To many residents of the historically black neighborhoods on Atlanta’s westside, Abiodun Henderson is both local savior and master storyteller. Better known as Miss Abbey, Atlantans drizzle her original hot sauce recipe — which she developed after watching YouTube videos — on their food, and they lean in close when she tells stories of her family’s roots in Liberia and Trinidad.
And when there’s a problem, they go to her. The 36-year-old mother heard about local farmers’ struggles to find enough farmhands to work their land. At the same time, Henderson watched as hordes of young people in her community came home from prison or jail, and went right back in after struggling to find a job with a stable, livable wage.
A lightbulb went off and Henderson, who previously oversaw a community garden in Atlanta’s Westview neighborhood, combined her knowledge of urban farming with a passion for increasing economic opportunities for disadvantaged youth. The result became Gangstas to Growers, an agribusiness training program for formerly incarcerated youth between the ages of 18 and 24.
Launched in 2016, the three-month program equips participants not just with farming and gardening know-how, but also the ins and outs of running a business. There’s a heavy focus on personal development, too, and on any given day the young adults might hear from experts on topics such as financial literacy, environmental sustainability, nutritional cooking, and criminal justice. In between morning yoga sessions and evening seminars, the trainees spend their afternoons at black-owned farms, digging, planting and harvesting crops for which they’re paid $15 an hour — more than twice Georgia’s minimum wage.
“We take care of the folks in these neighborhoods and change how these young people in these neighborhoods act,” Henderson told NationSwell, “and get them to be examples for the younger people coming up.”
Across the country, a black American is five times more likely to be jailed by the time they turn 21 compared to their white counterparts. And in Georgia, black residents make up nearly two-thirds of the prison population, compared to only 30% of the state’s population. Recidivism is a problem throughout Atlanta — where the youth recidivism rate is 65%. One of the main reasons people end up back in jail is a lack of employment.
To date, Henderson and Gangstas to Growers have worked with 15 young adults. When they finish the program, she helps connect them to jobs and fellowships in the food and agriculture industries. While several graduates have indeed gone on to work in the food industry, others have applied their new skills to other fields, like construction.
Henderson stressed that hers is a grassroots movement, not a nonprofit or a charity. All her work designing the Gangsta program and recruiting young people to apply for it starts from the ground up.
But that attitude has also put her work at risk. “I never thought of funding first,” she said. “I thought of programming first.” She received a $10,000 emergency grant from a local nonprofit in 2016, but that was quickly spent. To help ease the financial burden, her team began making, bottling and marketing Henderson’s hot sauce recipe, which the trainees named Sweet Sol. A fiery concoction of habanero and cayenne peppers along with ingredients like lavender, turmeric and muscovado sugar, Sweet Sol is sold for $10 a bottle at Atlanta farmers markets and for $12 online.
Though the city pays the $15 hourly wages through its workforce development program, there are still bills to pay. Last year Gangstas to Growers participants had to rely on Uber to get out to the farms, so a van is high on the wishlist. And with the lofty goal of training another 500 young Atlantans by 2025, Henderson needs all the support she can get.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BmEKQmqjG58/
Henderson has activism in her blood. Raised in Brooklyn by her immigrant mother and a father who, as she has described, was a “rank-and-file Black Panther member,” she started the long journey to Gangstas and Growers when she was connected to Occupy the Hood, an extension of the Occupy movement of 2011 that sought to expose the hold major banks and corporations have on the democratic process.
Through Occupy the Hood, which in part focused on increasing access to nutritional food in low-income minority communities, Henderson was provided with the resources and connections to put those ideals in action in her own neighborhood. After getting approval from local leaders in 2012 to run operations at the newly hatched community garden in Westview, she started a summer camp for area kids and taught them how to grow produce. Then came the idea for Gangstas to Growers a few years later. “We see this work as really shifting neighborhoods.” Henderson said.
For Raekwon Smith, the program helped him shift his attitude and embrace a straighter path. After finishing his stint at Gangstas to Growers, he earned a fellowship with a youth development program. Now he’s working in construction.
And for Derriontae Trent, the lessons he learned from farming went deeper than harvesting the fruits and vegetables he planted.
“I was so used to seeing death that I didn’t know how it’d feel to see something grow,” Trent told Politico. “To see plants grow full of life, from something I control, it’s probably the best feeling in the world.”
