To buy local fruits, vegetables, and meat, we do not have to look much further than a nearby farmers market or community supported agriculture share. But to buy wheat flour, we have traditionally spent our dollars outside of the farmers market to find the product we use during all seasons. For a large part, the underlying reason lies in the industrialization of wheat production, which started in the 1880s with the advent of the steam roller mill. This large-scale mill turned out a cheap shelf-stable flour which essentially crippled regional grain markets. But as we begin to realize the detrimental economic and nutritional effects of the transformation of wheat to a commodity crop, regional grain economies are beginning to regrow across the country. Over the past five years, the necessary infrastructure has been put into place to process and sell grains at a smaller scale and keep profits within local communities.

When we talk about grains, we are referring to starch-rich hard seeds which grow on cereal grasses. Common grains include wheat, maize, rice, barley, oats, rye, and more. The anatomy of a grain consists of three parts: endosperm (starch), bran (fiber and fatty acids), and germ (fatty acids, nutrients, and proteins).

When processed, industrially grains are stripped of their bran and germ, leaving only the endosperm. The resulting processed grain lacks fatty acids, which prevents rancidity and allows for long-term storage–but it also lacks the core nutritional value of fiber, proteins, and other vitamins/nutrients. Whole grains contain the same proportions of the bran, germ, and endosperm as the grain pre-processing; whether cracked, split, or ground, the grains maintain their nutritional value. The health benefits of a diet rich in whole grains has been documented to decrease blood pressure and the risk of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.

Sparked by these alarming public health implications combined with a hike in the price of grains on the global commodity market in 2008, regional grain economies have been developing. Some involved parties include farmers, millers, distributors, and bakers. Groundbreaking efforts to build these networks across the country include: Community Grains in the San Francisco Bay Area, Somerset Economic Development Corp. in central Maine, North Carolina Organic Bread Flour Project in Asheville, NC, and Northeast Organic Wheat in upstate New York. Many of these efforts focus on regional grain varietals, community education, regional economic growth, and job creation.

Join us for the next Kitchen Table Talks at Oliveto Restaurant in Oakland as we discuss the local grain economy in California from the economic, infrastructural, and public health perspectives.

Date: Sunday, June 17th
Time: 1:30 to 3:00 PM
Location: Oliveto Restaurant (5665 College Avenue, Oakland, CA)
Price: $10 at Brown Paper Tickets
Note: A limited amount of sliding scale tickets may be available at the door, dependent upon capacity.

Bob Klein has been a broadcast television producer, executive producer, national program consultant, and developer/syndicator. He’s currently co-owner of Oliveto Restaurant and founder of Community Grains.

Craig Pondsford is founder of Artisan Bakery, winner of the Specialty Breads category of France’s 1996 Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie (an international, invitational, artisan baking competition held in Parish every three to four years). He recently opened Pondsford’s Place Bakery & Innovation Center in San Rafael, CA.

Doug Mosel, founder of the Mendocino Grain Project, grows a variety of grains and lentils in the Ukiah Valley. Whole grains and stone-milled flour are distributed locally through a CSA-style grain-share. Doug is a member of the Mendocino Organic Network and host of a monthly radio show, the “Agriculture and Ecology Hour.”

Lately I’ve been realizing that I married well. Not in the typical, societal ladder, Downton Abbey kind of way. Far from that. More like in a homesteader’s kind of way. Forget investment accounts and family crests, when it comes to spring water, pickles and chicken coops, we are set! And most recently, we hit the jackpot. My husband just landed a job at our local feed store, which in itself doesn’t sound like the most lucrative position, but this isn’t your basic feed store.

Mountain Feed and Farm, owned by Jorah Roussopoulos and his wife, Andi Rubalcaba, opened eight years ago and has since become a talk-of-the-town destination around these parts. “We really just want to be a homesteader’s convenience store,” says Jorah, of the unique inventory he has come to offer. But instead of cheap malt liquor and junk food, this “convenience store” offers books and kits on how to brew your own beer and heirloom seed potatoes to grow your own. “Planting seeds to canning jams, our goal is to be able to take people full cycle from production to preservation,” says Jorah. That means you can walk in and easily find the standards that most feed stores provide: pet products, livestock feed, seed propagation supplies, soil amendments, and anything for the home garden. But wandering in deeper will uncover the homesteader’s playground it really is, stocked full of inspiring project starters, hard-to-find resources, and just the right touch of crafty farm aesthetic to invoke admiration in the whole package.

As they grow and shift (and they are growing at a crazy pace, partly due to knowing good business and partly due to our economic times and the public’s increased DIY inclination) there is an obvious need to make sure that all staff are well versed in every department. They now staff 12-15 full time employees and each department has a “specialist” who is truly expert at helping the customer find what they are looking for and can offer tips and advice on any given project. This level of genuine skill, personality and service is one of the main things that Jorah is concerned with offering. That, and a diverse assortment of items put together with intention to make his business known as the “Sustainable Living Country Store.”

This is where my personal benefits start to become clear. A new series of staff workshops, focusing on anything from canning to pickling to bread baking to beekeeping, are on tap almost every week. And as a spouse, who likes food and happens to write about it a lot, I get a free ticket in.

The most recent class was at our house, and was all about cheese. Our tome was the user friendly, concise and informative book called “Home Cheesemaking“ by Ricki Carrol. It offers practical guidance, clear-cut recipes and a lot of background on the science involved in making cheese from bacteria to rennet to temperature requirements.  It’s a great resource for anyone who wants a comprehensive view of the processes, even if they decide to chuck it over their shoulder and opt instead for making their own coagulator from fig tree bark or scraping stomach lining from a sheep’s intestine to make traditional rennet.  The book tells you about these things too, at least, so you can decide for yourself.

