The Zero-Energy Way to Produce Food, How to Build Hope in a Poisoned City and More

 
What’s Growing On at The Plant?, onEarth
On the southwest side of the Windy City, a former meatpacking plant is now the home of The Plant, an incubator of 16 food start-ups. Tenants work together in order to be as sustainable as possible — literally, one business’s trash is another’s storage container, recipe ingredient or energy source. The long-term plan for this urban agricultural experiment? Sprout numerous Plants across the nation.
Life as a Young Athlete in Flint, Michigan, Bleacher Report
In a city under siege by its poisoned public water system, hometown heroes are using basketball to raise awareness and kids’ spirits. Kenyada Dent, a guidance counselor and high school hoops coach, uses the game as a tool to motivate his players towards opportunities outside of the struggling city; another coach, Chris McLavish, organized a charity game featuring former collegiate and NBA players that grew up in Flint. The activity on the court doesn’t make the tap water drinkable or erase the damage already inflicted, but it does bring much-needed joy to a city overcome with despair.
Truancy, Suspension Rates Drop in Greater Los Angeles Area Schools, The Chronicle of Social Change
A suspension doesn’t just make a child miss out on a day of learning, it also increases the likelihood that he’ll go to prison. Because of this, many school districts in the Golden State now implement restorative justice practices — a strategy that uses reconciliation with victims as a means of rehabilitation — instead of traditional, punitive disciplinary measures. Suspension rates and truancy filings have decreased, but racial discrepancies still exist when analyzing discipline statistics.
MORE: Suspending Students Isn’t Effective. Here’s What Schools Should Do Instead

A Second Life For Old Shipping Containers: Farms, Shops and Housing

You’ve seen them stacked six high on cargo ships pulling into port, the multi-colored mosaic of corrugated metal boxes carrying products from the other end of the ocean. Built for seamless transition between ships, trucks and trains, the standard size for these crates of steel or aluminum is usually 20-feet long. Worldwide, there’s the equivalent of 34.5 million at that length.

The container’s best asset is its near-endless reusability, a quality that’s attracted those outside the maritime industry. We at NationSwell have written before about how these boxes revitalized downtown Cleveland by lining empty parking lots with pop-up shops, how a homeless man lived in one while he cleaned up a Southern California beach, and how they could be converted into solar power cubes. Seemingly all-purpose, we decided to look into some of the other surprising ways shipping containers are being (re)used to solve social problems. Here’s three inspiring projects we found:

Urban Agriculture

The United States imported more than $100 billion in food in 2013, the bulk of which is grown overseas in places like China, India, France and Chile. Rather than having our produce shipped to us in a container, two Massachusetts entrepreneurs — Brad McNamara and Jon Friedman — converted the boxes into Freight Farms. Inside their containers, dense stacks of plants and vegetables grow hydroponically, meaning their roots reach into a mineral-rich solution rather than dirt. “Our goal was to create a system that works the same in Alaska as it does in Dallas,” Friedman tells Outside magazine. It’s all controlled by computer — the intensity of the LED grow lights, the water’s pH balance, the density of nutrients released through the irrigation system — so crops can grow year-round. “Each farm is a WiFi-enabled hotspot, so your farm gets put down, it’s plugged in and it’s immediately on the web,” McNamara tells the local public radio station. Using a mobile app, farmers can set alerts and alarms. “So if you’re at home and it’s really cold outside, your farm’s covered in snow, you don’t actually have to leave your house to go check on things,” he adds. Each container can produce the equivalent of one acre’s worth of food.

Commercial Redevelopment

Reclaiming industrial materials is often a go-to for urban redevelopment. On the Jersey Shore, shipping containers that might have once been docked in the Newark Bay ports are being converted into stores and artists studios on the beach. In Asbury Park, N.J., Eddie Catalano sells ice cream; on a boardwalk nearby, another container run by Sari Perlstein offers boutique clothing. “I actually never thought it would be possible to get all the equipment that I need in such a small space,” Catalano tells the local paper. “Lo and behold, six years later, it works. It definitely works.” He says the structures aren’t the “most attractive,” but they’re highly functional. “It handles the elements well, it handles the weather well,” he adds. During Hurricane Sandy, the big box stayed firm on the boardwalk. Perlstein’s brick-and-mortar store, on the other hand, wasn’t spared from the flooding. It’s why she moved her operation into the box on the boardwalk. Now, “if there were a horrific storm we can get a crane and move that thing off. We can take it away,” she says. “That is a plus. Because if it was a building again, you’d just wave it goodbye.”

