Back to the farm: returning to our roots

By Maggie Beidelman

You've seen them. Row after row of exposed skin, voluptuous shapes rudely displayed under fluorescent lights and periodically misted so they appear enticing, even fresh. Many of them have been taken from their mother before it was time, left to mature alone, without proper nutrition. You've seen this produce, these mounds of fruits and vegetables at the grocery store. But do you know where it comes from?

The produce we find in the supermarket travels an average of 1,500 miles to get there. Our food industry expends 19 percent of the total fossil fuel used in the United States -- about the same percent used to fuel cars. Born on large-scale commercial farms, much of this produce is the product of pesticides and preservatives, frequently packaged in non-biodegradable materials, often produced by underpaid farm workers.

But our food system is changing. The number of small organic farms practicing sustainable agriculture, like Full Circle Farm, has grown.

Right here at Santa Clara, a brand new on-campus student garden, created and maintained with an avid dedication to sustainable farming, is beginning to bloom.

Though the industrial agriculture system of today is extraordinarily productive, it is failing because of climate change, soil depletion and the waste of excess energy, according to the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at University of California, Santa Cruz. Already this year, the southwest part of Central Valley has been de-irrigated due to lack of water, and statewide our water supply is at about 60 percent of normal.

California isn't the only locale involved. In the White House, the "Eat the View" campaign aims to get a large Victory Garden planted on the front lawn to supply the first family's kitchen.

More than simply a water conservation effort, sustainable agriculture is a movement. It aims to replenish soil, forgo or reduce the use of pesticides and nonrenewable resources like fossil fuels, improve nutrition and get fair wages for farm workers. "Organic" is a term often used to describe the food it produces. In essence, sustainable agriculture combines the original farming practices of our ancestors with modern technology, bringing the farm closer to the consumer than it has been in years.

Surrounded by suburban Sunnyvale, between the New Concept Chinese School and Norman Drive, where one-story houses cower under the Santa Cruz Mountains, lies 11 acres of school district property with not a single building on it. This land is Full Circle Farm, a one-year-old who's already teaching local schoolkids about where their food comes from and the importance of farming.

As the sun sets, the student garden on the far west side of the farm is the first to fall to dusk. Neat rows of garlic and lettuce plants parallel the wire fence boundary that separates suburban from rural, where handmade signs declare the garden rules: "Always Do Your Best" and "Do Not Run."

Due northwest of the student garden is a plot of tilled soil, the beginnings of the tree orchard -- now a mere twinkle in the farmer's eye. Here, the only full-time Full Circle farmer, Meghan Cole, plans for the future. Hands on her overalled hips and braids tucked into her sun-blanched baseball cap, Cole has an honest blue-eyed gaze that seizes a listener's interest. "It's sad how it's such a preposterous idea that there could be a farm in the middle of a residential area," she says, scanning the cover crop which replenishes nutrients in the farm's soil and readies it for planting.

Full Circle is the result of the neighborhood's proposal to do something different with the Santa Clara Unified School District land that in the 1950s held a plum orchard, then athletics facilities for the former Peterson High School and finally a makeshift open space for picnics and games of catch for the next 30 years -- until now.

Six years ago, Cole learned how to grow food for herself and was astounded at the vigor she felt because of the healthy change in her diet. "I was 22 years old when I made that connection with food. Some people never make that connection," she mused. That's the goal of Full Circle Farm -- to reunite youth with the land, educating schoolchildren who eat lunch within cemented cafeteria walls so that when they grow up to be the future, they will not only know the difference between a sweet potato and a yam, but they will know how to grow them, too.

As part of the national Farm to School movement, Full Circle works with the Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF), a statewide organization which fosters family-scale agriculture, to provide three elementary schools with monthly boxes of produce. On the farm itself, which has been funded by grants and donations, students participate in the planting, harvesting and vending of the food. Though this is the first production year, Full Circle plans to contribute 30 percent of their produce to reach all 14,000 schoolchildren in the district's cafeterias, creating salad bars with fresh greens and veggies at every school.