Our long butcher-block counter was quickly crowded with half gallon canning jars of fresh goat milk, each one labeled with the date of milking and the name of the goat who contributed the bounty. Michael Zlotkin is the goat farmer who generously donated the milk to the cause, who also happens to be on staff at Mountain Feed. His little farm is in the beginning stages, but he has already figured out how to raise and butcher a cow, tend to a herd of goats, and acquire a live-in apprentice to start the crops.

A couple of pregnant ladies, a few tradesman, a skilled chef and marathon runner, two little kids, an Aikido disciple, a filmmaker and a bunch of excited homesteaders crammed into our little kitchen. Milk steamed, curds formed, cultures flew as we stretched and stirred and cut our way through much of those jars. The end result was two types of mozzarella (one more successful than the other spongy mass), a kefir and a feta, one brined, one not. All goat and all contributing to a sense of education, accomplishment, and ultimately, community. What’s more is that the consistency of these seminars serves as infective motivation to keep the ball rolling. My husband is now on a weekly cheesemaking mission. He’s been turning the compost way more regularly, initiating a large-scale red wine vinegar project and tending to our garden with renewed vigor. The trend of proactive capability and knowledge gathering spreads, from staff member to staff member, and I think that is really the true gem. Those ripples are spreading from one great business in our little mountain town out into our community and beyond.

Portions of this article were adapted from an original piece in the Spring 2012 issue of Edible Monterey Bay.

The newly established farm on UC Berkeley-owned Gill Tract will soon be empty. At the time of this writing, it is surrounded by riot police from at least 8 different UC Campus police forces. Nine have been arrested. This is the end to a standoff that began on Friday, when the police blocked farmers from entering or leaving, forcing supporters to toss food and water over the fence. In addition, the UC has filed suit against 14 individuals and 150 additional unnamed persons.

The farm began with a celebration of life, the planet and the people’s right help determine the fate of a place owned by a state-supported institution. Three weeks ago on, Earth Day, a group of 200 volunteers occupied the Gill Tract. The multi-generational crew planted two acres of vegetables, including a children’s garden, and began to offer workshops on sustainable agriculture and food sovereignty. A small encampment sprang up, but organizers insisted it be limited only to those doing the everyday work of maintaining the farm.

The land in question is a 10-acre parcel that comprises the last remaining class 1 agricultural soil in the East Bay. Despite years of community action favoring the creation of a research site specializing in urban and organic agriculture, the land is slated to be sold for development. 

Even as the occupation phase ends, the farm represents a cross-pollination between the food movement’s embrace of sustainable and urban agriculture and the occupy movement’s emphasis on direct action and democratic control of resources.

This occupation is a direct confrontation with a university that, according to the occupiers, has long ignored its public mandate in the pursuit of profit. It is an attempt to seize a piece of land that is publicly owned in name only, and use it for the public good. It is an exercise in land reform, demanding that “farmland is for farming,” and insisting that because farming this land is the right thing to do, the occupiers have every right to do it. It remains to be seen whether some kind of agreement might allow the farming to continue once the occupation has ended. The land is currently used by UC researchers. Some explore agroecology while others conduct basic research on gene mutations that, if successful, will likely aid the development of GMO crops. But the tract is large enough that the occupy farm could remain while that research is conducted.

Occupy the farm is one of a handful of efforts that can reenergize a food movement that has become satisfied with its own success. Supporters of the food movement have become content to “vote with our dollars” in favor of local and organic alternatives, for small farms and farmers markets. But for all the good they do, these vibrant alternatives have not confronted the system head on. No farmers market places limits on the power of corporate agribusiness. No community sponsored agriculture program interferes with industrial farming’s ability to exert its influence on the way that agriculture is governed. Alternatives build power, but they cannot seize power from the systems that currently hold it.

Occupy the Farm represents a new way forward for the food movement, one that moves beyond support for alternatives to confront an important player in the industrial food system.  It’s a chance to vote, not with our dollars, but with our voices, for the kind of agriculture we want to create and the kind of society we want to be.

Here are some actions that Occupy the Farm has asked for in support:

Sign the online petition:  Show the UC Berkeley administration that you support the vision of Occupy the Farm – and call on them to stop police action so that the farmers may continue to farm!  Click here for the petition.

If you are an organization or group that wants to support: Endorse the collective letter of support, being signed by organizations, alliances and groups nation-wide. To sign on, please email occupythefarmletter@gmail.com.

Take more land, wherever you live: Wherever community needs are not being fulfilled and traditional avenues of change have failed, take space at the required scale to meet these needs. Occupy. Make Productive. Contest the Title.   

Stay updated:
–Twitter: @OccupyFarm
–Facebook: Occupy the Farm –Sign up for text message alerts if you’re local: Text “gilltractfarm” to 41411.
–Email list: send a message to GillTractFarm@riseup.net with “listserve” in the subject line to be added to the email list.

Donate to the Farm: Click here to find a link to their online donations page, as well as a current list of needed materials.

Learn more: www.OccupyTheFarm.org

Wendell Berry has said that eating is an agricultural act, but what about drinking beer? A thirst for fermented beverages may have inspired the world’s first farmers to plant crops some 13,000 years ago, yet today beer is rarely part of the larger conversation about where our food comes from.