Homes for the Homeless

Hardy structures, watertight and designed not to rust, shipping containers have been proposed as a solution to our housing crunch. In Myrtle Beach, S.C., the Veterans Housing Development, a recently founded nonprofit, is refurbishing shipping containers into a permanent place for homeless veterans to stay. “Anyone notices and sees homeless veterans on street corners and in tent cities around the Horry County area, and around the country. … I have a passion for this because I hate seeing veterans out there on the streets,” Brad Jordan, a disabled veteran and the nonprofit’s executive director, tells The State. “There’s a lot of funding available for veterans housing, but not a lot of housing available.” The group recently finished their first one-bedroom home and displayed it at a fundraiser. Their ultimate goal is to create a gated village somewhere in town, “a secure and safe environment with programs that are going to assist the veterans,” Jordan adds. “If we build 40 [homes], there would be 40 filled tomorrow. The need is there.”

Is It Possible to Grow Something on Every Rooftop?

Urban farming innovations are cropping up throughout the country, but getting more people to grow their own greens is trickier than you think. That’s because personal farms take time, a lot of care and the right weather conditions.

But the California-based startup CityBlooms is looking to eliminate the fuss over urban agriculture and get more city-dwellers on board through its growbots — lightweight, hydroponic greenhouses that can fit into any odd-shaped rooftop or space. The modular unit uses cloud technology, so users can track their growth and control conditions such as irrigation, humidity and plant nutrition, Fast Company reports.

Aside from is ability to produce a large quantity of produce — think: tons of lettuce, not a baby tomato here and there — the growbots technology is incredibly mobile compared to other greenhouses. For example, some traditional systems may weight 50 pounds per square foot, whereas growbots are only between 15 to 17 pounds per square foot, making it much easier to outfit any rooftop.

“The modularity also gives us the ability to scale very easily,” says Nick Halmos, founder and CEO of Cityblooms.  “So we can size a farming installation appropriately to the demands and consumption patterns and profiles of the community that the farm is built to serve.”

CityBlooms’ technology also protects produce from exposure to air pollution and lead — which, as research has shown, is a problem with urban farming. A recent Cornell University study found unsafe levels of lead in nearly half of root vegetables and problems with air pollution, but Cityblooms’ system seals off the plants in a greenhouse and uses recirculated water.

The company contends it’s not trying to replace traditional farming, but contends that this version of farming could reduce food waste and keep produce closer to urban centers, while also freeing up farmland for other crops. The global population is anticipated to hit 9 billion by 2050, which means farmers will need to produce 70 percent more food while facing drought conditions and other costs, as Fast Company points out. As more city dwellers embrace urban farming, innovations like growbots could help alleviate some of that burden.

“We’ve tried to chart a course with our development that gives flexibility and ease of installation so we can get farming happening now,” Halmos says. “We’ve all seen the pictures of rooftop skyscrapers that grow food, and that’s a wonderful goal, but is that going to happen within the next 50 to 60 years? Maybe not. We’ve really been trying to identify the solutions that get us moving in the right direction.”

MORE: No Soil? Or Sun? This Urban Farm is Raising Fresh Food in a Whole New Way

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This App Helps Urban Farmers Get Their Crops Growing

Across the country, urban farms are cropping up and making a difference in communities where food deserts have persisted. The idea is simple, but execution can be tricky.

Which is why a new app is aiming to help expedite the process by identifying potential areas to set up anything from growing vegetables to farming bee hives. Urb.ag is a mobile app developed by Fathom Information Design and was first developed for Boston after the city passed legislation allowing commercial urban farming in December 2013.

While Article 89, the new zoning policy, was heralded as a way to open up the city for commercial farming, Fathom designer Terrence Fradet recognized that understanding the policy was going to be difficult for most people who might want to start a farm. With support from the city, the Boston Redevelopment Authority, the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic and funding from the Knight Foundation’s Knight Prototype Fund, Fathom launched the app over the summer.

Urb.ag, which derives from urban agriculture, maps out the process of how to obtain zoning permits, submit necessary applications and explains the dense, municipal codes that are required to launch such a business. A user simply enters the Boston address into the app to begin the process, which then prompts a series of questions about whether you want to farm on the ground or roof, use hydroponics or conventional planting, etc. After customizing an ideal farm, the app clues you into the next steps on which government body to obtain permits from and where to apply.

