The California farming community is facing a demographic crisis. The average age of a California farmer is 58, and nearly 20 percent of them are 70 or older. As these farmers approach retirement, California needs to train new ones if we are to continue to feed our country and keep a healthy rural economy in the decades ahead. And with farm internships in California subject to strict labor laws, opportunities to get a hands-on farming education have become even fewer.

To help meet this need, the Center for Land-Based Learning in Winters, CA recently launched the California Farm Academy (CFA) to train beginning farmers in specialty crop production. The six-month incubator program is designed to help aspiring agriculturists transition quickly into starting their own farms. Unlike many programs and apprenticeships that require students to participate full-time or live on a farm, the CFA meets on evenings and Saturdays to accommodate the busy schedules of people who currently work at non-farming jobs. Academy students spend time in the classroom as well as in the field, greenhouse, and packing shed.

To provide perspectives from the frontlines, the CFA has teamed up with local farms such as Ferry Plaza seller Capay Organic, which also markets produce through its Farm Fresh to You CSA and Ferry Building store. Second-generation farmer Thaddeus Barsotti (pictured below), co-owner of Capay Organic with his brother Freeman, volunteers as a teacher for the Academy, and the farm serves as a site for classes and demonstrations.

When Barsotti learned about the new incubator program, he welcomed the opportunity to contribute to the education of new growers in California. Although he trains and hires workers as part of his farm business, he realizes that his farm cannot grow forever. In his work with the Academy, Barsotti can help “grow new farmers” who will start their own businesses with economic viability and sustainability in mind.

Other experienced farmers from several farms in the area, professors from the University of California at Davis, and National Resource Conservation Service employees teach Academy students the fundamentals of sustainable farming: field preparation, crop planning, soil management, pest control, irrigation, and equipment use. In the classroom, experts from organizations such as the California Alliance for Family Farmers and California Certified Organic Farmers teach students how to handle legal and financial issues, identify and develop markets for their crops, and hire, train, and manage farmworkers.

Barsotti recognizes that it is difficult for beginning farmers to understand how a farm works if they haven’t lived on one before. “If I hadn’t grown up on a farm, I wouldn’t be in the business,” he says. He believes the program gives students “an appreciation for the amount of expertise that goes into modern farms,” and serving as a mentor has also renewed his own appreciation for his line of work. “Teaching others has reminded me of how complicated the whole thing is,” he reflects. “There are a lot of details that go into farming. Farmers are always making decisions based on a set of circumstances that are never the same.”

For their final project, students will use their new knowledge to develop business plans that they will present to a panel of farmers and lenders prior to graduation. Similar to the farm training and incubator program at Agriculture and Land-Based Training Association(ALBA), the Academy will provide support to graduates after their initial six-month program by offering them the opportunity to lease land at the Center for Land-Based Learning and at Russell Ranch, located at the University of California at Davis. They can lease 1/4- to 1/2-acre plots at half the market rate for up to three years.

CFA director Jennifer Taylor explains that the first five years is a critical time for new farmers. “The Farm Academy can take some of the luck and uncertainty out of it and provide a scaffold for beginning farmers,” she says.

Graduates of the program who are renting land will be able to ask for guidance and advice from experienced farmers at the two locations. By farming plots near each other, they can also connect with other program alumni and create a support network. Taylor notes that students have already started talking about working together and sharing equipment.

Traveling from as far as San Francisco each week, the 20 students in the Academy’s first class range from young people just entering the workforce to midlife career-changers. Students come from diverse backgrounds, motivated by a love of farming as well as an interest in raising a family on a farm, working with youth, or agritourism. Some plan to farm a small one-acre plot, while others hope for hundreds of acres.

Taylor, who previously worked at an incubator program that trained beginning dairy farmers in Wisconsin, would love to see more programs like the CFA spring up in other parts of California. She envisions hubs around the state that would connect beginning farmers with regional farms and resources for mentorship and support. The last farm bill allocated money for programs that train beginning farmers, and Taylor hopes the next farm bill will continue to fund these efforts. The CFA is funded by a grant from the California Department of Food and Agriculture’s Specialty Crop Block Grant program, which is also dependent on authorization in the next farm bill.

The first session of the Farm Academy began in February and runs through August 2012. Session two will begin in late 2012 or early 2013. An application and information can be found at the Center for Land-Based Learning’s website.

Originally published by CUESA

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

Three of Berkeley Unified School District‘s elementary schools–Malcolm X,  Rosa Parks, and Washington—are in jeopardy of losing their entire cooking and gardening program funds beginning in October this year.

Under existing guidelines, the schools will no longer qualify for federal funding because they have fewer than 50 percent of their students enrolled in the free and reduced-lunch program, according to Leah Sokolofski, who supervises the program for the district.

Berkeley has an international reputation for its edible schoolyards, where public school children of all economic means learn what it takes to grow a radish and sauté some chard. Such funding cuts to the program, whose total budget is $1.94 million a year, would represent a significant setback in the city’s pioneering efforts to date.

School gardening and cooking champion Alice Waters, whose Chez Panisse Foundation helped fund the Edible Schoolyard at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, expressed dismay at the potential budget cuts to programs. “It’s inevitable cuts will come—people think these programs are dispensable and the state of California is in a financial crisis—but it’s a tragedy,” she said.