A handful of California craft brewers are starting to tap into that primitive connection. Taking up the motto “Beer is agriculture,” Almanac Beer Co. works directly with local farmers to source specialty ingredients for their seasonal brews. “For most people, beer is what shows up in the bottle or can,” says Almanac brewer Damien Fagan. “We’re trying to create a foundation that beer is rooted deeply in agriculture.”

Fagan founded Almanac with fellow brewer and Beer & Nosh blogger Jesse Friedman last year, after they met in a home-brewing club, where they traded brewing experiments. (“I’d show up with a fig beer or a puréed turnip beer. Not always great ideas,” Fagan admits.) The two instantly bonded over their interest in San Francisco’s farm-to-table food culture. “We saw a real opening to think and talk about the brewing process using that same vocabulary and ideology,” says Friedman.

No stranger to farmers markets, Friedman launched SodaCraft last summer, offering naturally carbonated sodas using fresh produce from his fellow vendors at the Ferry Plaza. He has since sold the business to turn his attention to Almanac, where his sourcing and brewing ethos remains the same. “Both businesses were born out of the idea that you can take farmers market produce and make something special out of it,” says Friedman.

From the Farm to the Barrel

While the term terroir is usually reserved for fine wines, Almanac has found creative ways to “infuse a sense of time and place in each brew,” as Friedman says, by integrating fresh produce into the mash. Since last summer, Almanac has collaborated with Sebastopol Berry Farm, Twin Girls Farm, Hamada Farms, Marshall’s Farm Natural Honey, and most recently, Heirloom Organic Gardens. For each of their beers, made in small batches and released seasonally, Friedman and Fagan meet with the farmer, tour their farm, and feature it prominently on the bottle’s label and Almanac’s website.

Like the Farmers’ Almanac, each brew serves as a record of the season. The Autumn Farmhouse Pale Ale celebrated the last of Twin Girls Farm’s fall plums, while the Winter Wit preserved the end of December at Hamada Farms, with a mix of Cara Cara, navel, and new blood oranges. “If we’d brewed two weeks earlier or later, the mix of oranges would have been different,” Friedman notes.

Their most recent release, Bière de Mars (March beer), is a French-style farmhouse ale highlighting baby fennel from Heirloom Organic Gardens. While fennel might sound like an unexpected choice for beer, farmer Grant Brians thought it made a lot of sense when Almanac approached him. “The flavors in fennel are carried in an oil and slightly alkaline base,” he explains. “It’s perfect to mix into the brewing process.”

The goal with each brew is to provide a distinct but subtle accent that does not dominate the flavor profile, but adds depth and pairs well with seasonal dishes. “We want the ingredient to be an integrated part of the beer,” Friedman insists. “It should not be a fennel cocktail.”

How’s the finished result? “It’s good!” says Brians. “I’m generally a wine drinker, but I enjoy full-bodied and well-balanced flavors in beers. And it was nice to taste the end result of our collaboration.”

Bottlenecks for Local Brewers

While Almanac has sourced some local grains for their brews, including wheat from Massa Organics, brewing a truly Californian beer is fraught with challenges when it comes to hops and barley malt. “Unfortunately, the beer world is defined by the big American brewers,” says Friedman.

California was once home to a thriving hops industry, but by the 1950s, the mechanization of hops harvesting, outbreaks of downy mildew, and changing beer tastes wiped hops growers out. Today, the majority of U.S. hops are grown in Washington and Oregon.

Sourcing specialty malt poses another obstacle, since there are no malt houses in California, and out-of-state industrial malting facilities prefer to work with large brewers. “You can grow high-quality barley here, but the issue is malting,” says Ron Silberstein of Thirsty Bear Brewing Company. “Part of the problem is that local growers are competing with commodity growers who can grow and malt their barley very inexpensively.” Organic malt from locally grown barley is even rarer.

San Francisco’s first and only brewery to carry the California Certified Organic Farmers seal, Thirsty Bear experimented with brewing a 100-percent local and organic beer in 2010, collaborating with Eatwell Farm in Dixon and Hop-Meister in Clearlake. Since there are no local malt houses, Eatwell had to ship its barley to Colorado Malt Company, which hand-malts in small batches.

In launching the Locavore Ale, Silberstein had hoped to enlist more local craft brewers to commit to purchasing organic malting barley from Eatwell Farm, but the buy-in wasn’t there, and Eatwell has since abandoned the project.
“You have to get enough brewers who want to tell a story, who want to have an heirloom varietal of the barley, and who are willing to pay a premium for that,” Silberstein says. He is hoping to build momentum to start a small artisan malting facility, which would make local, small-batch malting more feasible.

While the process of reconnecting local brewers and beer drinkers with local farms still has a long way to go, Silberstein and Friedman are optimistic that the farm-to-bottle movement is growing. “We need to build larger systems to support local brewing, and that’s a challenge we’re excited to tackle,” says Friedman. “In the meantime, we’ve contented ourselves with highlighting specialty ingredients from local farms.”

You can find Almanac Beer on tap at Il Cane Rosso in the Ferry Building, as well as at Bi-Rite Market and other local sellers of fine beer.

Originally published by CUESA

I grew up planting pumpkins in the backyard with my mom and dad.  With names like “Big Max,” “Atlantic Giant,” and “King Jack,” I always hoped come fall I might end up like James and the Giant Peach.  Each spring I would eagerly plant my seeds, carefully cover them with soil, and do my best to nurse them through the sweltering Nebraska summers.  Evil squash bugs and ever-looming drought aside, I usually ended up with at least one pumpkin that weighed more than I did.