Trent also learned about political justice and systematic oppression. He’s now working with other organizations in Atlanta to raise Georgia’s minimum wage and fighting gentrification in his neighborhood. “He is young and ready,” Henderson said.
But as she also pointed out, “You never really leave. It’s a life program.” Trent can still be found cooking hot sauce in the industrial kitchen on the weekends, and Smith still sells bottles of Sweet Sol at local farmers markets.
“They’ve become organizers and come up with solutions for their own neighborhoods,” Henderson said of Smith and Trent.
“We have to share our privilege and empower these young black folks,” Henderson said. “And saturate the local food movement — and every movement — with the hood.”
More: To Build a Healthier City, Atlanta Is Opening Its Schoolyards to Everyone
Tag: Agriculture
How Church-Owned Property Can Help Communities ‘Grow’
Over the past decade, there has been a push for ecological conservation within the Christian faith, motivated by concerns over how climate change might impact human welfare.
That movement has coincided with an uptick in the number of faith-based farms, many of which equate divinity with sweat equity and its bountiful results.
Where those two movements intersect sits Plainsong Farm & Ministry, a community-supported agriculture farm and ministry, located outside of Rockford, Michigan. Plainsong runs its own CSA program, solely with produce it grows on church-owned property. “How we take care of our land is an expression of our religious values,” says Nurya Love Parish, one of Plainsong’s co-founders. “Our land is an opportunity to create partnerships and relations toward greater ecological sustainability.”
Plainsong is part of a trend of the faithful growing food on unused church land. And since the church owns so much land — after centuries of buying up property and being gifted land by the worshipful, the church is certainly one of the largest landowners in the world — this represents untold acres that could potentially be used to grow food, scaled to parishes around the world.
But there’s a hitch: No one knows exactly how much land the church owns, or how much of that land is even arable.
“Churches owning land made sense in 1880, but now its almost 2020 and we haven’t had a purposeful approach to the stewardship of our land,” says Parish. “Especially garden projects on church-owned land.”
But this is changing, Parish adds. “In the past, we had 40 people [in the fields farming] wheat for the church.” That fell out of favor with the advent of large-scale industrial farming. “But now this is possible [again], and on a larger scale.”
In Rancho Capistrano, California, church-land-grown crops feed Saddleback Church’s parishioners, many of whom rely on the church’s food pantries each week for fresh produce. The land, which is managed by Saddleback pastor Steve Mahnke, was originally owned by the now-defunct mega-church Crystal Cathedral. It was sold to the owners of the craft superstore Hobby Lobby, which was then bought by Saddleback for $1, says Mahnke.
Mahnke, with the help of hundreds of volunteers, used the 1.5 acres of church land to build out 20-foot-long raised planters and a well-water-fed irrigation system. The garden yields enough food to feed up to 1,400 families each month, he says.
If 1.5 acres feeds up to 1,400 families each month, imagine how many families 1,000 might feed, asks Parish.
“As we’re looking at issues around climate change, there is a greater need for regenerative agriculture,” Parish says. “But there isn’t a comprehensive inventory, even within denominations, of land they hold.”
Parish is trying to change that. Earlier this year at the Episcopal Church’s General Convention — a triennial meeting of church leaders — she proposed legislation for the church to appoint someone to gather land ownership information for the specific purpose of regenerative agriculture projects.
There have been other successes in mapping church land ownership for social impact. In 2016, the organization GoodLands — founded by Molly Burhans at the beginning of her discernment process to become a nun — asked the Catholic church to map out how much land it owned around the world. One estimate puts it at roughly 177 million acres. (In 2012, The Economist published an investigation that found Cardinal Dolan was New York City’s foremost landowner.)
“A fundamental way to address many of the issues we confront as a society today is to use the land and properties we already have more thoughtfully,” the organization’s website says. “GoodLands provides the information, insights, and implementation tools for the Catholic Church to leverage its landholdings to address pressing issues, from environmental destruction to mass human migration.”
GoodLands partnered with ESRI, a global mapping organization, and built out the Catholic Geographic Information Systems Center, which has mapped over 35,000 parishes as of 2016.
The hope, Burhans told the Boston Globe, is to “[wake the hierarchy] up a little bit to the enormous potential they have to really change the world and do good through careful and thoughtful property management.”
The tradition of farming within faiths — including Islam and Hinduism — is something that could be an easy sell for churches that own lots of land, says Nicole S. Janelle, executive director of the Abundant Table. The Abundant Table is a Christian-based non-profit in Ventura County, California, and its farm yields enough food to feed two school districts in the nearby cities of Oxnard and Santa Paula.
