education

These Programs Use Farming to Heal and Empower our Nation’s Veterans

| ChrisHardmanWriter

ALTHOUGH IT HAS largely faded to the background, the U.S. is currently embroiled in the longest war in its history, the 16-year-and-counting operations in Afghanistan. Despite the declared end of combat operations in 2014, at least 11,000 U.S. troops are still stationed in Afghanistan, and the all-volunteer U.S. armed forces include more than 1.4 million active-duty personnel.

In addition, there are 20.9 million military veterans living in the country today, and although there are a number of programs to help them find work after they leave the service, there remain an estimated 453,000 veterans unemployed. These men and women face a number of barriers to finding and maintaining work, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), traumatic brain injuries, and difficulty transitioning back to civilian life.

Veterans who return to the family farm have found that farming requires some of the same skills they used in the military: resilience, a do-or-die work ethic, and physical stamina. At the same time, many veteran farmers find that farm life is good therapy.

Around the country, programs such as the Farmer Veteran Coalition, Archi’s Acres, and Combat Boots to Cowboy Boots are helping these former soldiers transition to careers in agriculture. Training veterans to be farmers offers a promising solution to the need to care for veterans and to address the ongoing shortage of farmers due to the rapid aging of the country’s farm population.

In honor of Veteran’s Day, Civil Eats is profiling five programs that use agriculture to heal and empower the nation’s veterans.

1. Heroic Food (New York)

Heroic Food gives veterans a new mission: serving their country by growing food. “Veterans are sitting at home feeling like their duty to serve is over,” said Heroic Food’s communications specialist Jasmin Vazquez. She points out that while veterans need a new mission, America needs farmers.

Veterans participating in Heroic Foods' Microgreens and Urban Farming class. (Photo courtesy of Heroic Foods.)
Heroic Food

Heroic Food—which was started in 2014 by Leora Barish, the daughter of a career army chaplain injured in Korea—offers a year-long immersion program for veterans who are interested in small-scale commercial farming. Local experts from the Cornell Small Farms Program, the Farmer Veteran Coalition, and the Hawthorne Valley Learning Center helped develop a curriculum with veterans in mind. Each is matched with an experienced farmer who provides a paid internship and on-site housing.

For those interested in a shorter time commitment, Heroic Food organizes workshops on the 10 farms they partner with. Topics are diverse and include welding, cheese-making, beekeeping, high-tunnel building, and composting.

Heroic Foods’ “Farm Squads” consist of intensive three-day workshops full of hard work and knowledge-sharing. The farmers receive help from strong, motivated workers and have a chance to give back. “America wants to help, but they don’t know how,” said Vazquez. “We offer these farmers a way to directly influence the life of a veteran.”

Heroic Food staff also attend to participants’ psychological needs. Program manager Ryan O’Sullivan, himself a combat veteran, regularly checks in with program participants to make sure they are meeting their professional and personal goals. “If the [Veterans Administration] doesn’t help these struggling veterans, we are going to,” Vazquez said.

2. Veterans to Farmers Colorado

In Colorado, veterans transform from “protectors into providers” with Veterans to Farmers’ agriculture-based certificate programs in homesteading, aquaponics, in-soil, and greenhouse programs. The training is free and includes a stipend for participants.

Founder and U.S. Marine Corps veteran Buck Adams had already established a successful five-acre greenhouse farm, one of the largest in Colorado, when he decided to specifically train and hire fellow vets in 2011.
Adams found that the greenhouse was a calming place for returning soldiers who were dealing with PTSD; by becoming providers, he felt that veterans could more easily transition back to civilian life. “You start growing food for your community and you automatically become enveloped [by] the community. It’s the next path of service,” he said.“I believe one of the biggest problems the nation faces is the unemployment rate for veterans,” says Adams. “A lot of people are talking about what we can do, but it doesn’t seem like anything is happening.”

VTF’s hydroponic program lasts eight weeks, provides on-the-job training and includes a curriculum developed with the help of Colorado State University. VTF has also partnered with the CSU Extension office to train veterans in business skills with a Building Farmers course.

