Monday, March 28, 2011

News: South Haven Promotes Agricultural Sustainability


                                                                                      Gazette file


South Haven is going back to its agricultural roots as a means of revitalizing its local economy.

Local leaders in business, agriculture, education, health, government, restaurants, non-profit organizations and interested citizens will meet on Thursday, March 31 at 6 p.m. at Lake Michigan College-South Haven Campus for a collaborative forum titled “Grow Local, Market Local, Eat Local.”

The objective of the forum is to identify the area’s agricultural assets and to find ways of cultivating new small businesses focused on agricultural products, packaging, distribution and second tier products.  This network is especially focused on the area’s small, local farmers who are not presently organized.

Scott Wall, 47, president and founder of New Age/Landmark, Inc., is the mover and shaker behind the forum.  He is also a farmer at Castle House Farms in South Haven who raises organic chicken, lamb, pork and eggs in a cooperative farm venture with Tracey Davis and her family. 

New Age/Landmark (NA/L) began in 1998 in Benton Harbor as a mobile laboratory testing service for environmentally-impacted facilities having to do with petroleum, hazardous waste remediation, brownfield redevelopment, Superfund investigations, and military sites and projects.  Five years ago NA/L began a construction project on a water treatment facility in Libya, one of its many worldwide ventures. 

Two years ago the company moved to South Haven where most of its 22 employees live. 

Recently, the company decided to pursue agricultural testing services because farmers were sending soil, water, plant and compost samples to Ohio.  New Age/Landmark also discovered that the community needed various agricultural developments like food storage, second tier processing facilities, and an entrepreneurial incubation process for new business.

The forum is also a response to the burgeoning local food movement taking place around the country.

“If there ever was a movement that people could get behind, this is it,” said Davis, vice-president of New Age/Landmark Inc.

Among the forum’s speakers are Chris Flood, nutritionist at the Shoreline Wellness Center, Bruce McIntosh of McIntosh Orchards & Wine Cellars and Diann Tosh, food services director for the South Haven Public Schools.

Other organizers of the event are Lake Michigan College-South Haven Campus, the City of South Haven, South Haven Charter Township and the South Haven Area Chamber of Commerce.

The South Haven area has a rich, 150-year-old agricultural history as the Southwest Michigan Fruit Belt, the largest non-citrus fruit producing region in North America.  It includes the legacy of Liberty Hyde Bailey, America’s father of horticulture and founder of the Michigan Pomological Society (later named Michigan Horticultural Society).  He was born in South Haven.

Much of the region’s agricultural heritage was abandoned in favor of the more lucrative and high-paying, job-producing automobile industry.  However, as manufacturing has declined in the area and throughout Michigan, area leaders are returning to their agricultural legacy.

For more information or to participate, call the South Haven Area Chamber of Commerce at 269.637.5171, e-mail cofc@southhavenmi.com or visit the Chamber’s website at www.southhavenmi.com.

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Food’s Impact on Re-Building New Orleans

In an odd sort of way, Hurricane Katrina helped to make New Orleans an incredible laboratory not only for understanding the role and importance of a city’s food system but for recognizing the importance of food as an essential tool for community building.

Two thousand homes were lost in the storm and over 66,000 lots were left vacant or blighted (compared to 19,000 before Katrina).  There were no grocery stores, food vendors or gardens.  Fishers were lost, their boats wrecked and farmers had no crops, said Poppy Tooker, culinary activist, local food preservationist, founder of Slow Food New Orleans and a Times-Picayune “Hero of the Storm.” 

The city looked as though it had been through a nuclear explosion.  Everything was brown and gray and there was no green to be seen.  But a few restaurants remained open.

That was a beacon of hope,” she said at the 14th Annual Community Food Security Coalition Conference held in New Orleans recently.

The food distribution system had collapsed, she said, however, it provided the opportunity to start all over again with a clean slate.

A month after the storm Tooker talked with regional farmers and vendors about supplying fresh food to restaurant chefs rather than rely only on national food distributors.  

Gradually, little cafes opened.  Some chefs used coolers for refrigerators.  CafĂ© registers put the farmer’s name on an envelope in order to pay for their food products. 

Then, grocery stores began to re-open but the struggle to find quality products continued.  For instance, when Tooker looked for butter and could only find margarine, she “burst into tears.”

