Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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October 26, 2008

Big Idea: Seeds of change
http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081026/NEW
S/81025028&template=printart
By Sally Pollak, Free Press Staff Writer

Martin Kemple stood before a group of high school students in a greenhouse
at a river-bottom farm and gained their attention with a hands-on
demonstration.

“Here’s how you plant a seed!” he announced with gusto. “You drop
it! You pat it! You say, ‘Thank you, Earth.’ This is the essence of —
the reality of — propagating life.”

The U-32 students were planting flats of tatsoi, an Asian salad green, last
week at a farm owned and operated by Food Works at Two Rivers Center. Apart
from propagating life, students said they were nurturing an interest in
gardening, farming and having fun.

“Martin’s cool,” said Taylor Lawson, 15. “He’s taught me how to
plant a lot of stuff. It’s really fun and cool to get my hands dirty.”

Farming, food access and nutrition education come together at Food Works, a
Montpelier-based nonprofit whose programs are bound by a common purpose: To
provide local, healthy food to people who otherwise might not have access
to it. Beyond getting central Vermont’s farm bounty to low-income and
under-served people, Food Works is committed to teaching children and
adults how to grow, prepare and preserve garden vegetables.

In the words of Joseph Kiefer, 54, who co-founded the organization with
Kemple, Food Works is: Localvore Meets the Food Shelf.

“Part of our message is a mindfulness that everyone needs a place at the
table,” Kiefer said. “It’s the time we’re living in right now:
People are realizing we do have a food crisis, an environmental crisis and
an economic crisis. We need to look within ourselves and we need to look
within our community to strengthen and rebuild our food system. And rebuild
one that’s more about food justice.”

It is this commitment — spreading the local food wealth — that is the
core of Food Works’ philosophy and efforts. It achieves this in a variety
of ways, including an education component that teaches about nutritional
self-sufficiency and aims to strengthen people’s connections to the land,
to farmers, to the source of their food.

“If you teach people how to grow and prepare their own food,” Kemple
said, “they’ll eat for a lifetime.”

Food Works belongs to a movement that is gaining momentum among people
involved in food issues, from growing to distribution, according to Amy
Trubek, author of “The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir”
and assistant professor of nutrition and food sciences at the University of
Vermont.

“I think that more and more people involved in certain types of advocacy
about food are starting to connect the dots in their work, imagining not
just solving food security issues but connecting food security to growing
healthy local food, and connecting a desire for local foods to our
inequitable distribution system,” Trubek wrote in an e-mail.

“This is exciting but complicated work, demanding new strategies of
action all along the food chain. Food Works has been cutting edge in doing
such work.”

The Chittenden Emergency Food Shelf in Burlington receives about 10,000
pounds of produce a year from farms in the Food Works network, through a
partnership with the Vermont Foodbank in Barre.

“They’ve taken hunger relief a step further, to say, ‘We can do this
if we work together,’” said Rob Meehan, executive director of the food
shelf. “We can grow the stuff locally. We can get it out. We can preserve
it. We can use it all during the year and you can be low-income and enjoy
it, too. You’ve got to salute them from my desk.”

Dirt, not desks

Desks don’t seem to be a big part of the work life of Kemple, 47, who 25
years ago was working in rural development in Africa when he came to
understand that Africans had something to teach him about agriculture and
connection to the land.

“We’re in the process of losing it here,” Kemple said. “We should
be learning more from them about our ties to the land.” Kemple settled in
Vermont, where he wrote an unpublished travelogue, “Black into White,”
about his two years in Africa.

He met Kiefer, an upstate New York farm boy who was a co-founder of the
Vermont Foodbank. Their interests — small-scale sustainable farming,
hunger prevention and food/nutrition education — merged, and together
they founded Food Works in 1987.

“When I met Joseph and we started this work, I knew that it was the
future for me and the country and the world,” Kemple said. “To change
the way we define growth from being this high-tech, industrial means that
takes from the earth to be being a more human-scaled, technologically
appropriate approach that gives back to the earth — honors the earth.”

The earth is being honored in a decidedly low-tech way at the Two Rivers
Center, a 19-acre pitch of land with a dilapidated farmhouse on the edge of
Montpelier, where the Winooski River and Stevens Branch come together. On
the historic property, once owned by Revolutionary War soldier and
Montpelier founding father Col. Jacob Davis, Food Works is building a
center for its operations.

“Saving history is a labor of love,” Kiefer said the other day.

He was looking at the faded gray 1836 farmhouse, envisioning it in bright
yellow at the completion of its multimillion-dollar renovation.

