandparents in Eden, North Carolina, where they kept a small store in their living room. The store came with the ever-present promise of sweets, her mother’s warnings not to eat too much junk, and her grandparents’ determination to slip her snacks nevertheless.

It was only recently—when the sociologist and University of Wisconsin professor was researching for her new book Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and Black Freedom Movement—that White’s aunt explained the store was more than just her own personal candy jar.

“It was called The Community Store. My grandfather, Kenneth, along with eight other Black farmers, co-owned a car and the store was their co-op … I knew my granddaddy was a farmer, but I had no idea he was a member of a cooperative,” said White. “To hear about the collective … I still get goosebumps even just mentioning it, because it shows the serendipity of how we study who we are.”

Freedom Farmers tells the story of how Black farmers in the Deep South and Detroit—independent farmers who owned their property, sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and urban gardeners alike—banded together to counter white racism, fight economic deprivation in an age of increasing mechanization and commercial agriculture, and articulate a different vision of the future.

Many of these groups were founded in remote places that were hotbeds for grassroots labor agitation. Take Mississippi’s North Bolivar County Farm Collective (NBCFC). It was formed in 1965 when a group of Black farmers, many of whom were tractor drivers on a white-owned plantation, turned off their engines to demand a better hourly wage. After they were fired and evicted from their homes, they built a temporary tent settlement, Strike City, close to the plantation.

Two years later, the NBCFC was up and running, with its members loaning land, tools, and divvying up the resources and work. The collective fed farmers and their families, provided children with clothing so they could attend school, and launched conversations about the need to disrupt the entire food system—from decisions about what to plant to how to keep the power to process food out of factories.

Freedom Farmers is not your conventional Civil Rights narrative, couched in terms of campaigns for voting rights, school desegregation, and lunch counter seats, though there are familiar historical figures: W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Fannie Lou Hamer, whose Freedom Farm Cooperative gave the book its title. It’s a timely, connective, and expansive book; one that reframes the whiteness of agricultural history and calls us to remember the fact that the Black freedom struggle is an ongoing labor movement in places far and wide.

It also locates Black farmers in a Civil Rights narrative that goes beyond their historic and continuing legal struggles against USDA discrimination. Freedom Farmers moves beyond stories of subsistence and survival; it centers Black farmers as unsung food justice advocates and organic intellectuals who imagined better communities, food systems, and politics. And then, depending on one another, they started building.

Civil Eats spoke with White about the book, the ethos of Black farming communities, and why she coined the term “collective agency.”

This book made me realize how much of Civil Rights history really focuses on the urban South. What did you learn about rural folks and Black farmers, specifically?

Doing this work on rural Black Southerners flipped what I thought I knew about the South. When we were kids in Detroit, [my friends and I] would talk about what we wouldn’t do if we lived in the South and how we wouldn’t put up with [racism]. That was an overly simplistic view of how oppression manifests and people’s reaction and responses to it. One thing that I have fallen so in love with is the farmer’s freedom. There’s a certain kind of freedom that people who produce food have; they feel a sense of agency. And I don’t think it’s ever discussed when we talk about who farmers are.

I learned the genius of what it means to be a farmer, especially a Southern Black farmer. For example, Ben Burkett [of the National Family Farm Coalition] can look at a bag of seeds and tell you how many bushels he’ll get out of that, what the profit will be. Farmers don’t get credit for knowing applied mathematics.

I’m also fascinated by what rural Southern communities offered us in terms of open methods of communications—the way they supported each other, organized, and cared for each other. I feel like this book taught me a lot about the South that I didn’t understand but came to know through meeting Black folks who were raised there, but (unlike my family) never left.

You define “farmer” broadly, to include those who don’t own the land but work it.

When I first came to [the University of] Wisconsin, I presented my early ideas on what has become the book. One of my colleagues said, “You use ‘gardener’ and ‘farmer’ interchangeably, and I think you need to really [differentiate].’ In the ag language, a gardener is someone who does it for a hobby. A farmer has a certain percentage of land, a certain percentage of their income, a certain percentage of land ownership. In a broad sense, I wanted to complicate the idea of farmers only being those who own the land. For me, the expansive definition really captures the people who feed us, the people who stand out in the weather and the bugs and all conditions to make sure that we have food—often at their own expense.