Waters recently raised over $500,000 to launch the Edible Schoolyard Project (ESP), an online resource that shares curriculum and best practice principles for garden and cooking programs with schools around the country. ESP has affiliate programs in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and New York. “We have to continue to make the case for why an edible education is so important to the health of every child and the health of the whole country,” she said.

BUSD school garden and cooking programs are funded through September 2012 through Network for a Healthy California, a state program that distributes federal monies to local school districts through a three-year grant. The network seeks to improve the health of low-income Californians through increased fruit and vegetable consumption and daily activity.

Changes to funding

Changes to the way school cooking and gardening programs are funded are coming down the track, however, following the passage of the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, which President Obama signed into law amid much fanfare in December 2010, with the goal of improving childhood nutrition.

“Until the new guidelines for eligibility are released we just don’t know what’s in store for our school programs,” said Sokolofski, who anticipates hearing later this month. “This is the biggest change in the funding for these programs in 11 years.”

Further complicating matters: The U.S. Farm Bill is up for reauthorization in 2012. Potential changes to funding priorities there may impact all the BUSD’s gardening and cooking programs as well. “The Farm Bill is yet another wild card because that’s the overall place where our funding comes from,” explained Sokolofski. “And any changes there could trump changes elsewhere. There are a lot of unknowns right now.”

While it’s possible that funding for these programs could remain intact, for now the immediate concern is the three schools who will likely not qualify for federal funds for the next school year, Sokolofski said.

Sokolofski has been sharing her concerns with school administrators, principals, parents, and teachers. A recent presentation at Malcolm X spurred dozens of parents to attend the March 7 BUSD board meeting, where they made a passionate case for protecting a program beloved of both students and adults.

Malcolm X parent and family doctor Shannon McCune, a Malcolm X alum herself, sees many young children in her practice and said she can immediately tell which of her patients have gardening at school. “They have a favorite vegetable and know why they’re good for you,” said McCune, whose daughter recently taught her mom how to make kale salad by massaging the leaves with oil, which eliminates the need for cooking the fibrous vegetable. “I would never have known how to do that if my daughter hadn’t shown me.”

Another physician-parent echoed McCune’s sentiment. Mickey Adams, a parent from Washington Elementary, talked about the challenges of working with adult patients who have obesity and other lifestyle diseases. “These people don’t know how to eat well and cook food—they’ve never been taught,” said Adams, whose children make recipes at home they’ve learned in school cooking classes. “These programs work and there will be so much damage done by cutting them and we’ll all pay on the other end.”

If kids grow and cook it they will eat their greens

As a school board member noted at the March 7 meeting, the value of such programs was measured in a recent UC Berkeley study, which found that young students routinely exposed to fruits and vegetables through cooking and gardening instruction ate 1.5 more servings of produce a day compared with kids with fewer opportunities to dig in the dirt and work the stove at school.

School gardening teacher Joy Moore doesn’t need data to know the benefits such programs can bring. This kind of instruction gives young people alternative and innovative ways to learn, along with “skills for life,” said the long-time school food advocate.

School board president John Selawsky promised parents that the board will “see what it can do,” while acknowledging the challenging fiscal constraints already impacting the school district.

For now, Berkeley schools are researching ways to sustain these threatened programs. “We’ve been looking at the possibility of grant funding, but most of the grants available are small and aimed at schools just starting a garden plot,” said Alexander Hunt, principal of Malcolm X. “We haven’t been able to find anything comparable to the $135,000 we stand to lose.”

Despite serving a growing group of children in need, Malcolm X’s free and reduced school lunch numbers stand at 46 percent of its student body. “Materials can’t replace the quality of programming currently being provided by our staff,” said Hunt. “It’s wonderful how these classes engage students in learning at the same time they impart the benefits of health and nutrition. They’re key to our students’ education.”

The Malcolm X PTA is also exploring whether a large corporation, local merchants, philanthropic individuals, or some other benefactor may step in to fill the void. It is also in the early stages of discussions with other PTAs about a collaborative effort to secure contributions. “The garden and cooking program at Malcolm X is beloved by the school community and the community at large,” added Hunt. “It’s sad to see that in the place where this school food movement started, we’re now going backwards trying to sustain these valuable programs.”

Sense of urgency

Malcolm X parent Marian Mabel noted a sense of urgency to secure funding for next year, which must be identified by June 30, when the school district’s budget is finalized. In addition, Mabel pointed out that not all the city’s schools currently offer these programs—Berkeley Arts Magnet, Cragmont, Jefferson, and Oxford don’t receive any federal funds for such instruction. These schools rely on parent volunteers, PTA funds, and other sources to fund programs at their sites, if they have them at all.

“Short term, these three schools need to fill these funding gaps,” said Mabel, “but long term we want to find ways to make these programs available and sustainable to every public school student in Berkeley.”

As for Waters, another ESP program is in the planning stages for Sacramento, a strategic move, she said, so that she would be “under the noses” of state legislators. Waters, whose foundation has gifted about $10 million to BUSD, mostly to the Edible Schoolyard at King, also hopes that the governor will convene a taskforce for edible education soon to address the healthcare crisis among school children.