VTF’s other courses are equally rigorous and rely on partnerships with experts in the community. The 10-week aquaponics program is run in partnership with Colorado Aquaponics and the Mental Health Center of Denver (MHCD). The soil-based program takes place at the Denver Botanic Gardens and focuses on small-scale, organic vegetable farming. The homesteading program (livestock) is run by veteran-owned Farmer Murphy family farm. To date, 100 vets have successfully completed the training programs.

3. Heroes to Hives Michigan

Healing is also at the heart of this Michigan-based program. Adam Ingrao, a former Army Patriot missile fire controller, found that nature—in particular weeding his mother’s flower beds—helped him heal from a training accident that cut short his military career at age 25. He went on to earn a degree in agriculture from California Polytechnic State University and then to pursue a Ph.D. in entomology from Michigan State University.

Army veteran and Heroes to Hives Instructor Adam Ingrao teaching Heroes to Hives students in the Heroes to Hives apiary at Kellogg Biological Station Bird Sanctuary (photo Lacey Ingrao)
Heroes to Hives founder Adam Ingrao

His experience as a beekeeper made a lasting impression. “Beekeeping is kind of a meditative experience,” Ingrao said. In order to keep the bees calm, beekeepers need to be very mindful of what they’re doing and maintain calm themselves.

He realized that other veterans could benefit from working with bees, so he and his wife Lacey started Heroes to Hives in 2015. They took five combat veterans through a nine-month program that trained them in the science and business of beekeeping. Their success attracted funding from the AT&T Foundation and a partnership with the MSU’s Michigan Pollinator Initiative.

In the second year of the program, Heroes to Hives mentored 15 combat veterans, 80 percent of whom have a service-related disability, PTSD, or a traumatic brain injury. The vets work directly with hives, learn the science behind beekeeping, master best business practices and connect with potential employers.

“We also get these individuals out in the public,” Ingrao said. This year, his students put on demonstrations at the Michigan Honey Festival in August. “It’s amazing to see how much more comfortable they feel in these public spaces [after attending the program].”

Heroes to Hives is free for participants and tailors instruction time to the students’ work schedules. Now that it has joined forces with MSU, Ingrao expects the program to grow in services and capacity.

4. Growing Warriors Kentucky

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 1.7 million veterans use food stamps to feed themselves and their families. That statistic doesn’t sit well with Mike Lewis, a veteran of the 3rd U.S. Infantry, The Old Guard. Add the fact that veterans disproportionately come from rural areas, and Lewis, who is a farm advocate in rural Kentucky, takes this statistic personally.

“You come from a community that feeds the country. Then you go to defend the country and [when you come home] the land that you defended can’t even feed you,” he says. Lewis watched his brother Fred struggle after coming home from multiple tours in the Middle East with a traumatic brain injury in 2009, and saw firsthand how therapeutic life on the farm was for him.

Mike Lewis and his son on their industrial hemp farm. (Photo courtesy of Growing Warriors)
Growing Warriors Founder Mike Lewis and son

He founded Growing Warriors, a non-profit that has been teaching veterans how to feed themselves, in 2012. “Initially we started with a small garden with about 10 vet families,” Lewis said. Monthly classes covered farming techniques, healthy cooking, seed saving, and food preservation.

As the participants of Growing Warriors expressed an interest in farming as a profession, Lewis reached out to other organizations to expand his offerings and provide business training.

In 2017 alone, Growing Warriors facilitated more than 50 workshops that covered a wide variety of topics including mushroom-growing, beekeeping, aquaponics, soils science, and organic gardening. The organization also offers a 12-month immersive residential farmer-training program. “[We’re] seeing vets go from wondering what they’re going to do to thinking: ‘My mission hasn’t changed, I’m defending my land through nutrition,” Lewis said.

5. Veteran Farmer Project Pennsylvania

The lush, rolling hills of Westmoreland County in western Pennsylvania are home to more than 1,000 working farms. To take advantage of that deep agricultural heritage, the Westmoreland Conservation District started the Pennsylvania Veteran Farmer Project to connect veterans with farmers and farming resources.

Project director Mimi Brooker describes their services as a “one-stop shop for those who have served and are in ag or wish to be in ag.”