Within the next couple of years, a demonstration/educational kitchen will
be on site, and a “local-icious cafe,” to use Kemple’s phrase. People
will come for nutrition workshops, cooking demonstrations and to learn
about seasonal cooking. Winter produce storage will move from a Montpelier
church attic to a root cellar at the farm.

Behind the house, the river-bottom land is under cultivation. Farm manager
Jen Lloyd grows nine crops and coordinates a farming network with other
regional farmers. Together, they grow about 60,000 pounds of produce for
distribution through the Vermont Foodbank.

“We knew we couldn’t grow it all here,” Lloyd said. “So we brought
in a couple more farms, and that was the accidental birth of the Foodbank
farming network.”

Little localvores

An open-air kitchen and pavilion is the site of a summer camp for children,
Gardens for Learning, one of 15 camps in the state. It is designed in
particular for children who receive free or reduced-price school lunches.
Hand-painted peace banners hang above the summer kitchen. Raised garden
beds in the shape of continents yield flowers and vegetables.

“This to me is the heart of our program,” Kemple said. “We’re
meeting the needs of childhood hunger in summer months. And growing the
next generation of localvores.”

The camp day begins with a breakfast feast, which counselor Danielle Pipher
said is eaten by children and parents at drop-off. “It’s a really cool
part of the day,” she said.

Campers enjoy home-baked breads, yogurt, fruit, granola and more. A focus
of the day is on growing food: planting, harvesting, weeding and watering.
The kids do the garden work and explore agricultural themes through art,
music and nature programs. The last two hours of the day are spent cooking
and eating — preparing “elaborate meals” in the outdoor kitchen,
Pipher said.

These include West African stews, sushi, crepes and stir fries. “It
really is about them cooking it,” she said. “The impact of the kids
cooking and eating what they cooked significantly changed their eating
habits.”

Joe Buley, an East Montpelier vegetable farmer, sells produce to Food Works
for its Farm to Table program — which gets local produce to people at
senior centers, mental health programs, schools and other social-service
agencies.

Buley, a longtime chef, recently left his teaching job at NECI to farm
fulltime. Food Works gave him a market when he started farming.

“It allowed me to start selling everything I grew the first couple years
just to them,” he said. “I didn’t have to worry about marketing; I
didn’t have to worry about distribution.”

He sees double good in a grower getting fair market value for his product
and ensuring fresh, high quality produce gets to under-served populations.

“What I see us doing with our food system right now is going back to what
I call a European model,” Buley said. “Small growers producing on a
small scale and selling locally.”

At the Montpelier farm the other day, with the sound of traffic coming off
the Barre-Montpelier Road, Kemple pointed out one of Food Works’ newest
projects: Producing charcoal for the soil, a supplement that is said to
enhance the fertility of the earth by holding in its nutrients.

Wood is stacked near a yurt to be charred in an upside-down metal can. The
can is framed by a larger metal barrel, within which a wood fire is lit and
burns. The makeshift kiln produces a pot of charred sticks, which are
pulverized the old-fashioned way: smashing. The charcoal is added to the
soil.

Not far from the woodpile, two autumn flower beds represent a loose
experiment that speaks to the power of the charcoal.

The bed whose soil contains no charcoal is full of brittle stalks and brown
leaves. In another raised bed, where the soil is mixed with charcoal, the
orange flowers and full foliage of calendula brighten a gray fall day.

Kemple has afternoon plans to teach a group of students how to make salve
from calendula flowers. In preparation, he leans over the blooms in a kind
of silent tribute, honoring the flowers and seeking permission to pick
them.

Moments later, he breaks the quiet — and the flowers from their stems.

“Can’t you feel it?” Kemple says. “They’re saying ‘Take
me.’”

Thank you, he says to the plants. “I love you. I’m glad to be here.”

Contact Sally Pollak at spollak@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com or 660-1859.
Additional Facts
FOOD WORKS AT TWO RIVERS CENTER

• WHAT: Food Works at Two Rivers Center, 64 Main St., Montpelier, is a
nonprofit with an annual budget of approximately $400,000, co-founder
Joseph Kiefer said.
• FUNDING: Its funding sources are foundations, private donations, grants
and fees for services, including educational workshops and selling
guidebooks written by the organization (the top seller is “Digging
Deeper,” about designing school and community gardens).
• GOALS: Food Works has raised more than half of its $2.8 million capital
goal for construction and renovation of its 19-acre farm and center on the
edge of Montpelier, at the confluence of the Winooski River and Stevens
Branch
• INFORMATION: 223-1515; 800-310-1515; info@tworiverscenter.org;
www.tworiverscenter.org 
Joseph Kiefer of Food Works at Two Rivers Center