At a compost bin that doubles as a podium, urban farming hero Will Allen faced the inaugural class of 50 FoodCorps service members—sitting together in Milwaukee but about to spin out to ten states around the country–giving them advice for the year of service they have ahead of them.

“There’s a lot of skill and knowledge existing in the communities you’re going into. You’ll bring stuff, and you’ll learn stuff. It’s a two-way street,” he said. “That’s how real sustainability works.”

After three days of training, workshops, presentations and open space discussions, these young men and women spent day four touring Growing Power, studying their systems of composting, year-round growing, aquaponics…and on and on. Learning stuff.

More advice from Allen on how to make the most of the tour of the Growing Power operation: “Don’t look at the plants (they’re green), look at the infrastructure. See how it works. How we use space.” Notebooks out, eyes open, they followed his instructions. They also pet goats (I did, too).

Their work this year will be focused on three pillars: knowledge, engagement and access. That is: delivering hands-on nutrition education, building and tending school gardens, and bringing high-quality local food into public school cafeterias. And while they bring skills—like farming experience and nutrition degrees—this work will largely be brand new for them, and they will be learning as they go.

So what did they learn this week?

Graham Downey will be serving in Mississippi. He told me how he’s learned about the importance of pairing realism with positivity.  That this work—giving youth an enduring relationship with healthy food—is challenging, but that it’s still important, and possible, to be excited about it.

Norris Guscott, who will be working in Massachusetts, has learned about the importance of getting the students’ parents involved in this work.

Jackie Billhymer, headed to Arkansas, is beginning this work understanding the need to engage the larger community and to harness the power of networking.

So, Civil Eaters, help us out here: what do they still need to know? What does it take to do this work effectively?

It’s an unlikely story: A vegan chef and his vegetarian wife open a butcher shop that becomes a commercial hit and an industry game-changer. It all started thanks to that omnivore gateway meat, bacon, which for years was Jessica Applestone’s one vegetarian exception. When she started craving more meat she searched for meat that aligned with her ethics: Something raised with respect for the animal and for the environment. But she found meat labels confusing.

She concluded her best option was to buy a whole steer from a farmer, but how to deal with a whole animal when she was the only meat-eater in the family? Jessica’s dilemma revealed a gap in the market: Butcher shops that break down whole, well-raised animals for the average home cook. Her husband Joshua saw an opportunity and the couple began the painstaking training and groundwork that eventually became Fleisher’s Grass-fed and Organic Meats in Kingston, New York.

The couple have chronicled their meat odyssey in the book, The Butcher’s Guide to Well-Raised Meat, co-authored by Alexandra Zissu. Told through the voice of Joshua Applestone, the book gives a succinct history of industrial meat to contrast with the Fleisher’s approach followed by an insider’s guide to butchery including the equipment.

Then there is an animal-by-animal manual on butchering and cooking meat, including diagrams of primals and recipes, with a final chapter on sourcing “well-raised” meat. But more than a guide to butchery, the book is an empowerment tool for ethical meat eaters. By getting to know your meat, inside and out, the book posits, we can change our relationship with food and ultimately transform the meat industry for the better.

The Applestone’s are clear about what they consider “well-raised” meat. Their standards for meat sold at Fleisher’s demand that animals come from a farm within 150-mile radius. The animals cannot be administered hormones or antibiotics, ever (they accept meat from farms that treat ill animals with antibiotics but will not buy those treated animals).

The four-legged animals must be fully pastured, meaning they are on pasture 100 percent of the time, though they can be fed grain grown by the same or a local farm. Their chickens are organic but (with occasional exceptions) not pastured, again a reflection of customers’ preferences. All animals must be processed (slaughtered) within a couple hours’ drive as travel is stressful for animals.

Living up to these standards can be a tightrope act. Applestone is honest about the difficulties of their approach. Timing the slaughter for pastured animals is dicey since animals don’t always gain exactly at the rate you them to in order to fit into a small-scale abattoir’s tight schedule. Due to processing regulations you can’t get everything you want, like organic sausage casings or beef cheeks from pastured cattle (though Fleisher’s and other butchers do sell pork cheeks). Fleisher’s supports farms that are small (60-200 steers) by industry standards but their supplying farms still need to be large enough to provide a steady volume. They currently go through about 300 steers a year.

Trials and tribulations aside, this book is mostly a lot of fun. Inquisitive home cooks will love the copious diagrams and charts that dissect all aspects of meat animals and meat cooking. The Applestones make a point of encouraging whole-animal cooking, which means they explain how to cook every cut, especially the lesser-known cuts that require slow, low heat methods.

