Communal cropping, cooking and canning

I hear it in students’ voices – we want better food, better communities, why can’t we go back to older ways … where our grandparents gardened, canned and enjoyed the dirt? Spokane has neighborhoods, parkland, weed-infested lots, and empty buildings prime for community growing plots and rooftop gardens. It also has Pat Munts, a master gardener working with Spokane County Regional Health District on the Healthy Communities Projects. As Small Farms and Acreage Coordinator at WSU Spokane County Extension, Munts advises 24 community gardens, where 480 residents work communal beds. Gardeners benefit from growing fresh food, and food banks reap a bounty. She believes places like Spokane can ramp up the community garden concept — in a sense, the available dirt’s the limit. Munts says it can take six to nine months to get a community garden going, and $3,000-$5,000 to fence it, build garden boxes and bring in soil. Water remains an issue. Hoops like these can be daunting for neighborhood groups to even start the ball rolling, though Munts believes there are hundreds of acres here where gardening could and should take place. Water infrastructure, insurance, issues tied to soil analysis, easement and right-of-way permits can bog down a process that should be easier, more elegant, and more in-line with a community’s needs. Spokane faces a high school dropout rate, high poverty levels, and hunger. Hunger also exists at spiritual levels, where young people desire to break away from fear and boredom of the “Look at Me” generation, offspring of the Baby Boomers, and want a new paradigm. What is a farm, anyway? According to recent census information, for the first time since World War II, the U.S. actually gained farms: 75,810 in 2007, a total of 2.2 million. Except these numbers are misleading. Since 1850, definitions of a farm have changed nine times. Today, a farm is “any place from which $1,000 or more of agricultural products were produced and sold, or normally would have been sold, during the census year.” This means, if you boosted your backyard laying hens from four to eight, and sold free-range organic eggs to neighbors, you could pull in $1,000 a year, and be considered a farm. At the other extreme, there’s the Lockney, Texas, Cargill feedlot which holds 60,000 cattle, imprisoned in dirt and manure yards where they get ulcers and bloating from feed grown many states away. The census calls it a bona fide farm, while many call it something else. Community gardens, while not farms under current definitions, are still incubators that might one day spur youth to become farmers with one foot in the soil and a head studying GPS readouts of soil moisture and precipitation patterns. They help strengthen food security and beautify cities, and get youth interested in growing and what they eat. Munts sees Spokane parks as potential sites for community gardening projects. A park connected to an elementary school could be a “classroom in the corn rows,” helping with social studies, science, math, writing and business instruction. We’ll need millions of farmers in coming decades because farmers bring a human scale to our massive industrialized food system. They’re almanacs of information, soil and seed historians, and bring oversight and ethics to food production. WSU and other ag schools work with the concept of “the future of farming” and relate directly with farmers because they know farmers are intimate shaman of the land. Cheap energy and other input that industrial agriculture depends on like a crack addict on cheap rocks is disappearing. Who will feed us? Small-scale farmers using innovation and manual labor. Munts has degrees from Oregon State in forest recreation planning and Eastern in international marketing. She worked 13 years with People to People and developed skills to help communities self-select their needs. She knows the global scale of the food system, but sees more interest in knowing where food comes from, who grows it. More want to support local food and retail systems, she says, and question the environmental and physiological efficacy of genetically modified organisms in food. How hard is it to envision an interactive map of everywhere in Spokane County and the city of Spokane where gardening takes place; one with the produce being grown; a map/directory of resources, both human and processing; how to get food to market or restaurants, and to learn how to dry and can it. That’s the goal of any food visionary. Munts knows the only way a garden works is if the community does the work, organizing, and celebrating. Even though the census’ bizarre definition of a farm conflates the growth curve, between 2002 and 2007, the U.S. lost 43,603 real farms. Folks like Lisa M. Hamilton, author of “Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness, says we have to “stop this hemorrhaging … we must shift from blindly encouraging production to investing in a system that values farmers and propagates them. We need to help new farmers obtain markets, land and credit. We must inspire non-farmers to enter the profession.” Hamilton said the AmeriCorps system can be a template for what she calls the “AgriCorps” – “where participants would learn the skills of farming and experience the lifestyle; hosts would receive valuable labor to bolster their businesses.” All these pieces need backing by politicians, local businesses and financial institutions. We have people ready to pick up hoes, or start building chicken coops. We need more classes on food preservation or beekeeping to get our communities back to the face-to-face, sun-to-soil relationship we’ve had for over 10,000 years as agriculturists. We need to get food back into homes, out front in the yard, in school playfields, on corner lots currently full of plastic bottles, discarded “vote” signs and weeds. Munts, also a member of the Garden Writers Association, returned from Dallas and witnessed thirtysomethings (and under) getting into seeds, gardening, canning, and writing blogs and online ‘zines to perpetuate and grow a new Victory Garden movement. The community garden concept includes Slavic gardeners who start planting tomato seeds in early April. Or low-income groups like Latinos and Hmong who bring centuries of growing and food knowledge to a system Munts and others hope to call a sustainable community gardening program, designed for each locale’s needs and flavors. Spokane can take pages from the playbook of the Berkley, Calif., Edible School Yard program, which started in 1995 under the direction of chef/author Alice Waters, who inculcated it through the nonprofit Chez Panisse Foundation. The garden’s first iteration was a monthly gig for students to tend a cover crop on a vacant lot. Now it is home to veggies, herbs, flowers and fruits, and each student participates in 12 to 30 sessions in the kitchen and garden. That’s 1,000 middle school kids touched by this one garden. Imagine the Inland Empire Edible Schools and Parks Gardens. Young people learn the arts of soil, sautéing, sustainable living, and food banks are enhanced by seasonal crops to use not only as food, but to show how urban and suburban subsistence farming, honey making, egg and chicken production can get us all back to the land. Jobs, Not Jails. Edible Food, Not Emergency Rooms. Organic, Not Frankencrops. Garden Plot, Not Empty Lots. I can see bumper stickers now.