"You don't find big spaces of land like this except for two places: schools and churchyards," said Cole. "Hopefully this is a model for more projects that will emerge in other communities. There's definitely a need for it."

Things are going to shift, professes agroecologist Patrick Archie from his second-story office in a South Bay Victorian house, home of the Environmental Studies Institute at Santa Clara.

Beneath the office window, four-inch green sprouts rising from rich soil overlook the tear-streaked adobe buildings of the university. Miserable looking twenty-somethings trudge by in soaked sweatshirts and sloshing shoes, cursing the stormy weather, while inside, Archie blesses the much-needed rain. "Water's going to become more expensive," Archie says. "It's going to get more difficult."

As a third year of drought persists, California's water supply has significantly shrunk. Officials from the Central Valley Project, which provides most of the water for the Central Valley, the Bay Area and much of the state of California -- including 3 million acres of farmland -- announced a "zero allocation" to farmers on Feb. 20. This means that farmers who depend on this federally-rationed supply will have to look elsewhere for water this year, unless an unusual amount of rain ups that percentage. In comparison, farmers who depend on the State Water Project have been allocated 15 percent of the normal water supply, accounting for 600,000 acres of farm land.

But the lack of water is not quite as big a concern for farmers practicing sustainable agriculture. Small farms that grow high-value crops like organic fruits and vegetables make enough profit to pay for water conservation technology like drip-line irrigation on a small scale. But on large corporate farms, which produce more than 95 percent of the United States' food, water conservation is pricier and, at times, unrealistic.

Most large farms are monoculture, or single crop, farms, so the soil isn't naturally replenished like it is on their small polyculture farm counterparts, which also store carbon in the soil better, reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Unhealthy soil is like a dry sponge, causing more water runoff. "The water use issue will become more important with global warming, with the more common droughts that we're experiencing," says Archie. "But the small farm sector is growing."

Archie is interrupted by a colleague's curiosity about what he's bringing to the Phylum Feast that evening. With a reply of "crickets," Archie returns to his homily on sustainable agriculture.

"The average age of a farmer is 62 or 63 years old," Archie reflects. Scrunching his eyebrows inward in careful thought, he says, "The trend is that farms are disappearing. Farmers are going extinct in this country." Despite this concern, Archie believes that the movement toward sustainable agriculture is starting to reverse that trend. "The organic sector is the only sector of agriculture that is actually growing. Most agriculture in the country is basically stagnant, and organics have been growing at about a 20 percent rate a year," he says.

In fact, according to the United States Department of Agriculture's 2007 census, which was released in February of this year, the number of small farms that make sales of less than $1,000 and contribute mainly to local farmers markets jumped from 580,000 in 2002 to 700,000.

Archie believes that the next phase in sustainable agriculture will be the provision of food for local institutions -- specifically, schools. With a hopeful grin, he reflects on CAFF's Farm to School program. "The idea is to improve the nutrition of kids, to reconnect kids with where their food comes from and to create markets for local farms. We've got direct sales, but if people could crack into institutional sales...," Archie muses, scratching his head in contemplation.

The Mountain View Farmers Market does what all Bay Area farmers markets do: finds a strip of pavement, sets up camp for the morning and reconnects the urban-suburban world with the land of our ancestors via local agriculture.

Here, suburbanites bargain. Sellers weigh, package and grin. Shoppers weave between strollers and bulging reusable Trader Joe's grocery bags to get to the blood red oranges that are sold at $1 for 2 pounds. Here, in the wholesome chaos of an early weekend morning, tomatoes are a healthy red, and soft yellow pomellos are mistaken for one-finger bowling balls.

When you choose a local farmers market over a corporate grocery store to buy your food, you are saving resources and contributing to the economy of local agriculture, the primary supporter of sustainable food systems.

Farmers markets are energy savers. According to a 2008 study at Cornell University, a head of iceberg lettuce provides 110 calories, but irrigating the lettuce in California takes 750 calories of fossil energy and shipping it to New York another 4,000 calories of energy per head. On the other hand, locally-grown cabbage you buy at a farmers market requires only 400 calories for the process.