Fertile Valley Farms' Tammy Preble. (Photo courtesy Veteran Farmer Project)
Army veteran Tammy Preble

Specifically, the Troops to Tractors program matches veterans who want to get into farming with successful local farm mentors. The relationships range from casual farm visits to a paid internships. “[The] mentor farmer is getting a really solid employee … someone with a proven set of skills who is dedicated,” Brooker said.

The Project curates a website with information about agricultural job opportunities and ways to secure business funding and educational programs in agriculture. A map of 26 veteran-owned farms and agribusinesses offers another resource for aspiring farmers.

Last weekend, Troops to Tractors held their first Farm Trail tour. Eight veteran-owned farms opened their doors to the public, including  Fertile Valley Farms, which was started by Army veteran Tammy Preble and her husband.

“Veterans considering transitioning into farming need to understand that much like life in the military, life on a farm is non-stop—almost like a constant deployment,” says Preble. In order to succeed, she adds,  “Your family has to be understanding of the time demands and demands of the livestock taking precedence over everything else.”

Published on Civil Eats by Chris Hardman 

Refugees in Cleveland Gain Language and Job Skills

| ChrisHardmanWriter

ACROSS THE Cuyahoga River from downtown Cleveland, men and women dressed in brightly colored clothing harvest vegetables from tidy rows of plantings. Multilingual conversations take place in Hindi, Nepali, Somali and English. With the Cleveland skyline as their backdrop, these refugee farmers nurture their connection to the land and to their new home.

In 2010, the Cleveland nonprofit The Refugee Response created The Refugee Empowerment Agricultural Program (REAP) to support resettled refugees in the Cleveland area through farming. During the year-long program, men and women from Afghanistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Burundi, Myanmar, and Somalia learn language and job skills as they work the six-acre Ohio City Farm—one of the largest urban farms in the nation.

This year, REAP expects to harvest 22,000 pounds of produce from the farm’s hoop houses and fields. The Refugee Response leases nearly five acres of the Ohio City Farm from the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority.

Since Donald Trump took office in January, the United States has become a less friendly place for people born in other countries. But various community groups across the U.S. have long supported refugees—often through efforts focused on agriculture.

In addition to REAP in Cleveland, projects such as Plant It Forward in Houston, New Roots in San Diego, and the Refugee Urban Agriculture Initiative in Philadelphia have found that refugees and urban farming are a good fit, and despite the hostility at the federal level, they remain committed to their work.

“We did a survey, and 80 percent of people who were coming as refugees have some sort of agricultural background,” said Refugee Response Director of Agricultural Empowerment Margaret Fitzpatrick.

That makes a farm an ideal entry into the American work force. In addition, Fitzpatrick explained, people are coming from all kinds of backgrounds, often with a history of violence and trauma. Refugees find farm work comforting and therapeutic.

REAP graduate Lar Doe has been working for REAP since 2012. Although he was born in Myanmar, Doe grew up in a refugee camp on the border of Myanmar and Thailand.

After spending nearly 15 years there, he was granted permission to move to the U.S. in 2010. His first jobs were in Kentucky and Iowa, but then he accepted an invitation from the Refugee Response to relocate to Cleveland. He was one of REAP’s first refugee employees.

“It is a diverse city. You can find many different people from different countries,” he said. “I feel like the local people here understand about the world.”

Cleveland has a long history of welcoming refugees; since 1983, 17,000 displaced people have settled in the city. To better serve Cleveland’s increasing population of refugees, 16 organizations pooled their resources to form the Refugee Services Collaborative of Greater Cleveland in 2011. Collaborative members come from county refugee-resettlement agencies, area school systems, healthcare providers, and community and faith-based organizations.

REAP’s current cohort includes 10 refugees from Congo, South Sudan, and Myanmar.

As part of the program, trainees spend 28 hours each week on the farm and 12 hours in the classroom learning English as a Second Language. Farm work includes planting, seeding, harvesting, packing and delivery. For their farm and classroom time, they earn $9 an hour.

“The farm provides a step into employment in an area where people are comfortable (farming) with a skill set that people already have (farming),” Fitzpatrick said. Graduates of the program have gone on to work in the food service industry or been hired to work for REAP itself.

REAP also teaches participants about U.S. workplace culture. “The idea of being to work on time, calling a manager if you are sick, time sheet—those are things we take for granted being U.S. citizens, but these are skills that are not necessarily taught before they arrive,” Fitzpatrick said.

