|
An Inspired Path to Food Security
BY CAROL BUSCH
“A Food Corps would support young people spreading out into the country to spend time on farms, to teach children in school gardens, to work with emergency food service providers, to engage with food policy councils to transform local, state, and federal policies to support healthy, sustainable foods.” —Anna Lappe
As sustainable agriculture (see Note) and the locavore movement meet the current political, economic, and social climate of our times, Bailey and Dennis Stenson have found a way to create food production opportunities that build community and empower beginning farmers.
Owners of Fort Collins–based Happy Heart Farm CSA, the Stensons formally organized their longstanding service-learning and farmer training efforts into a program they call Agricorps. Similar in scope to what Lappe recommended to now President Obama, Agricorps is designed to transform community through sustainable agriculture.
Sustainable agriculture is a model of farming that
• Supports stewardship of land—what is taken out of the environment is put back in, without degradation,
• Offers humane working conditions,
• Provides a fare wage to the farmer, and
• Supports and enhances the local foodshed.
Service-Learning
The Stensons have long integrated service-learning into daily operations at Happy Heart Farm through projects with local schools and the Youth Conservation Corps. Service-learning is a volunteerism movement that connects people of all ages, though most often youth, to opportunities for service. In exchange for time, participants learn.
Since 2008, Fort Collins Polaris Expeditionary School has participated in weeklong sustainable agriculture learning expeditions. Working CSA member and Polaris science teacher Kyle Stack has worked alongside his junior high and high-school students planting garlic and potatoes, weeding, and helping with the harvest.
During the summer growing season, the Larimer County Youth Conservation Corps, a summer youth employment program, is a vital component of the farm’s service-learning model. Since 2007, YCC has increased its participation at the farm from one day to two weeks.
“Although YCC primarily focuses on conservation projects, I was able to convince YCC Director Maelly Oropeza [who is also a Happy Heart working member] to spend two of the program’s 10 weeks focusing on agriculture and local food production. I feel like that’s a huge success,” Stenson says. “Doors are opening.”
Following this June’s torrential rains and hailstorms, the 10-person YCC crew was the first on the scene to assist with water removal, leaf raking, and other clean up projects. According to Bailey Stenson, their assistance was critical in keeping the farm afloat.
Future Farmer Training
Since its inception 25 years ago, Happy Heart Farm has trained future organic farmers in the art and business of community-supported agriculture. Now the farm runs a three-year apprentice program. Under the tutelage of Dennis Stenson, apprentices learn greenhouse management, plant propagation, field management, biodynamic farming, repairing equipment, problem solving, and more.
“My time here has been invaluable,” says third-year apprentice MeganWilliams. Among her many farm duties,Williams leads weekly member work sessions and takes care of the farm when the Stensons go away. She’s also on track to start her own monoculture farm in 2010.
For any farm, new farmer training requires a dance between real production and education that comes with a real cost. “I’ve got a list of people interested in apprenticeships,” Stenson acknowledges. “We just don’t have the funding to pay for the extra time it takes to train more people or give them stipends.”
Thanks to Adrian Card, former Happy Heart apprentice cum CSU extension agent, Agricorps may receive a first-ever financial lift from a new farmer training program he developed. Once approved as a Larimer County training site, Happy Heart Farm will earn $25 per hour for up to 75 hours to train apprentices each season. “The program
is very limited in scope right now,” Stenson says. “But this is a huge step in the direction we want to go.”
Alternative Energy
“I think for food security we should be expanding our local food systems,” Stenson says. “It’s not going to happen until we take this next step and help new farmers get started.”
According to Stenson, Agricorps addresses this bind and has the potential to make an even greater impact by helping experienced farmer trainees acquire land and bring their produce to market. Yet this aspect of the program won’t take off until Agricorps finds more secure financial footing through grants and other funding sources.
“A lot of the talk right now is about alternative energy,” Stenson offers. “I call alternative energy growing our own food. For some reason food is being overlooked in the link.” Fortunately, Agricorps offers a genuine solution.
Note: Legal Definition of Sustainable Agriculture (according to the USDA)
The term ‘’sustainable agriculture’‘ (U.S. Code Title 7, Section 3103) means an integrated system of plant and animal production practices having a site-specific application that will, over the long term
• Satisfy human food and fiber needs.
• Enhance environmental quality and the natural resource base upon which the agriculture economy depends.
• Make the most efficient use of nonrenewable resources and on-farm resources and integrate, where appropriate, natural biological cycles, and controls.
• Sustain the economic viability of farm operations.
• Enhance the quality of life for farmers and society as a whole.
Learn More About Agricorps or Get Involved happyheartfarmcsa.com • 970.482.3448 info@happyheartfarmcsa.com
|
The following is a letter from Ann Moore Lappe, author, local food activist and co-founder of the Small Planet Institute, to then President- elect Barak Obama. She spoke in September at the 2009 Rocky Mountain Sustainable Living Fair in Fort Collins.
One powerful way you could call upon young people across the country to engage in meaningful change would be to create a Food Corps, modeled after the Peace Corps, that would inspire a generation of young people to dedicate a year or two of their lives to engage with ending needless hunger in a country
of plenty and the squandering of fossil fuels, water, soil, and other precious resources through chemical agriculture. A food corps would support young people spreading out into the country to spend time on farms, to teach children in school gardens, to work with emergency food service providers, to engage with food policy councils to transform local, state, and federal policies to support healthy, sustainable
foods. A food corps would, asWendell Berry would say, solve for patter: At once you would generate a compelling call for service and at the same time directly address one of the most painful legacies of the previous administrations: 36 million Americans who are food insecure. At the same time you’d be supporting the flourishing of sustainable, people-dependant, fossil-fuel-independent farms and gardens that would be well suited to withstand the coming climate chaos. These organic sustainable farms, we know now, will also play a vital part in climate-changing solutions, because they decrease dependence on fossil fuels and sequester carbon in their soils. By creating a food corps, you’d be sending a signal to the rest of the world that the United States will no longer be known as the subsidizer of commodities that we dump to the decimation of local food systems globally, but that our country joins together with many others around the world who have embraced the idea that access to healthy food is a basic right of every citizen. May it be so in the new Untied States of America. -Ann Moore Lappe , December 2008
|
Carol Busch is a freelance writer who happily discovered Happy Heart last spring upon returning to her hometown. She is a working member at the farm.
|
RSS Feed