Poppy Tooker
Slow Food USA wanted to help and by 2006, through the fundraising efforts of Tooker, the Terra Madre Relief Fund was established to assist Louisiana food communities hit by Hurricane Katrina.  Now that fund has evolved to lend a hand to farmers and food artisans struck by natural disasters on the Mississippi River and its tributaries.

Evacuees and food
Many evacuees, who were scattered all over the country, swore they would never return to New Orleans after they saw Katrina’s destruction on television.  However, some found that food comforted them in their homesickness.

Pam Broom and her family lived in Chicago for 18 months and sorely missed their native cuisine.  They’d get together with other evacuees and tell stories of home around a delicious Orleanian meal. 

Food had other effects.  Broom said she once saw a man with a basket full of green peppers and suddenly became extremely happy.  Green peppers along with celery and onions are part of the “trinity,” the base of New Orleans cooking. 

Broom began gardening in Chicago through Growing Power, an urban garden program started by MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” recipient Will Allen.  One day as she harvested collard greens in an icy rain, she discovered that she really loved this work—but had had enough of Midwestern winters.  She decided to go home.

“Flying into New Orleans is like no other place in the world,” said Broom. “It’s full of mangled landscapes of wetlands and swamp, but I feel excited and blessed.  It’s a spirit that grabs you and holds you.” 

Broom is now executive director of the Women and Agriculture Network, a group of New Orleans organizations that strategically think and plan for food justice in urban areas. 

Lolis Eric Elie and his family evacuated to Baton Rouge, a mere 80 miles from New Orleans.  But it was obvious from the start that they weren’t in the same culture.

“There is an unquenchable human spirit and joie de vivre in New Orleans,” said Elie.

The former Times-Picayune columnist turned filmmaker (he wrote Treme, the HBO series about post-Katrina New Orleans) reflected on eating red beans and rice away from home.  The dish is a city tradition tied to Monday, laundry day, when people prepared it and let it simmer all day while they worked.

“[It] was affirming because it meant that all had not been lost,” he said.  “Through food, a part of the Orleanian culture could still be maintained.  There is a kind of security you get from food beyond having your stomach full.  Having a food tradition is part and parcel of one’s culture.”

Grassroots organizing
Since the storm new groups have been forming to address many of the city’s food—and health—needs.  For example, the New Orleans Food and Farm Network. (NOFFN) organizes projects and events that help citizens get fresh and healthy food through education, public policy, maps that locate farmers markets and local food vendors and by celebrating and addressing local food needs and resources at the neighborhood level.

NOFFN also latched on to the burgeoning urban gardens movement to teach people how to grow their own fresh fruits and vegetables on vacant land in neighborhoods that lost houses due to the storm.  Local government has responded to provide incentives for people to develop this vacant land for gardens, green spaces and beautification projects, although there is still a great need for soil building and composting.

Broom also recognized that urban agriculture has the capacity to develop a viable workforce by reaching out to groups like the underserved, at-risk youth and prisoners. 

Training them to grow food is far better than just giving them handouts, she said. 

It is interesting to note that most of these efforts to re-establish a local food system have come from grassroots people.

“City government lacks much understanding let alone does it have any policy on urban farms and farmers markets,” said Elie.  “The State of Louisiana recently set up a food policy initiative but there are lots of problems with it, some of which existed before Katrina.”

But things are changing as NOFFN “envision[s] a vital community that values its agricultural and culinary heritage,” according to its website. 

The oral history of a culture is important and food is quite connected to it. 

“It is part of discovering and understanding one’s identity but it is also a matter of food security where you not only prevent starvation but feel secure through food,” said Elie.

He added that several organizations are currently doing some “cultural excavation” through seed saving, writing community cookbooks, returning to the oral history of what the elders ate and how that has changed, learning about food-related diseases.

Among these efforts is Poppy Tooker’s book, The Crescent City Farmers Market Cookbook that not only incorporates renowned Orleanian chefs’ recipes, but tells the story of the rise and decline of the city’s markets, which date back to 1718. 

The book features the Crescent City Farmers Market, founded by the Twomey Center for Peace Through Justice at Loyola University New Orleans in 1995 after an absence of public markets for nearly 50 years. 

The market is an outgrowth and a reflection of the core mission of marketumbrella.org, which seeks “to cultivate public markets for the public good, utilize local resources to bolster authentic local traditions and to improve social, health, environmental and financial through trust and respect,” according to its website.

