Food in Boston

what

a 10-day Permaculture Design Course

when

mid-September

who

instructor Dick Pierce; over a dozen Vineyard residents whose farms, businesses and homes we visited; me & 10 other students.

where

the Hostelling International on Martha’s Vineyard — a shining example of the breed. Very clean, with a super friendly staff, very reasonable rates for the Vineyard, and a flock of chickens & ducks to boot. The staff was very supportive of the class, letting us mostly take over the common room, and also install a few things on the property.

why

Before and during the course, I had some good conversations along the lines of what is permaculture anyway and why study it? Obviously I had some ideas when I signed up, or I wouldn’t have committed my money & time — I’d say that I had a general sense of permaculture as a body of theory and practice refined over the last few decades, having to do with designing & implementing ways to live ethically in the face of declining energy supplies.

what it was like

Some days were mostly listening, with some projects thrown in (turning the compost, or walking the property looking for wind, water and elevation changes). Some days were mostly field trips.

I hadn’t thought much about the fact that the course was going to be on the Vineyard, but that turned out to be a hugely influential aspect of the experience. Dick lined up 10 field trips to area farms, orchards, homesteads, and organizations, all of which exemplified some aspects and approaches to sustainable living. I was struck by how much consciousness our hosts had about looming challenges of climate, energy, water and soil, and food production, and how generous everyone was with their time and with their hard-earned knowledge. Not everything we saw fit exactly into the principles we were studying, but that’s the real world for you; discussing the similarities and differences was instructive.

What was it like living in a hostel with a dozen strangers (and dozens of others passing through), taking this course for a week and a half? The overall experience was surprisingly good, though there was definitely some friction and frustration. I think that the main controllable factor was that the course had a tremendous amount of material and activities crammed into 10 days. This was the first time for this particular configuration of the course, so I’d hope that future incarnations would either cover a bit less, or spread it out over another few days. Despite / because of this, the group did build a great relationship & will hopefully continue to collaborate.

where I could go with the experience

The last few days of the course consisted of a design exercise. I worked on a design for the yard of the property I’m renting, focusing mainly on protecting and building the soil, and will be pursuing implementation of that design. I’ve also talked to a few friends who own land about doing designs for their properties, and hope that the chance arises to pitch in on other students’ projects as they come up.

Longer term is less clear. I can definitely see the potential to turn permaculture design into a part-time pursuit, if the above projects go well. Even if I find that it’s not as good a fit for me as I’m currently thinking, I’ve got a whole new set of skills and ideas for evaluating and dealing with any property I’ll be living on in the future.

thinking of signing up for a course?

Apart from the money, spending 10 days away from family and job is a big commitment. It’s really worth thinking through what you want to get from the experience, and verifying with the instructor that what you’re interested in is going to happen. For courses such as this where students do a design exercise based on a piece of property of their own choosing, it really does pay off to get to know the property ahead of time. I’d definitely do it again, and it sounds like Dick’s intention is to do the two trainings again next year, one in Vermont and one on the Vineyard — I’d expect details to be posted at http://www.permie.us/ as the time draws nearer.

In my new-ish capacity as the person responsible for most things electronic at The Food Project, I met the other day with Kelley O’Connor of Massachusetts Local Food to discuss possible overlap of our work. In particular, we at TFP maintain a list of local farmers and the things they produce on their farms, which is also going to be one of the many pieces of Mass Local Food’s job.

From my perspective, the issues with our current list is that it’s a bear to update, being just a bunch of static pages, and that there’s some duplication between it and other people’s lists. Seems like everyone involved (farmers, local food buyers, and food organizations like us) would be better off with a more up-to-date and trustworthy listing, which is only going to happen if keeping it up to date is a simple process, and if there wasn’t so much potential confusion between the various farm listings (more on that below).

We spent a fair amount of time just trying to put together a picture of the different parties already engaged in providing online lists of MA farmers (for my benefit; Kelley has this stuff down cold). It turns out that most regions in MA are covered by one site or another, mostly not overlapping with one another, though there’s certainly duplication.

Massachusetts farm listings:

• Berkshire Grown: their own listings
• CISA in Western Mass: listings are provided through farmfresh.org
• The Food Project’s Boston-area listings, which we maintain ourselves
  
• Essex County & Merrimack Valley has their own listings
  
• SEMAP listings also through farmfresh.org

Side note - after Kelley walked me through this list & I dug around, I noticed that the Mass Department of Agriculture has all of this info and more.

There are also some national listings which include Massachusetts farms:

• the Eat Well Guide has a few
  
• Local Harvest has many
  

It’s pretty silly to be duplicating all this info, but it’s not immediately obvious how to effectively share data while still presenting the relevant parts through existing channels (to wit, the above sites). For the Mass Local Food project’s purposes, the easiest thing would be some facility tied into the local food coop software that they’ll be running their operations through. If that was done in a modular fashion, it might also be a labor saver for all these sites that are either maintaining manual lists of farms, or maintaining their own web databases.