“The way that zoning legislation works, you have different divisions, and within that there are subdistricts, and within that there are parcels,” a data lead on the project Alex Geller tells Fast Company. “You really quickly fall into a rabbit hole.”

Urb.ag, on the other hand, hones in on the location of where someone might want to start a farm and then applies the exact codes and what is required of the new law. For food deserts and other communities facing health problems, simplifying the process for urban farming could be a solution they’re seeking.

“You hear a lot of talk about food deserts and you hear a lot of talk about the obesity epidemic, and it all falls back on the idea that healthy food is less accessible for certain sectors of the population,” Geller tells Boston magazine. “I think what’s so cool about urban agriculture is in a city, where you have a coalescence of different populations, that seems like a point where it’s most especially important to make healthy food and local food accessible at a reasonable price.”

While the app is only available in Boston, it has potential to shape urban farming elsewhere and help government create better connections with citizens looking to transform urban agriculture.

MORE: No Soil? Or Sun? This Urban Farm is Raising Fresh Food in a Whole New Way

The Urban Farm That Is Soil-Free and Uses Virtually No Water

Futuristic farms are not such a fantasy anymore, with dozens of projects cropping up around the country designing solutions to urban farming. The only problem? The costly price tag that comes with those initiatives.
Which is why CityFarm, born out of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, is aiming to create a soil-free urban farming system that may be economically feasible for cities — regardless of locale. The 60-square-foot farm grows lettuce, tomatoes and herbs in a windowless room inside MIT’s Media Lab, Fast Company reports.
With no soil and the help of artificial light, the farm produces crops with as much as 90 percent less water than traditional methods.

“It’s essentially like a big, clear plastic box, about 7-feet wide by 30-feet long,” Caleb Harper, a research scientist leading the project, tells Fast Company. “Inside of that box, I have pre-made weather. I monitor everything,”

The system uses both hydroponic (water) and aeroponic (air or mist environment) soil-free processes to grow and has produced crops three to four times more quickly than the normal growth process. Using a 30-day cycle, CityFarm has produced food for 300 people.

“No one has proven an economically viable model for these kind of plant environments,” says Harper. “What I’m trying to do is kind of be the Linux for these environments — the person that creates the common language for this new area of food production.”

Harper believes his methodology could eventually reduce agricultural consumption of water by 98 percent and eliminate the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers, double nutrient densities and reduce energy use to grow crops.

Harper first became interested in the idea after visiting Japan following the Fukushima disaster in 2011, prompting him to think about how cities could produce food without fear of contamination. Through CityFarm, Harper is developing a “plant operating system software” and looking for ways to make the process economically feasible for more cities.

CityFarm is working with Detroit to open the first off-campus version and continues plans to expand the MIT location vertically.

MORE: No Soil? Or Sun? This Urban Farm is Raising Fresh Food in a Whole New Way

The Latest Place to Grow Greens

While urban farms are gaining popularity in cities across the country, some metropolitans are taking them to new heights. Literally.
Instead of planting gardens on the ground, some groups are utilizing rooftops to grow food to feed customers, students and the homeless.
One such urban rooftop farm is located at Roberta’s Pizza in New York City. Located in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood, the restaurant has two small rooftop greenhouse facilities that produce 20 percent of the ingredients the restaurant uses throughout its multiple locations. And on the west coast, you’ll find Project Open Hand in San Francisco. This nonprofit uses its rooftop greenhouse to produce healthy meals for the sick and elderly. All of the herbs and greens are grown in the city headquarters, prepared by the chefs and then distributed across the city.
Schools are also a popular destination for rooftop farms. At George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., a greenhouse sits atop the school’s Exploratory Hall. As part of the Department of Environmental Science and Policy, the university’s greenhouse has three rooms — each paralleling a different climate. It has also partnered with the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and the university’s Potomac Heights’ vegetable garden, which feeds the homeless.
Chicago features a few different schools taking a unique approach to rooftop farming. The University of Chicago’s greenhouse sits atop the Donnelley Biological Science Learning Center.  Boasting 7,500 square feet of growing space, a portion of it is also used for drug research.
There’s also a local high school getting involved in the sky-high action. The Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos High School in Chicago has a hydroponic greenhouse on its roof. Since the school bases its curriculum on social transformation, it views social ecology and urban agriculture as vital components. So, the school uses its greenhouse to grow food for the students, as well as it serving as an educational tool.
And so far it’s working. For one student Jaleen Starling, the opportunity to work in the garden was life changing or at least lifestyle changing.
“When we get taught something, it’s never just for us to learn,” she tells New Communities. “It’s something for us to connect to. … Until I came to this school, I didn’t pay attention to food.”
So while these farms may be high up, they’re starting a movement on the ground.
To find more urban rooftop farms growing across the country, click here.
MORE: How This Coal Capital is Going Solar