A parent-led meeting open to the community to update interested parties about the problem and brainstorm ideas about potential solutions is scheduled for today, Monday, March 26, at the Malcolm X library at 7 p.m. Malcolm X is at 1731 Prince Street. Parents will also prepare public comments for the school board meeting on Wednesday March 28, where they intend to keep this issue on the minds of school board members.

Watch “The Whole World in a Small Seed,” a Lunch Love Community video on the Malcolm X school garden program run by Rivka Mason.

Originally published on Berkeleyside

Photo: Middle, sharing the pleasures of an outdoor table at Berkeley’s Malcolm X Elementary School. Below, Malcolm X’s school under the sky teaches more than just how to grow good food.

We hear a lot about recalls these days. But last night it wasn’t ground turkey, cantaloupes, or peanut butter that was taken off the market. It was one of the most hotly contested pesticides in recent memory: methyl iodide. As reported by the San Jose Mercury News, Arysta Lifescience, the makers of the fumigant, announced on Tuesday evening that they’d be suspending sales of the product (also known as Midas) in all U.S. markets.

In California, where methyl iodide was being slowly phased into use as a replacement for the ozone-depleting methyl bromide, farming communities have spent the year protesting. Several Central Coast counties even banned the chemical, which is used to sterilize the soil before strawberries and other high-dollar row crops are planted. Amy Yoder, head of Arysta LifeScience North American, was sufficiently vague when speaking to the San Jose Mercury News about the company’s withdrawal, and she said the company’s decision was based “on its economic viability in the U.S. marketplace.”

It may have also had something to do with the fact that California Gov. Jerry Brown has recently appointed Brian Leahy, a former organic farmer, as the head of the state’s Department of Pesticide Regulation. Or the fact that, just a month into the job, Leahy authorized a half-million dollar project to explore less toxic alternatives to fumigants. Adding to the strikes against Arysta, Pesticide Action Network (PAN) also announced yesterday a new round of evidence that a pesticide called Chloropicrin, which is used in conjunction with methyl iodide, had been found in the air in every site they tested near the farming operations conducted by Driscoll’s, the nation’s largest strawberry distributor. The press release read:

“This study illustrates how readily fumigants can move away from where they are applied at levels that can have serious health impacts on neighbors,” said Dr. Susan Kegley, consulting chemist for Pesticide Action Network. “Methyl iodide evaporates even more readily from soil than chloropicrin does, and used in conjunction, these two fumigants will pack a carcinogenic punch that no one should have to tolerate.”

It’s too early to know what Arysta’s decision will mean for California’s conventional strawberry farmers, who produce the popular fruit for around 80 percent of the nation, and are just this month beginning to harvest their first crops of the season. Although methyl bromide has been officially phased out of use, many farmers still have what is called a critical use exemption, meaning they can prove that “the specific use is critical because the lack of availability of methyl bromide for that use would result in a significant market disruption and there are no technically and economically feasible alternatives or substitutes available.”

In other words, the loophole is big enough to plant a field of strawberries in. And it may now be years before methyl bromide is truly, completely phased out. But, considering what a well-documented danger methyl iodide posed to farm communities, methyl bromide may be the lesser evil for the moment.  Not only is methyl iodide listed as a carcinogen on the state’s own Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986, but, according to PAN, it is also a source of thyroid toxicity, neurotoxicity, and reproductive toxicity.

Either way, we may soon see an end to the era of cheap, conventionally grown strawberries and the often wasteful behavior that comes with them, like this jaw-dropping 2010 video of a Florida strawberry farmer plowing under half his crop for the year because the market was flooded.

At the moment, however, I’m thinking of the high school I visited last fall in the midst of the Monterey County strawberry fields, where teachers and students were working furiously to have their concerns about the carcinogen heard by the outside world. Many of the kids in that area are the children and grandchildren of farmworkers, and I have no doubt they’ll have challenges ahead of all kinds. But for now, they have one less thing to worry about.

Photo: Sarah Cady

Originally published on Grist

Mesa-Bains’s exhibition, “Geography of Memory,” draws on her personal memories of the Santa Clara and San Joaquin Valleys and her family’s history as immigrants and farm laborers. An important retrospective of her intricate, sensory-rich installation work, the exhibit includes pieces such as “Transparent Migration” and “The Curandera’s Botanica” that incorporate synthetic and organic materials and that pay homage to family history, Mexican iconography, and the botanical world. To walk through and immerse oneself in these installations is to encounter a space of curio cabinets packed with botanical samples, family photographs, handmade journals, rows of sculptured maize, religious icons and, in the case of “The Curandera’s Botanica,” a stainless steel medical examination table. Spending time in the galleries containing these visceral and expansive installations is to see California’s shared, multiethnic histories that center on cultivation and food but also the violent realities of migrant labor and industrial agriculture.

Walking back through the atrium and past its permanent collection of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican art takes the viewer into Bixler’s exhibition, “A New Pastoral: Views of the San Joaquin Valley.” Comprising over forty photographs arranged into fragmented clusters that at once seem mechanical and organic, the exhibit includes images of state-of-the-art industrial dairies, rusted machinery, manure evaporation lagoons, brownfield sites, and austere grain elevators. These are the images that viewers notice first, perhaps seeing in them a searing critique of industrial agriculture and its environmental costs. With time, though, other images come into focus that offer a more ambivalent view: a newly planted field glowing yellow and green with young crops; perfectly still, fog-shrouded orchards in winter; doves taking flight from a burned-out trailer; and a man’s weathered hands held poised over the soil he stands on (the only photograph containing a person). In a recent article on Bixler’s project, Fresno Bee arts columnist Donald Munro captures the overall effect of “A New Pastoral”: “an almost ghostly tour of a familiar landscape, one that strips away the human presence while at the same time zeroing in on the human impact.”

