For 12 weeks each summer, the Hideout is home to Veggie Bingo and its cult following of community garden supporters. The fees, $4 a card or three for $10, benefit a different community garden each week and have helped gardens purchase tools and supplies including soil, seeds, sheds, compost, benches, and scholarships for young workers. On this July evening, the numbers are being sung for supporters of the Fulton Street Flower and Vegetable Garden located in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood.

Some of the players are regulars while others have come to the Hideout to try Veggie Bingo for the first time. Regular Jenny Hines, who lives in the city’s Logan Square neighborhood, admits to loving the offbeat event, calling it “the best day of the week!”

“I love the spirit in here and the idea that it’s a gathering to support food and community gardens,” Hines says.

This unusual way of supporting an estimated 110 of Chicago’s nearly 800 community gardens grew out of a winter ritual held at the Hideout known as Soup & Bread. During the economic downturn in 2009, Tim and Katie Tuten, two of the bar’s four owners, said it might be time once again for soup lines. In response, Hideout bartender Martha Bayne, who also worked as a food writer, invited 12 local chefs to prepare their favorite soups weekly. Gaines bought an army of crockpots and added bread bakers as well. Every winter since then, patrons have come to eat soup and bread once a week, all winter long—and all of their cash donations have supported local food pantries.

The Hideout launched Veggie Bingo as a way to keep the goodwill—and support of community meal efforts—flowing into the summer. NeighborSpace, the nonprofit urban land trust that supports community gardens, sponsors the bingo night, and pools and divides proceeds among the dozen gardens chosen for the season. Robin Cline, assistant director of NeighborSpace estimates one night of bingo can bring in anywhere from $300 to $1,000. Since its founding, Veggie Bingo’s popularity has grown steadily; on some nights, it attracts as many as 125 to 130 players.

For prizes, community gardens donate items ranging from locally grown fruits and produce to preserves made from harvests, and organizers hand out seeds and herb starts as well. Small, sustainable food businesses, such as local coffee roasters, bakeries, and craft breweries, contribute prizes too. The night I was there, a couple who were moving even added some of their furniture to the mix.

Veggie Bingo is not the game of church basements. On this night, performer Lily Emerson and her husband Charlie Malave deliver the numbers on the Hideout’s stage by singing little ditties, say, about B-49. Local celebrities clamor to partake. Jon Langford, lead singer of the punk band the Mekons, once led the calls with his rendition of Marxist Bingo.

Somewhat of a small food fest in its own right, people coming to play bring friends and hold small potlucks at their tables. Along with local beers, they bring chips and hummus, small salads, and large bags of cherries. Because indoor space is limited, players spill outside onto the tables of a small patio as well.

In addition to being a fun and festive time, Veggie Bingo enables gardens to fund improvements that further support their communities. Angela and Sam Taylor, who oversee and maintain the 50- by 150-foot Fulton Street garden plot, said they used the $500 they received last year from Veggie Bingo through NeighborSpace to purchase solar panels for the greenhouse.

“Community gardens do more than just grow food,” Angela says as she lines up her bingo cards. “Community gardens grow babies and adults. They have created marriages and friendships.” Each season, she says, the Fulton garden yields greens, lettuce, beans, asparagus, zucchini, and flowers, some of which the organizers share with senior residents and sell at their market.

Through grants, Angela continues, workers train young people in the neighborhood in how to grow their own food and tend to a garden, giving them entrepreneurial skills. In addition, Fulton Street is teaming up with other local gardens to form the Lake and Kedzie Garfield Park Neighborhood Market where they hope to build a food incubator and grow a food hub business. “When I first moved into our home, Fulton Street was a drug spot,” Angela says. “Now neighbors can sit on the porch.”

In addition to building support for community gardens, Veggie Bingo also educates the public about Chicago’s community garden culture—and about gardening more generally.

“When they come to Veggie Bingo, they get to meet the people running these gardens,” says NeighborSpace’s Cline. The event has inspired some players, she continues, to begin gardening in their own backyards.

Historically a working man’s bar that catered to steel workers and local scribe Nelson Algren, the Hideout has remained a classic “third space” for both political mobilizing and feeding people, says Cline. It has also been a drop-off location for various CSAs and host of the annual “Farmer’s Talent Show.”

Such locations are needed in neighborhoods that are developing their own food cultures, says Hideout owner Katie Tuten, who also works for Catholic Charities doing research on food deserts and community health. “I am very aware of the importance of community gardens,” Tuten says, “as well as what it means to be a community and the importance of feeding the community spiritually as well.”

The post Veggie Bingo Raises Support for Chicago’s Community Gardens appeared first on Civil Eats.

Based on a collection of Farm and Food File columns, as well another called “Letter From America,” which ran in several foreign markets and explained and often criticized farm U.S. policy, the book also paints a picture of pre-industrial farming, or what Guebert calls “the first farm-to-table people.” It also slyly offers an optimistic blueprint of how today’s farms might return to a way of growing food that thrived before multinational food companies bought up much of the food system.