One in Five Baltimore Residents Lives in a Food Desert. These Neighbors Are Growing Their Own Produce

Boone St. Farm operates on two vacant plots in the center of East Baltimore Midway, one of dozens of neighborhoods in Baltimore identified as “food deserts.” Cheryl Carmona adopted the land in 2010 with two goals — that it serves as an urban farm that grows and provides fresh produce for its neighbors, and as a community garden where residents can learn about growing their own food.
Dozens of neighbors have pitched in and, four years later, Boone St. Farm has grown thousands of pounds of affordable produce. Residents on food stamps pay only $5-10 a bag. The community plots are used for gardening workshops and offer classes in nutrition to students at the nearby public school. As Boone St. Farm enters its fourth season, Carmona plans to include local cleanup initiatives and other projects aimed at making the farm an essential part of the neighborhood. 
 
 

No Soil? Or Sun? This Urban Farm is Raising Fresh Food in a Whole New Way

With no natural dirt or sunlight, an abandoned brewery may be the most unlikely spot for a farm producing kale and tilapia. But with a little help from technology, St Paul, Minnesota has turned a shuttered industrial space into a source for fresh produce and seafood.
The food-based urban renewal project is spearheaded by local company Urban Organics, which focuses on using an aquaponics system — where fish and plants help each other grow. The ideas is that aquaculture — like fish or shrimp — uses water from hydroponics, or cultivating plants in water, for mutually beneficial agriculture.
In East St. Paul, the local Hamm’s Brewery has long been a local landmark, once symbolizing the neighborhood’s livelihood before it closed in 1997. The shuttering left many without jobs in an area that was in much need of urban renewal.
MORE: What’s ‘the Country’s Best Smart Growth Project’? You’ll Be Surprised

“Hamm’s and 3M provided most of the jobs in East St. Paul, and they shut down within a few years of each other,” said Dave Haider, an Urban Organics cofounder who runs day-to-day operations.

With the help of $300,000 in grants and loans from the city of St. Paul, as well as private backers, Hamm’s is once again giving the community something to boast about.

The aquaponics technology was purchased from Pentair (PAES), a Swiss-based multibillion dollar company that makes industrial fluid-control systems. In three tiers, plants float atop polystrene rafts in plastic troughs while roots drip down into the fishwater — all of this stacked atop 18-foot-high racks illuminated by bright lights.

The leafy greens are electric in color, benefiting from the aquaponics system that uses nutrient-filled wastewater (from four 3,500-gallon tanks stocked with tilapia) to irrigate and fertilize the plants before redirecting it back to the fish as clean water. The closed-loop system may be the largest indoor facility such as this in the country, according to Fast Company.

Without using any soil, the sophisticated system uses about 25 percent of the water needed to grow greens conventionally while using 40 percent less energy than most office buildings. The system can produce about 75 fish a week but the plan is to add more tanks to increase production to 150,000 pounds of fish and 720,000 pounds of greens annually. Produce is available to local consumers within 24 hours of harvest.

The ambitious project took two years to build before its launch this past April. Urban Organics’s first harvest of tilapia was delivered in early April to 20 Lunds & Byerly’s locations, a local grocery store chain.

The high-tech farm is a test case for this new type of urban farming, with hopes that it will serve as a model for other places around the country. Pentair already serves customers in North and South America, Scandinavia, Asia and Saudi Arabia. Randy Hogan, Pentair’s chairman and CEO, said they are now working with entrepreneurs in Kansas City and Chicago.

Though Urban Organics employs only a handful of people, the group is collaborating with a local restaurant, craft brewer, and a distiller to grown some of their botanicals. Urban Organics co-founder Fred Haberman said expectations are high, but the local reaction to seeing a “symbol of decay turned into an asset” is an empowering reason to continue serving the community.