Doe talks about the differences in workplace culture: “[At home,] if you work and you get tired, you can rest, and if you feel OK, you can go back to work,” he said. “I always suggest to new refugees that they have to be patient, because the way that they work in their home country might be totally different than here.”

refugee

Located on the west side of the city, next to public housing and across the street from the city’s oldest farmers’ market, the farm is ideally positioned to help integrate refugees into the diverse fabric of American life.

“I’m very fortunate to have this job here, because this is an opportunity that I can get involved to the community and also learn more about the people and culture,” Doe said.

Refugees have the opportunity to practice English with visitors touring the farm, with Americans volunteering on the farm, with REAP staff, with members of REAP’s 60-person CSA, and with customers at the weekly farm stand.

Before coming to Cleveland, Doe worked at a meat packing plant. “The job I used to work before, it was hard to get involved in the country,” he said. “You only go to work and come back. You may never feel like it is your home.”

The community aspect of the program also appeals to Lachuman Nopeney, a 52-year-old refugee from Bhutan who spent 20 years in a refugee camp in Nepal and came to the U.S. in 2009 with no work experience and few English skills.

He worked at a restaurant in Milwaukee, where talking wasn’t encouraged. After going through REAP in 2016, however, he was hired by The Refugee Response to work on the farm.

“I’m happy,” he said with a broad smile. With the help of Refugee Response staff and other refugees, he is learning English. He likes his job of “working, joking, talking.”

“It’s more than a job,” said Refugee Response Executive Director Patrick Kearns. “The people in the program become like family to each other.”

According to Fitzpatrick, Cleveland is a diverse city that celebrates different cultures. As a result, The Refugee Response has formed solid partnerships with area restaurants including Great Lakes Brewing Company, Urban Farmer, and The Flying Fig.

In addition to buying produce, these and other local restaurants hold fundraising events, host dinners on the farm, and even employ REAP graduates. As one of the founders of the Ohio City Farm, the Great Lakes Brewing has a special interest in REAP and currently pays REAP to grow vegetables, herbs, and hops on the restaurant’s one-acre parcel of the Ohio City Farm.

“We’re very fortunate to be surrounded by a lot of local food restaurants here in Cleveland,” Fitzpatrick said.

Lar Doe says he is proud of his job. “I want to do something for the community,” he explains. As a refugee and a relatively newcomer to the country, his options to help build community may be limited. “English is the big issue for me. This [farm] is about the only thing we can do to make the city proud.”

Published on Civil Eats by Chris Hardman | Photos courtesy of The Refugee Response

Good Food Takes on the School Fundraiser

| ChrisHardmanWriter

OCTOBER IS NATIONAL Farm to School month. It’s one of those “take the pledge” times of year that catapults school fundraising season into overdrive. And with the designation comes all the familiar annual pressure to load the tables with goodies and buy whatever is on offer.

We’ve all been there. A co-worker or family member blindsides you with catalogues and order forms for candles you don’t need or cookies you don’t want. In a moment of weakness, you find yourself signed up for a giant tub of cheddar jalapeno popcorn chock-full of artificial ingredients..

But school fundraising is no longer the old-time cottage industry many of us remember, bolstered by the bake sale and door-to-door dollar chocolate bar pitch. It’s big, big business. According to the Association of Fund-Raising Distributors and Suppliers (AFRDS), schools and other non-profits net $1.7 billion selling cookie dough, candy, popcorn and a variety of other food and non-food products. Schools depend on these fundraisers to purchase sports equipment, technology, and plan field trips.

At the same time, as cultural interest in—and government support of—healthier school lunch programs has grown, parents and educators have begun questioning why schools sanction the sale of high-fat, high-sugar processed food, especially in a nation with a childhood obesity rate of 17 percent and rising.

When Mark Abbott found himself faced with the annual school fundraising campaign, he dutifully supported his son, who sold $400 worth of candy and cookie dough to friends and family. But after Abbott’s son questioned why he was selling processed food his family never ate at home, Abbott was inspired. He thought, why not create a school fundraising program that offers healthy, locally made products including honey, jam, pasta, granola, and seasonal produce?