Whether for nutrition, the environment or otherwise, American consumers have increasingly been shopping for fresh local produce at farmers markets, where one-on-one time with farmers reconnects consumers with where their food comes from. The number of farmers markets in the United States continues to grow, reported USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) in September 2008. The 4,685 total represents a 6.8 percent increase in the number of markets since August 2006.

Even closer than farmers markets are the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) boxes of fresh produce, like those delivered into downtown Santa Cruz via bicycle from Freewheelin' Farm on a weekly or monthly basis.

The farm is five miles north of downtown in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where Back Ranch Road meets Coast Road, and a pipe over the road referred to as "pipeline" signals the turnoff. This eight-acre production depends wholly on its CSA boxes for business, and since 2008, the request for CSA boxes from Freewheelin' has expanded from 40 to 100 members.

Farmer Amy Courtney, who is part of a three-person team which does most of the farm work manually, bicycles the produce down Highway One into town twice a week during the season.

Courtney, who supports herself with a side job as a masseuse, commented on the link between the economic crisis and purchasing from local farms. "I think it works well with hard times financially," Courtney said of the CSA project specifically, "because people will eat out less, so they need more food to cook, and they want it to be good."

Back at the Environmental Studies Institute, Archie discusses his plans for the new half-acre on-campus student garden, located on the north side of campus at the corner of Benton and Sherman Streets. A cover crop of legumes and grass has already been planted to treat the soil, and what once was a stone-dry field is now morphing into a nutrient-rich green pasture.

On the University of California, Santa Cruz's 25-acre on-campus farm, students harvest food at 7 a.m. that will be served at lunchtime in their on-campus gourmet restaurant, Terra Fresca.

Faculty foodie Tim Galarneau's cowboy hat leads aspiring green thumbs between rows of kiwis and cabbage, where he teaches the art and significance of sustainable agriculture.

Last February, Galarneau, a systems education and research specialist, led a youth conference at UCSC to discuss the plan for the future of sustainable agriculture called "Strengthening the Roots: Food, Justice and Fair Trade."

Students from the University of California, Davis, UCSC, Santa Clara and others gathered with farmers, Fair Trade activists and even a farm worker from Immokalee, Fla. to discuss the necessity and future of sustainable agriculture.

Fruits and vegetables weren't the only topic of the conference, however. A portable metal coffee machine doled out discussion about direct-trade Costa Rican coffee, which eliminates the need for a middle man and allows the farmer to directly profit from the sale. Nearby, a discussion about free-range meat was led by Brittany Cole Bush, a member of the Community Agroecology Network (CAN), a group of sustainable agriculture activists.

"When you get a hamburger in your mouth, where is that meat coming from? Where was that wheat grown? Is it genetically-modified meat?" Bush, a UCSC student, asked, leaning across the table to emphasize the importance of her question. Her head, covered by a thick curly brown braid, was cocked to the side, waiting and not waiting for an answer. "When you're eating something that's out of season," she continued after a brief pause, "you're probably eating from a different country."

Many of the conference-goers, who are part of the Farm to School movement, are trying to get school campuses to stock cafeterias with more "real" food -- that is, local food that is grown sustainably and produced by workers who are paid fair wages.

Colleges across the nation have begun to recognize this need for more real food. About 300 campuses are now part of the Real Food Challenge, which aims to get universities to increase their total food output from 2 percent real food to 20 percent by 2020.

"There's youth converging all across the country on these issues," said Galarneau. A slight glint in the eye and relaxed smile reveals Galarneau's passion to pass off his knowledge of sustainable agriculture to eager apprentices. "The goal is to extend the awareness of students through the network, resources and support for helping to transform our food systems."

Back at Full Circle Farm, where the sun has dropped behind the Santa Cruz Mountains, Cole is still straightening rows for the orchard with a volunteer's help. A farmhand spreads out water that has collected in a ditch from the week's rain to keep from attracting mosquitoes. Not another soul is in sight. The three work until the sky turns pink, purple and then a deep blue, preparing to harvest food for their local world.

Contact Maggie Beidelman at (408) 551-1918 or mbeidelman@scu.edu.