From Garbage to Greens: How This D.C. Lot Plans To Make History

The vacant lot tucked away in the District of Columbia’s Anacostia community has long been a wasteland for the Department of Parks and Recreation and the Department of Transportation — serving as a storage facility and a temporary space for leaf collection, respectively.
More recently, construction companies have taken to using the space for illegal dumping, painting a picture of desertion in a struggling neighborhood. But by early next year, city officials are expecting the overgrown area to be transformed.
Into what, you’re probably asking? Impressively, the wasteland is going to be turned into the home of the world’s largest urban greenhouse.
Washington D.C.’s Department of General Services and the Anacostia Economic Development Corporation have teamed up with BrightFarms, a New York-based firm that builds and manages greenhouses and rooftop farms across the country. (BrightFarms has spearheaded urban greenhouses and rooftop farms in New York, Chicago, St. Paul, Minn., and St. Louis, Mo., among others.)
Authorities expect the 100,000 square-foot greenhouse to produce 1 million pounds of produce — such as tomatoes, leafy greens and herbs — to be sold at 30 Giant grocery stores throughout the greater Washington, D.C. area, according to the National Journal.
The Anacostia community itself, which grapples with high unemployment and crime as well as a lack of fresh-food options, will also benefit from the new project. Some of the greenhouse produce will be sold to local merchants at a subsidized rate while also providing between 20 and 25 new permanent jobs as well as 100 construction jobs, according to BrightFarms.
MORE: From Windowsills to Rooftops, Check Out the Rise of Urban Farming

“We can make a meaningful impact on the food supply chain and help improve it, lessen the environmental impact, and improve the health, the safety, and the quality of our produce that’s available,” said Toby Tiktinsky, BrightFarms’ director of business development.

The transformed space will also serve as a classroom for students to learn about sustainable farming and healthy eating.

Construction is expected to start late this summer and take up to five months to complete, turning this community blight into a neighborhood bright spot.

From the Battlefield to the Farm: How Two Iraq War Vets Found Their Passion as Foodies