Guebert, whose column now appears in 70 newspapers, grew up working with three brothers and a sister on Indian Farm, a 720-acre dairy operation in Illinois. By the mid-1970s he went off for college to earn a degree in science and agriculture.

Guebert says he initially wanted to farm, loving “the seasons, the people, the rhythm to it. Everyday you contribute something to someone’s world.” Instead, he began writing about farming. Before starting his column, he worked as an editor at Successful Farming magazine in Des Moines, Iowa, and as a contributing editor at Farm Journal.

“Long before the Slow Food movement took to Facebook and urban foodies flocked to Twitter,” Foxwell writes in the book’s introduction, “Dad recognized the complex convergence of farm and food issues, and in 1993 he decided he was up to the challenge of reporting on them. And while I may not have grasped the broad scope of his ambitious mission at the time, I certainly gathered that my father had an unusual job.”

“I like helping people connect the dots,” says Guebert, citing the recent attempt by giant seed company Monsanto to buy its rival Syngenta. “It’s a story not only of interest to farmers who use the products, but also for everyone who eats, because [Monsanto’s seeds and chemicals] are used in the food we grow. There are endless stories out there about farming and food.”

Guebert and Foxwell have been touring to promote the book this summer, and they are using the platform as an opportunity to speak not only about the history of small-scale farming in the U.S., but also about several big picture issues. As Guebert sees it, Europe has retained a relationship between food and culture (Agri-culture), while most parts of the U.S. have lost it due to corporate farming. But, he says, food culture is slowing returning, with a renewed focus on smaller farms, organic farms, and a growing numbers of younger farmers.

“If you look at where food is headed, you will see that, in many ways, it’s going in the opposite direction of American agriculture,” Guebert told Civil Eats. “Big American farms, are growing less and less food to be eaten. They grow commodities. They grow soy and corn and wheat under the guise of ‘we’re feeding the world’ and they aren’t feeding the world. They are growing these crops to make money.”

Guebert says farmers who own hundreds of acres are often hard pressed to pay for massive farm equipment and other expensive inputs. Overhead costs are enormous. Yet, he points out that if more farms could scale back, and grow food to feed people locally, it could solve many of problems agriculture faces today. He cites the recent study that found that as many as 90 percent of us could eat food grown within 100 miles of their home.

Guebert points to the farm-to-table movement and the proliferation of small and urban farms as proof that our food system is going through great change. But Europe, he adds, has been doing this forever.

“American cities were once surrounded by farms that grew food and raised hogs and cattle. There were hundreds and hundreds of acres dedicated to fruit. Now you don’t see that,” he says. “You rarely see food growing just outside of cities such as Chicago or St. Louis like you used to. And this is the Midwest, where there’s some of the richest soil in the world. And there’s lots wrong with that. We’re trucking our food in from afar; our food supply is dependent on oil.”

Guebert sees the small farmer as America’s hope, yet it’s the large farms that receive most of the local and government support. This is a fact he has been stressing on his tour. Fearless in his outspoken opposition to corporate farming, Guebert urges more young people to take up farming, adding that good food may be what eventually causes the collapse of global food trade and our heavy dependence on fossil fuels.

“People want to eat local and healthy. How many Oreos can you really eat? Good food never goes out of style. Julius Caesar dined on lamb chops, fresh vegetables, and wine. It was a good and elegant meal then and it is a good meal today,” he says.

Other countries are curious about America’s food system he adds. But not always in a positive way. “Europe is interested in how we are able to eat large portions of food and eat it in our car,” he says. “Good food should be part of our culture. If it takes more than three minutes to get lunch, we get angry. We aren’t eating, we are refueling.”

The post Alan Guebert: Looking Back to Farm Forward appeared first on Civil Eats.

Teacher Kinga Kelly extolled the virtues of eating colorful foods–like bright red strawberries and deep purple blueberries–to the group. “What is the benefit of eating the rainbow?” she called out. “We get nutrients,” they called back. “Iron! Vitamin C for your immune system! Vitamin E for your skin! Vitamin A! Vitamin D for your bones!” Meanwhile, the thud of dribbled basketballs echoed from a gymnasium down the hall.

The kebabs disappeared in a few bites and for some of the children it was the first time they’d tasted cantaloupe or honeydew melon. Signs on the wall declare: “No Junk Food in the Classroom.”

Fun With Food, a weekly after-school class offered by the Chicago Park District (CPD), is bringing cooking and health education to under-served neighborhoods, and it’s helping the Park District find new uses for its hundreds of former fieldhouses. Many were warming facilities used in winter and others have held events and activities throughout the years.

Back in 2009, the district began retrofitting some of the buildings–like the 100-year-old Broadway Armory Park, once a National Guard training center—with large kitchens so they could begin teaching healthy cooking classes to young people in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Not all have kitchens, so the educators adapt with recipes that can be prepared cold.

