Schneider’s fierce commitment to local food production goes “beyond organic,” and mirrors Alika Atay’s argument on Maui, where schoolchildren are still fed oranges grown in Florida rather than papaya grown next door. It also mirrors Drew Norman’s argument in Maryland, where local producers still struggle to get their produce into conventional supermarkets. Their common push is to find ways to support food that is grown—and eaten—within individual communities.
The market for local food is plainly growing. Nationwide, the number of farmers’ markets has increased 76 percent since 2008. In Delaware, where I work, farmers’ markets have increased more than eightfold since the state Department of Agriculture began tracking them in 2007. Fresh produce now makes up 60 percent of local produce sales, with the remainder coming from value-added products such as meats, cheeses, jellies, breads, salsa, eggs, and honey.
“Over the last few years, we have seen an incredible rise in people wanting to eat healthy and buy fresh, local foods for themselves and their children,” the state’s secretary of agriculture said recently. “Our farmers and producers are working to meet that demand by selling some of the best fresh produce, meats, cheeses and honey that any state can offer. Our farmers’ markets also connect the people who eat with the people who grow their food, fostering conversations and friendships that can last a lifetime.”
Thanks to a national surge in demand for both organic and local food, the federal government seems finally to be getting the message. The USDA announced in 2014 that it would spend $52 million to support local and regional food systems, including not just farmers’ markets but local food distribution networks, and to do more to encourage research into organic farming methods. The Obama administration has also tripled—to $291 million—federal funding for organic farming, including $125 million for research and $50 million for conservation.
As helpful as this has been, it’s worth keeping these numbers in perspective. The total federal farm bill in 2014 was $956 billion, including more than $44 billion for commodity crop programs. Compared with these numbers, the money given to local or organic farm programs is barely a rounding error.
Steffen Schneider’s sense is that for the local, organic sector to grow, it will have to find a way into the kitchens of people who aren’t only in search of expensive microgreens. Hawthorne Valley accepts WIC stamps for their CSA. He is exploring ways to open a store in Hudson, a historic city that is popular among weekenders from Manhattan but which remains largely working class. His wife runs a program called Kids Can Cook, a three-week day camp that teaches local kids how to grow, harvest, and cook their own food.
But to think about the price of local organic outside the context of the way it is grown—and outside the context of the way “conventional” food is grown—is to miss a much larger point. In Germany, Schneider said, research has shown that as per capita spending on food goes down, health care costs go up. In other words, the cheaper your food, the worse (and more expensive) your health.
It may be true that organic farms have generally lower yields than farms that use petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides, though recent studies indicate the differences may be smaller than previously thought. Organic corn, soy, and wheat can yield up to 97 percent of crops sprayed with chemicals, one study showed; other crops, in other places, fare almost as well. Gaps can be reduced further—or eliminated completely—by growers who “mimic nature” by creating “ecologically diverse farms that harness important ecological interactions like the nitrogen-fixing benefits of intercropping or cover-cropping with legumes.”
A thirty-year study conducted by the Rodale Institute found that chemical-dependent farming may outyield organic farming during good years, but over the long haul (and especially during drought years), organic systems, with their vastly healthier soils, outyield conventional systems. Organic farming also reduces the use of fossil fuel energy by about 30 percent and significantly improves the organic matter in the soil itself.
But comparing yields—pretty much the only metric that “conventional” farmers like to use—is a puny way to think about the optimal way to grow food. So is “convenience,” the other word industry uses to pitch processed food.
“Agriculture is not just an economic activity designed only to produce cheap food,” Schneider said. “It is a multifunctional reality that underpins all culture and economics and has ecology as its foundation. Looked at that way, farming takes on a whole different meaning.”
It is political dogma to say that food has to be cheap, Schneider said; such a stance devalues both food and the farmers who grow it. A far better parameter by which to decide how food should be grown? Health—both human and environmental.
“Good food should be a right everyone has,” Schneider said. “Think how many millions of dollars people are spending to see a new movie. Some of this really requires a rejiggering of awareness. Food has been looked at as sort of an afterthought. It’s only recently that people are beginning to realize that this isn’t the right place to skimp. Only recently have people begun to think about the link between food and health, which is nuts. Health is really the only sensible outcome by which you can measure agriculture. And by health I mean the health of the earth, of communities, and of individuals. When you think about how effective this industrial agriculture has been, this has been a failure.”
A couple hundred years ago there was a Hawthorne Valley in every community, and as late as the mid–nineteenth century, more than half of all Americans worked on a farm. Which poses the question: In our advanced technological age, and with our exploded population (thanks in no small part to expanded food production developed during the Green Revolution), is it in fact possible to live in a world without GMOs, or without industrial farming itself? Can there ever again be such a thing as community self-sufficiency, or are networks of enormous farms and global transportation systems here to stay?