In 2013, Abbott did just that, and introduced FarmRaiser—an online and mobile market—to schools in Flint, Michigan. With his fundraising model, not only can schools raise money, they can also support local businesses that produce healthy food. “Parents are responding to it in a big way,” Abbott says. “We are disrupting an industry.” Since 2013, FarmRaiser has managed 150 fundraising campaigns, become active in 22 states, and helped raise $270,000.

With a traditional school fundraising program, a school can expect to net 20-50 percent of sales. FarmRaiser, on the other hand, preserves that net percentage for schools (by charging a flat rate of 10 percent of sales, Farmraiser guarantees at least a 45 percent return to the school, though the typical campaign returns, on average, 51 percent to the cause), but also extends the support to local food artisans and farmers. “Our entire value proposition is leaving 85 percent of the money in the community,” Abbott says.

FarmRaiser tailors the products to the school’s location, so most of the vendors are truly “local,” and live within 30 miles of the school. For people who want to support the school but aren’t interested in receiving products, FarmRaiser offers a community basket donation. Half of every cash donation goes to the school while the other half goes to a local food bank or homeless shelter. According to Abbott, 10 percent of sales are community basket donations.

FarmRaiser works with 150 food vendors who offer more than 500 different products. Abbott explains that although the vendors sell their products at 50 percent less than retail, they gain tangible benefits with very little risk. FarmRaiser shares customer information with their vendors, allowing them to reach out to potential customers they know have already tried their product.

“For our suppliers that sell direct to consumers in their community, the cost of acquiring that potential customer is the margin [they] would have made in retail sales,” Abbott says. He estimates that 15,000 people have tried local products with FarmRaiser so far.

Al Dente Pasta Company in Whitmore Lake, Michigan has participated in 16 FarmRaiser campaigns since 2013. It sells its products in a bundle: two bags of pasta and one sauce. “For us it isn’t a financial gain. It was more wanting to support something really interesting that I thought served an important purpose,” says owner Monique Deschaine. “The model is a real win-win. You’re showcasing local ingredients. You’re allowing schools or organizations to fundraise. And you are giving people what they want.”

Like any online fundraising platform, FarmRaiser’s business model depends largely on how well its technology functions. And for users of other similar platforms like Kickstarter or GoFundme, the interface and “campaign” process will feel relatively familiar: a dashboard design that’s friendly to users who sit anywhere on the tech-savvy spectrum, and a mobile app that replaces order forms and processes payment by check, cash or credit card. Around 45 percent of FarmRaiser transactions are electronic, Abbott says, and he expects that number to grow.

For schools that still want to use paper, brochures and order forms can be printed from the FarmRaiser website, and schools can input their own orders into their custom campaign pages. Abbott says 75 percent of the campaign set-up and maintenance is automated, and his team is working on the final 25 percent.

But getting the technology up to speed is really only part of the equation. “Our biggest challenge is finding schools that want to do healthy fundraising,” Abbott says. Approaching schools to give a sales pitch is very expensive and time consuming. So instead, FarmRaiser has developed partnerships with like-minded organizations such as Slow Food USA, Food Corps, and Whole Kids Foundation. Abbott estimates that the FarmRaiser message can reach as many as 1 million people on social media through posts from its partners.

Meanwhile, the billion-dollar school fundraising market provides an endless–and annually renewable– source of growth opportunities. The company currently staffs three full-time and one part-time employee, along with five engineering contract workers. So far, investors have provided the funding for start-up and operating costs. And as FarmRaiser continues to automate campaign management, the profitability of each campaign increases.

FarmRaiser is harnessing the power of good food rather than irrelevant junk, and in turn making more money for schools. Their technology is not that new, and neither — obviously — is the idea of healthy food. What it is doing is extending at scale the intangible benefits of a fundraiser beyond the institution and into the community.

Published on The New Food Economy by Chris Hardman 

How to Change School Food in Detroit

| ChrisHardmanWriter

IN THE PAST FOUR YEARS, school meals in Detroit have been transformed. Gone are the chicken nuggets and sugary drinks. Now school cafeterias serve fresh fruit and mixed baby green salads, lean meat, low-fat milk, and whole grain breads. Better yet, some even serve produce from school gardens and local farmers.