Readers will learn not only how to cut up and cook meat, but also how to store it. The Applestones probably provide more insider knowledge about butchering than the average consumer will ever actually put into practice. But obtaining that more complete story provides readers with a thrilling sense of authority. I’m not talking about that annoying know-it-all-ship of foodie connoisseurs, though that is also a potential outcome of reading the book. The more you know about animals and meat the better use you can make of it and the more you can demand of your suppliers and the meat industry as a whole.

This knowledge also makes cooking with well-raised meat more affordable. Is an artisan-cut prime rib expensive? You bet. But it’s not your only option if you know how to cook the cheaper cuts. It’s not even necessarily the most delicious option. (Is it meat blasphemy to suggest this? How many of you love braised short ribs as much as I do?) Jessica Applestone can provide you with a shopping list that supplies 10 meals and adds up $50. You’ll be cooking ground beef, bacon, sausage, chicken, eggs, even bones, and many of those meals will feature meat as a garnish rather than a main course. The Applestone’s aren’t afraid to tell customers to eat less meat in order to eat better meat.

Joshua is clear about placing his shop within a political context. Former Fleisher’s apprentice and food writer Julie Powell described it in her memoir Cleaving, “It might be a neighborhood butcher shop, or it might be a political movement masquerading as a neighborhood butcher shop.”

“It’s both,” Joshua says. “We write in the manual we give new employees that the act of eating is inherently a political one. Though we didn’t come up with that idea, we realize that every bite of food we consume affects the animal from which it came, the farmer who raised that animal, the environment, and our health… we never forget that animals die for our business and your dinner.”

The book concludes with a guide for buying meat and questions you should ask and what to look for whether you’re buying at the farmer’s market, through a CSA or whole-animal share, or even at the supermarket. If your only option is a supermarket Joshua encourages you to ask the manager for pastured meat and to get friends and family to ask for it as well to incentivize supermarket owners. Finally, in answer to Jessica’s initial label disorientation, the book concludes with a guide to deciphering labels with the warning that label meanings can change and your best bet is to know the farmer/butcher.

Meanwhile, the ethical/artisan butcher movement is growing. Fleisher’s is expanding their business and opening a new shop in Brooklyn (a five-minute walk from my apartment, in fact). Fleisher’s is not the first sustainably-sourced butcher in New York City, though they are a welcome addition to the club.

We have enjoyed the services of Dickson’s Farmstand Meats, The Meat Hook (owned by Fleisher’s-trained Tom Mylan), and Marlow and Daughters (opened by Mylan) for a few years. But Fleischers is helping to seed the movement by training apprentices, some of whom are opening their own shops. Fleischer’s alum Tim Forrester is expected to open his butcher shop Harlem Shambles later in the month. And in Los Angeles there is Lindy & Grundy, owned by Fleisher’s trainees Amelia Posada and Erika Nakamura. And so, little by delectable little, consumers, restaurants, farmers, and processors are carving out growing niches in the world of meat.

When Nona Lim and Jennifer Tuck of Cook! San Francisco set out to plan, gather, and prepare the food for the Plastiki expedition, they had no small task ahead of them. In fact, planning and sourcing meals for six people at $15 a day for an 11,000-mile trip from San Francisco to Sydney was a voyage in and of itself.

Near the end of last year, Lim and Tuck responded to a call from Jo Royle, the skipper on the Plastiki, Adventure Ecology’s catamaran made from 12,000 post-consumer plastic bottles made in part to document the Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch. Royle wanted an alternative to the pre-packed meals that sailors often take on such trips. “She described long journeys where she’d live for months on freeze-dried food and the ill consequence that has on the body,” recalls Tuck.

The pair — and the crew of chefs that Nona employs to prepare the ready-made meals she sells through Cook! San Francisco — were up for the challenge. “We wanted to provide something healthy and flavorful over a three–month period, which is pretty tough,” says Lim. And, seeing as how the Plastiki expedition is focused on sustainability, Lim and Tuck decided it would be a great opportunity to incorporate as much local, Bay Area-produced food as possible. The answer, they soon realized, would be to prepare meals based largely on home-canned stewed meat and dehydrated vegetables. They added a pressure cooker to the equation, collected and developed recipes (including quite a few by pressure cooker expert Lorna Sass), and set about making it happen.

That’s where Everything Under the Sun’s Bill Crepps, a farmer known for his wide range of dehydrated products, entered the picture. When Tuck approached him with a list of ideas, Bill saw it as an opportunity to try out some new things. “Finding Bill was a dream come true,” she says. “He was willing to dehydrate any and all veggies he could get his hands on – and the experimentation began!”