“Geography of Memory” and “A New Pastoral” on the surface offer starkly different visions of California and its agricultural story. For Cano, the former “remind[s] the viewer of the difficult life journey of the immigrant,” the latter of the “environmental degradation caused by industrial farming.” But, as Bixler puts it, “both shows explore how agriculture simultaneously shapes the land and the fortunes of the people who live on it and work it. Both shows present a tension between growth and decay, wholeness and fragmentation.”

Given all the media attention, you may think that Alice Waters is the only person in Berkeley doing anything to fix school food–and that her Edible Schoolyard Project is the only organization tackling this topic across the country.

But that perception would be wrong. Founded in 1995, the Center for Ecoliteracy has also long championed school food reform and channeled funding in the millions to garden programs, cooking classes, and nutrition-based curriculum in Berkeley public schools.

Along with the Chez Panisse Foundation and Berkeley Unified School District, the Center for Ecoliteracy also implemented the School Lunch Initiative, which kickstarted local, seasonal, and sustainable food for students here and connected the classroom and the cafeteria.

Currently, its Rethinking School Lunch program offers a planning strategy for revamping food service beyond Berkeley to rural and urban areas around the state struggling to improve the eating habits of school children, many of whom are hungry, nutritionally depleted, or hampered by diet-related illnesses such as obesity and diabetes.

Last week, the center introduced school nutrition personnel from around the country to its new cookbook-guide, Cooking with California Foods in K-12 Schools, which played a starring role in a hands-on workshop on creative school lunch menu planning, as part of the national Community Food Security Coalition‘s 15th Annual Conference in downtown Oakland.

On a sunny Sunday afternoon a stuffy, windowless Marriott hotel conference space was packed with about 60 school food folk from both coasts and the country’s center and south, all eagerly drinking the Kool-Aid—sorry, make that freshly squeezed lemon juice with a hint of mint—dispensed by renowned cookbook author, culinary teacher, and food policy consultant Georgeann Brennan and her colleague Ann M. Evans, former Davis mayor, co-founder of that city’s food co-op and farmers’ market, and a long-time advocate of sustainable food systems.

Participants, who left with renewed enthusiasm and ideas to try back at their own schools—along with a free guide and a nifty apron—formed small groups to turn out such salads as zucchini and feta; broccoli, raisin and walnut; tabbouleh; and Asian cabbage and orange with ginger. They also connected with kindred spirits in the school food world while they grated, chopped, and stirred.

Also on hand to talk transforming school food: award-winning Oakland Unified School District Nutrition Services Director Jennifer LeBarre—along with four of that city’s Lunch Ladies who shared stories about the pressing need and formidable barriers to bettering school food, as only those in the frontlines every day can do—and Zenobia Barlow, the Center for Ecoliteracy’s executive director and co-founder.

Barlow isn’t a celebrity chef and she doesn’t own a famous restaurant. Rather, she hails from an anthropology-sustainability-think tank-policy wonk pedigree. And her commitment to improving what children eat at school every day is clear and consistent. “The Center has quietly and steadily worked on improving school food and providing professional development and training to school food personnel for about 15 years,” said Barlow post conference from her office at the David Brower Center. “We helped bring about the changes in school food in Berkeley and we’ve moved on to other schools and districts to facilitate change there too.”

The cookbook is part of this plan. It is based on a simple yet clever 6-5-4 formula that consists of six dishes (salads, soups, pastas, rice bowls, wraps, and pizza toppings), five flavor profiles (African, Asian, European/Mediterranean, Latin American, and Middle Eastern/Indian) and the fresh produce available during the four seasons. The approach was developed in the Davis, Oakland, and Winters school districts over three years.

Funded by TomKat Charitable Trust, the guide’s goal is to help school food service staff find ways to add more fresh, local, healthy foods to school meals (though the downloadable document offers recipes suitable for home cooking too). Some 8,000 guides have been downloaded since August, more than 1,000 have been shipped to school nutrition staff and all 40 copies got snapped up at last week’s workshop, according to Barlow.

Each presenter stressed the importance of integrating California specialty crops—such as walnuts, lettuce, olive oil, strawberries, apricots, figs, citrus and more — into meal programs. “How can we expect our children to understand what food is grown in their area and how it tastes if it’s not on their plate?” asked Evans to a receptive crowd, who also noted California’s long growing season and diverse range of produce not available in most parts of the country.

Attendees from states such as Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Montana raised the challenges they face in sourcing affordable fresh produce at certain times of the year. “California is blessed with great soil and climate and has the capacity to grow for a population far larger than itself,” said Evans. “To share that bounty is great for California farmers and for consumers around the nation. This doesn’t have to supplant local produce in other states, but can compliment it.”

