Michigan

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 

Edible Flint Sows Seeds for a Healthy Future

| ChrisHardmanWriter

IT’s A BEAUTIFUL day in Flint, Michigan. The sky is clear, flowers are in bloom and the volunteer gardeners in the edible flint Demonstration Garden are hard at work. Mike Roose is watering pepper plants in the raised-bed gardens. Scott Poinsett is trimming the garden perimeter, and Garden Manager Ginny Farah is harvesting crops for neighborhood residents. By the time they are done, the community garden will look its best in preparation for the evening’s food garden tour.

The Flint Food Garden Tour, which attracted 200 paying participants in late July, is edible flint’s signature annual event. For the past nine years, garden fans have toured the city’s community, church and private gardens in celebration of the vibrant food-gardening culture in the “Vehicle City.”

“Gardening here goes back 100 years or more,” says MSU Extension Community Food Systems Educator Terry McLean. In addition to her role on edible flint’s Leadership Board, she is the liaison between edible flint and MSU Extension.

Edible flint has existed as a network with workgroups since 2009, but it wasn’t until 2014 that it became a true nonprofit with an advisory board. “We support people who want to garden, we engage interested gardeners and we inspire people to garden,” says Garden Starters Training Coordinator Micah Williams, one of edible flint’s three paid employees.

edible flint demonstration garden

The most visible result of edible flint’s work is the demonstration garden located at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Begole Street across from the Hurley Medical Center. Employees from Hurley created the garden and maintained it for a few years but then asked edible flint if they would take it over. Edible flint adopted the garden in 2014.

Volunteers are the fuel that feeds the demonstration garden. Garden managers Ginny Farah and Scott Poinsett work in the garden at least three mornings a week from April to October. “Between the two of us we put in a lot of volunteer hours, but we really enjoy it,” Farah says. In addition to edible flint regulars, volunteer groups from Whole Foods and Michigan State University have lent a hand this year.

Most of the produce grown in the garden goes to people living in the surrounding neighborhoods. Last year, in spite of a prolonged drought, the demonstration garden donated 1,500 pounds of produce to community members. “Community gardens are meant to share,” says McLean. “It’s been an amazing outreach.”

On distribution days, edible flint volunteers fill plastic bags with a variety of the day’s harvest. The produce they grow includes watermelon, tomatoes, okra, squash, collard greens and herbs. Farah says she likes to introduce a new vegetable each season. This year, they are growing long beans, a specialty of Asian gardeners.

People trickle in to take the plastic bags of produce hanging on the garden fence. “We’ve gotten to know quite a few people who live in the neighborhood,” Farah says. She specifically plants okra for one neighbor, and McLean recalls the grandmother who said because of the garden, her entire family was eating healthy food that summer.

The Flint Demonstration Garden donated 1,500 pounds of produce to the community this year.”

In Flint, fresh produce can be difficult to find. In the past few years, several major grocery stores have closed their doors and left the city, and many of the city’s low-income residents don’t have a car to drive to the remaining places that do sell fruits and vegetables.

“I think that gardening empowers people. Growing your own food is an essential skill, especially in a community where there are no chain grocery stores,” Williams says.

To make food gardening affordable, edible flint sells highly subsidized garden starters kits. For $15, a beginning gardener gets 44 live plants, a bag of seed potatoes and 19 types of organic seed. The kit is designed to feed a family of four with a 1,500-square-foot garden. “It allows just about anybody the ability to garden,” McLean says.

The program also offers low-cost soil testing, tilling and compost delivery. According to Williams, in 2017 edible flint sold 330 kits, delivered 377 yards of compost, tilled 27 gardens and distributed 58 water filters.

To ensure success in urban food gardening, edible flint runs an 11-week garden starters class. Drawing on experts in the community, the class covers soil science, pest management, vegetable and fruit production and seed starting, among other topics. The class also includes an introduction to land access and food accessibility in Flint. “Every week has a new class topic and a new teacher,” Williams says.

Key partnerships with the Ruth Mott Foundation, MSU Extension, the Michigan Food and Farming Systems and the Flint Farmers’ Market have contributed to edible flint’s growth. Part of edible flint’s strategic plan is to increase commercial food production and provide support for food entrepreneurs in the city and its surroundings. For a city with 42% of its population living below the poverty level, economic opportunities, food sovereignty and increased access to healthy food are just what the community needs.

Published in edibleWOW Magazine | Photos by Chris Stranad

How Flint is Using Good Food to Combat Lead Poisoning

| ChrisHardmanWriter

WHEN NEWS OF the Flint water crisis went viral in January, water donations and pledges of support came from around the world, and suddenly a community that was long ignored by the outside world was the subject of national news reports. The story was alarming: hundreds of people had been exposed to lead simply by using the water in their homes.

When the city of Flint began using water from the Flint River in April 2014 and forwent treating it for corrosion, the move resulted in corroded pipes, lead in the public water supply, and a public health crisis. Ingesting lead is dangerous for anyone, but it is especially damaging to children and pregnant women, with long-term effects including behavioral, learning, and hearing problems, delayed fetus growth, and harm to the brain, kidneys, and other essential organs.

Research shows, however, that good nutrition can help mitigate the impact on children with elevated lead levels. Like calcium, lead is stored in the bones, and it can remain there—eventually leaking out into the bloodstream, continuing the exposure internally—for months or years after the external exposure stops. Fortunately, foods low in fat and high in vitamin C and iron combat lead poisoning by decreasing the metal’s absorption by the body. Calcium also decreases lead’s negative impacts by helping prevent it from leaving the bones.

With that in mind, members of Flint’s food community doubled their efforts to get healthy food into the homes of Flint residents.