“She would tell me what she needed; if I had it I’d dry it for her,” recalls Bill. “If I didn’t, I’d find someone who did. That’s how Dirty Girl Produce got involved—with carrots and beets—and Eatwell Farm with leeks.” Once dehydrated, most of the produce weighed around one tenth of what it had fresh; for instance, 20 pounds of fresh carrots became a mere two boat-friendly pounds of dried carrots. Crepps also experimented with olive oil and salt to create chips with vegetables like kale, eggplant, and cilantro (his personal favorite). And with the help of some regular customers, put together a Plastiki-inspired soup mix that combines his kale, onions, garlic, and peppers for his every-day shoppers who want an easy way to flavor beans or broth-based soups.

“The crew were the guinea pigs for a lot of stuff I hadn’t dried before,” says Bill, who tends to dehydrate things like apricots, mandarins, and tomatoes. He ended up donating a portion of the food (such as a big batch of summer squash he’d dried last summer) and selling a great deal of it at cost. In return, he says the effort reinforced the fact that he could dehydrate fresh produce that doesn’t sell year-round, and market it to backpackers and others who need a nutritious alternative to the pre-packed meals sold in stores like REI.

As for meat, Tuck and Lim ordered more than a hundred pounds of organic grass-fed lamb and beef from Marin Sun Farms (with the goal of providing seven to eight ounces of meat per person, per day). In the Cook! SF kitchen, they canned 110 quart-sized mason jars full of beef bourguignon, lamb ragout, Thai chicken curry, lamb tagine, and some additional meat in stock for the crew to use in their own recipes. “We had four pressure cookers that each fit four mason jars that had to cook an hour and a half in order to properly preserve the meats. If you do the math, we were in the kitchen many, many hours.” The crew was also given back-up jerky and other forms of preserved meat from sources like Fatted Calf, in case the canned meat doesn’t hold up in tropical temperatures. (See a video of Jo Royle preparing Beef Bourguignon on the boat.)

The Plastiki left Sausalito on March 2, with an initial supply of fresh fruits and vegetables (see their kitchen at right), but have been transitioning to the preserved food over the last week. There is also a small hydroponic garden on board the ship, which will provide occasional fresh greens for the six crew members. And. of course, they enjoy occasional fish when they can catch them. (To date they have only caught one tuna and hope to call attention to diminished fish populations while on their journey.)

In a recent email from onboard the ship, where the crew regularly blogs and shoots footage for a film about the voyage, Royle discussed her efforts in the boat’s kitchen. “I am trying to move the guys away from simply opening the yummy Cook! SF canned food to experimenting with the dried. I made Lorna [Sass]’s veggie bean chili — and adapted it a little to include lots of Bill’s vegetables. It was sooo good.”

Before the boat launched, David de Rothschild, the founder of Adventure Ecology and the Plastiki expedition leader, also commented on the community-wide effort to stock the vessel with local food. He wrote: “The Plastiki has [been] exposed to many diverse, curious, passionate and incredibly generous individuals and none more so than the committed and diverse group of organic farmers and local suppliers who have not only overwhelmed the team and myself with their carefully crafted meals, snacks ands treats but they have also deeply inspired me with their unrivalled commitment to authenticity, quality and community spirit.”

Originally published by CUESA

Causing no end of difficulties in our national discourse is the steadfast belief held by both the right and the left that everything is either right or left: bad or good, strong or weak, despotic or patriotic.  You’re either with us or you’re against us.  President Obama addressed this very effectively before both House Republicans and Senate Democrats in recent days.  It is media driven to a large extent because the media need controversy to sell papers, or bytes or views or whatever it is they’re selling these days.

The most common form this takes is the old build’em-up-then-tear’em-down routine.  Perhaps the only thing many Americans enjoy more than the uplifting emotion of a success story is the schadenfreude of watching that success come tumbling down.  So when an idea comes to the fore, the critics ooze from the woodwork and their primary tactic is divide and conquer.  Label it, frame the debate, and the fight is won or lost before the story is even told.

For a long time in the circles I travel in this was not a problem because the ideas embodied in what some have come to call SOLE food (Sustainable, Organic, Local, & Ethical) were not perceived as a threat to the established paradigm.  Recent successes such as Michael Pollan’s work have, however, shined a very bright spotlight on advocates of real food.  As a result, people who have been toiling at these ideas for decades are becoming targets of powerful interests in the Big Food lobby.  Such is the case this week at WeeklyStandard.com, where Missouri Farm Bureau vice president Blake Hurst has found his most recent audience.