“The Christian tradition is agricultural,” Janelle tells NationSwell. “You’re digging into your agrarian Biblical tradition, growing food to share with others, gathering around a table of abundance to share the gifts of God’s creation.”
10 Innovative Ideas That Propelled America Forward in 2016
The most contentious presidential election in modern history offered Americans abundant reasons to shut off the news. But if they looked past the front page’s daily jaw-droppers, our countrymen would see that there’s plenty of inspiring work being done. At NationSwell, we strive to find the nonprofit directors, the social entrepreneurs and the government officials testing new ways to solve America’s most intractable problems. In our reporting this year, we’ve found there’s no shortage of good being done. Here’s a look at our favorite solutions from 2016.
This Woman Has Collected 40,000 Feminine Products to Boost the Self-Esteem of Homeless Women
Already struggling to afford basic necessities, homeless women often forgo bras and menstrual hygiene products. Dana Marlowe, a mother of two in the Washington, D.C., area, restored these ladies’ dignity by distributing over 40,000 feminine products to the homeless before NationSwell met her in February. Since then, her organization Support the Girls has given out 212,000 more.
Why Sleeping in a Former Slave’s Home Will Make You Rethink Race Relations in America
Joseph McGill, a Civil War re-enactor and history consultant for Charleston’s Magnolia Plantation in South Carolina, believes we must not forget the history of slavery and its lasting impact to date. To remind us, he’s slept overnight in 80 dilapidated cabins — sometimes bringing along groups of people interested in the experience — that once held the enslaved.
This Is How You End the Foster Care to Prison Pipeline
Abandoned by an abusive dad and a mentally ill mom, Pamela Bolnick was placed into foster care at 6 years old. For a time, the system worked — that is, until she “aged out” of it. Bolnick sought help from First Place for Youth, an East Bay nonprofit that provides security deposits for emancipated children to transition into stable housing.
Would Your Opinions of Criminals Change if One Cooked and Served You Dinner?
Café Momentum, one of Dallas’s most popular restaurants, is staffed by formerly incarcerated young men without prior culinary experience. Owner Chad Houser says the kitchen jobs have almost entirely eliminated recidivism among his restaurant’s ranks.
This Proven Method Is How You Prevent Sexual Assault on College Campuses
Nearly three decades before Rolling Stone published its incendiary (and factually inaccurate) description of sexual assault at the University of Virginia, a gang rape occurred at the University of New Hampshire in 1987. Choosing the right ways to respond to the crisis, the public college has since become the undisputed leader in ending sex crimes on campus.
This Sustainable ‘Farm of the Future’ Is Changing How Food Is Grown
Once a commercial fisherman, Bren Smith now employs a more sustainable way to draw food from the ocean. Underwater, near Thimble Island, Conn., he’s grown a vertical farm, layered with kelp, mussels, scallops and oysters.
This Former Inmate Fights for Others’ Freedom from Life Sentences
Jason Hernandez was never supposed to leave prison. At age 21, a federal judge sentenced him to life for selling crack cocaine in McKinney, Texas — Hernandez’s first criminal offense. After President Obama granted him clemency in 2013, he’s advocated on behalf of those still behind bars for first-time, nonviolent drug offenses.
Eliminating Food Waste, One Sandwich (and App) at a Time
In 2012, Raj Karmani, a Pakistani immigrant studying computer science at the University of Illinois, built an app to redistribute leftover food to local nonprofits. So far, the nonprofit Zero Percent has delivered 1 million meals from restaurants, bakeries and supermarkets to Chicago’s needy. In recognition of his work, Karmani was awarded a $10,000 grant as part of NationSwell’s and Comcast NBCUniversal’s AllStars program.
Baltimore Explores a Bold Solution to Fight Heroin Addiction
Last year, someone in Baltimore died from an overdose every day: 393 in total, more than the number killed by guns. Dr. Leana Wen, the city’s tireless public health commissioner, issued a blanket prescription for naloxone, which can reverse overdoses, to every citizen — the first step in her ambitious plan to wean 20,000 residents off heroin.
How a Fake Ad Campaign Led to the Real-Life Launch of a Massive Infrastructure Project
Up until 1974, a streetcar made daily trips from El Paso, Texas, across the Mexican border to Ciudad Juárez. Recently, a public art project depicting fake ads for the trolley inspired locals to call for the line’s comeback, and the artist behind the poster campaign now sits on the city council.