The book describes a heartbreaking but brief episode when landless Black farmers occupied an abandoned military base in 1966 Mississippi. That kind of protest seems like it was within the Civil Rights strategic playbook, but with very different “characters.”

When I found out about this story, it wasn’t too long after the Bundys and white nationalists occupied federal land in the West and didn’t have a license. I thought about how different we treated them from how we treated the sharecroppers and seasonal workers who occupied the Greenville Air Force Base.

In January ’66, about 70 folks occupied an abandoned Air Force base and they were like, “Look, this is federal land, we pay federal taxes, and so we want to use this space as a strategy for our survival.” They were unemployed or [some] may have been fired because of their political inclinations or efforts to vote. So folks brought in blankets and stoves and all kinds of resources. Their demands were: “We want land, we want food, we want jobs, we want shelter.”

And please be clear: They said, “We’re not asking for a handout, we’re asking for an opportunity to uplift ourselves, our family, and our community.” They were evicted in a violent sort of extraction [as opposed to the years-long conflict in which Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy illegally grazed on public land and negotiated with the Bureau of Land Management]. These were folks who were asking for land to grow food.

After the eviction, federal attention turned to the state and resources were then allocated to Mississippi in terms of food, shelter, and housing. It’s important to recognize that this occupation was right in that area where Hamer and her freedom farm was and in the Mississippi Delta. There was this air of resistance and resilience in the region.

You coin the term “collective agency” to describe how Black farmers mobilize, whether that’s in Mississippi or Detroit. Can you say more about that?

I didn’t feel like there was a way to help us understand what happens in cities like Detroit, where the economic bottom is falling out. People are left to fend for themselves, and they collectively engage in something that impacts or changes the political, economic, and social context of their future.

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Agency is mostly defined as a very individual thing. The language has to capture that as an individual, yes, you make the decision that you’re going to grow food. But what about when several people decide they want to [farm] as a strategy for increasing access to nutrient-rich food and pool our resources together? What happens when we care about each other in terms of health, education, safety, security, and wellness and there’s this collective decision to move in these directions? I couldn’t find a way to explain it other than “collective agency.”

In my research in Detroit, folks would tell me, “I have a backyard garden … and I contribute to the food that’s grown in the community garden, I don’t harvest anything there. I do it because this is for us.” That’s a collective agency that we don’t talk about.

How do you connect Black farmers to other seminal Black thinkers in the book? You have a different take on the relationship between W.E.B. Du Bois (who is often framed as an elitist who only wanted to educate the “talented tenth,”) and Booker T. Washington, (who is often framed as telling Black people to stay on the land and not aim higher). Both frames lack nuance.

I was really cautious about this. But I thought: If Booker T. was talking about farmers, was that not 90 percent of the population? If Du Bois is talking about the talented tenth, what would happen if the two of them were actually in a room together to say, “Here’s 90, here’s 10, and this is how we’re going to get free.” Then as I read more and more about Du Bois, I realized that he stopped talking about the talented tenth, and really started investing in thinking about cooperatives in ways that people haven’t really understood until Jessica Gordon Nembhard’s book Collective Courage came out.

We don’t have to do binaries. What tools can we use from Washington? What tools can we use from Du Bois, George Washington Carver, and Hamer?

What’s your relationship to the soil? Because this book is chipping away at the idea that, after slavery, Black people wanted to remove themselves from agriculture.

I really love this question. I have some soil from [New Orleans’] Congo Square in a little container. I have soil from Hamer’s final resting place. I have soil from Burkett. I have soil from Tuskegee. Soil is a substance that I greatly revere. I have an immense amount of respect for the stories that soil holds. It’s not unlike the Equal Justice Initiatives Legacy Museum’s remembrance project [where people collect soil from places where people were lynched]. My connection to the soil is that I see freedom and a medium through which birth and death are connected.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Author photo by G. Greg Wells.