The change hasn’t occurred overnight. The Detroit Public Schools Office of School Nutrition, which serves breakfast and lunch to more than 55,000 kids in 141 schools, has worked hard to create such a dramatic nutritional turnaround. And much of the credit goes to the office’s executive director, Betti Wiggins.

In 2008, Detroit Public Schools (DPS) was outsourcing its food service program. But the staff union had the foresight to hire Wiggins to propose bringing it back in-house. Her background as chief of nutrition for the District of Columbia and as a food services director in three other states, came in handy, and the district was convinced she was the one to turn things around.

Right off the bat Wiggins did away with the outside food management company, which allowed her to more than double the size of the food budget. (Before Wiggins came on board, DPS was spending 23 percent of its budget on food; it’s now 51 percent). The change in the quality was dramatic.

“One of the first things we did was turn the deep fryers off,” Wiggins says. “There are certain foods I don’t think we should be serving in schools. I don’t serve hot dogs and corn dogs; I think that’s carnival food.”

Next she increased the servings of fresh fruits and vegetables. Once a week the students are introduced to a new raw vegetable. If they don’t like the jicama, sugar snap peas, or asparagus the first time, it doesn’t matter. As long as Wiggins continues to put new food on their plates, the kids will eventually eat them. Since 2009, the students have also been eating brown rice and enjoying Meatless Mondays with hummus, eggs or cheese.

“Cafeterias should be viewed as an extension of the classroom,” she says. “We don’t do home economics anymore. That is where we are doing real nutrition education—on their plates.”

During Wiggins’ tenure, the Office of Nutrition staff has also grown to include lunchroom workers with nutritional training like Chef Kevin Frank, a Detroit native and graduate of the Schoolcraft College Culinary Arts Program. Chef Frank’s daily challenge is to create delicious and healthy meals that children will actually eat.

Thanks to Wiggins, Detroit public schools now buy 22 percent of their produce, including potatoes, apples, squash, peaches, and asparagus from farms around the state. They work with seven farmers, including Barbara Norman, whose farm, Barbara’s Blueberry Patch, sells 80,000 pounds of berries to the district each year.

Under Wiggins’ leadership, DPS became the first school district in the country in 2009 to offer free breakfast to every student regardless of household income. The goal has been to eliminate some of the social stigma associated with free food. As a result, more kids are eating a healthy breakfast than ever before. Breakfast—which includes yogurt, a granola bar, fresh fruit, and low-fat milk—is integrated into the school day and served in the classroom after the bell rings.

At lunchtime students can eat a free hot lunch and those participating in after-school tutoring and enrichment programs can also eat a free dinner. “A lot of kids come to school to eat,” says Wiggins.

The companion program to the meal service is the Detroit School Garden Collaborative. Wiggins comes from a farming background and has maintained strong ties to the agricultural community. With the help of a school board member, she started a farm-to-school program that now includes 76 school gardens. To make sure gardens thrive, each participating school has to sign a contract committing staff time to maintain its garden. DPS employs a garden director, a farmer, and a horticulturist to run the program.

The largest DPS farm is located at the Drew Transition Center, a school for young adults with special needs. There, a 2-1/4-acre farm and 96-square-foot hoop house produce corn, greens, and root vegetables. More than 7,000 ears of corn from the Drew farm ended up on the plates of schoolchildren throughout Detroit last year.

Another shining star in Wiggins’ $43 million dollar budget is a plan to turn an abandoned high school into the Kettering Urban Agricultural Campus. The site will include installing a 27-acre farm, 8 hoop houses, indoor growing areas, and a food processing center. Food grown and processed on the site will be used to feed schoolchildren and other members of the community.

Throughout the city, innovators from the Detroit Bus Company, the Green Garage, andMotor City Blight Busters are working to rebuild the city and grow its economy. Wiggins sees public school lunches as another sign of this positive change.

“It’s a rebirth,” she says. “It’s caring about our citizens.”

Published on Civil Eats.com by

 

Bringing Pollinators Back to Washington

| ChrisHardmanWriter

HAVE YOU CONSIDERED putting in a beehive, but worried that you might not have the time to maintain it? If you live in Seattle, you’re in luck. Once a month, Corky Luster’s Ballard Bee Company will install a hive, care for the bees, and harvest the honey for you.