Continue reading “10 Innovative Ideas That Propelled America Forward in 2016”
4 Startups Revolutionizing How Food Is Produced in the U.S.
Ask city dwellers what an American farmer looks like and it’s likely that they’ll describe an image reminiscent of a Norman Rockwell painting: a man sporting overalls and a John Deere hat, bouncing his daughter on his lap as he steers a combine through his corn fields. In truth, today’s agrarian ideal is much different. Instead of rusty tractors working the land, fields are hooked up with the same modern technology used in Silicon Valley.
As part of our continuing coverage of FarmNext’s nationwide listening tour on food and young farmers, NationSwell talked to a few tech-savvy individuals building systems that can more efficiently feed America.
Drones
Trevor Witt, a third-year student at Kansas State University in Salina, spends most of his days flying unmanned aircraft systems, or drones. He’s involved in a project in the school’s entomology department — with “the bug guys,” as he says — studying techniques for early detection of invasive species. Witt spent the summer mapping sorghum fields, looking for evidence of an aphid that can ruin an entire harvest in just a few weeks. “If you can detect that aphid early on, you can spray that specific area to get rid of it,” Witt explains. With a camera shooting in high-resolution visuals and near-infrared imagery, Witt’s drone flies over fields of crops, looking for a shiny, sugar-dense resin on the top of leaves and a black underside — the telltale sign of this aphid’s infestation.
Witt, who dates his interest in unmanned aircraft to his high school shop class, says the primary goal of his research at K-State is “dealing with information overload.” His team is “translating all this data that we can collect and make actionable solutions,” he says. “Earlier, using satellites, the data pixel had a 15-acre resolution; now data pixel resolution is sub-centimeter. It just gets significant amounts of data even in the smallest field.”
For now, the farmer must take action against the infestation himself. But eventually, perhaps a decade from now, a grower won’t have to do a thing: he’ll have another drone or self-driven tractor that can automatically spray the area. “That’s the end goal when it comes to mapping,” Witt says. Unmanned aircraft systems aren’t the end-all solution, he concedes, but it’s “an extra tool in the toolkit.”
Solar Power
To lay the optimal number of eggs, a hen needs a full 16 hours of light. That’s an impossibly high bar for small farmers to reach during the winter, when a December day at California’s Riverdog Farms, for example, only receives eight and a half hours of sunshine — causing production to drop anywhere from 30 to 60 percent. (During that time, chickens continue to consume the same amount of feed.) Most large farms employ artificial lighting to stimulate production, but the cost can be prohibitively high for small-scale farmers to invest in the technology.
Egg producers “take those seasonal changes pretty hard,” says Edward Silva, who developed a solar-powered supplemental lighting system called Henlight as an undergraduate at University of California, Davis. Programmed by software, the Henlight “comes on in the morning hours, a little before sunrise. The very darkest days, it comes on earlier,” he says. “It doesn’t wake [the chickens] up. Eventually they rustle up, but what’s happening is that laying hens receive the okay to reproduce through a gland on the top of their head.”
According to Silva, who grew up on a farm in the Central Valley, field data from one coop using the Henlight in Capay Valley, Calif. saw a 20 percent boost in egg production — laying an additional 2,253 eggs — compared to a control group. Sold at $3 a dozen, the farmer made $563, meaning that he got a return on the $450 investment in the first year.
“There’s this movement where tech in ag is becoming much more democratic,” says Silva. “Smaller farms can optimize their operations as well. With Uber, anyone can be a taxi driver; with Aribnb, anyone can open a hotel. In agriculture, with a lot of precision sensors, with smartphones and drones, the systems are allowing small-scale guys to be competitive with what’s existing on a bigger level.”
Genetics
Donald Gibson is trying to grow a better tomato. A graduate student at University of California, Davis is using cutting-edge biotech that would allow tomato plants to grow with far less phosphorous, a vital nutrient (along with nitrogen and potassium) that’s increasingly costly and environmentally damaging to extract for fertilizer. When lacking phosphorous, a tomato expends much of its energy expanding its root system. By identifying and switching off the gene that activates that response, the fruit could grow with much less of the nutrient.
Genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, have earned the wrath from the organic crowd for altering a plant’s fundamentals, but Gibson argues his research will make agriculture sustainable. “Today we’re seeing a major shift in advances in plant breeding. There’s been a boom in the biotech field in the last 20 or 30 years, a technology revolution and also a biological revolution. Now finally, we’re using brand new technology and adapting that to select better and better plants,” he says. “When it comes to GMOs, it’s actually getting a lot better from the consumer perspective.” Most of the innovation in the field has benefited farmers, but the next generation will benefit consumers with products like a potato that doesn’t bruise or an apple that doesn’t brown as quickly.
Data Analytics
FarmLink is employing analytics to help farmers decipher big data and turn it into actionable items, moving agriculture from maps on paper that tracked annual yields to create more precise information. “There is plenty of data out there, and the data increases every day. It’s not that we need more data,” says Kevin Helkes, FarmLink’s director of operations. “Farmers are saying they need to know what to do with that data.”
Helkes compares the farmers’ fields to a front lawn. “There’s always that part of the yard that’s higher, where the grass grows taller. It’s the same thing in the field. Farmers know that year over year, this area is higher and this area is lower,” he says. What’s new, though, is that data analytics will be able to tell a farmer how productive those high and low areas could potentially be. Instead of a grower learning the hard way that he’s been wasting money on a fallow spot of land, FarmLink can communicate in advance how much he can expect from an area.
Agriculture’s first great revolution was switching from a donkey towing a plow to a tractor trailer. Now, agriculture has reinvented itself with new improvements in genetics and feed. This is called Ag 3.0.
(Homepage photograph: Courtesy of Gregory Urqiaga/University of California, Davis)
The Number of Farmers Is Dropping. So How Will the U.S. Continue to Feed the World?
According to last year’s report on agriculture from the U.S. Census, the American farmer is aging. The percentage of farmers and ranchers over the age of 75 grew by 15.1 percent between 2007 and 2012, while the number of farmers and ranchers under the age of 54 decreased by 16.1 percent during the same time period.
Several programs are trying to entice veterans into the agricultural field, while the AgrAbility Project, which helps older and disabled farmers gain various forms of assistance, is helping existing farmers to plant, shepherd and harvest longer.
In Colorado, the program enables Dean Wierth to tend to his herd of goats in Park County, despite his declining balance and vision. Using an electric cart, he is able to feed and tend to the livestock living on the 40 acres he owns, plus the additional 40 acres he leases.
“It’s been a godsend. My balance was just about gone,” he tells the Denver Post about the AgrAbility program.
For 16 years, Goodwill Industries and Colorado State University have run the AgrAbility program in Colorado, helping 538 farming and ranching families during that time. Recently, the federal government kicked in $720,000 to fund the program for four more years.
Wierth, a disabled Vietnam veteran himself, is now pitching in to start a facility that will teach veterans how to farm and ranch. South Park Heritage Association and the Wounded Warrior USA Outreach Program are currently raising funds to purchase land for the program.
Robert Fetsch, co-director of the Colorado AgrAbility Project says, “Most farmers and ranchers don’t retire; they just keep on keeping on as long as they can. Our best course for now is to help them stay active and working, so they can continue to thrive, remain independent and be loyal taxpayers in their communities.”
MORE: The Label You Should Look For At Your Supermarket
In These 8 States, Students Are Going to Be Served Healthier School Lunches
A new pilot program aimed at encouraging states to purchase locally-sourced food will bring more fresh produce to school meals across eight states.
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced California, Connecticut, Michigan, New York, Oregon, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin will be able to use some of their USDA Foods allocation toward unprocessed fruits and vegetables from local farms rather than going through the USDA Foods program.
The Pilot Project for Procurement of Unprocessed Fruits and Vegetables, which falls under the Agricultural Act of 2014 (Farm Bill), was created to not only promote farm-to-table meals, but also help schools strengthen relationships with vendors, growers, wholesalers and distributors, according to the USDA.
USDA Foods comprises about 20 percent of foods served in schools, with schools using their allocation from a list of 180 items including fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, rice, low fat cheese, beans, pasta, flour and other whole grain products. Under the new program, schools will be able to substitute those allocations for fresher, local options.
“Providing pilot states with more flexibility in the use of their USDA Foods’ dollars offers states another opportunity to provide schoolchildren with additional fruits and vegetables from within their own communities,” says Kevin Concannon, USDA Under Secretary for Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services. “When schools invest food dollars into local communities, all of agriculture benefits, including local farmers, ranchers, fishermen, food processors and manufacturers.”