Mr. Hurst was among the earliest vocal detractors of Mr. Pollan’s work, as well as that of anyone who might find flaw in agroindustrial model.  His essay last summer, titled The Omnivore’s Delusion, did an excellent job of exploiting Pollan’s success to rally the big corporate agriculture interests against the perceived threat of critics both in the media and in the field.  It’s natural: he felt attacked and he responded, and has now done so again.  Unfortunately Mr. Hurst’s vitriol, then as now, only serves to fan the flames of a fire that needn’t be burning.  Individuals on neither side of the debate are inherently evil, in fact both want the same thing: healthy food for all.  Since our ideas for how to accomplish this differ, we are immediately cast into the right and left corners and told to come out fighting when the bell rings.

Of course this is not a new phenomenon.  City and country folk have mistrusted each other since the beginnings of civilization (which, it bears pointing out, came into being because of agriculture).  Nonetheless our society has changed enormously in the last 100 years.  Where once nearly everyone lived on a farm or had an immediate relative who did, today only 2% of the population lives in rural America.  It’s not a surprise that when the 2% senses criticism emanating from within the other 98% they’re going to feel a bit nervous.  Some of the critiques in fact even come from within the 2% (witness cattleman Will Harris in Georgia).  In his most recent essay though Mr. Hurst’s fears are misplaced, and he remains little more than a tool for moneyed interests.

The essay suffers from many errors of presumption as well as fact.  He contends that Kathleen Merrigan’s Know your Farmer initiative results from the idea that “America, it seems, has been operating at a knowledge deficit when it comes to farmers, and farmers lack the social skills to close the gap between eaters and producers of food.”  He is partially correct in that people in this country and throughout the Western world have become increasingly distanced from their sources of food, and we have become so to our detriment.  The second part of his statement though, a backhanded swipe at critics of industrial agriculture disguised as self-deprecation and designed to raise the ire of his fellow Farm Bureau members, is uninformed to say the least.  Not only are the farmers I know perfectly capable in the “social skills” department, both they and the rest of my friends in the movement to improve our food are working hard to close that gap.  Ms. Merrigan’s program is one of many tools.

While he correctly points out that the average age of farmers in America is 58, he misses the point that this means we are running out of farmers.  We actually now have more prisoners in America than farmers.  He goes on to put words in foodies’ mouths by claiming that we seem to think farmers are not sustainable.  Quite far from it, but many of the inputs many farmers use are not. These include the GMOs and chemical fertilizers that Farm Bureau and the Property and Environment Research Center he cites both adamantly advocate.  It’s not the farmers or even the farms that are unsustainable; it is the methods they have been railroaded into using by large corporate interests seeking markets for their chemicals since even before the early 70’s when Earl Butz and his “Get Big or Get Out” mantra took hold of American food.

The point is missed yet again when Mr. Hurst says:

In December, strawberries from California can be shipped to market in Canada with less total energy use than the locally grown crop. The food miles are greater, but the carbon footprint is smaller. True believers in the local food movement, of course, simply stop eating strawberries in winter. Their devotion is admirable, but a winter diet of freshly dug turnips and stored potatoes is hardly interesting.

I choose not to eat strawberries in the winter not because they come from far away but because they taste awful.  In my own restaurant, we stock everything feasible from local sources.  This does not mean, as Mr. Hurst would have it, that we have nothing but turnips and potatoes in winter, nor does it mean we forego oranges or olives because they don’t grow in Iowa.  Despite what he and his corporate-activist-supported friends at PERC might have you believe, the “SOLE” food movement is not a bunch of lefty Luddites, and that’s my main point (besides that I like turnips).  Not only does food I trust from people I know taste better for those reasons, it also keeps my dollars in my community.

Consider this: there are about 50,000 households in Johnson County Iowa, where I live.  If each of those households redirected just $10 of their existing weekly food budget toward buying something local, whether from the farmers market or a CSA or eggs from the farmer down the road, it would keep $26M in the local economy rather than it being siphoned off to China via Bentonville.  Now imagine the same thing in larger communities.  That’s not a left or right issue, that’s a hometown issue.

I must also point out Mr. Hurst’s use of the phrase “alleged global warming.”  It carries with it all the intellectual honesty of “alleged cancer from smoking.”

Agendas like those of Mr. Hurst, the Farm Bureau and PERC serve only the interests of the large corporations that fund them, not of the farmers whose toil fills their coffers.  Better to look to the like of the Practical Farmers of Iowa, who are truly concerned with the well-being of the food, the farms and the people on them.