Now, the program is rapidly expanding. This summer, many of the 11 current locations will partner with nearby urban farms such as the city’s successful Growing Power, as well as several school and community gardens.

Colleen Lammel-Harmon, wellness director for the CPD, created the sustainability program and classes that run in size from 15 to 30 students ages six to 12. Kelly taught her recent shish kebab class at the Humbolt Park field house, located on the city’s west side where childhood obesity and gang rivalry persist.

While some children sign up as part of overall after-school programming with the park district, many parents enrolled their children to combat picky eating or instill smart food choices at an early age.

Alka Tyagi signed up her son Ravi, 5, because he was becoming too choosey about what he’d eat. The class, she said, has introduced Ravi to vegetables and fruits he wouldn’t try at home.

Jerald Avila, 12, said his favorite recipe so far was, “a really good smoothie” made with yogurt and bananas. Six-year-old Jaden Diaz said he learned that “strawberries made into stars with the cutter are very good.”

Kelly, the program director who also penned the Fun With Food Cookbook, teaches the students to make dishes like Apple Nachos Supreme, a combination of apples, yogurt, raisins, honey, and pecans and Creamy Avocado Toasts (a favorite). The cookbook also includes recipes for Meaty Veggie Roll-Ups and Peaches & Cream Parfait.

The kids also learn portion control, knife and utensil skills, food sanitation, and how to dry herbs. The curriculum is based on the U.S. dietary recommendations, which specify that at least half our plate should be filled with fruits and vegetables.

After one or two classes, Kelly said the children begin to talk about what they’ve brought for lunch, with an immediate focus on including more fruits and vegetables. “If they have grapes, they will pull them out and call out ‘look what I have!’” she said. Others start to participate in dinner and lunch preparation at home.

Lammel-Harmon said her plans include continued partnerships with city growers, with the children perhaps visiting the farms and gardens and harvesting their own herbs and vegetables. She has shared the class recipes with the staff at Growing Power’s three-acre farm so that they can grow specific herbs and vegetables for the classes. Chefs from the city’s Washbourn Culinary School have also assisted students and the parks department will soon be incorporating more culinary colleges and universities into the Fun With Food program.

Combining cooking with local growers will also help the students connect where their food comes from as well as soil knowledge and the importance of organics. Produce is donated by local grocers.

Abigail Vences, who has two children in park district classes, said they both now want to help her in the kitchen. She enrolled them in hopes that by sitting on the sidelines she too could learn how to make healthier snacks.

“They are not only trying different and healthy foods, they are watching what I have in the house,” Vences said. “If they see juice, they tell me that we can’t drink it because it has lots of sugar. The tortilla chips, too much salt.”

The post In Chicago, Former Park Houses Become Cooking Classrooms appeared first on Civil Eats.

The pair helped each other navigate plantings and marketing, like pioneers in a changing rural landscape. Their “Lone Ranger” status, as Cannon refers to it, shifted last January when they attended the first informal potluck held by the newly formed Southeast Wisconsin Women in Sustainable Agriculture.

Christine Welcher, an organic farmer, started the group last March. In December, she began sending out emails to a handful of local women, suggesting that a grassroots movement fueled by simple potlucks would form a needed network. The idea traveled by word-of-mouth. Slowly, the farmers learned of one another, even if they were miles apart.

The potlucks now take place in three regions of the state, and Cannon calls them a route “to survival.”

Fueled by the very food they raise and grow—crisp salads, pulled pork, homemade cheese—the potlucks have become a forum for women to share information: where to buy tractors and hay, who might have a farm for sale, the name of good plumber. Some have found home for an abundance of farm cats, while others donate older vegetables as feed for piglets.

Each potluck includes a tour of the hosting farm, formal introductions, and requests and offers of help and resources. Throughout the year, guests stay in contact through a listserv.

At a potluck Anna Prusia of the 50-acre Dorothy’s Grange held last summer, women “shared the season” by setting up a barter table filled with jams, soaps, cheeses, sundried tomatoes, “and everything created over the year,” she says.

Potlucks have also sprouted business partnerships. Cheesemaker and goat farmer Anna Landmark met Anna Thomas Bates, who became her business partner and assistant, at a potluck. The two now run Landmark Creamery near Albany, Wisconsin. And, thanks to the potlucks, Lori Stern and LeAnn Powers have found local women-owned sources for the meats, cheeses, and produce they serve at their farm-to-table cafe, Cow & Quince.

The number of farms run by women nearly tripled between 1987 and 2007 [PDF] and women remain the principal operators of 14 percent of the nation’s farms, despite a drop in the number of farms overall. As the number of women farming everything from organic produce and livestock increases, so does their need to connect.

The more women get to know one another, the less they tend to feel competitive. “I’ve attended dozens of classes through the local extension service where men farmers dominate the room and the women farming sit in the back, too shy to ask a question,” Welcher says.