Even though soccer practices (and later, girlfriends) kept me away from the garden for a few years, I’ve always had that experience to show me the importance of growing food.  Whether it was the magic of a tiny seed growing into something so huge (unfortunately, never like James’ peach) or the extra responsibility I felt for caring for another living thing, I understood that this was something essential.  However, it wasn’t until I traveled over 12,000 miles across the country for my film, Growing Cities, that I realized how lucky I was.

I became interested in urban farming while working at Zenger Farm in Portland, Oregon during college.  Through this experience I realized all of the amazing things people were doing with growing food in the city and yearned to learn more. Fresh out of college and having nothing but time, I formulated a plan to visit urban farmers across the country.  I spoke with my childhood friend (and filmmaker) Andrew Monbouquette about my idea and he said, “We have to make this into a movie.”  And that was the beginning of Growing Cities.

We have all heard about the problems in agriculture, from GMOs to CAFOs, but what all these acronyms don’t add up to is change.  So, we figured it was time to show off the people on the ground who were doing something positive, right in their own backyards.  And this is what Growing Cities is all about.

The film follows Andrew and me as we visit the folks who are challenging the way this country grows and distributes its food one vacant city lot and backyard chicken coop at a time. We’ve done everything from milking backyard goats to getting stung by urban bees, all in an effort to understand how much potential these activities have to revitalize our cities and change the way we eat.

We found urban agriculture has remarkable power on many different levels—it connects people to their food, strengthens communities, creates jobs, revitalizes blighted areas, and much more.  Yet, what’s most exciting to me is that it allows people to re-imagine what’s possible in cities. City farms challenge us to get beyond the urban/rural divide and really think about how we can all be producers in a society that is driven by consumption.  I think it’s this quality that is capturing so many people’s hearts and minds, especially during this rough economic time.

Critics of urban farming say it never will produce very much food.  To this I could counter with countless examples of how it already is doing so—just one, residents of Havana, Cuba produce more than 70 percent of fruits and vegetables consumed within their city.  But instead of presenting them a laundry list, I would say these “critics”  are missing the point.  On our trip we found there are way too many children who don’t know that apples grow on trees or tomatoes on a vine; kids who never have the opportunity to care for plants or even a chance to play outside.  So what?

This generation is projected to have a shorter lifespan than their parents. One third of them are projected to get diabetes (half if they are a minority).  And nearly 20 percent are obese.  And don’t tell me an average of 50 hours of electronics per week and not knowing how a carrot grows is not part of this.  We may not train the next generation of farmers in the city, but given that we need millions of new farmers and that we are predominantly an urban population, it’s worth a try.  At the very least we can educate a generation of eaters who understand how food gets to the table.

I don’t mean to say urban farming will solve all of our cities’ problems. It won’t. We are working against hundreds of years of unfair policies, social and economic inequality, rampant disinvestment in our inner cities, and so much more.  But I do think it’s a place to start.  A conversation—“Hey, you have chickens in your backyard?  Wow, my grandparents had them back on the farm.”  A journey—go out and meet people in your city who are doing this, you’ll be surprised how amazing and kind they are.  And a place to start a movement—we met or know of someone of every age, race, class, and economic situation who is growing food in the city for as diverse reasons as they are people. This is not a hippie (or hipster) movement, although there are plenty of each.  This movement is for anyone and everyone, whether you have a window, a rooftop, a pickup truck, or a backyard.  As Eugene Cook, an urban farmer from Atlanta, told us, “We’re not asking you to grow everything.  We’re saying grow something…grow where you are.”

Dan & Andrew are currently running a Kickstarter campaign and need to raise $35,000 in 30 days to complete their film.  Watch their trailer below (and make a pledge) here.

You can also follow their journey on their website, www.growingcitiesmovie.com, or on Facebook.  

Photo: A city plot in Chicago, IL

Young food movement activists may be idealistic but we are not flower children. We are process and results-oriented; we may criticize, but also we learn from successful business models. We’re comfortable with money, know how to network and are handy with a spreadsheet.

Three years ago, I was organizing protests at UC Berkeley. Now I’m at my laptop, speaking with Camilla Bustamante, a Northern New Mexico College Dean.  She’s enthusiastically telling me about a student-run, local foods cafe that has just opened at her campus.

In January 2010, CoFED (The Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive) trained Jeff Ethan Genauer, a student at Northern New Mexico College, at our Training the Trainers retreat. For 10 days, he and a group of 5 other organizers huddled together around a wood stove and wifi router in a farmhouse in Sebastopol and learned the basics of how to open a cooperative food business on college campuses. Since then, he’s been hard at work doing financial planning and market research and now, with the help of his campus, he’s successfully opened a student-run cafe. And he even taped the only-slightly-awkward ribbon-cutting.

La Tiendita (“The little store”) sells healthy, local breakfast and lunch and provides meaningful employment to 5 students. It is currently run “collaboratively”, according to Bustamante, but there is interest in transitioning it to more of a formal student cooperative, though it’s unclear whether students, or workers, or both, would be the cooperative’s members. The produce for the Tiendita is either grown onsite at the Sostenga farm or purchased from local farmers. This is an unusual project for a college that is rural, known mainly for its athletics and is not filled with affluent foodie types.

It’s not just happening in New Mexico of course. At UC Santa Barbara, they’ve gotten administrative buy-in for a solar-powered food truck, at the University of Washington-Seattle they’ve gotten rent-free cafe space and are negotiating for a prime space in their student union, at NYU they’ve gotten funding for a food cart. This summer, some 80 new student co-op organizers will gather for seven days on the West and East coasts to re-”inspiregize” and learn basic organizing, fundraising, campaigning and planning skills.