In Europe, large cities like Rome and Lyon—and countless smaller cities, like Orvieto and Avignon—are ringed by hundreds of small, diverse farms. The answer in the United States lies in many more acres, in many more places, involving lots more people—and not just in the middle of the country, said Craig Holdrege, the scientist and philosopher who runs the Nature Institute, an environmental and agriculture education center just down the road from Steffen Schneider’s farm.
“If you think of metropolitan New York’s 16 to 20 million people, you can’t have a single Hawthorne Valley feed that whole population,” Holdrege said. “But the regionalization of food production—that’s really happening. You can have urban agriculture—there is a big movement in Detroit—and you can have a lot of farms around these population centers. There would be no problem feeding Chicago from right around the city if you took some of that land out of soybeans and corn. That’s how it was done just a hundred years ago. The city was fed by its region.”
The City Farm
Baltimore City has 11,000 city employees. Guess how many of them are farmers?
One.
His name is Greg Strella, and his 33-acre farm—situated behind a Popeyes chicken joint, a discount mattress warehouse, and a Pep Boys auto parts store—is where Strella is teaching city kids how to grow and eat things most kids wouldn’t be caught dead eating. Like beets. And sorrel.
A couple of years ago, Strella, the manager of Great Kids Farm, noticed something strange as he led school kids on tours of his farm. As they walked between farm buildings, the kids kept bending over and sneaking handfuls of a perennial plant called sorrel. Sorrel grows easily along sidewalks, and Strella had planted small batches not as a crop but as a kind of edible landscaping.
“When you’re standing outside with students eating lunch, and students are coming out of the lunchroom and sneaking sorrel and saying, ‘Is it okay if I have more sorrel?,’ it totally reverses the challenge of getting students to eat something they don’t want to eat,” Strella said.
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bsp; “‘Sure,’ you say. ‘You can eat more of this pure food.’ It’s a beautiful inversion.”
Strella was not trained as a farmer, he was trained as an artist at the Maryland Institute College of Art. As a student, wherever he went—the classrooms where he studied, the restaurants where he waited tables or worked the kitchens—he was confronted by his own ignorance about food. But he kept asking questions, and every chef he talked to responded with “an endless willingness to share what they knew and already experienced.”
Strella has now been farming for more than ten years, ever since he got out of art school. He went to Chicago and volunteered at City Farm, near the Cabrini Green housing projects. He tutored under Will Allen, the legendary urban farmer whose Growing Power operation has become world famous for both feeding and employing people on the farms he’s built in downtown Milwaukee. This led to an apprenticeship at a small CSA farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and then a job in Baltimore, as the first farmer the city had ever hired.
The piece of land he was given did not, at first, seem promising. There were busted-up greenhouses and soil that hadn’t been properly cared for in years. And it wasn’t like Strella himself was bringing generations of farming wisdom to the table. He had trained as a sculptor.
But Strella was taken by other things, like the old orphans’ home with historic photos of young black teenagers helping black masons put the building’s stones in place. The place had a history of craftsmanship and self-determination that Strella liked a great deal.
Urban farming also drew him. Some 20 percent of the world’s undernourished people live in cities, and urban “food deserts”—where food can mostly be found in gas stations or convenience stores—have become a focus of intense concern for public health experts. Millions of America’s poorest city residents have little access to produce of any kind, let alone fruits and vegetables grown in their own neighborhoods. Much of this is due to the flight of middle-class residents (and the markets that served them) to the suburbs; Baltimore has lost fully 300,000 residents since 1950. Replacing supermarkets and vibrant residences, in Baltimore and Detroit and countless other cities, have been vacant lots.
But into this vacuum a new generation of inventive farmers has begun to break ground. Post-industrial cities like Detroit and Milwaukee—which are now dotted with bona fide farms, not just garden plots—have joined more prosperous places like San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, as innovative hubs for young people trying to reinvent the way food is grown, and delivered, to the country’s population centers. Detroit alone has some 1,300 community gardens; Portland has twenty-six farmers’ markets; gardeners in Austin, Texas, provide the city with more than 100,000 pounds of local food a year. Baltimore’s mayor recently started a Vacants to Value program, intended to nurture urban renewal and promote open space; neighborhoods can lease land to create gardens and green space.
Urban farms provide local food and jobs to people who see too little of either. They also provide places of respite and natural beauty within caverns of concrete, especially for school-age kids who suddenly have recreational options beyond the pavement.
Which brings us back to the magic of sorrel. For his first three years at the farm, that became the most common question Strella got from his students: Can I please have more sorrel? So Strella did what any farmer does: he acknowledged the desires of the market and he provided. The following year, he and his students planted a thousand pounds of sorrel.
“No adult in their right mind would sit down and design a process to ‘create curiosity and participation in eating salad’ by serving a tart, lemon-flavored green,” Strella said.
By listening to students—and figuring out how to navigate the city’s public school bureaucracy—Strella had little doubt what he ought to add to the public school salad bar. “That probably seemed outrageous to anyone who hadn’t just seen thousands of four- to twelve-year-olds enjoying this food,” Strella said. “But to us it was the obvious decision, because we had watched our students and listened to our students.”