She also noted that schools in as diverse California locations as Davis, Riverside, Ventura, Winters, Santa Cruz, Los Angeles, and Clovis are all early adopters of the 6-5-4 approach to school menus, which allows for substitutions based on availability.

Barlow, who is currently working closely with the Oakland Unified School District, also pointed out the OUSD’s novel approaches to enhancing the edible experience at different sites—like the “Grab and Go” breakfast bags offered at high schools, the grant-sponsored fruit and vegetable snacks for elementary schools, the new supper program recently implemented at some schools, or the more than 20 afterschool farm stands on school grounds in that city, where many children live in food deserts.

“It’s been important to take what we learned in Berkeley and apply it on a larger scale in districts in more urban settings like Oakland, which benefits 40,000 children a year, more than 70 percent of whom are eligible for free or reduced lunch,” Barlow said.

“For some children who are fed five times a day at school, it’s the only place they eat. So we’re applying the best of Berkeley’s school food practices and sharing them with the rest of the state and even the country. This guide is part of the solution to the challenge of reinventing school food.”

Photo courtesy Zenobia Barlow

Originally published on Berkeleyside

The letter comes as big ag interests are working to short-circuit the 2012 farm bill process by pushing a secret farm bill through the deficit-reduction Super Committee.

The letter includes a petition signed by more than 14,000 Californians asking their 55 members of Congress to defend key farm bill programs that are critical to a state that generates more than $36 billion in agriculture revenue. The coalition letter demonstrates a broad consensus in California that top priority for federal agriculture funding should go to local food production, nutrition, research, specialty crops, organic agriculture and proven conservation programs. It also underscores the need to invest in local food infrastructure and to expand access to local and fresh fruits and vegetables in food assistance and school lunch programs.

As the nation’s largest grower of fruits, vegetables and nuts–as well as the home to the biggest organic sector–California stands to gain from policies that put more emphasis on production, promotion and consumption of healthy and sustainably grown foods. These kinds of proposals are included in a new Local Food Farm and Jobs bill being introduced by Rep. Pingree (D-Maine) and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio).

Supporters of the coalition warn that their healthy food reform ideas may be thwarted by a closed-door process being pushed by industrial agriculture lobbyists and their patrons in Congress. The San Francisco Chronicle’s Carolyn Lochhead elaborated in a front page article Sunday (Oct. 30):

Leaders of the House and Senate Agriculture Committees are attempting a breathtaking end-run around the democratic process. They are hatching their own farm bill in private and plan by Nov. 1 take it to the new deficit Super Committee to be enacted whole, without votes in their own committees or in Congress.

EWG’s Ken Cook issued a call to food policy reformers to stand up and fight the agribusiness lobbyists’ to hijack the farm bill debate with a backroom process. Long-time farm bill reformer Rep. Ron Kind (D-Wis.) is circulating a letter to his colleagues objecting to this profoundly undemocratic process:

If the Joint Select Committee were to approve such a proposal, the Congress would have no opportunity to consider any amendments to whatever terms are agreed to by the Chairs and Ranking Members of the Agriculture Committees. The Congress would never even have an opportunity to have a separate up-or-down vote on the Farm Bill. Numerous media reports quote Senators and House Members saying that is precisely the reason the Agriculture Committees are pursuing this route.

If the California delegation wants a voice, their first job is to object strongly to this undemocratic scheme to craft the $300 billion farm bill entirely out of public view.

Unless the California delegation stands strong for the interests of their state’s producers and eaters, it is likely that the closed-door process will yield much of the same: a grossly inequitable system that puts tax dollars in the hands of largest and wealthiest growers of commodity crops such corn and rice, while shortchanging healthy food, small farmers and the environment.

Originally published on EWG’s AgMag

Pat Van Valkenburgh is the kind of person that The Bread Project hopes to help. A stay-at-home mom who home-schooled her two children until they attended Berkeley High School, Van Valkenburgh desperately needed a job when her construction worker husband became unemployed. Since she enjoyed cooking, she thought the nonprofit’s nine-week café training program, which focuses on basic kitchen, food service, and barista skills, was a good fit and would help her find a job in the restaurant industry.

Van Valkenburgh didn’t have to look far for work: she was snapped up by the organization to manage the café it runs out of the Berkeley Adult School, where the program for low-income job seekers, started by Susan Phillips and Lucie Buchbinder in 2000, has been housed since 2003.

The part-time gig has made all the difference during tough economic times; Van Valkenburgh’s family has held on to their home and health insurance. (Both her kids, who attended the Academic Choice School at BHS, currently study at local community colleges and intend to transfer to UC.)

The Bread Project Café, where students learn and practice their new culinary skills, is open to the public and frequented by the staff and students at the adult school. It serves baked goods, soups, salads, and sandwiches, along with coffee and tea at prices half those charged in most local cafés.

No matter that the vast multipurpose room that houses the cafe is largely devoid of charm, people come to the café for the food, the friendly service, and to support a worthwhile cause. On the menu yesterday: lemon scones and chocolate croissants, corn chowder with spinach, vegetarian pizza, and corn-crusted tilapia with rice and vegetables. In the late morning a steady stream of people were putting in their lunch order.

The Bread Project also boasts a bakery in Emeryville, opened last year thanks to funding from both Semifreddi’s and Chevron, where it runs a 12-week training program that emphasizes baking, batch cooking, food service and food manufacturing.