We also tossed around the idea of a standard Farm Markup Language for exchanging updates. FML, anyone?

Next steps include digging further into the food coop software, and continuing to reach out to potential partners on the information-sharing and web DB aspects. This isn’t the most urgent project on my pile, but it’d be great to come up with something over the winter that put us in a position to do smart things for the ‘09 season.

Update: while I hope it’s implied, I realized this post is incomplete without an explicit acknowledgment of all the hard work done by TFP staff and interns to assemble and keep our guide up to date, as well as the maintainers of all the other farm lists mentioned. When looking forward to possible improvements, it’s all too easy to take for granted the labors that got us where we are.

First of all, it’s strawberry season in NE. Woo!

On that topic, all reports are good on the CSA front this year. Here’s one from an exciting new player on the local food in Boston blogging tip, Boston Localvores. Special props for their local beer section, and personable about page. In some alternative reality where I manage my time more efficiently, this site might be a bit more along their lines, or any of the other fine sites that continue to pop up. Maybe it’s time to turn FiB into an aggregator or something.

Finally, the latest Lionette’s newsletter is also worth a mention (it’s not on the web yet, but go ahead and sign up for the emails) — some really interesting stuff about local & sustainable fish, and a new program for delivering Lionette’s goods to other parts of town, kinda like a CSA dropoff point. Warning: I really dig Jamey’s closing thoughts, as usual, but I suspect they are a tonic too bitter for most folks just yet.

The NOFA winter conference is coming up this Saturday! It’s in Worcester, just an hour out of Boston. Workshops on a range of food and sustainability issues, a big ol’ potluck lunch, and a chance to holla at Agricultural Commissioner Doug Petersen — what’s not to like?

An alert reader pointed me to the local rag stuff@night’s latest issue, which has a number of food-related items. Of greatest personal interest is the article detailing some local chefs’ food sources. Meat and fish sources are all over the place, but some interesting trends emerged from the 10 interviewees:

• Russo’s is the overwhelming favorite for produce
• Iggy’s dominates in the bread category
• a few of the restaurants have more or less exclusive relationships with local farms for their produce
• Christina’s gets the most nods for spices, Eva’s Garden for herbs, Formaggio Kitchen for cheeses

Special props to Tim Wiechmann of T.W. Food for his particularly local stance on meat, fish, and everything else. Having said that, the overall level of local food sourcing was impressive. The profiled restaurants are relatively high end, so it’d be interesting to see how more affordable places measure up.

Tuesday’s local food forum at Lucy Parsons included a ton of information, questions, and ideas crammed into 90 minutes. Rather than try to capture it all, here’s a few snippets that stuck with me.

I don’t think you need an excuse to hold something like this, but a nominal reason for the event was the recent release of Vandana Shiva’s new book from South End Press, which includes a troubling-but-inspirational essay from James Lionette of Lionette’s Market, who kicked off the night’s discussion. Other panelists were Adrieanna Bozeman & Kettia Louis, interns at the Food Project; Matt Kochka, grower at ReVision House; and Jean Claude Bourrut, grower at the Farm at Long Island Shelter.

Economics

It still doesn’t sound like anyone’s getting rich around here producing or selling real, local food. That said, some of the panelists see potential for a better economic picture, especially if the proximity of producers and consumers in local food systems can be better taken advantage of.

There are certainly innovative arrangements being made already to get good local food to Bostonians in an economically sustainable fashion. For example, ReVision House does some interesting collaboration with local farms, including redistributing food from Drumlin Farm in their CSA, and from Allandale Farm at their farm stand. These have both been successful ways of getting local food to people in their part of Dorchester.

The Challenge of Winter, and Limited Land

This came up a number of times: how can we feed ourselves locally through the winter? A decentralized root cellar network could help. James Lionette argued that there’s a gap on the demand side: too many people still act like children and turn their nose up at turnips & cabbage, but those are what were traditionally eaten around here in the winter (along with meat & other animal products, of course). Jean Claude Bourrut’s farm feeds 2,000 shelter guests daily; there’s no way they could produce enough food on their 2 acres to store a significant supply for that many people. ReVision’s Matt Kochka ran the numbers and came up with ~900 farms within 40 miles of Boston, which still don’t produce enough to feed everyone in the metro around the year. Jean Claude followed this up by reiterating that there just isn’t enough farmland to support the people in & around Boston as long as we’re going to use it for golf courses & the like.

A farmer from Lincoln’s Blue Heron Organic Farm shared some thoughts about how much potential suburbs have for producing food. The main barrier has to do with the relative market values of real estate and of food. Suburbs can overcome this using conservation policies, as is the case in Lincoln where they and many other farms are located.

A recent emigrant from the Berkshires pointed out that there is, in fact, a thriving local food system there, and it’s an easy trip from Boston for anyone who’d like to get a bit of the experience.