Three Generations, Two Families, and One Organic Farm Model Succession

Cival Eats

Three Generations, Two Families, and One Organic Farm Model Succession

At Meadowlark Organics in Wisconsin, a young couple has partnered with an experienced farmer to take stewardship of his 950-acre sustainable operation.

By Beth Raboin, Farmer Profiles, Local Eats    December 19, 2018

“They have the desire and motivation to lift the heavy stuff off my shoulders,” says Paul Bickford from his place at the kitchen table in a recently renovated farmhouse. Bickford is the 65-year-old owner of Bickford Organics. “It’s nice to see what I envisioned, what I built, continue,” he says.

Bickford is speaking about the 950-acre organic grain farm in the Driftless Region of Southwest Wisconsin, which he has managed and owned through several incarnations across the span of four decades. Bickford is in the process of transitioning the farm to the young couple seated across from him.

Bickford’s successors, John and Halee Wepking, hold sweat equity in the farmhouse renovations. In exchange for their work, they live here with their growing family on the farm they now co-manage with Bickford, who lives just down the road. The couple holds no familial relation to Bickford, and met him through a Craigslist ad. But, Halee says, to the nodding of heads, “We have become a family.”

Even the farm’s title is in transition, with the old-guard Bickford Organics easing out of the spotlight to make room for Meadowlark Organics, a name adopted by the Wepkings to carry the farm into the future.

Meadowlark Organics is an organic farm that specializes in growing grains: wheat, rye, polenta corn, and buckwheat. They also grow hay and recently added a small beef herd of around 20 breeding cows to the mix. With plans to continue diversifying with the addition of a granary and flour mill, Meadowlark Organics is poised to lead the Driftless region of Wisconsin into a new era of local, value-added organic grain products grown with an eye for soil conservation and land stewardship.

All this has been made possible by Bickford, who—in wanting to ensure his farm found the right heirs—allowed an enterprising couple to realize their dreams in an industry where many newcomers struggle to ever achieve viability.

Paul Bickford with John and Halee Wepking and their childrenThough the Wepking’s children, a three-year-old and his baby sister, are with their grandmother on this day, a countertop collection of toy tractors suggests that the kids usually fill the kitchen with life.

“It’s my responsibility to see the operation survives because they have a family,” Bickford says. “I take that quite seriously.”

Farmer ISO Protégés

Bickford, who has carried the farm from its beginnings as a confined dairy, through its transition to rotational grazing, and on to its most recent incarnation as an organic small-grain producer, only began to think about retirement around 55.

Bickford’s children are now adults following their own paths—and though he has a son who farms with him, he would prefer to stay out of the farm’s management. So, Bickford has had to pursue a less conventional route to transitioning the farm.

Lucky for all, just the right eyes landed on the ad Bickford posted early in 2015. It read: “I am seeking a forward-thinking individual or couple to join my 950-acre organic farming operation … Ethics and trust are a cornerstone of organic farming and are important to my operation. I want to share my 40 years of farm experience with someone who is willing to work to improve my farm.”

The Wepkings met working in the kitchen at Prune in the East Village of New York City. A Wisconsin native, John had always dreamed of farming, and Halee, who is from Arizona and holds a degree in modern dance and years of professional experience in kitchens, was eager to support this dream. “I was always moving toward what felt important to me,” Halee says. “Farming, producing people’s food—that felt important.”

When the Wepkings moved back to Wisconsin, they hoped to farm on John’s family land. When that proved infeasible for reasons beyond their control, they began to look for other options.

The initial investment necessary to raise livestock alongside grains at a marketable scale limited the Wepking’s ability to start from scratch. To create the farm they envisioned, they sought an established operation managed by someone willing to build them and their vision into the farm’s future.

When the Wepkings answered Bickford’s ad, they were still wet behind the ears. But they shared Bickford’s values—they wanted to farm as land stewards using practices modeled by balanced ecosystem function. In teaming up with Bickford, they found a perfect fit.

Forging a Path Forward Together

“My first month on the job was a blur,” says John. He spent much of that first stretch alone on a tractor with three times the horsepower of anything he’d ever operated. Halee had given birth to the couple’s first child just a few weeks into the new arrangement, and through these earliest days Bickford was nearly absent—a fire had burned a building on his property, and as happens on farms, he was pulled in opposing directions.