The program serves vulnerable populations, including low-income immigrants and single moms, former felons and recovering substance abusers, the once homeless and the formerly employed. Bread Project staff recruit students from quarters few other culinary programs would approach: homeless shelters, halfway houses, addiction recovery programs, jails, and social service agencies.

Potential participants go through a screening interview to assess their strengths—along with their challenges and barriers—to better serve their goal of finding food service employment once they finish their training.

Students earn a certificate of completion if they attend most of the instruction sessions and pass most of the required written and practical tests given during the course.

While there’s a lot of encouragement and support for students, there’s also an expectation that they meet standards of on-the-job food industry—like showing up for work. The program’s main goal: to foster economic self-sufficiency in program participants.

Their results speak for themselves: over the past three years an average of 77 percent of students graduated, 72 percent found jobs in the food field, and 80 percent retained employment. Last fiscal year 126 students completed the program.

Many of those students have never had a job, have been welfare recipients for a long time, have minimal education or workplace history gaps. But as the economy continues to tank, there’s been a significant increase in the number of college graduates in the program’s mix, along with a larger group of recently unemployed and those who need job retraining, said acting executive director John Lee.

Graduates have gone on to work in restaurants like Radius in San Francisco and Lake Chalet and Spice Monkey in Oakland, said Daniel McCarthy, a veteran chef who co-teaches the culinary café program. Others have obtained employment in food industry positions for Jamba Juice, SF Soup Co, Mariposa Bakery, AG Ferrari, Berkeley Bowl West, and Revolution Foods, according to Lee. Some have joined the staff of catering companies or senior centers. In addition, the program, which has a policy of hiring its own graduates, currently has six on staff.

“It is personally rewarding to see the individual successes of our graduates, whether it is an improvement in self-confidence or obtaining their dream job,” said Lee.

The culinary program is free of charge to participants. The organization’s income is split 2 to 1, between donations, grants and other charitable contributions and earned income. The organization’s budget this year is $1,235,039.

The program offers students the opportunity to try their hand at everything from bread baking and cookie and cake making to main meals, side dishes, and other savory fare. Students also learn how to make specialty coffee drinks and work a cash register. The project has a catering arm, wholesale bakery business, and partnerships with farmers’ markets like the one at Rincon Center in San Francisco, and social-service agencies such as Project Open Hand.

“It was an excellent training program,” said Dilsa Lugo, a graduate who runs Los Cilantros Mexican food catering company, in a Berkeleyside story last year. “To this day the staff there have been helpful to me in my business.”

One former student recently opened her own café in Berkeley. Mary Dirks runs the new Hippie Gypsy Cafe on Shattuck Avenue (in the former Village Grounds space). Dirks hired two fellow students from The Bread Project to work with her, Angela Guzman, 25, from Oakland, and Erika Burrios, 19, from Richmond.

She’s not your typical Bread Project success story: Dirks’ parents ran a coffee house-gas station and she had years of food service experience as a Subway manager in Florida, where she lived up until two years ago, when she sold her home and moved with her son to South Berkeley.

The 46-year-old single parent already had a café business plan in the works, but landed in town with few connections on the food industry front. When a flyer for the Berkeley Adult School landed in her mailbox, she realized The Bread Project was just the kind of course she needed to help turn her café idea into reality.

She jokingly described Chef Daniel as the Gordon Ramsey of The Bread Project, because of his high expectations and commitment to restaurant-quality standards. But she also said he’s been an invaluable resource and informal consultant for her own budding business. And his philosophy of passing on your culinary expertise and giving back to the food community resonated with her.

Guzman, a single parent and former nurse’s assistant with no formal culinary training, was an immediate pick for Dirks, because of her common sense, calmness under pressure, and strong work ethic, the café owner said.

Along with food service training, the program helps students with job placement skills such as resumes and cover letters, said Guzman, and encourages students to overcome self-esteem issues (she described herself as quite shy before she did the training) in order to find work.

“I learned knife skills, such as how to julienne vegetables, health and safety rules around the use of cutting boards, and other kitchen skills,” said Guzman. “But there was also room to be creative. We were shown the basic ingredients that go into making scones and were given the opportunity to come up with our own flavors like lemon blueberry or orange chocolate,” she explained.

“It’s really hands-on, which is how I learn best. You’re encouraged to just do it, get messy, and figure it out for yourself—which is great training for a job.”

Photos: courtesy The Bread Project

Originally published by Berkeleyside

While the expression “vote with your fork” has become a slogan for the modern food movement, many advocates struggle with how to move from conscientious consumerism to engaged citizenship. Harnessing the groundswell of public interest in food to create lasting policy change was the subject of a recent San Francisco Kitchen Table Talks, a monthly conversation about food issues.

Richmond District Supervisor Eric Mar, San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance co-coordinator Eli Zigas, organizing expert Stephen Burdo, and 50 local food advocates gathered at 18 Reasons to discuss tactics and tools for activating the good food movement. Surrounded by street artist Zoltron’s images of a conflicted Ronald McDonald, the conversation focused on two successful campaigns that put San Francisco food policy on the national stage.