Things aren’t all bad; we can always make sprouts in our kitchens, and can & otherwise preserve food during the summer. Getting through the winter in these parts has traditionally been done by preparing in the harvest season.

Local Grains?

A little (expensive!) spelt & bulger is produced in the Champlain Valley, but generally the economics of producing grains in the NE are much less favorable than for veggies or animal products. There was some confusion about King Arthur Flour being owned by one of the big agribusinesses; it looks like they’re actually a 100 percent employee-owned business. Maybe the point was more about their grain coming from industrial producers?

Farm Bill

We talked about the general situation with the farm bill, as well as its impacts on our local food system. People from the Food Project who had recently visited Senator Kennedy’s office heard that nobody had been in touch with the senator about the importance of preserving the Community Food Projects money — if I understand correctly, this helps keep the Food Project running in Boston, and similar initiatives throughout the country. More info at the above resource, and at Slow Food USA. It looks like the bill is about to hit the Senate floor, so there’s still time to contact Senators Kennedy and Kerry & let them know about our needs here in Boston.

Just saw on the Slow Food Events site that there’s going to be a fascinating looking panel on the costs and challenges of local & sustainable food at Lucy Parsons next Tuesday, 7 PM. If it’s half as good as the combination forum / potluck that the JP Forum put on last month, we may learn things that we didn’t even know we didn’t know. I myself am excited at the prospect of meeting Jean Claude from the Share our Strength farm in person — talked to him on the phone for the survey, but haven’t had a chance to say ‘thanks’ in person yet.

Farming the Concrete Jungle, in this month’s In These Times, provides a great overview of the state of urban agriculture in the US, and has a bunch of great quotes from Food Project folks.

I would have been thrilled to find this last year when I was starting to wrap my head around this stuff, and still find it useful to see all the various pieces wrapped up succinctly.

(via ethicurian)

Being a huge fan of food-related bicycle rides, I’m happy to pass on the following press release. Last year’s tour sounded like a blast, so it’s great to see another happening.

I’m also happy to be getting the word out more than two days in advance, which makes for a big improvement in my average lead time.

SAVE THE DATE:

BOSTON’S 2ND ANNUAL Tour de Farm BIKE TOUR
SATURDAY, AUG. 11, 2007

Please join Farm Aid and Boston-area cycling and farming organizations for the 2nd annual Tour de Farm bike tour.

The Tour de Farm will showcase innovative urban farms and food projects that are strengthening Boston’s local and sustainable food system. Riders will visit an urban farm in Roxbury, a CSA (community supported agriculture) farm and greenhouse in Dorchester, a new community farm in the Blue Hills Reservation and Boston’s oldest commercial farm. Riders will sample fresh, locally grown food, learn of the benefits of local agriculture and how they can actively support these efforts. The ride will go through the neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, Brookline, Mattapan, Milton and the beautiful Blue Hills Reservation.

The Tour de Farm is a free event and all are welcome. New this year, the tour will offer a shorter option for less experienced or younger riders of approximately 15 miles of mainly flat terrain. The longer of the two loops, approximately 25 miles, includes some moderate hills. The ride will start and finish at Boston’s Franklin Park, beginning at 9:00am and concluding by 1:00pm.

Pre-registration is required. For more information about the Tour de Farm and to pre-register, contact Mark Smith at Farm Aid, 617-354-2922, or via email to mark@farmaid.org

The Tour de Farm is sponsored by the following organizations:
Farm Aid (http://www.farmaid.org/)
MassBike (http://www.massbike.org/)
The Food Project (http://www.thefoodproject.org/)
Victory Program’s ReVision Urban Farm (http://www.vpi.org/)
Brookwood Community Farm (http://www.brookwoodcommunityfarm.org/)
Urban AdvenTours (http://www.urbanadventours.com)
Allandale Farm ( http://www.allandalefarm.com/)
Bikes Not Bombs (http://www.bikesnotbombs.org/)

Following are the people and organizations I talked to for today’s Farming the City Conference. Everyone was enthusiastic about helping and very generous with their time — thanks again! Also a big thanks to the conference organizers, presenters, and other attendees.

Non-profit farms:

• Bob Burns and Danielle Andrews at The Food Project, in Roxbury.
• Matt Kochka at ReVision House, in Dorchester.
• Jean-Claude Bourrut at the Farm at Long Island Shelter, on the harbor.
• Mark Smith of Brookwood Community Farm, on the Canton / Milton line.

Community Gardens:

• Jeremy Dick of Boston Natural Area Networks, downtown.
• Betsy Johnson of the South End / Lower Roxbury Open Space Land Trust.

From the Boston metro’s only for-profit farm, John Lee of Allandale Farm, in Brookline.
Finally, representing the 43 orchards in the Boston metro, Ben Crouch of Earthworks, in Roxbury.

I’d welcome any information about producers or related organizations not listed here, along with other information related to the survey. Still working on how to communicate what I learned, and figuring out where the information will be of use. More to come!