Our generation of food movement leaders gets how complex the food system is–and we are committed to addressing the whole, messy picture. These projects are educating and taking action on issues many foodies would rather ignore, including issues of race and class, of corporate control and workers’ rights. And it’s definitely not just CoFED that sees things in this way.

I was privileged to join the Real Food Challenge leadership for a weekend national planning retreat last year. In between creating next year’s plan for shifting campus dining dollars towards real food purchasing, we took a couple hours to reflect on privilege and how it manifests in the organization. It was simply that integral to the work being done. Youth-led hunger organizations are seeing the connections as well–FeelGood’s student leaders don’t just want a world without hunger, they want water that is clean to drink and workers to have jobs with dignity.

To me, it’s clear that this is where the food movement is going–towards a justice orientation–and that’s because this is where the energy is with young people. The reason CoFED has been able to get over 250 students to commit themselves to starting cooperatives on 37 campuses is not just that students are excited about good, healthy food or starting their own business (they are though!).

Our generation is coming of age with the starkest income disparity since the 1920’s, with climate change already making major impacts on our environment, with student debt creeping towards $1 trillion, with progress on race and gender issues stagnating. We did not create this mess. We are pissed, so we are connecting the dots and we are skilling-up.

When our student leaders say, “I’m starting a co-op”, they are saying they find the individualism and alienation that defines much of our economy and our culture unacceptable. They are channeling common sense from kindergarden teachers, like that we should clean up after ourselves and share.

When CoFEDerates do our work, we are creating systems that acknowledging our interdependence–with those people we would easily ignore, with a future planet that our children will inhabit, between our health and what we put in our bodies. If you’ll excuse the pun, we’re creating a world that is “co-fed.”

Bustamante, of the NNMC cafe, says it is doing so well that they are expanding to a second cafe and considering converting the rest of the school’s cafe services. With this success, CoFED as an organization is looking at longterm growth and sustainability. As I write this blog, we’re wrapping up a $125,000 challenge to find 212 monthly donors at $12 a month (we’re at 184 right now, you can still give to help us reach our total!).   We’ll continue to meet the challenges ahead of us and keep growing–as will our allies in the young food movement.

Photo: The managers of “La Tiendita Cafe”

Foraging for food—whether it’s ferreting rare mushrooms in the woods, picking abundant lemons from an overlooked tree, or gathering berries from an abandoned lot—is all the rage among the culinary crowd and the D.I.Y. set, who share their finds with fellow food lovers in fancy restaurant meals or humble home suppers.

But an old-fashioned concept—gleaning for the greater good by harvesting unwanted or leftover produce from farms or family gardens—is also making a comeback during these continued lean economic times.

In cities, rural communities, and suburbs across the country, volunteer pickers join forces to collect bags and boxes of fruits and vegetables that find their way to homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and food pantries, as well as senior centers, low-income homes, and school lunch programs.

Where some may see excess, others see opportunity—the chance to make a difference, feed the hungry, and avoid waste. It’s a win-win-win all round: Growers who have surplus or seconds find a good home for these edibles beyond the compost pile; financially strapped aid organizations get much-needed fresh food for free for their patrons; and the gleaners get to give back in their communities. “I’ve been surprised at how emotionally rewarding this is,” says Andrew Sigal, an avid gardener in Oakland, California, who started Food Pool last summer to share the abundance from his prolific 800-square-foot garden with local food pantries. “It’s one thing to give someone in need a dollar or a donation, but seeing someone get excited about beans from my backyard has been deeply fulfilling.”

Some gleaners have even made a national name for themselves. Take The Lemon Lady, aka Anna Chan, a stay-at-home mom who began collecting excess fruit in suburban Clayton, California, while driving her then-baby daughter around to nap. Chan, who knew hunger as a child and how it felt to wait in food lines for canned goods, was shocked to see so much fresh fruit—such as oranges, apricots, and apples—left rotting in her neighbors’ front yards. so she started a single-handed campaign to do something about it.

Three years on and hundreds of tons of produce later, Chan, who is now a regular fixture at local farmers’ markets where she collects unsold fruits and vegetables that she hauls to a local food pantry and Salvation Army site, has been featured in People, The Huffington Post, and Civil Eats. While the press attention has helped her cause, she keeps a laser-like focus on her mission to feed those in need. “Many people don’t know where their local food pantry is located and don’t realize that food banks will gladly take fresh produce,” says Chan, who encourages people to get started by picking excess fruits and veggies in their immediate area and passing it on.

From California to New York and places in between, communities are finding creative, local ways to get fresh food to the residents who have the most challenges accessing such food. Glean for the City in Washington, D.C., for example, has a three-pronged approach: picking surplus produce from regional farms, gathering leftover greens from farmers’ markets, and harvesting excess residential edibles.

Since 1988, Friendship Donations Network in Ithaca, New York, has worked with local farmers to “rescue” thousands of pounds of produce that would otherwise go to waste and distribute it to low-wage workers, the elderly, and the young. Gleaned produce donated by the organization serves 24 programs that feed more than 2,000 people a week. The model just makes sense, says FDN program coordinator Meaghan Sheehan Rosen, who points out that there’s no reason perfectly good food should go uneaten if farmers are willing and people are needy.