The Wisconsin potluck movement began nearly five years ago when farmer Lisa Kivirist of Inn Serendipity Bed & Breakfast and Farm in Monroe, Wisconsin held an informal gathering of local women. From there it grew to become a small potluck movement in which a handful of Green County farmers who also attend the yearly Midwest Organic & Sustainable Education Service (MOSES) conference began to meet informally in Southwest Wisconsin. Today the potlucks draw dozens of farmers, homesteaders, and women who are interested in farming.

“There’s just so much you need to know as a woman farming alone. I’m growing 30 different kinds of vegetables and there are 30 varieties of each one,” says Cannon, the former Lone Ranger. “If I had not been able to ask other women for guidance and help, I wouldn’t have been able to make it.” Aptly, Cannon says that the theme and topic of her first potluck, hosted at her 11-acre LarryVille Gardens in April, will be “Growing Pains.”

Networking among female farmers is expanding nationally, and it’s taking a number of creative forms. Some women gather for pub nights or farmer girls’ nights out. Noreen Thomas of the Doubting Thomas Farm says women in her area are meeting through a tool-sharing program. In California’s Napa Valley, women viticulturists have started to network in their male-dominated industry by holding bocce ball games, says Debby Zygielbaum, who grows grapes for Robert Sinskey Vineyards. Nationally, many farmers connect via the Iowa-based Women, Food & Ag Network (WFAN) which began as a service for widow farmers trying to figure out what to do with their land.

Prusia says that newfound networking is also leading more women to participate in farm and food politics. “We are coming together to make some changes in our policies,” she adds. “We have to think about how we can change the system so it works better for small farmers, such as the Wisconsin Cookie Bill.” Earlier this year, WFAN and MOSES collaborated to launch Plate to Politics to advance women’s leadership in sustainable agriculture and food systems development.

Like farming itself, the network runs that gamut from the political to the deeply personal. Case in point, one recent potluck participant was new to the area. “She said she needed female friends because all she had was a fiancée,” Stern recalls. “Another woman’s husband ended up doing their wedding ceremony. Lovely stories surface.”

The post Women Farmers Connect and Build Networks Through Shared Meals appeared first on Civil Eats.

The 75,000 sq. ft. greenhouse caps off a new $30 million facility built by Method, the San Francisco-based soap company. Expected to be in production next year, Gotham farmers will grow an estimated 1 million pounds of greens yearly, supplying Chicago restaurants, schools, hospitals, and universities.

But the farm’s enormous size isn’t all that’s noteworthy about the project. If done right, the rooftop farm could also help revive a historic African American neighborhood and bring fresh food to its residents.

Once the farm is up and running, Gotham will be selling its produce in the neighborhood at affordable prices. Nicole Baum, a spokesperson for the Brooklyn-based company, says this will be the first time Gotham has sold produce direct at local farmers markets, as opposed to, say, through Whole Foods. This will make the produce more accessible because low-income residents in Illinois who qualify for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) can get twice the dollar value at farmers markets.

“This means that Pullman residents will be able to buy a fresh head of lettuce instead of something that is two weeks old by the time it makes it to us,” says Anthony Beale, alderman of Pullman, which is in the city’s ninth ward.

The project marks Gotham’s first foray beyond New York and it is the beginning of what will become a national expansion for the urban agriculture pioneer launched in 2011. Viraj Puri, one of Gotham’s founders, says that while urban farming “isn’t a panacea” for the nation’s growing food needs, it provides small solutions. For instance, Puri says that Gotham will hire between 30 and 40 greenhouse employees mostly from Pullman.

Rooftop farms are becoming more commonplace as cities seek ways to acquire fresher food and cut transportation costs. Steven Peck, president of the Toronto-based nonprofit Green Roofs for Healthy Cities says five years ago, there were no rooftop farms in North America. Today, he estimates there are more than 20 with the number expected to exceed 100 by 2020.

Located 11 miles south of the Loop, Pullman is said to have been the one of the nation’s first factory towns. The self-contained community known for its red-brick row houses, provided housing, shops, churches, and recreation for early railway workers, many of whom were African American. Pullman has experienced several shifts in population since then, and as more people moved to the suburbs in the middle of the century, businesses shuttered and jobs dried up. Today, the neighborhood has an 8 percent unemployment rate.

In the past decade, however, the city has been set on reviving the neighborhood because of land availability and its location near railroads and major highways. The historic district is also under consideration to become a national park. According to the Chicago Times, “No park in the country captures the rise of organized labor and the black middle class quite like Pullman, where black rail car workers formed the first union to be included under the American Federation of Labor.”

Today, says Alderman Beale, “Pullman is hot.” And the rooftop farm will only enhance the appeal, bringing tourists and serving as an educational facility, teaching students and foodies about the growing process, he says. Moreover Beale say that major grocery chains are already vying to move into the region. It also fits in perfectly with Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s mission to grow the city’s urban farming projects.

“We partnered with Method because Chicago is a great food city and a city investing in green building and green roofs,” Puri says. “My partners and I have lived there, we have a network of people there, and it’s prime for a year-round, controlled agricultural model. More importantly, the people will know how their food is produced and where it’s coming from.”