States were selected on criteria including a commitment to farm-to-school efforts, previous promotion initiatives, the variety and abundance of fruit and vegetable growers in the state on a per capita basis, as well as how diverse the state’s educational agencies are in size and geography.
For states like Connecticut, the program not only promotes the local economy, but also helps children form more nutritional habits of buying fresh, local produce.
“Connecticut’s participation in this federal pilot is great news for our farmers, our economy and our children,” says Governor Dannel P. Malloy. “Our state is home to thousands of farming operations responsible for billions in economic activity. By increasing the amount locally-sourced healthy food options for our students, we help lay a foundation for lifelong successful habits.”
MORE: The District Where Healthy School Lunches Are Actually Succeeding
For New Americans, These Programs Help Them Live Off the Land
The classic image of the American immigrant involves a family arriving in a big city like New York or San Francisco and working to make their way in that urban environment. But statistics show that more immigrants to the U.S. head to the Midwest where they take jobs in agriculture.
In fact, according to a report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, between 2007 and 2011, 2.1 million foreign-born people lived in rural areas. Since 1990, the Midwest and South’s Latino population has grown significantly — particularly in towns with meat packing plants. Now, more children of immigrants are seeing farming as an attractive career path.
In a two-part series for Iowa Public Radio, Amy Mayer explored this shift. Five years ago, the Boelens sold their farm in the Netherlands because they weren’t able to expand it enough to sustain it and moved to Iowa. The family of seven came to America through a program called the Startup Visa for foreign entrepreneurs who plan to invest $100,000 or more in a U.S. business. Through it, five American jobs must be created in order for the visa to be renewed. Two of the Boelen’s five children tell Mayer that one day they plan to farm the family’s land.
A more typical immigrant farmer story is that of Pacifique Simon, who was born in Congo to Burundian parents in refugee camps. The Simons received asylum in the U.S. and came to Des Moines. They didn’t have enough money to buy a farm and make use of their agricultural experience, but a program sponsored by some Iowa churches has provided them with land to work.
Simon is majoring in agricultural systems technology at Iowa State University in the hopes of making farming his life. “I want to learn some skills here and then go teach people back there so they can produce enough food to feed their own family,” Simon tells Mayer.
The largest immigrant group in the Midwest, however, are Latinos, especially Mexican-Americans. Mayer found that some of the children of Mexican immigrants are turned off by the prospect of a career in agriculture since they’ve seen their parents worn down by backbreaking labor in meatpacking plants in exchange for low wages.
Still, with so many second-generation Latinos in the Midwest, some of them are turning to farming for a career. Mayer spoke to Brian Castro, who graduated from Iowa State this year. His parents are immigrants from Mexico, and he plans to make a career out of providing better agricultural jobs for Latinos.
“There’s a huge misrepresentation of the Latino population,” Castro says, “of Latino workers in the decision-making area for agriculture, even though they are the number one, the main population of the workers.”
Melissa Garcia, whose parents also immigrated from Mexico, earned a full-ride to Iowa State and plans to study to be a large animal veterinarian. “There’s a career and a job out there waiting for me,” she tells Mayer. “And then hopefully one day I’ll reach my goal of having my own farm.”
MORE: From Field Hands to Farmers: This Program Helps Latino Immigrants Become Land Owners
Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this post referred to Iowa State University by its old name, Iowa State College of Agriculture, and stated that Brian Castro and Melissa Garcia are cousins–they are not.
How Digging in the Dirt Improves the Health of Immigrants in America
As anyone who’s traveled to a foreign country can attest, food can vary greatly from land to land.
So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that when some immigrants move to America, their health declines because they don’t have access to the fresh produce that enriched their diets in their native country.
In rural western Colorado, a unique program is solving this problem by helping immigrants learn English while they grow healthy food for their families — and it’s giving the farmer who hosts them some new notions about what crops to grow, too.
In the town of Delta, immigrants from countries including Mexico and Myanmar who sign up for ESL classes learn about a program at the Thistle Whistle Farm, located near Hotchkiss, Colo., about 45 minutes away. The immigrants help out at the farm and in doing so, get tips on how to cultivate and grow their own food. Plus, they can practice their English writing skills while taking notes on gardening techniques.
Their ESL and farming teacher, Chrys Bailey, tells Laura Palmisano of KVNF, “A lot of what has brought them to the program is that they are noticing that their families and themselves are beginning to suffer from health issues that they had not suffered from before and they are making the connection that some of their food choices are not serving them.”