This is not about rich v. poor, city v. country or smart v. dumb.  It’s not even I’m right and he’s wrong nor the reverse.  It’s that these issues are only important to those of us who eat, live and breathe on this planet.  It matters to those of us who have to pay for health care, and raise our children, and get and keep a job.  And the positions that the organization I work for, and many others take are not ones designed to attack farmers but rather to support them and all the people who are making food where it should be made: on farms and dairies, in breweries and wineries and vineyards and not in factories.

Last Sunday, I had the pleasure of lending a hand as a volunteer at Rooftop Farms in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The name says it all: it is a 6000 square foot urban vegetable farm on the roof of an industrial building, growing rows inter-cropped with lettuces, tomatoes, eggplants, cucumbers, kale and much more, which they sell directly to restaurants and at a farm stand inside the building every Sunday from 9am – 4pm.

Annie Novak and Ben Flanner are the farming minds behind the project. Both are passionate about how food gets to our table (Novak works with farmer with Kira Kenney of Evolutionary Organics at the Greenmarket, and works as the Children’s Gardening Program Coordinator at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx. Flanner is new to farming but seems to get a kick out of hawking produce). Chris and Lisa Goode of Goode Green, a green roofing company, found the roof and funded Rooftop Farms as a test. With this project, the team hopes to determine what is possible in terms of scale for growing on rooftops in the city.

Flanner was managing the farm stand while I was there, encouraging everyone to try a tomato, or a leaf of the alternative sweetener stevia. Most of the people who came by were neighbors. The stand quickly sold out of red and green kale, and I joined Flanner in the field selecting the largest leaves for new bunches.

Novak, meanwhile, handled coordinating the fifteen or so volunteers. On Sunday we removed sweet peas plants (the season had ended), harvesting the beans and breaking down the rest into compost. We also harvested lettuces growing in between the tomato plants, planted radish seeds (the Rooftop Farms radishes have been quite a hit with local restaurants like Marlow and Sons and Anella, and they get quickly bought out by the neighbors at the farm stand, too), applied fertilizing compost tea and did pest management, among other tasks. As a new grower myself, I found it all to be quite educational; Annie showed me some pests to look out for in my own garden, and she gave me some information on how organically minded growers are dealing with the tomato blight. (Luckily Rooftop Farms grew almost everything from seed, and are not as worried as they would be with transplants, but she is still taking precautions like spraying copper in some areas.)

This is part of the point for her: She wants others to jump in and learn and hopefully create their own version of what Rooftop Farms is doing in other parts of the city. One rooftop is enough for Novak for the time being, as what needs to be done there is at times keeping her up at night. But what they are doing is replicable, and she is willing to teach all who come to help out about her methods.

One of the first questions she often gets asked is about the soil: they had to lift all 200,000 lbs to the roof with a crane. And yes, an engineer was brought in to get clearance on the weight. The soil is a mix containing shale, a light material made specifically for rooftop applications. But as Novak tells it, they are experimenting with growing vegetables instead of sedum, the succulents considered the standard green roof plant species. The experiment seems to be working, as they’ve harvested 600 pounds of produce since early June, and the tomatoes and cucumbers are just getting started.

Novak wants even beginners, or New Yorkers without much growing room to get in on the act. One row on her farm even showcases what can be done in a small plot. “The square foot bed is an example of the amount of space a renter might have,” she said. “We’re using that space to show that you don’t have to be confined to one tomato plant.” (In photo, vegetables growing together include swiss chard, cabbage, tomatoes, lettuces, peppers, beans, onions and more)

The roof is exposed from all directions, overlooking the East River and a glorius view of the city. Novak said that it can get windy, but that the plants compensate when grown from seed by growing denser, deeper root systems and heartier stems. Standing on the rooftop soaking in the lush rows and the abundance of food growing there (not to mention the view) was enough to make an urban farmer out of almost anyone.

My obscure Community Studies undergraduate degree provided a multitude of lessons, but the main things I gained were these two ideas: 1. The personal is political. 2. To affect change you must begin right where you are. With these dictums in mind, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about communities that are coming together to become self-sustaining. With food safety threats, economic destruction, globalization, outsourcing of jobs, and the homogenization of our food sources, it is no wonder that people are starting to get more and more organized. It seems like just this week, I have heard about a variety of examples, not just nationally but really close to home here in my small-ish town of Santa Cruz.