Before joining Bickford, the Wepkings gained much of their understanding of farming practices through online research. Halee says they both gleaned as much as they could from resources such as Practical Farmers of Iowa and MOSES.

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When they finally did get to work side by side, John says Bickford shared knowledge of another sort. The veteran farmer knows how fields will carry water after a rain, when to plant or weed, and what grows well where and why. In short, Bickford knows the intimate details of his land and its seasons.

Three years into their arrangement, their roles have developed definition. Halee takes the lead with the kids, manages marketing, keeps the books, and collaborates on planning decisions. Bickford is mechanically inclined: he likes his tractors and enjoys the hands-on aspects of farming. John, Bickford says, “is the boss.”

“John has very good skills at organization,” Bickford continues. He “has a grasp on the organic plans and the food that we’re going to grow.”

Extending Rotations, Diversifying Production, and Looking to Value-Added Products

John soon demonstrates his ease with planning as he launches into a description their crop rotations. “When we started, it was a pretty typical Southern Wisconsin rotation of corn, soybeans, and small grain—in spring, start with small grain like oats or barley to establish alfalfa and make hay, then plow that alfalfa under for corn again,” he says. “What we’ve done is extend that into fall with planting grains.”

meadowlark organics grains for sale at the farmers' marketThey also transitioned the spring grain mix to include spring wheat for bread flour, and last year, they started growing buckwheat. “So we’re looking at more of a six-to-seven-year rotation as opposed to four to five,” John says.

On top of these changes, with the aid of a Farm Service Agency (FSA) microloan, the Wepkings have introduced a small beef herd to the mix. The cattle allow the farmers to keep their soil nutrients in a closed loop, and the longer crop rotations allow them to, in Halee’s words, “limit tillage; manage weeds, pests, and diseases; and grow and conserve our soils.”

Bickford has always been open to adaptation, but thanks to the Wepkings, he has come to truly value diversification.

“Our current agricultural system is not going to support family farms as is, so we have to be thinking of how we diversify, where we capture value,” Halee says.

Along with the new crops, Meadowlark has expanded into value-added products such as milled flour and polenta that they sell to area co-ops, restaurants, bakeries, and consumers at markets and online. They have already invested in grain storage bins, and their long-term plans include a grain cleaning and production facility as well as a small flour mill. Ultimately their hope is to create an organic grain hub to supply the region with locally produced, consistent products on a scale that keeps pace with the burgeoning local markets.

ORIGIN Breads, an organic bakery based in nearby Madison, already bakes exclusively with grains sourced from Meadowlark Organics. When the small-scale bakery opened two years ago, owner and head baker Kirk Smock says he was faced with a decision: “Organic or local?”

With Meadowlark Organics, he and his customers get both. Meadowlark now plans their yearly production with ORIGIN Breads in mind, but allows Smock to pay for his purchases incrementally. The arrangement is somewhat unconventional, but Smocks says it is one of the many benefits to the relationships that grow through sourcing locally.

The focus on relationship-building is reflected in the farm transition. The Wepkings and Bickford have yet to work out the fine print, but they’re okay with letting the transition take shape organically. Bickford sees himself easing into full retirement within five to 10 years. In those years, the group plans to continue to evolve alongside their ideas about how best to delegate responsibilities and ownership. For now, they’re content to know they share a vision and common goals.

When asked what others might learn from their experience, Halee says, “You don’t need to have a certain salary; you need to be secure in your life. You need to have a path forward in your future. It’s about our common goal and our values. It’s about maintaining this land organically.”

Bickford chimes in, “And about feeding people healthy food.”

France will cut imports of palm oil, soy and beef

EcoWatch
November 23, 2018

France taking steps to fight ‘imported deforestation’!

Read more ➡️ Ecowatch.com/france-palm-oil-deforestation

via World Economic Forum

France will cut imports of palm oil, soy and beef to fight ‘imported deforestation’

France taking steps to fight 'imported deforestation'! Read more ➡️ Ecowatch.com/france-palm-oil-deforestationvia World Economic Forum

Posted by EcoWatch on Thursday, November 22, 2018