Supervisor Mar brought his perspective as a legislator and chief sponsor of the Healthy Meal Incentive Ordinance, passed last November. Misleadingly nicknamed the “Happy Meal Ban” by critics, the ordinance holds fast food restaurants accountable by placing limits on calories, sugar, and fat in kids’ meals served with toys.

Facing a fierce opposition from chains like McDonald’s, Mar credits the campaign’s success to uniting diverse community interests under the banner of public health. “Legislation is not the most important thing; it’s the process of empowering or disempowering people,” he said.

The campaign found allies in local community groups with interests in food access and children’s health, including the SEFA Food Guardians in Bayview Hunters Point, the Women’s Collective of La Raza Centro Legal, and Literacy for Environmental Justice. They also partnered with Corporate Accountability International, authors of the Retire Ronald and Value the Meal campaigns.

McDonald’s threw lobbying and advertising money into a strong counter-campaign, claiming that the regulations would hurt small businesses and take away parents’ right to choose. In response, the Healthy Meal campaign framed the issue as a public health concern, rallying pediatricians and parents groups behind the cause.

Eight supervisors’ votes were needed to override Mayor Gavin Newsom’s anticipated veto. The campaign put pressure on Supervisors Sophie Maxwell and Bevan Dufty by mobilizing parents and communities in their districts. The ordinance passed eight to three. By asserting local rights over the interests of multimillion-dollar food corporations, the groundbreaking legislation sent a powerful message. “It’s a small step forward but it’s a proud moment when you force corporations to make some changes,” said Mar. “We have to be revolutionaries in thinking about the food system, not only about what we do as individuals. It has to challenge the corporations that rip off and oppress our communities.”

From the Grassroots Up

From the citizen frontlines, Eli Zigas discussed how the San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance (SFUAA) went about changing outdated zoning code, thereby empowering urban farmers to cultivate and sell their produce in the city. The initiative originated with two young urban farmers, Brooke Budner and Caitlyn Galloway of Little City Gardens, a 3/4-acre farm in a residential neighborhood in the outer Mission district. When they decided they wanted to set up a farmstand and start marketing to restaurants, they ran up against city rules requiring an expensive conditional-use permit and a hearing before the S.F. Planning Commission.

They launched a campaign to revise the old law, backed by the newly formed SFUAA, who began sending letters to the mayor’s office. After an influential sympathizer wrote a letter of support, the mayor began to take notice.  Motivating many individual citizens to take action (grassroots), while simultaneously forming alliances with well-connected or well-respected champions (“grasstops”), were key ingredients in the campaign’s success. “Much of what we did was not about electronic activism,” said Zigas. “It was about old-school activism that used electronic tools in turning out people and sending in letters and making phone calls and turning out people again.”

After nearly seven months of meetings with city departments and supervisors, Supervisor David Chiu and Mayor Newsom introduced the new legislation, kicking off a larger public debate. As a volunteer-run effort, numbers were important, with some individuals being more or less involved. Participants showed up at hearings, circulated petitions, solicited businesses for support, got other groups to sign on, wrote letters, built a Web site, and presented to classes.

Timing and luck also played their part. Urban ag was experiencing a renaissance and public support was flourishing. In 2009, Mayor Newsom passed the Executive Directive for Healthy and Sustainable Food, which called for an increase in urban food production through an audit of unused public land, support from Rec & Park, and new marketing opportunities for local farmers. The SFUAA’s proposal was right in San Francisco’s sweet spot.

On April 12, 2010, the bill passed unanimously, raising the level of power and influence of farmers and gardeners in the city. “When it came down to it, the most important thing was packing 70 people into a City Hall hearing room, so much so that the police had to keep people out,” said Zigas. “That had an impact on everyone who saw that hearing.”

Tools of the Trade

Stephen Burdo, Political Director for Kathleen Russell Consulting, a strategic communications firm specializing in nonprofit and political campaigns, described the importance of blending tried-and-true traditional organizing methods with modern tools.

Prior to social media, some of history’s most successful movements, such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott, organized through word of mouth: church meetings, phone calls, knocking on doors. From the food movement playbook, federal food labeling requirements started with a group of California mothers who organized through PTA meetings, leading to the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990.

With the advent of social media tools, the rules for engagement have changed, but they haven’t replaced direct action; they’ve just maximized it. “Social media increases your ability to organize by 100 times,” Burdo says. An early example of social media organizing, Kitchen Gardeners International’s 2008 Eat the View campaign gathered 110,000 signatures through online channels, successfully urging the White House to plant a garden. The project reached a critical mass after months of campaigning when their petition jumped from 10,000 signatures to 20,000 in six days after it posted clever videos that went viral.

How can food activists successfully blend old-school tactics with modern technology to create real and lasting change?

Tell a story. The SFUAA’s campaign gained attention by presenting a simple, easily relatable story about two young gardeners who just wanted to sell their veggies. Create strong, clear messaging, and use voices, photos, and videos to bring your issue to life.

Get the word out. Know where your message is going. According to Burdo, 71 percent of Americans are on Facebook, making it the place to go to build and converse with supporters. Only 5 percent of the general public, but 90 percent of media professionals, use Twitter, making it less useful for grassroots organizing and more useful for framing the debate for reporters.