The Crescent City Farmers Market prides itself on making an annual $9 million economic impact on the city, however, it deems the social transactions among friends, shoppers, farmers, fishers and vendors as critical to the market’s success.

For example, on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving after Katrina when the market re-opened, people who couldn’t previously find each other, all met at the market, said Tooker. 

“It was a real community builder,” she said.

The market’s co-founder and executive director Richard McCarthy regards the importance of community especially critical today as “the promises of life long careers, financial stability, and civic engagement” fade.  


In 2004, the White Boot Brigade, a project of Market Umbrella was formed to protect the livelihoods of wild harvest fishers in the Greater New Orleans’ coastal waters from the onslaught of farm-raised seafood imports and natural and industrial disasters.  After Katrina, they donned the white boots of their trade and knocked on the doors of New York and California restaurants to promote their boutique catch. 

One other significant outcome in the post-Katrina re-organization of New Orleans is the new partnership between the people and local government around food, something that didn’t exist before, said Broom.

For example, the city’s Food Policy Council, which began in spring 2007, a year later approached the New Orleans City Council with recommendations on strategies aimed at improving the local food system.

The Council also started a summer program that provided 800 meals per day.  Currently, the city is breaking ground for a 6,000 square foot community kitchen where 2 million meals will be served per year, said Broom. 

New Orleans illustrates the resilience and imagination of its people in response to extraordinary disaster, virtual abandonment by government and the wariness by some Americans in seeing the city re-built.  New Orleans also represents an example of what can happen when friends and neighbors see the need not only to help each other but to preserve their culture.  In this case the driving force of community was—and still is—centered around food. 

Sunday, March 6, 2011

From Motown to Grow-Town!

A bucketful of vegetables from Romanowski Farm Park, Detroit


by Ashley Atkinson, Michigan Citizen

Here’s a little known statistic: More than one-in-50 Detroiters will be engaged in growing their own food in family, school, community and/or market gardens across the city this year. Although our landscape is covered in ice and snow now, very soon Detroit will be overflowing with productive patches of green, filled with heirloom tomatoes, snap peas, collard greens and vines ripe with the fruits of summer, lovingly tended by the capable hands of our citizenry. With over 16,000 residents involved in the Garden Resource Program (GRP) alone, Detroiters are leading the country with efforts to transform vacant land into productive gardens and farms; rebuilding local networks of food producers, distributors, processors, and consumers, while building community and stability in our neighborhoods.

These are promising numbers for those like Sam Newsome from Brotherly Love Community Garden who routinely says, “We’re turning Motown into Grow-town!” Sam and others believe Detroit is poised to become the first post-industrial city in America to regain control of its food system. Not only do we have engaged and knowledgeable residents, we have the land and natural resources at our fingertips. A recent study published by Michigan State University found that Detroiters can produce 75 percent of our vegetable needs and nearly 50 percent of our fruit needs for 900,000 people on just 2,000 acres, a fraction of the vacant land currently available in the city.

Now is the perfect time to join the thousands of residents growing a food secure Detroit! One of the important goals the Detroit Food Policy Council is tasked with is to help Detroit realize its potential by promoting a policy environment that facilitates the transformation of vacant into productive gardens and farms. Join the conversation by attending the first annual Powering Up the Local Food System Summit hosted by the Detroit Food Policy Council May 19 and 20 at the Eastern Market. For more information contact detroitfoodpolicycouncil@gmail.com.

Here are a few other ways you can get involved:

1) Start a vegetable garden. Residents of Detroit, Hamtramck and Highland Park can join the Garden Resource Program and receive seeds, transplants, and other garden resources for a nominal fee by contacting Lindsay Turpin at The Greening of Detroit, 313.285.1249  detroitagriculture.org.

2) Cultivate a green thumb. Attend one of the gardening, farming, cooking or preserving workshops offered by the many community-based organizations working to promote food security in Detroit. For schedules and more information visit detroitfoodandfitness.com/events.

3) Buy Local. Buy Grown in Detroit. Support local farmers and gardeners selling at farmers markets and restaurants. To find a farmers’ market near you visit www.mifma.org/find-a-farmers-market.

Ashley Atkinson is Secretary of the Detroit Food Policy Council and Director of Urban Agriculture and Openspace at The Greening of Detroit.