Some students bring their children to Thistle Whistle to help out, filling idle summer hours with a productive and fun activity. “My kids enjoy coming to the farm and they like it because they learn about plants and how to grow some vegetables,” Yadira Rivera tells Palmisano.
The participants then take their new found gardening skills back home, planting their own vegetables, even if the only space they have is a couple of pots.
The program, which has run for three years through a grant from the Colorado Health Foundation, needs funding to continue.
Meanwhile, Mark Waltermire, the owner of Thistle Whistle Farm, has benefitted from the program too. “They’ve suggested or requested I grow a lot of vegetables and herbs I haven’t heard or tried before and I’ve been introduced to all sorts of fun, new varieties and fun new vegetables that I would otherwise not have been exposed to. So it has changed my diet too. I eat all sorts of things that I previously never knew about.”
MORE: Bringing Bhutanese Village Life to Refugees in New Hampshire
Could Olive Trees Save California’s Drought-Stricken Farmers?
The olive branch — a timeless Greek symbol of peace — could now signal a new beginning for drought-stricken California. All but completely built for total dryness, these trees are mighty impressive and may just save America’s biggest agriculture state, according to Grist.
With small, waxy leaves and the ability to sense drought and go dormant during rain-free times, olive trees are the perfect crop for California’s future – a future that soon enough, may not be able to support the crops currently growing.
That’s because California’s drought is very real — and goes far beyond a simple slowdown in rainfall. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Governor Jerry Brown has called for residents to voluntarily reduce water use by 20 percent, and a recently passed law makes wasting water illegal.
READ MORE: How Fog Could Solve California’s Drought
“[Farmers] are coming to the stark realization that, no matter what they do, there won’t be enough water to keep their trees alive,” Peter Fimrite of the San Francisco Gate writes.
Which is where olive trees come in.
Dan Flynn, executive director of the UC Davis Olive Center, told Grist that “there’s 10 times more California-grown olive oil than we had 10 years ago,” meaning an oil boom — olive oil, that is — already has legs and is off and running. That’s because the California climate is becoming nearly identical to the native habitat of olive trees: the Mediterranean. This makes them incredibly easy to farm, as they are significantly more sustainable than the almond tree, which, in many cases, they will displace.
Especially with the advent of almond milk, that nut has been in high demand. Almond trees require a lot of water, though, which makes them bad crops for the new California.
Health fanatics shouldn’t worry, though, as olive oil has been shown to be extremely good for you. Another plus is that an increased domestic supply could make for olive oil that’s both higher in quality and better tasting.
So what does all this mean?
We get tastier olive oil and become healthier as a country in the process? Yes. Most importantly, however, is that California can continue on as an agricultural powerhouse even as the climate changes.
This olive branch is bringing peace. Peace of mind, that is, that we don’t have to give up in the face of drought.
DON’T MISS: The Silver Lining To California’s Terrible Drought
When the Shovels and Pitchforks Weren’t Quite Right, These Savvy Female Farmers Designed New Versions
Ladies, does using your shovel leave you with an aching back and quivering biceps?
No, you’re not weak, as some might claim. Instead, the problem is probably that not all garden and farm tools are created equal and just about all of them are created by — and for — men.
If you’re tired of this inequality, you’re not alone.
That’s where Ann Adams and Liz Brensinger come in. Twenty-year veteran farmers, they started their company, Green Heron Tools, back in 2008 after talking to several of their female farming counterparts. Adams says, “At the farmers markets, we got together with other women producers or couples farming, and the topic of tools constantly came up.”
“Some of the tools didn’t work because they were designed for men,” Adams explained to Modern Farmer. “We saw a need for a place where women could go for tools that work for their bodies.”
Using a USDA grant, Adams and Brensinger took this idea to occupational therapy and engineering experts to help design their line of tools (which aren’t pink, by the way), which includes a wide variety of equipment useful for anything from simple gardening to serious farming. Their HERS shovel, for example, has a handle designed for smaller hands, and the tweaked design — including an enlarged blade with tread — helps women take advantage of their lower body muscles.
While not all items sold through Green Heron Tools are designed by the company, all have been tested and recommended by women.
According to Grist, the number of women in agriculture is on the rise, so there’s a growing market for female friendly farm tools. And thanks to some smart thinking, now there are implements just for them.
MORE: This Woman Fought The Tough Chicago Streets and Won