David Doig, President of Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives, is also looking forward to Gotham bringing healthier food choices to the community because Method has also agreed to use green space in the surrounding area as plots for community gardening. The added jobs will boost local income, making healthier eating choices more affordable, Doig says.

“We are creating a new paradigm in the way we grow in urban areas and redefining what a rooftop can mean,” Doig says. “What Gotham is creating in Chicago would take 30 acres of farmland and it’s right here in this historic community.”

Patricia Bethany, 68, has lived in Pullman for the past decade. Before the recent addition of a Walmart in the neighborhood, she drove more than 20 miles each week to shop at a chain grocery store. Upon hearing that the proposed farm, Bethany says she made it a point to go to a meeting where Gotham’s plan was explained.

“There was a time when we couldn’t go outside because of gangs and crime and bullets flying down the street. But we had hope that there would be change,” she says. “Then this meeting was announced where we were told there was going to be this farm on a roof … This is a place where we will have to take our children and grandchildren so they can see how they’re growing everything and they can learn. There are people who have been living in Pullman for 40 years who never thought this could happen. And we’re not looking back.”

Photos, from top:  William McDonough Partners Architects, MBA Photography.

The post The Nation’s Largest Rooftop Farm Could Also Help Transform a Chicago Neighborhood appeared first on Civil Eats.

In the first three weeks, only 13 of the 300-plus employees signed up. But Calloway is optimistic that interest will grow, even in a company, she says, is full of “production workers who don’t always care about healthy eating.”

One of the first deliveries from High Meadow included garlic scapes and onion blossoms–the kind of things most people won’t find in the grocery store. And it made a bit of a splash among the company’s employees. “The [scapes] came with a recipe for an egg-based pasta and I tweaked it with a red wine sauce,” Calloway says.

For Meg, Mike, and Matt Kelly, the farmers at High Meadow, the odds are good that this new relationship could bear fruit. The Kellys have been able to increase their CSA shares by 100 this year by linking up with companies that want to make it easy for their employees to access fresh produce. And they’re not alone.

In fact, more of the nation’s cube farms are forging relationships with real life farms through workplace CSAs. In Wisconsin, the boom is especially evident. It’s the only state in the country where a handful of health insurance companies are offering rebates to employees who sign up for CSAs. And other states are watching what happens there closely.

At the center of the trend is the FairShare CSA Coalition, which evolved from the Madison Eaters Revolutionary Front (MERF), the group that introduced CSAs to the town in the 1990s. Now FairShare has a grant to link potential CSA customers with local growers, and the organization represents 50 farms that sell over 11,000 CSA shares annually.

Julie Garrett, the Coalition’s community program manager drives the roads of Southern Wisconsin enlisting businesses and manufacturing plants, hubs untouched by the local food movement where workers still lunch on fast food. In just two years, Garrett has enlisted 18 companies to which 16 farms have sold 390 shares. And she expects the numbers to increase.

“CSAs were once for country granola people, Whole Foods types, an elite niche,” says Garrett. “But by going into the workplace we’re able to reach more mainstream people who eat processed food, go to McDonalds, and may not have thought about healthy diets.”

Workplace CSAs are the way of the future, says Garrett. The shares boost the local economy and support farmers, and delivery saves time for working parents, who may not have time to stop at a farmers market on the way to pick up the kids. These deliveries can also help cut back transportation costs and, in the long run–especially with the rebates–lower food costs.

What’s more, a food culture blossoms when workers have a reason to talk about recipes or trade produce. And some businesses have been known to add an educational component by holding cooking demonstrations and bringing in local chefs. FairShare published a CSA cookbook, and one Madison, Wisconsin-based company called Local Thyme, even bills itself as “a CSA menu planning service.”

Outside Wisconsin, especially on the coasts, workplace CSAs have been around for years. New York City’s Just Food delivers CSA shares to businesses throughout Manhattan and Santa Cruz, California’s LocalHarvest helps dozens of companies–including well-known tech firms such as Google and Microsoft–connect to farms for their employees. But in areas where workers have long commutes, maintaining strong membership numbers can be a challenge.

“There tends to be a lot of initial enthusiasm, followed by considerable attrition,” says Erin Barnett, LocalHarvest’s director. “Sometimes employees find that between their long hours and commute they don’t actually have much time to cook, so they drop out. The farms that are successful working with corporations are those that find ways to deliver the types and quantities of foods that this population wants.”

At Research Products Corp., a Madison, Wisconsin-based air purifier company, workers seem to want variety.

After they were given the chance to subscribe to a CSA from Wholesome Harvest Farm, employees added both an artisan bread and grass-fed meat CSA to the mix.