My boyfriend and I already try to support our local economy as much as possible and grow our own food. We have our own source of water and know that if the time came, our little mountain road would come together and help each other out. Once we get chickens, pigs, a couple of goats and a grape vine or two, we’ll be even more set. Actually, we’ll never want to go into town even in the most peaceful and harmonious of global climates. We are lucky to have the resources to keep ourselves and our neighbors okay if the shit went down, at least for a longer period of time than most urban and sprawling suburban communities.

But then I hear about Jerry Belanger of Detroit who has created a regional currency called “Cheers” to stimulate inter-city spending and Lyle Estill in North Carolina who is doing the same thing with the Pittsboro Plenty. That town is moving closer and closer to becoming totally self sufficient through their own food and biodeisel co-ops and now, separate money system.

Closer to home, I see so many people on the forefront of creating this momentum, businesses that are sharing a vision through collaboration and supporting each other to promote the importance of keeping the focus on locality. The popularity of CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) programs are a prime example of this concept, where people contribute to their food sources up front in exchange for consistent fresh produce and the knowledge that their dollars go towards supporting a sustainable system. In Santa Cruz County, where organic farms are a dime a dozen and CSA’s have novel length wait-lists, I’m seeing several local farms offer an ever-increasing diversity to their CSA clients. The rise in collaboration between producers is creating an exciting new approach.

Blue Moon Organics in Aptos is a special 40-acre farm tucked away in a unique microclimate where at times, “all four seasons are experienced in one day,” says owner Greg Rawlings. For this reason, their crops feature intense flavor and they are able to grow an incredibly diverse selection of atypical varieties. Greg’s disgust with the polluted disconnect of watching his fellow chemists pour harsh materials down the drain while researching cancer fighting formulas guided him towards his current career, creating healthy food for people and the planet. Co-owner Patrick Deyoung left a lucrative career in finance to get his hands dirty in the farming business for the very same reason. This spring marks Blue Moon’s first CSA schedule, as well as a unique partnership with Verve Coffee Roasters in Santa Cruz. Now, the weekly CSA boxes will contain a bag of freshly roasted artisan coffee from farm-direct beans, to the clients who sign up for it. Not only is this a delicious and convenient ideology, it also helps both businesses in that they share marketing efforts, promote each other’s brands, and widen the scope of who becomes involved in this positive food movement.

Another example here is Freewheelin Farm, located on the Santa Cruz Northern coast, who presents a very low impact philosophy to farm delivery. They use bicycles for all distribution, and are now teaming up with another business to increase the variety in their CSA’s. Yellow Wall Farm, located in a sunny pocket near downtown, has the climatic advantage of growing hot summer produce successfully. Because Freewheelin can offer coastal crops like greens, broccoli, herbs and strawberries, the collaboration with Yellow Wall will round out the offerings with tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, melons and orchard fruit while further enhancing a local network and utilizing the benefits of two diverse landscapes.

A purely simple, old-fashioned idea in a modern time comes in the form of I-Rise Bakery. Fortunately for my mountain community, we can have weekly deliveries, straight to our door, of organic sourdough breads, cookies, granola, and scones at amazingly affordable prices. We can pay monthly or upon delivery, and have the pleasure of conversing with the baker each time on our front stoop. It is as basic as the milk bottle service of yore, and so rewarding to support. “By making a conscious choice to know where your food comes from and keeping it local, you strengthen our community,” aptly written on the latest monthly specials list. I-Rise also collaborates with local chicken expert Brandon Faria of Faria Farms. All of the baked products use his eggs, and there is an egg delivery option by the dozen as well.

The ultimate self-sustaining tactic is to grow your own food supply. For those who don’t necessarily have the time, energy, or confidence to utilize their space for edible means, there are now a number of landscapers turned food activists who are doing the work for them. Custom garden consultation, installation, and harvesting is an important service leading the way towards re-thinking our outdoor spaces, especially in urban locales. One such company, GROW, is taking the idea a step further by implementing neighborhood food sharing. Owner David Stimpson envisions a network of yard spaces, each producing crops suited for their particular climate, then harvested, combined, and distributed among the inhabitants. It is essentially a community owned, community created, community grown CSA.

Just inside New York City limits, there is a historic 47-acre farm dating back to 1697. Once owned by Dutch settlers, the Queens County Farm Museum was taken over by the NYC Department of Parks and saved from further development in the mid 1970’s. For 33 years, it has provided much-needed open space and has served as a community center, with visitors and schoolchildren of every age and from every borough in attendance.