Some gleaning efforts have grown out of religious organizations—not surprising, since the term has Biblical origins. In the Book of Ruth, for instance, the poor are permitted to pick grain leftover from the harvest. The Society of St. Andrews, based in Virginia, has gleaning groups in several states including Arkansas, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania that have collectively gleaned millions of pounds of produce. Faith Feeds, a Lexington, Kentucky, gleaning group that grew out of a church meeting, has picked up more than 111,000 pounds of produce since the summer of 2010, from farmers’ markets, farms, and private residences. “It is not hard to feed the hungry,” says Jennifer Erena of Faith Feeds, an interfaith group not affiliated with any particular religion or church. “The word is spreading and there’s a wonderful energy among different people and organizations that is both collaborative and community oriented.”

There are gleaning programs that connect homeowners overwhelmed by an abundant harvest with volunteers willing to pick produce and take it to local food banks, such as Portland Fruit in Oregon. But many gleaning efforts are simply started by an individual who sees a need and wants to fill it. “I particularly like picking fruit for seniors, many of whom can no longer climb a ladder or aren’t able to do physical labor anymore,” says North Berkeley Harvest founder Natasha Boissier, who started solo but now works with a group of volunteers. “They come out and talk with me while I work, and I appreciate and respect their wisdom and experience, and hearing about the ups and downs of having lived life. These moments of connection have brought me—and I hope them—a great deal of unexpected joy.”

Bossier’s first stop with fresh food is often the local men’s shelter. “These men are often blamed for what’s wrong with them,” says the clinical social worker. “I see them early in the morning standing out in the cold after enduring a night of who knows what and I want to give them a piece of fruit to offer a moment’s respite from their pain and suffering. That’s my hope: To provide something tangible, simple, and sweet in their lives.”

Some gleaning programs have become an integral part of their community. Take the Novato Unified School District Gleaning Program. Every week for the past six years, parents, students, and members of this Marin County, California, community glean excess organic produce from a participating local farm. (There are about 15 in the program.) Through a partnership with Marin Organic, a cooperative association of local growers, that fresh chard picked by a volunteer on Monday finds it way into school pasta sauce later in the week. The gleaned fruits and vegetables now offsets up to 25 percent of the district’s weekly produce, according to Miguel Villarreal, the director of food and nutrition services for the small school district, where some 4,000 meals a day are dished up at 13 schools.

For Villarreal, who has worked in school food for 30 years and grew up helping pick crops with his parents in the fields, the program is a no-brainer. “There is so much beautiful abundance in this area and our school food program can use all the help it can get,” says Villarreal, who sees educational and community-building benefits to the program, as well.

Others raise some unexpected benefits of gleaning. Melita Love, of Farm to Pantry in Healdsburg, California, found a community of people in her new hometown when she started gleaning. Love has collaborated with local preservers to extend the shelf life of the bounty she and her crew harvest in such staples as applesauce and tomato sauce — think canning for a cause — that food pantry patrons can pick up along with gleaned fresh goods. She’s also worked with local groups to explain to patrons how to use produce that may be unfamiliar. “The first time we dropped off kale to a food pantry nobody took it because they didn’t know what to do with it,” says Love. “So we did cooking demos for kale salad, kale chips, and a winter soup with kale, and we handed out recipes, too. Education is an important part of any gleaning effort.”

Food Pool’s Sigal points out that a group of gardeners who share their backyard bounty with less fortunate folk in his community have gone a step further, funding and constructing a community garden at a local food pantry where there was once an unused piece of land. “A year ago, most of these people didn’t even know there was a food pantry there,” he says. “There’s this incredible value in creating community that goes beyond just sharing surplus fresh food.”

Top, Lemon trees often produce far more fruit than a single family can use. Photo credit: Marco Chiesa. Middle, Blackberries grow wild all over rural and, often, suburban areas. Photo credit: Alex Brown. Bottom, One of several varieties of kale, lacinato kale grows abundantly and can be used in numerous healthy dishes. Photo credit: Oriana Papadopulos. All photos used under Creative Commons license.

Originally published on Shareable

When I was in undergrad in the Northeast, around 15 years ago, a degree in “Food Studies” was unheard of.  A campus farm or edible garden was something reserved for agriculture schools or off-campus hippie/granola enclaves. However, the past 5  years have shown a proliferation of opportunities to get trained as farmers, gardeners, food policy makers, and food law practitioners.

On a recent site visit to Portland, Oregon, I met with FoodCorps service site supervisor Caitlin Blethen and her service member Jessica Polledri. Caitlin told me about her local program that trains school garden coordinators. This signaled to me a similar kind of sea change. It indicated that there is a desire out there to be trained in this work, and that there is a (slowly) growing market of jobs being created to do this work. I’ll let Jessica—a graduate of the program– take it from here:

Sometimes, pieces just fall into place. Soon after I moved across the country to Portland, Oregon, I heard about something called the School Garden Coordinator Certificate Training course (SGCCT), a 35-hour course offered by Growing Gardens, a local nonprofit.

I didn’t know something like this existed, and I applied for the course in the hopes that I could climb out of an illustrious past in retail work and unpaid internships. I crossed my fingers, was accepted, and propelled myself into the career track that I didn’t even realize was a career track.

That’s because it’s relatively new: school gardens date back to World War I–when the national school garden program was called, aptly I think, the United States School Garden Army–but have only recently enjoyed a resurgence. Gardens are growing in schoolyards all over the country, a trend that is highlighted by the recent inception of FoodCorps, a national organization dedicated to building and tending school gardens, providing hands-on nutrition education, and bringing high-quality local food into school cafeterias (full disclosure: I am a FoodCorps service member currently serving with Growing Gardens).