“It’s like having a lawn service, but with bees. You can sit back and enjoy the bees, and we will take care of them,” Luster explains.

Ballard Bee customers sign up for a year of “urban pollination” services at a time. During the 6-month honey season, they receive two 12-ounce jars of honey a month, and in winter, Luster makes sure the hive survives.

In the process, he is turning suburban backyards and city rooftops into honey producing habitats, in hopes that it will help his customers connect the dots between what they eat and the natural world around them. “By [giving people] bees, you bring them into the fold, and they become part of the food system,” Luster says.

To make his business sustainable, Luster does more than manage hives. He teaches classes, consults with chefs, and sells honey and beekeeping supplies. “We’ve had a huge interest in beekeeping in Seattle,” he explains. His classes sell out and many of his graduates move on to their own beekeeping adventures.

Luster also consults for some of Seattle’s finest chefs. He helped both Jason Stoneburner of Bastille Café & Bar in Ballard and Gavin Stephenson of Seattle’s Fairmont Olympic Hotel set up rooftop apiaries. “My goal was to educate the chefs and get them involved,” says Luster. “Both are really bright and very interested in trying to be part of the solution.”

The restaurant apiaries have succeeded. Chef Stephenson now manages five rooftop hives that house half a million honeybees. He harvested more than 400 pounds of honey last summer. Last year, after relying on the service of Ballard Bees for three years, Chef Stoneburner has taken over caring for his hives. He uses his honey in desserts, vinaigrettes, and in a popular cocktail called the Bee’s Knees.

In 2014, Luster started a new service for restaurants called the apiary partnership program. He invited restaurants and chefs to buy bee hives that he manages for a small fee. The restaurant gets 100 percent of the honey. According to Luster, the partnership is a great success and he plans to expand this program in the future. His clients include the Walrus and the Carpenter, an oyster bar in Seattle, Vif, a wine and coffee café in Seattle, and the Tom Douglas Restaurants.

Nearly half of Ballard Bee’s income comes from honey sales. The company owns an additional 130 hives that are housed 45 minutes outside of Seattle at Local Roots Farm and at Camp Korey. The honey produced by those hives has varied flavors that depend on where the bees are foraging. The first nectar flow begins early in the spring when the bees are feeding on pollen from the flowers of bigleaf maple trees, the largest species of maple found in the Puget sound area. Next the bees feed on pollen from blackberry bush flowers. The last flow is from the Japanese knotweed plant and has a fig and caramel taste to it. Called Dark Cream Honey, it’s Ballard’s favorite flavor and recently received national recognition as a 2015 Good Food Awards winner.

Education is important to the Ballard Bee Company’s mission. Luster’s goals when starting the business in 2009 were to teach people about bees, replenish the local bee population, and encourage new beekeepers. He is dedicated to spreading the word about the value of bees and says people are afraid of bees because they don’t know enough about them. When he works with a hive, onlookers express surprise that he is dressed in short sleeves without gloves. “People are amazed that honey bees are extremely gentle. They’re teddy bears,” he says. Some of his clients put lawn chairs near the hive so they can relax and watch the bees at work.

As pollinators of fruit trees, nut trees and crops, the value of bees is vast. According to the Washington State Department of Agriculture, honey bees pollinate $2.2 billion worth of tree fruits, nuts, and berries, and produce 2.5 million pounds of honey in their state alone. Those calculations do not include the value of all the seed crops bees pollinate, such as onions, watermelon, and squash.

Seattle, with its vibrant local food scene, is an ideal place to launch an urban bee company. Since Luster started his business, other bee companies have debuted, offering hosting, consulting, and education services. One business, called the Urban Bee Company, gives city dwellers a chance to sponsor a hive or an apprentice beekeeper along with hosting and education programs. “I could not be here without the support Seattle has given me,” Luster says. “I am really thankful for that.”

 

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FarmRaiser Takes Fundraising Local

| ChrisHardmanWriter

WHEN MARK ABBOTT’S SON  was in fourth grade, his local elementary school recruited students and their families to participate in a fundraiser for the school. After successfully selling cookie dough and candy to friends and family, Abbott’s son remarked that he had just sold $400 worth of things the family would never eat at home. “It’s too bad we couldn’t try something healthy like apples,” said his son.