As is what sometimes happens with historic preservation, often with the best of intentions, the original purpose of a building or its land fades over time when the role it once served is deemed irrelevant (see Wendell Berry’s essay, The Purpose of a Coherent Community, in his book, “The Way of Ignorance”). Through the years, QCFM has always had a strong educational component, but it downsized their agricultural production from what was once a working farm to an annual 3-acre corn maze for their autumn harvest festival, a pumpkin patch, and a livestock area (for petting, not for meat consumption). They also recently started growing wine grapes on 2 acres.

What happens on far fewer an occasion is a historical preservation effort is given the opportunity to re-envision its mission as something similar to the original purpose 300 years prior—a working farm that serves the community-at-large—in order to meet the needs of New Yorkers today.

As consumers of all stripes come to understand the complexities of our food system and the importance of supporting local growers, Queens County Farm Museum has experienced a surge in the level of interest in what they have to offer. Attendance at the farm in 2008 has seen record numbers, and they are now strategizing how best to meet this growing demand. As a start, this year they hired their first farmer in decades.

On one of the first blustery December days, QCFM held its annual meeting, which was open to the public. It began with the usual reading of the minutes, like every meeting held there over the past thirty years. On this occasion, however, there was something new to report. Nearly two years ago, Queens County Farm Museum teamed up with the NYC landscape architecture firm Quennell, Rothschild and Partners, LLP to re-imagine the farm as a working agricultural center that would teach and practice sustainable farming methods.

Over the course of those two years, countless meetings were held with local Community Board 13, sustainable agriculture organizations such as the Glynwood Center, and many other constituents in order to create the most comprehensive assessment. Beth Franz, a representative from Quennell, was finally able to unveil their vision to the public—which included both the short and long-term goals for the farm. They also outlined the potential stages of installation, given the large capital investment it would require.

While plans are still awaiting final approval from the Parks Department, the community members present seemed very pleased with the new potential ventures to the museum, which include:

• An increase of acreage for farmland and vineyard;
• An increase in acreage in pasture for farm animals;
• A new Green Visitor’s center;
• An education hut and path to woodlands;
• The installation of a pond;
• Possibly a cheesemaking facility.

Meanwhile, QCFM farmer Michael Grady Robertson has already begun turning around their production during his short tenure there. Just a few weeks ago he began selling winter vegetables at the Union Square Greenmarket once a week, and has been selling to restaurants throughout the city. QCFM Executive Director Amy Fischetti recently attended the market with Michael and was delighted to see entirely new avenues for growth. “I can see that there are now more selling and outreach opportunities off the farm than there are on the farm. There is a lot of potential, and a lot of demand.”

And with that, a very promising beginning.

Photo: Queens County Farm Museum

For every sack of apples wearing its “I’m local” label proudly, there is a cup of coffee that will never be able to proclaim such a thing. Between all of those trips to the farmer’s market to shake hands with the farmer growing your dinner, and short of traveling to the coffee farm yourself, what is the devoted locavore who wants their morning brew to do?

Stumptown Coffee Roasters has come up with one solution: they bring the coffee farmer to you.

Last week Stumptown, which has roasteries and shops in Seattle, Portland, and soon, New York City, held the fourth in its series of “Meet the Producers” events in Portland and Seattle, pouring cups of El Salvadorian Finca Kilimanjaro coffee for all of those who turned up to hear the grower of that coffee speak. Aida Batlle, a fifth generation coffee producer whose family left El Salvador amid a burgeoning civil war when she was seven, returned in 2002 to the land that her family has owned for decades after years of living in Nashville and Miami. She knew little about growing coffee when she returned to El Salvador, and when her Finca (farm, in Spanish) Kilimanjaro won first place in El Salvador’s Cup of Excellence competition in 2003, her US-based family was as shocked as she was.

Coffee grown by farmers like Aida and roasted and marketed by companies such as Stumptown is part of a recent push to surpass the standards set by labeling regimes such as organic and Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance and Bird Friendly. These labels, now commonly found on coffees sold through both high-end cafes and also grocery stores, have attempted to fulfill coffee drinkers’ demand for knowledge about where their coffee is coming from and how it was grown and processed.

Aida sells to Counter Culture Coffee, based in Durham, North Carolina, to Sweet Maria’s, based in San Francisco, and to a handful of roasters in Europe and Japan through Direct Trade guidelines. The waiting list to import her coffee is long, and she maintains a firm policy of only selling to buyers whom she has not only met but also respects. This reciprocal relationship between coffee grower and roaster/distributor is the hallmark of the Direct Trade process and is also what makes growing organically, paying high wages, and supporting the community surrounding Aida’s farms possible.