Seek grassroots and grasstops allies. Form coalitions to build numbers. Partner with community groups and organizations that share interests in public health, local development, and the environment. Don’t underestimate the power of sympathizers in high places, who can push your cause behind closed doors.

Use social media, but don’t overuse it. Clogging feeds and inboxes with e-blasts is no way to keep supporters. Be strategic in your communications. “Post no more than three to four times a week on Facebook,” said Burdo. “Organizing is about building a list and turning that list out.”

Keep momentum going. In drawn-out political campaigns—and most of them are—the worst thing you can do is let momentum fade, according to Burdo. To keep supporters engaged, provide concrete actions to participate in, such as meetings or rallies. Zigas agrees: “When you ask people to do something make it meaningful (don’t waste volunteers’ time), make it fun, and win.” Celebrate victories of all sizes, even if it’s just scoring a hearing date.

Make it personal. What about those chain-letter petitions that glut our inboxes? The panelists agreed that a personalized paper letter goes much further in getting a legislator’s attention than a boilerplate e-mail. Put time into your communications to elected officials, write from the heart, and create a meaningful connection.For the SFUAA, having online petitions, a Facebook page, and a MailChimp list helped keep their supporters informed, but they were just tools of the trade, not ends in themselves. “It’s not how many tweets you have, but how well your tweets and phone calls get people out to do tangible things,” said Zigas.

Further Reading

• Michael Pollan discusses how the good food movement is winning the culture war but making little progress with the political one. Read his article in The Nation.
• Online campaign strategist Michael Silberman summarizes the best articles about online organizing. Read his work at the Huffington Post.
• Frances Fox Piven describes the process of change through grassroots efforts in Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America.
• For an instructive take on the late 19th Century farmers’ insurgency, read Lawrence Goodwyn’s The Populist Movement.
• Mark Bittman relates Occupy Wall Street to the modern food movement, calling for a systemic approach to change. Read his column at the New York Times.
• Want to get involved now? There are many opportunities to engage around the 2012 Farm Bill. Visit Food and Water Watch.

The Alameda Point Collaborative Urban Farm is a one-acre farm growing a variety of fruits, vegetables, herbs, eggs, honey, and–with the introduction of new aquaculture ponds–will soon offer fish as well. Neat rows of plants are surrounded by olive and stone fruit orchards, but beyond this farm, towering cranes are positioned on the horizon. This farm is in a unique location.

The Naval Air Station at Alameda was founded in 1927 when wetlands were filled on the tip of this island in the San Francisco Bay to build runways for military planes. As a naval port, the base was most active during World War II and later during the Cold War. In 1997 the station was closed, as part of the fourth round of closures under the Base Realignment and Closure Act. But the closing of a military installation is often seen as a development opportunity in urban areas, as it opens up land for growth and expansion within city limits.

In the case of the Alameda Station, 1,734 acres became available for other uses. At least three other former military lands are slated for redevelopment in the San Francisco Bay Area, including Mare Island, the Presidio, and Treasure Island–most in some form of combined mixed-use, housing, and open space plans. Typically, some portion of the land is also set aside for use by government agencies and non-profits as a “public benefit conveyance.” One such public benefit, a portion of the former Alameda base is used by the Alameda Point Collaborative (APC), a “supportive housing community” that provides homes, job training, and other services to formerly homeless families.

The APC Farm grew out of a food community assessment that found widespread difficulty in obtaining nutritious and fresh food due to availability and cost. The community was stranded in a food desert. In 2008, following these findings, the farm was created to provide produce for the residents and to educate youth and community members on the benefits of healthy eating. The APC Farm now offers a CSA-style weekly produce delivery service and sells at a farm stand and to local restaurants, and produce from the farm also serves the community kitchen. The farm’s focus on education was nationally recognized in late August, as members of the Growing Youth program traveled to Philadelphia to help draft the Youth Food Bill of Rights at the Rooted in Community Conference.

The APC Farm is an example of the public benefit communities can reap from former military lands, one that addresses multiple levels of the urban food system, including food security and food deserts. In urban areas, lack of available land restricts potential for growing food. But base closings free up large swaths of land which can be used for farming. In fact, the very scale of lands available in these former bases indicate the possibility for much larger, more ambitious farming projects.

Areas around a former base are often economically depressed, having weathered a sudden loss of population and jobs. They are also poorly served by grocery stores and public transportation. By bringing productive landscapes to the base (and setting up market stands and CSAs, too), the neighborhood is served with a fresh, nutritious food source.

So why don’t we see more proposals for farms on former bases? One major constraint is contamination issues: Military bases are often highly polluted from former operations at the base, and many are Superfund sites.

In the case of the APC Farm, the farm is located on a former playground, which means the risks of contamination are low (soil was tested to confirm lack of contamination before the farm was cultivated). Depending on the past uses of a base, there can be many low-risk areas suitable for agricultural uses, including buffer areas at the base edges, former housing and administration areas, or undeveloped areas. In most cases, soil health has to be rebuilt and soil testing must be performed.

Communities will emerge around land that can support a population. If we consider the option of repurposing natural landscapes, integrating agriculture as a core element, then we can grow new types of neighborhoods and marketplaces which are strong enough to provide for local populations and the city beyond their borders.

Farm programs on abandoned military land are opportunities to strengthen food deserts. We shouldn’t ignore their potential.