Pete Hanson, a plant manager at Research Product pays $75 a month to receive organic and pasture-raised beef, chicken, lamb, and pork from Black Earth Meats. The farm, says Hanson, also includes a surprise in each box. Recently, it was beef cheeks. “That’s what’s great about the CSAs. They give you some things you many not have purchased otherwise, but that forces you to try things,” he says. After sautéing kale and kohlrabi with his wife, for instance, Hansen says, “the kohlrabi came out great, the kale–chewy.”

First and third images courtesy of FairShare, second image courtesy of Duluth Trading Company.

The post Farm-to-Cubicle: Workplace CSAs Deliver Healthy Eats to the Office Set appeared first on Civil Eats.

Emtman, a Seattle resident deeply concerned about food waste, acquired his bittersweet collection in dumpsters located on FallingFruit.org, a long underground source for dumpster divers or “freegans” who dine on out-dated, over-stocked or overripe food tossed out by stores, restaurants, and bakeries. Now, the map is no longer a buried treasure.

In April, Caleb Phillips and Ethan Welty, FallingFruit’s founders, went public with the global dumpster map, which is just one of several options the site offers, including the location of fruit trees and other foraging opportunities. Recently, the pair has begun speaking at food justice conferences, contacting online freegan communities and handing out stickers, expanding the site’s fan base. Calling it the most extensive and diverse map of its kind, the pair’s ultimate goal is to shed a bright light on the enormous quantity of food that goes to waste–in this country and abroad.

Phillips and Welty are raising money to create a FallingFruit mobile app for foragers and divers through Barnraiser.us, a newly launched crowdfunding site specifically designed for food and sustainability projects. They hope to raise $10,000 by the end of May.

To create the dumpster map, men spent months combing the Internet for dumpster location information and painstakingly checking each entry before adding it to their site. Their hope is that other freegan sites such as trashwiki.org and freegan.info will embed the FallingFruit map.

To date, there are at least 2,500 bins on the map with up to five new ones added daily. Welty estimates that around 500 people are using the site every day and he expects the numbers to rise as summer kicks in. Along with most U.S. cities, map users have entered dumpsters in Antarctica, Jamaica, and even the North and South Pole, says Phillips.

“We wanted to take [dumpster diving] from being a secret hobby to something that illustrates first-hand how ubiquitous food waste is,” says Welty. Despite the fact that 40 percent of the food produced in the U.S. goes uneaten, few people spend much time thinking about food waste. But, Welty adds, “You can only feel [the magnitude of] it when you open up a dumpster and see what’s in it.”

Considered an anti-consumerism movement, dumpster diving, bin raiding or “skipping” as it’s known in England, where dumpsters are called skips, is said to have its originated with the Diggers, a group of 1960s artists and activists who lived in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district and distributed rescued food on the streets.

Who are today’s divers? Meitar Moscovitz (screen name MayMay), a traveling software programmer, says he lives on the road and depends on FallingFruit for “literal sustenance.” His best find so far was around $100 worth of recently expired cheeses.

“It’s been amazing to realize that wherever I am, food is not far away,” says Moscovitz. “My situation may seem unusual at first, but a lot of people I’ve met dive.”

Is dumpster diving legal? According to Freegan.Info, a popular site for divers, “Dumpster diving is legal in the United States except where prohibited by local regulation.” In other words, legality varies place-by-place. (Here’s a rundown of the law in California, for instance). “Folks should use their own discretion and study the laws where they live,” says Phillips. And when it comes to food safety, most divers avoid meat and dairy, focusing instead on dry and canned goods (often with bent or torn packaging), baked goods and produce they can prepare later.

In Winterthur, Switzerland, 29-year-old Mylene Jacquemart came across a “green bin” flush with delicious apples and added it to the FallingFruit map. The apples became a pie and she’s now searching her neighborhood for more “mappable edibles.” The town also collects unsellable food from stores that is placed in a community fridge. “It’s not your classic dumpster, but check out www.restessbar.ch next time you’re in Switzerland,” she says.

Founder Phillips, who treasures brown bananas from dumpsters, believes everyone should try “diving” least once to experience a new awareness of what’s in the bins behind their local grocery store. “It’s a compelling thing to do and it changed my life,” he says.

By posting the dumpsters on the map, Phillips also hopes to highlight “serial wasters” and “cause them to do some rethinking.”

Don Rakow, a professor of horticulture at Cornell University believes the locavore movement has shed new light on urban foraging as well as the freegan movement. But more importantly, he says, it has empowered people with limited budgets, giving them more food choices. “They are taking control of local resources rather than relying on governmental largesse,” Rakow explains.

While most freegans enjoys the free food, Emtman says he hopes to one day find dumpsters with no food waste in them at all.

In the meantime, he says, the FallingFruit map has led him to discover Seattle’s neighborhoods. Emtman recently began dating a woman who lives near a bakery that throws out leftover loaves of bread in large flour sacks. “When I learned where she lived, I immediately checked out the map to see if was near any good dumpsters,” he recalls. “It makes dating her doubly good.”

The post Online Map Helps Makes Wasted Food Visible appeared first on Civil Eats.