From her three farms in western El Salvador, Finca Kilimanjaro, Finca Los Alpes, and Finca Mauritania, Adia distributes beans that are harvested from the highly prized Bourbon Arabica varietal and also the rarefied SL28 varietal that was brought to Latin America in the early 1900’s from Kenya (namesake of the farm “Kilimanjaro”). “Something magical happens when the beans from these two varietals [are blended] together,” she says, though it was an accident that they formed a blend at all. El Salvador struggled to prop up its coffee industry during and shortly following its civil war, which formally ended in 1992. Coffee farms were abandoned and overgrown; the crumbled transportation infrastructure left few routes for the coffee beans to travel from farm to market. The occurrence of uprooting older, heirloom coffee trees and replanting with hybridized varietals is often ironic: during times of war and economic crisis, farmers leave their heirloom varietals in the ground because they can’t afford to replant with costly hybrids. Aida has committed to preserving the presence of her two heirloom varietals despite being able to afford replacing them, however. These older trees, some of which bear fruit for eight decades if well-tended, usually have more deeply established root systems and fewer budding nodes on their branches. What does that mean to those among us who might never see those twisted, grandfather plants on the coffee farms? Juicier coffee cherries, yielding a sweeter, more complex coffee bean.

Of course, the new hybrid coffee varietals yield more cherries per plant than those such as Bourbon and SL28, which is precisely why so many coffee growers in El Salvador think Aida is crazy. Converting derelict farms into sites of high-cost input organic coffee production, replacing older trees with still low-yielding varieties, spending years working towards organic certification: none of these practices follow the typical Salvadorian coffee growing mantra of quantity over quality.

Aida attended a Fair Trade information session back in 2002 but immediately realized that Fair Trade certification wasn’t going to work for her. She was considered to be too large of a landholder under their rules and was also reluctant to form a cooperative, a requirement for entering into the certification process. Despite the absence of Fair Trade certification, the employees who work on Aida’s farms (she employs up to 70 during the harvest season) are paid the highest wages of any coffee farmer in the country. So high, in fact, that coffee farms in the vicinity have had to increase wages after their workers found out that Aida was paying substantially more.

Besides the favorable economics behind Direct Trade (the processing mills she works with are also paid more than they ever have been), she believes in emphasizing the story behind the coffee rather than any specific adorning label. Duane Sorenson, founder and owner of Stumptown, remarked, “Some of the poorest farmers I’ve seen in my life were Fair Trade farmers. The cooperative managers were living well, but not the majority of the farmers. Some Fair Trade co-ops have good practices… but we don’t buy their coffee just because it’s Fair Trade.” He spoke also about having a visceral response to the working conditions on coffee farms, of being able to tell by showing up and meeting the farmers how the workers were treated, and then taking the stories of individual farmers back to coffee drinkers. Aida herself said she wonders why people would pay $3 for a cup of coffee (or $12.50 for 12 ounces of beans, which is what Stumptown sells her coffee for) if it doesn’t have a compelling story behind it.

There may still be a lot of “coffee miles” between farm and cup but never before have coffee drinkers and coffee growers been so connected. Sheldon Rosevear, a devout Stumptown customer, admitted that he cried at the first Stumptown “Meet the Producers” event earlier this year, which brought Panamanian coffee farmers to Portland and Seattle. “These events are the best examples of absolute globalism coupled with absolute localism that I’ve seen,” Sheldon said. “These farmers are so used to throwing their beans on the commodity market, they usually don’t even know where the beans go beyond five kilometers from their farms. When they visited some of the restaurants carrying Stumptown coffee they were just shocked to see that not only does the menu have Stumptown’s name printed on it but his name and his farm’s name too. Their eyes welled up when they saw that.”

A few attendees at the Seattle event were particularly interested in Aida’s employee practices, and asked her to elaborate on how she gets them to sort the coffee cherry into such precise piles according to ripeness. Aleco Chigounis, Stumptown’s globe-traveling coffee buyer, spoke up and told them how hands on he’s seen Aida be during his visits to her farms. She sorts the cherry alongside her workers, rolling up her sleeves to do all of the jobs she asks her employees to do. Duane agreed. “Aida’s blessed farms are in a special part of the world,” he explained, “but it hasn’t all fallen into her lap—she has to wake up every morning and bust ass. The only way you can get employees to respond to you is to pay well and be involved.” The back row, along with three-dozen other attendees, listened intently to their responses.  As it turned out, the back row had come on behalf of Starbucks.