For over a decade, Growing Gardens has been steadily building its youth programming but recognized that the need for school gardens was outweighing the organization’s capacity. In an effort to keep the school garden movement blossoming in Portland, they decided to develop and offer the training. Nationwide, there are precious few school garden coordinator training programs: it is possible that Growing Gardens’ SGCCT was, in 2009, the very first.

Growing Gardens’ Youth Grow Manager, Caitlin Blethen, put the course together using her experience working in the field as a garden educator. Over the course’s 35 learning hours, Blethen and a host of guest speakers cover developing a master plan, community organizing, teaching students in a school garden setting, how to connect school garden activities and lessons to the curriculum, and planning a planting calendar, among other topics. To sweeten the deal even more, SGCCT students can opt to receive continuing education credits from Portland State University, an incentive for current teachers and graduate-degree seekers alike.

Though locally directed–speakers include Michelle Markesteyn Ratcliffe, the Oregon Farm to School Program Manager; and there is a special evening class dedicated to understanding the procedures that surround using garden produce in Portland Public Schools cafeterias–the skills taught are universal.

Graduates of the program have gone on to great things: There has been a steady stream of graduates stopping by the Growing Gardens office to peruse our seed library for flowers and vegetables for their new–and thriving–school gardens. Two graduates applied for and received a lucrative grant to get their garden project off the ground. We get constant feedback on how integral certain topics (creating a garden committee, working with school custodial staff, writing mission and vision statements) really were to the graduates’ success. And this particular graduate can ensure you that the course got her exactly where she had hoped to be.

Jessica Polledri is a FoodCorps service member in Portland Oregon, serving under the Oregon Department of Agriculture, with Growing Gardens.

San Francisco will experience an unexpected windfall of free fruit thanks to a group of graft-happy gardeners. They call themselves the Guerrilla Grafters, and their vision is to see the trees lining the city streets begin to produce perfectly edible food.  When I interviewed one of the Guerrilla Grafters recently, I learned that it’s not all about the grafting.

I discovered that Tara (last name withheld to protect her privacy), an early member of the Guerrilla Grafters, cares deeply about the society in which we live and our relationship with public spaces. We had interesting and engaging chat via Skype, and she explained what’s behind their efforts to crowd-source caring for fruiting trees in public spaces.

Let Them Eat Fruit

The Guerrilla Grafters are splicing productive branches onto the city’s non-fruiting ornamental trees and transforming them into fruit bearing trees. They’re methodically repurposing the city’s once strictly ornamental apple, cherry, and pear trees as food producers.

Why didn’t the city plant fruit producing trees in the first place? It seems that fruit trees in urban centers are undesirable since they attract rodents and because of the potential for rotting fruit littering the sidewalks. The Guerrilla Grafters have a solution to those concerns: they only graft trees that have caretakers who commit to their proper upkeep.

The Guerrilla Grafters have been active as a group since last year; they’ve got approximately 130-140 members on their e-mail list for their newsletter and about a dozen who show up regularly for grafting events. Tara described the organization as having a lateral structure–that is, without hierarchy. There are no leaders, just active members, and some members are more active than others.

Their motto: “Undoing civilization one branch at a time…”

Grafting Guerrilla Style

Tara became involved with grafting ‘guerrilla style’ after she was unable to get permission to plant productive fruit trees in front of her own house. The city administrators cited concerns about maintenance and liability. She was willing to assume responsibility for these but the city still refused, which she found unreasonable. Tara further discovered that it is simply city policy to not allow fruit producing trees, but apparently no formal law exists prohibiting them.

The Guerrilla Grafters’ goal is to demonstrate that with proper care, fruit trees are not a nuisance and in fact add to the quality of life in the urban environment. In Tara’s view, fruit trees on private property are more likely to suffer from neglect when the owners no longer want to care for the tree or harvest the fruit or when new tenants arrive and are not interested in the trees’ upkeep. This is why the Guerrilla Grafters won’t graft a tree that doesn’t have a committed caretaker. Trees in public spaces have the advantage of being accessible to a number of people that can take over as caretakers when the need arises, and the public can harvest the fruit.

In fact with a little effort, a city with fruit trees can be a food forest.

Social Change Through Fruit Trees

Tara expressed concern that the public at large is disconnected from public spaces. This disconnect arises in part because citizens don’t have any responsibility in the public space. She explained that the Guerilla Grafters hope to instill ‘a sense of responsibility to care for what is in the public realm’ through the act of ‘editing’ their neighborhood space by grafting.  But she clarified that they are ‘not necessarily for (citizen) responsibility without participation in the decision-making.’

Beyond grafting for fruit production, caretakers and grafters make the effort to see that the trees are pruned and watered as needed and keep them healthy. They are invested in an activity that is ultimately a public good.

Data Gathering in San Francisco’s Microclimates

Another interesting piece to the Guerrilla Grafters’ mission is that they are beginning to collect data about the trees they have grafted. They want to monitor how well the trees produce certain varieties of fruit, including the quality. The results of this research should be helpful for urban gardeners in San Francisco, which is well known for its varied microclimates. She is seeking help with their Web site to enable this data-gathering project.

The Grinch Who Hacked Trees

Sadly, they recently discovered that the trees they grafted in the Hayes Valley area of San Francisco were severely pruned, including all of the grafted branches. This was unnecessary solely for ‘pruning” purposes.’  They lost all of the grafted Asian pears that were ripening there.