That suggestion resonated with Abbott, so he had an idea. Instead of candy and chips from national suppliers, why not make it possible for students to sell healthy food from local farmers, beekeepers, and food artisans? He started a pilot program in his hometown of Flint, Michigan. And the following year, in 2013, FarmRaiser ran 30 fundraising campaigns for schools in Michigan and Washington State.

Fundraising is a necessary evil for our nation’s schools. Budget cuts from federal and state sources have left most schools financially needy. In a 2007 survey conducted by the National Association of Elementary School Principals, 94 percent of principals–representing a wide range of school districts across the country–reported that they had held fundraisers.

Often run by parent volunteers, these fundraisers generate money to pay for everything from field trips, to playground equipment, school supplies, and new technology. Schools in both low-income and high-income areas report the need to fundraise. At least 35 states provided less funding per student for the 2013-14 school year than they did before the recession hit. Fourteen of these states have cut the amount they give for each student by more than 10 percent.

Fundraising is big business. Student salesmen generate $1.4 billion a year peddling packaged food, magazines, and gifts, according to the Association of Fund-Raising Distributors and Suppliers. But as schools are challenged to create a healthier environment for their students, parents and teachers alike question sending kids out into the community to hawk high-fat, high-salt cookie dough and candy bars. “I want to support the schools, but I don’t want to buy the stuff full of high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oils,” says Therese Povolo of Champion Hill Farm in Beulah, Michigan. She and her husband are beekeepers who have sold honey through FarmRaiser since last fall. The first school that used their products was only half a mile away from their home.

Fundraising is also one more way to fill students’ lives with candy and processed food. Children are especially vulnerable to big food marketing and having schools train them to be salespeople for high-calorie, low-nutrient foods seems counterintuitive. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, diet related illnesses such type 2 diabetes are on the rise. Their research shows that childhood obesity has doubled in children and quadrupled in adolescents in the past three decades.

Similar to traditional catalogue-based fundraising programs, FarmRaiser customers order products from a set list of vendors. But FarmRaiser campaigns avoid cookies and desserts, opting instead for local fruits and vegetables and locally sourced honey, pasta, granola, spice mixes, artisan breads, jam, etc. Schools can also collect money from cash donations made online.

Most of FarmRaiser’s vendors are within 30 miles of the school and if the school has a personal connection to a farm or food artisan, FarmRaiser will add them to their product list. “We love to sell products that directly connect back to the students at the school,” says says FarmRaiser’s campaign manager Christina Carson. For example Leelanau Montessori in Suttons Bay, Michigan, includes dried cherries in their fundraiser from Cherry Bay Orchards, one student’s family farm.

FarmRaiser vendors also use the campaigns as marketing tools. It provides a chance to reach new customers at a time of the year when farmers’ market crowds in Michigan are dwindling. “We have a big tourist market in the summer and when that falls off, it’s nice to get other people aware of our product,” says Povolo.

Carson says that FarmRaiser’s financial model is competitive with other types of food-based fundraising, which offer schools anywhere from 20-50 percent of the profit. In this case, the school ends up with a flat 45 percent of the amount sold, FarmRaiser takes a 10 percent fee, and the rest goes to local businesses.

FarmRaiser also helps schools raise money through a program they call The Community Basket. Here’s how it works: The school accepts cash donations in the name of a local food bank. The school keeps 50 percent and the rest of the money is used to buy local food for the food bank. Typically the students choose the charity and then have a chance to deliver the donation. “[It’s] a great way for people to share the bounty of the fundraiser with people who are in need,” says Carson.

As the need for fundraising grows, so does the need for fundraising companies working for more than just their own bottom line. FarmRaiser plans to increase their campaigns throughout Michigan and the Seattle area and to move into other states in the coming years.

“Eighty percent of households purchase something from a fundraiser every year,” says Carson. If they were selling, say, local apples instead of candy, she adds, “you’d have 80 percent of people purchasing local food.” The impact on the local farm economy could be huge.

Published on Civil Eats by