“Where there were 45 small farms, there are now four,” says Natalie Relyea, a 51-year-old farmer from Walstonburg, North Carolina, who with her husband, John, grew mainly tobacco on their 200-acre farm. The crop once provided 88 percent of the family’s income, but in recent years they’ve had to diversify.

For decades, tobacco farmers were guaranteed a price and market for their crops through a quota system established during the New Deal. That was all axed in 1997 with the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement. In its wake grew the federal tobacco buyout, in which farmers received either a lump sum or an annuity, canceling out the quota system. (As of 2012, the program had paid $4.11 billion directly to tobacco growers and $5.85 billion directly to former quota owners.) But the buyout ended this spring, and how North Carolina farmers will transition from their tobacco years remains to be seen.

Goats raised in a former industrial chicken house.

Some are growing sweet potatoes, others are re-purposing greenhouses for hydroponics or starting up strawberry crops. The Relyeas chose to plant more butter beans. They also launched Relyea’s Crazy Claws Prawn Company in 2004 with an $8,000 grant from the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) designed to help transitioning farmers. Last year, a second grant allowed the couple to acquire a butter bean sheller, allowing them to contract with neighboring farmers to grow the beans for sale at their roadside farm stand.

Both ventures have helped the Relyeas recoup some of their losses, even if it will never amount to the income made during their tobacco years.

Since 1997, RAFI’s Tobacco Communities Reinvestment Fund (TCRF) has provided an estimated 500 farmers with small grants to help them replace lost tobacco income by backing their new ideas. Recently, RAFI expanded the program to include all farmers, from Hmong flower farmers interested in building greenhouses to collectives putting together tool lending libraries (see the audio slideshow below).

Now these farmers’ experiences in transitioning and diversification will make up an online library designed to help farmers nationwide. Funded by a $15,000 Kickstarter campaign, which successfully met its goal over the weekend, work can now begin on the Growing Innovation resource library. The goal is to include interactive maps, photos, records of personal experiences, farmers’ budgets, and detailed plans of their farm-led projects. RAFI has teamed with FarmHack to help build the site. A portion of the money raised will be used to publish a coffee table photo book of farmers helped by the grants.

To date, the reinvestment fund has helped create everything from mobile farmers markets to a mozzarella cheesecake production to wind-powered farms, says Joe Schroeder, RAFI’s Farm Sustainability program director. Open-sourced, the library will be searchable by topic or category and will provide the opportunity for farmers to continually add information and resources.

A flower farmer in his new greenhouse.

Online research libraries such as Growing Innovation come at an important time in agriculture, Schroeder adds. More people are expected to be experimenting with small scale farming and the internet is becoming an additional tool in the farmer’s arsenal–as important today as draft horse and combines once were.

The Relyeas’ journey, for example, could help farmers interested in raising prawns. Randy Lewis, a dairy farmer since 1980, is another good example; he runs the Ran-Lew Dairy in Snow Camp, North Carolina. After facing severe financial hardship and losing the family’s life savings, Lewis decided to transition his traditional dairy into a micro bottling plant and eventually began to manufacture yogurt.

The Lewises used their RAFI grant to purchase a trailer for their refrigerated milk tank, fitting it with both electricity and plumbing.

“We were going to let the dairy go, but not sell our farm,” says Lewis, 53, who now milks 75 cows. “Milk prices bottomed out in 2009 at $1 a gallon and feed and fuel prices soared. So I borrowed $100,000 to begin bottling our own milk with home pasteurization and sell directly to grocery stores and cooperatives.”

Like tobacco, the changes in the dairy industry have left many producers in the lurch. Losses like these are “a drain on the rural economy and there’s no silver bullet,” Schroeder says.

There might just be a silver lining, however, as these once commodity farmers make creative moves toward new, diverse products. And thanks to the Growing Innovation library, they’ll be able to learn from one another as they go along. “And hopefully,” Schroeder adds, “attract younger kids back to farming.”

Photo Credit: Alix Blair for RAFI, 2011.

The post As Commodity Farmers Shift Course, a Library to Collect Their Stories appeared first on Civil Eats.

For starters, American agriculture made a lot of money in 2012. According to the census, U.S. farms sold nearly $395 billion in farm products that year, or 33 percent more than they sold in 2007. This won’t surprise you if you’ve kept up with the prices of corn and other big commodity crops in recent years. But the census numbers make it a little difficult to tell who is making all that cash. And some farm experts say that most people in today’s farm communities aren’t exactly raking it in.

Katherine Ozer, Executive Director of the National Family Farm Coalition, says the high sales numbers don’t entirely reflect “the ripple impacts of the recession and the economic stress going on among a lot of different communities.”

That’s where another important, complementary piece of the ag census enters the picture: While the number of large farms has grown, the number of mid-sized farms continues to drop.

The Disappearing Mid-sized Farm

Ozer says that, from her organization’s perspective, mid-sized livestock and dairy operations have been hit the hardest over the last several years. “They may have sold off significant numbers of their animals, but they still have the acreage, so they may still be counted as a midsized farm,” she says.