That spring, Strella and his student farmers got sorrel into twelve inner-city lunch programs. Later, when the schools surveyed what the kids were eating, and what they would like to see at the school salad bars, 97 percent said they would eat more sorrel.
As Great Kids Farm began to take root, Strella and his shoestring staff began organizing visits from elementary and high school students into three parts: some time in a classroom, some time exploring the landscape around the farm, and a tasting experience, where students would sample the foods they were helping to grow on the farm.
This is where Strella introduced five hundred Baltimore city kids to beets.
The idea was to find a way to get root vegetables into school cafeterias, and to prepare them in a way the kids would eat.
Potatoes, I could see. Carrots, sure. Even sweet potatoes. But beets? Aren’t beets, for American kids, the universal symbol of disgust? In a bit of ironic serendipity, many of the students Strella was trying to convince didn’t hate beets because they had never seen one.
“Part of the quirkiness of the urban environment is that it’s almost like the preconception against beets isn’t there,” Strella said. “This creates different opportunities for forming relationships with food. The kids could just as easily have been out playing basketball. Here they were, harvesting beets.”
Strella picked six high school seniors to plant, and tend, the entire crop. Once the beets had been harvested, Strella and his chef set up stations with the vegetables prepared five ways. (“It was kind of like a wine tasting,” Strella said.) He was sure that the most promising, since it offered the most sweetness, would be beets mixed with orange juice. Station Number Five was shredded raw beets, with nothing added: no sugar, no dressing, no nothing. Strella and his chef had set the station up as a kind of control, to see just how much more kids liked the other four recipes.
To his surprise, and by a large margin, the kids picked the raw beets.
“That’s just one example of what happens when we put young people in a position to be collaborators, and give them the opportunity to make decisions for themselves and to take the risk of trying new things,” Strella said.
As with the sorrel experiment, the beet test turned into something magical. That season, Strella and his student volunteers planted and harvested a lot of beets—3,300 pounds of them—and sent them out to sixty schools, where students would serve them to their peers in their cafeterias. Strella’s young farmers did all the marketing; they put posters up in their cafeterias—“What’s a cucumber? You’ll find out today!” “What’s a beet? You’ll find out today!”—and included a riff on lyrics from the rapper Drake: Started from a seed, now we’re here.
Word started getting around that something special was happening in Baltimore. Strella and his student-farmers found themselves hosting a series of workshops for 146 food service directors from forty-eight states and Washington, D.C. The students toured visitors around the farm and shared some of the raw shredded beets they were growing for the city’s school cafeterias.
“Here we have all these amazing food service directors from all around the country, and they are eating a raw vegetable that is simply a raw vegetable, not raw beets and sugar, or oil,” Strella said. “The directors would say, ‘What do we have to do? Where are the labor costs that make it work? The production cost must be so onerous, that must be why I can’t see raw shredded beets showing up in our cafeterias.’
“We said, ‘All we can tell you is that we have a tiny little staff of a farmer, a teacher, a chef, and an incredible group of students,’” Strella said. “We don’t know why this can’t exist in your cafeteria. What we do know is that our students can grow them, harvest them, put them in the cafeterias, and eat them. We can tell you that this is what we have done. We don’t have access to anything you don’t have access to.”
For Strella, teac
hing city kids how to grow and eat their own produce is part of the vision shared by Drew Norman and Steffen Schneider and Wes Jackson and Alika Atay: it is teaching them the value of autonomy, of caring for their bodies and their communities and their local landscape.
“We see our students change physically,” Strella said. “They develop shoulder muscles, a certain pace in how they walk, a certain confidence in how they work in teams, a certain resonance in their voice when they speak to young people, or in front of two hundred people for events. Those ripples, you can see them in the classroom and schoolyards and cafeterias. I’m talking about high school students growing food for their peers. These are seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds, and they are planting the seeds and picking the vegetables, and that is something that profoundly changes what it means when those veggies show up in the school cafeteria.
“When we hear people talking about the world the next generation is going to inherit, where are they right now? What are they eating right now? We want them to take responsibility for participating in that world’s creation.”
Arguing that industrial agriculture has a fixed and immutable place in our world is like arguing that because highways are the most efficient mode of transportation, all we need is highways, Strella told me. The truth is, we need sidewalks and bike lanes and side roads too, because “no one would discount the value of walking down a sidewalk and saying hi to your neighbors, and you can’t do that from a highway.
“That’s not to say we don’t need highways. But it is to question the singular value of highways,” Strella said. “We’ve had fifty or sixty years to test out our highways and industrial ag, and we now have the vista to see things we couldn’t see thirty years ago. So often the debate is an incredible narrowing to cost-benefit analysis. What we’re taking about is holding ourselves in relation to a much fuller accounting of the role we play in the world. In the food landscape, even just to narrow it down to ‘food’ is already too narrow an accounting. In our homes, in our backyards, on our streets—there is incredible value to having our food living with us, even before it gets to our plate. Once you start going up to levels of economy, you start to lose this.”
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