Steve Smith and James Jeffers, both 38, first met serving with the United States Army at Fort Hood, Texas, in the tense years after the 9/11 attacks. They became fast friends, but when they received different assignments, they set off on their separate ways. Over the years, their paths would diverge and cross, until eventually the two friends would come together back home in Texas and forge an unexpected business partnership — as farmers. The two veterans had a lot of healing to do after their tours in the Middle East, and they found comfort, sustenance and a revived sense of serving their community by digging their hands into the dirt around their homes in a Dallas suburb.
The first time Smith and Jeffers reconnected, it was pure coincidence. Smith had briefly left the Army before being recalled in 2005 to serve as part of a security force at Camp Buehring, a staging base in Kuwait for soldiers headed north into Iraq. Smith accompanied convoys into that country. Jeffers, meanwhile, had made the Army his career; a natural leader, he had risen quickly to the rank of sergeant first class. He ended up at the same base in Kuwait, before heading into Iraq. On the last night of Smith’s tour, he happened to go to the gym, where he looked up and spotted Jeffers. The two men pledged to do a better job of staying in touch before parting ways again.
Both Smith and Jeffers served two tours in the Middle East, but Smith says his friend had a tougher time by far. Jeffers served his second tour in Baghdad on Haifa Street, the contentious two-mile line between the Sunni and Shiite populations in the city. The U.S. Army and the Iraqi National Guard patrolled the median, constantly trying to maintain order in an area that had become known as “Grenade Alley.” “I loved what I did,” Jeffers says. “I loved being in the Army and I was good at it.”
But the experience left him scarred. While on patrol he encountered car bombs, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), rocket-propelled grenade attacks and firefights with insurgents. Shrapnel scarred more than half his body and numerous concussions led to an eventual diagnosis of traumatic brain injury (TBI). His cognitive functions were becoming clouded. Jeffers says he realized he needed help after he got back stateside and began forgetting how to do simple, everyday tasks like reading or making coffee. He says he’d forget to put coffee grounds in the machine one day and then fail to put water in the reservoir the next — he broke three coffee makers. After being diagnosed with TBI, he was faced with a decision: either stay in the Army and likely be relegated to a desk job, or leave it for an uncertain future. Rated at 100 percent disability, Jeffers reluctantly chose to leave the Army he loved.
He sought out his old buddy Smith, who was working in construction, and they reconnected. He told Smith he couldn’t just sit around and collect his disability check. Over in Iraq, Jeffers had done more than fight battles; he had built up communities and provided basic services to people who needed them. “‘I have to have a purpose,’ he said,” Smith recalls. The two friends came up with an idea to start a green home-renovation business in Dallas, but bad luck struck again as the recession hit and the housing market slowed.
Smith was also dealing with his own health issues. He had developed a rainbow of debilitating food allergies, including lactose intolerance, while in the Army, and he was trying to mitigate the symptoms through lifestyle changes — namely by eating a totally organic diet. Smith plowed the yard around his Oak Cliff, Texas, home, and he and his family began growing their own food.
Inspired by his friend, Jeffers decided to tear up his own yard and go organic, too. It turned out that gardening was just the kind of work he needed. “I fell in love with it immediately,” Jeffers says. “It was peaceful, quiet and I was working on my own.” Reading was recommended as therapy for his TBI, and he found himself voraciously reading organic gardening books.
The two men also began holding regular evening get-togethers with their neighbors, which they called “firepit nights,” Smith says. Oak Cliff is an eclectic neighborhood near downtown Dallas, a mix of pre-World War II homes and mid-century moderns, and a mix of residents that include lawyers and chefs, carpenters, brewmasters and artists. Gathered around the fire, the guys would hold “cool brainstorming sessions,” Smith says, “where the energy of the fire and maybe the beer” fed dreams and plans.
It was around the firepit that Smith and Jeffers came up with an enduring plan. They wanted to share their enthusiasm for gardening and their passion for fresh, locally produced food with a wider audience. So they decided to try to scale up their home growing efforts and launch a real urban farm. They used every square inch of their own land for planting, and supplemented it with community gardens around town, friends’ yards and rooftop planters — all told, about an acre of harvestable land, growing Swiss chard, tomatoes and kale. Smith and Jeffers went through a training program with the Farmer Veteran Coalition, a national program that helps veterans launch new careers in agriculture. They toured small-scale farms run by vets in other parts of the country to learn what works and what doesn’t.
Smith and Jeffers’ vegetable beds thrived. They sold their freshly harvested crops to local groceries and restaurants. They wanted their operation to have as small an environmental footprint as possible, so they strove to make it a closed-loop system, selling their produce to restaurants, then in turn taking the restaurants’ biodegradable waste to use as compost and fuel oil. They called their new venture Eat the Yard.
Eat the Yard is still a small operation, and its long-term profitability remains a question mark, but its founders have big dreams. The food movement is just taking hold in Dallas, and Smith and Jeffers are planning to ride the wave. A local developer, Brian Bergersen, and his partners have undertaken a $65 million renovation of the cityʼs derelict Farmers Market. Taking inspiration from Seattleʼs iconic Pike Place Market, they plan to turn the Dallas location into a food and community center complete with market stands, residential housing, a beer garden and restaurants. Smith and Jeffers have met with Bergersen and have plans to include a two-acre urban farm as part of the project. They say the farm will not only produce vegetables, but will also serve as a “learning farm” for Dallas schoolchildren, many of whom live in the low-income neighborhoods nearby. “If itʼs not on a cheeseburger from McDonaldʼs, they donʼt know what it is,” Smith says, but the Eat the Yard farm will teach kids how to grow fresh food and what it tastes like.
They also want the farm to serve as a resource for other veterans who are struggling to make the transition back into civilian life. Smith says he wants them to learn what gardening can do for them — what he calls “dirt therapy.” The idea is to bring other vets on the farm and teach them the ropes, which will eventually allow them to build their own farms — along with other veteran outreach networks — in their own communities.
“The Army has a culture of passing on knowledge,” Jeffers says. “A tradition that before you leave you should bestow what you know on the next generation. Itʼs the same thing with farming.” Passing on their knowledge is a way to serve their community, and creating a learning farm, Smiths adds, “is a way to share the gospel with everybody.”
Smith still works full time in construction, but Jeffers spends his days on the farm. “The biggest thing for me is that itʼs meaningful work. I needed that,” he says. “I am very passionate about this and without this I would be a lot worse off.” He has persistent memory problems and occasional vertigo. But being out in the garden, where there is always something to do, no matter the season, has been the catalyst that helped heal his friend, Smith says. “It has done wonders for me,” Jeffers says. “For veterans, no one needs to stamp them ʻBroken. Needs Fixing.ʼ They need something to do. They need to continue their service.”