The USDA’s initial census highlights claim that, “The number of large (1,000 plus acres) farms … did not change significantly in that time.” But Ozer notes that acreage and income are very different things. And while income on mid-sized farms went up a little over all, she adds, “Based on income, it looks like the largest operations did go up by a pretty significant percentage.”

Meanwhile, the census also shows that small farms held steady, which might sound–from a sustainability perspective–like good news. But in actuality, these small farms rarely bring in enough income to support the people living there. Nearly half (or 1 million) of the 2.1 million farms in the U.S. require at least one member of the family to work off the farm. And, as historical data from the USDA web site points out: “Many farms are not profitable even in the best farm income years. As a result the median household income from farming shows a loss from farming.”

In its census highlights, the USDA also says that: “The number who identified something other than farming as their primary occupation was nine percent lower in 2012 than 2007.” But, again, this news may not be as positive as it sounds.

“I think that is really a reflection of the lack of other jobs in rural communities. Many farmers in 2007 may have been in a position to earn off-farm income, whereas in 2012 that may not be the case,” Ozer told us.

Farmers Are Still Aging

The demographic information from the census numbers tells an equally complex story.

On the one hand, the average age of the American farmer is now nearly 58, and has consistently been on the rise for 30 years (it went up 1.2 years since 2007 alone). On the other hand, the number of farmers between the ages of 25 and 34 did go up.

“We have small rise in the number of young farmers, but you have a decrease in the 35 to 44 range. That means many of those farmers didn’t graduate up to the next age bracket,” says Traci Bruckner of the Center for Rural Affairs.

She sees that as another sign of farm consolidation, and the challenges small- and mid-sized farmers face. “That’s a healthy vibrant age where they could be doing a lot of that work, and we’re losing them because they aren’t making it out there.”

On a related note, the number of beginning farmers–or those who have been running their current operation less than 10 years–was down 20 percent in 2012.

Women Farmers Holding Steady

Women farmers remain a viable and strong addition to the farm landscape, according to today’s census.

The overall number of farms is down nationally over four percent from 2007, with a four percent decline in male farmers and a six percent drop in female farmers. But Ginger Harris, a USDA census statistician, told Civil Eats there had been a rise in the number of women who report farming as their only income (from 122,000 to 125,000). “More women are going into farming as a career,” she says.

Harris says that women are remaining in the field, likely indicating that the trend towards more females farming will hold steady or even go up in the coming years.

As is the case across the board, however, these women are older. The biggest rise was among those between 55- to 75-years old, which could mean that women are choosing farming as a second career and/or inheriting farms.

Indeed, when the USDA’s Economic Research Service reported last year that women were the group of farmers growing the fastest, many came forward to tell their stories of leaving professional careers to pursue a life long dream of owning either a produce, goat, cattle or hog farm.

According to this new data, women remain the principal operators of 14 percent of the nation’s farms, despite the overall drop in the number of farmers.

While this may seem disappointing after the significant bump in the number of women reported as farm owners in 2007, Leigh Adcock, executive director of the Iowa-based Woman, Food and Agriculture Network, attributes that to a shift in the sampling technique that took place in the last census. Beginning in 2007, more than one person could be listed as farm operator, whereas before, married men used to put their names down solely.

The census also illustrates that women continue to own and operate smaller farms than men and earn less income–a fact that was equally true five years ago.

Adcock says that women tend to run small-scale, diversified farms, “producing food for direct sale, rather than the large commodity farms.”

And although there was a general bump in minority-owned farms (the number of Latino farm owners went up by 21 percent, for instance), the census also shows that women of color aren’t fairing particularly well in the current farm landscape.

“There’s a slight increase in black farmers who are 55 and older. But there’s a decrease in younger black women going into farming,” says Tammy Gray-Steele of the National Women in Agriculture Association. The older farmers must start mentoring and training the younger minority farmers for this to work. The numbers should have been flipped upside down–more younger black women coming in and fewer older minority farmers. We have a lot of work to do out here, but I expect that the numbers will increase with younger, minority women farmers during the next census.”

More information about black and Latino women farmers will be available when USDA releases the complete census data in May.

A Roadmap for Policy?

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack spoke during the release of today’s numbers, saying it shed light on a “strong rural America” and commenting on the fact that the ag census should—ideally–shape public policy.

But farmer advocates like Traci Bruckner are doubtful that Vilsack sees the same census they do. Instead, she says, much of today’s policy–including the recently-passed 2014 farm bill–isn’t adequately responding to the story this data it has to tell.

“This census hasn’t helped to solve the problems we’ve been looking at in rural areas for decades,” says Bruckner. Namely: The widening gulf between big corporate farms benefitting from crop insurance and direct payments and well, everyone else. “If you really look at the data, our policy is wrong.”

The post Farmers Aging, Big Ag Getting Bigger: Behind the Preliminary 2012 Ag Census Numbers appeared first on Civil Eats.