Apparently the now popular YouTube video about the grafters inadvertently gave away the location of these grafted trees. The video was never meant to circulate widely and advertise their activities. It was made for a demonstration the Guerilla Grafters were giving at a conference, but they never even used it.

They’ll be more careful next time, Tara assures.

Today, most of us see “local” as shorthand for fresh, delicious food that comes with a story attached—and that serves an alternative to consolidated, anonymous, commodity-based farming. But that hasn’t always been how the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) sees it.

USDA is known for creating, subsidizing, and promoting industrial agriculture. So the agency’s effort to dip its toes into the local food movement in 2009 with its Know Your Farmer Know Your Food program (KYF2) raised eyebrows and questions. Could USDA really help create a thriving bottom-up food system? Or would it spread the term local, and the ethos behind it, so thin as to make it meaningless?

Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food essentially re-packaged and highlighted government programs that support and promote the development of local farmers and ranchers. The funds it made available are a drop in the bucket (at a few hundred million dollars spread across 27 programs run by nine different agencies that support local food efforts in some way) when compared to the tens of billions the USDA puts toward the “big 5″ commodity crops—corn, soy, wheat, cotton and rice.

But that didn’t make it insignificant. In fact, as Know Your Farmer appeared in 2009, former Grist food editor Tom Philpott admitted to feeling cautiously optimistic about the effort. He wrote:

“…it’s remarkable and to my knowledge unprecedented that the USDA is making a major effort to publicize these programs and ensure that at least some federal money flows into emerging alternative food systems.”

This month, the USDA is making a very public effort to report its progress with the Know Your Farmer program after two and a half years. The agency has held several press events, including a live streaming conversation from the USDA headquarters last week, another from the White House on Monday (that included the first family’s head chef/resident looker, Sam Kass), and an ongoing attempt at a conversation via a hashtag on Twitter.

The agency has released what it calls the Compass, a series of documents, case studies, tools, and an interactive map designed to be a living representation of the KYF2 effort and its resources. The Compass includes anecdotes about scrappy, likable farmers, ranchers and other business owners who’ve used USDA dollars for things like food co-ops, small meat processors, hoop houses and artisan cheese operations. And most who take the time to dig in to the somewhat dry materials will likely be convinced that real work and concrete change is taking place—even if they’re ultimately dwarfed by the USDA’s agribusiness efforts.

But the USDA’s media blitz also raises a disturbing question, if we look closely: Does the agency see local food as any sort of alternative to industrial-scale (or “production”) agriculture? Or is it more of a garnish–say, a sprig of parsley—meant to make our nation’s heaping plate of corn and soy more appetizing?

This scene from last week’s live stream might shed some light on the answer:

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan are sitting together talking to an online audience flanked by the USDA seal and the American flag. Off to the side is a screen, where every few minutes a questions that’s been asked by an audience member via Twitter or email will pop up for the secretary and deputy to read out loud and answer.

After a promotional slideshow and several fairly benign questions about the KYF2 effort, an anonymous question appears on the screen (it’s at 17:55, for those of you following along at home). “How can local foods complement production agriculture?,” it reads.

Here’s what they have to say:

Vilsack: “This is a really important question. Because when KYF2 got launched, there was this belief that somehow it was separate from production agriculture.

We have always thought that it complements production agriculture. That it actually… increases the connection between consumers and people that are distant from the farm. The reality is that so many people who live in America today are generations removed from family members who farmed. So they may not have an appreciation for the challenges of farming… [see the video for his complete statement]

Merrigan: One person quoted in the Compass said…”Those of us doing the local/regional food work are ambassadors for American agriculture.” … That resonated with me because they’re putting that face on farming that I think is so important for all our constituents at USDA. [emphasis mine]

In other words, small producers working their behinds off on a local scale—who may get small loans but generally receive no subsidies, little to no crop insurance, and no lobbying power from organizations in Washington like the Farm Bureau—are valuable to the USDA because they make all farmers look much better by proxy.

Now, irony aside, why would USDA feel the need to dedicate so much time to making the point that stronger local economies should be in no way threatening  to Big Ag interests?

Well, some large producers have shown themselves to feel threatened by local food. Take this 2010 example, described by Don Carr of the Environmental Working Group, wherein an Iowa corn and soybean grower who is chairman of the Iowa Corn Promotion Board spoke up to criticize Merrigan’s early KYF2 efforts as “not the USDA that people in the Midwest are familiar with.”

There’s also the fact that a number of the services and funds KYF2 is highlighting were products of the 2008 Farm Bill. Since the Senate Agriculture committee is in the midst of holding hearings about the next Farm Bill, Merrigan and others behind Know Your Farmer probably feel they have a case to make.

The day after the Compass was announced, Republican senator Pat Roberts publicly criticized the KYF2 effort: it’s not “steeped in reality,” he said, since most food Americans consume isn’t grown locally.  In a story that ran on the industry site Agri-pulse, he was quoted saying that the initiative would be the subject of discussion at the Senate Ag Committee hearing. He continued:

“Would taxpayer dollars be better invested elsewhere, like research, pest and disease management that help the entire industry, rather than one particular farmers’ market.”

I’m guessing Merrigan and her staff understand the benefit of playing up local food’s “complementary” qualities in public, while doing work behind the scenes that could—even in small ways—begin shifting the power in American farming back towards small-scale producers and local infrastructure.

In fact, depending on how the 2012 Farm Bill shakes out, I have a hunch that the KYF2 effort will either be seen as a foundation on which the next several decades of system-changing local food work are built and strengthened, or a brief moment of possibility that very few of us truly understood while it lasted.

Originally published on Grist