The hub of Flint’s food community is the year-round Flint farmers’ market, an indoor bazar conveniently located across the street from the MTA bus terminal. While the market has long purveyed high-quality fruits and vegetables and offered cooking demos, exercise classes, and health programs, it took on a new mission earlier this year: getting foods that combat lead poisoning into the homes of Flint residents.

Along with the Hurley Wellness Center and Michigan State University Extension, the market created a series of cooking classes that teach participants to prepare meals with the lead-fighting foods.

It just happens that most of the foods that help with lead exposure are just your basic healthy foods,” says Chef Sean Gartland, market cooking class lead and culinary director of Flint Food Works, an incubator program also at the market.

Gartland rotates teaching duties with Hurley dietitians and MSU educators. All of the classes are free of charge, and each participant goes home with a bag of produce, a nutrition guide, and recipes designed to reduce the effects of lead exposure.

One of Gartland’s recent classes featured a brown rice dish with grilled chicken, kale, and black beans. “We try to drive home why you would add [those ingredients] to a recipe for flavor and also for the effect of mitigating lead in your body,” Gartland says. Since June of this year, 258 people have attended 24 of these special cooking classes in the farmers’ market demonstration kitchen.

Various other community groups have joined the lead-fighting effort as well. Last summer, the market hosted a program sponsored by the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA) and the non-profit FlintNOW. On the last day of school, 8,000 Flint public school children received “nutrition backpacks” containing a mini basketball, information about nutrition and lead, and three $5 gift certificates to the Flint farmers’ market. Additional funding from the Detroit Pistons matched each $5 gift certificate with another $5—bringing the total to $30 worth of free food.

It’s clear that families have bought more produce because these incentives. Gartland says $35,000 worth of NBPA gift certificates have been redeemed, which translates to 7,000 individual gift certificates for 2,333 kids. An additional $27,500 worth of Pistons gift certificates have been cashed in as well.

The national non-profit Fair Food Network (FFN), another organization with a track record in Flint, has also stepped up its offerings to help combat lead poisoning through diet.

In 2011, the FFN introduced the Double Up Food Bucks program, which enabled low-income Flint residents receiving SNAP benefits (formerly known as food stamps) to double their healthy food budget. If a shopper spends $20 in SNAP benefits on produce at the grocery store or farmers’ market, for example, they earn another $20 in food bucks to spend on more fruits and vegetables.

“We were already in Flint doing work in farmers’ markets and grocery stores when we started hearing about the exposure that families and kids had to lead,” says FFN’s President and CEO Oran Hesterman. “Medical experts [told] us one of the only ways they know to mitigate the long-term impacts of lead exposure is to make sure that those who have had that exposure have a high nutritional level of iron and calcium.”

To build the program’s capacity to fight lead poisoning, Fair Food expanded to include milk as an eligible item and moved the program beyond the farmers’ market and a few grocery stores to additional retail outlets that sell fresh produce. (Because neither the farmers’ market vendors nor the grocery store partners offer produce grown in the city or affected areas, lead-contaminated produce is not a concern.)

Additionally, FFN hired a company called Epic Technology Solutions to develop the technology needed for shoppers to seamlessly go from venue to venue spending and earning food bucks.

Flint resident Liberty Bell uses Double Up Food Bucks at both the farmers’ market and the grocery store. “Buy one and get double back, how can you beat that?” she asks. “That extra $20 or $40 in your pocket is awesome.” She says the extra money helps to provide a healthier lifestyle for her and her young son.

Because the original Double Up program was underutilized—only 3,000 of 40,000 eligible people took advantage of it in 2015—FFN launched a targeted advertising campaign using billboards, bus signs, radio and TV commercials, and ads on social media. So far, the results have been positive. Since then, FFN reports that 4,000 people have used the program since June 2016, a 76 percent increase in enrollment compared to the same time period last year.

It takes a lot of people to get a buzz going in a community about a program like this,” Hesterman says. “I’m not sure what it’s going to take to make [Double Up] a daily habit, but that is our goal.”

The Food Bank of Eastern Michigan, which works on increasing access to healthy food in 22 Michigan counties, including Genesse County, where Flint is located, has also gotten involved. In partnership with the Michigan Department of Public Health, the food bank operates a mobile food pantry that hauls truckloads of healthy food to Flint families.

Since March, the “Flint Nutrition Mobile Pantry,” which is supported by a $28 million state appropriation, has brought tuna, potatoes, baked beans, cereal, apples, peppers, and tomatoes to religious institutions and neighborhood centers throughout Flint. This past September, the mobile pantry made 24 stops in 20 days.

“I think this is a wonderful example of neighbor helping neighbor to provide healthy food to families to mitigate the impact of lead,” says William Kerr, president of the Food Bank of Eastern Michigan, in a statement.

Kerr promised that the Food Bank will stick with Flint over the next 10 to 15 years to work through the after effects of lead exposure to the city’s children.

Now, as the Flint water crisis fades from the political spotlight and offers of help dwindle, members of Flint’s food community continue helping families get the good food they need—now more than ever.

Published on CivilEats by Chris Hardman

Flint MTA Provides Rides to Grocery Stores

| ChrisHardmanWriter

BEFORE FLINT, MICHIGAN became synonymous with poisoned water, residents had another major health concern: limited access to healthy foods. Residents were shocked in the spring of 2015 when two of Flint’s major east side grocery stores, part of the Meijer and Kroger chains, closed their doors. The city had already lost a Kroger several months earlier on the northwest side of town.

“The public was wondering, ‘How will people get their groceries?’ There wasn’t a grocery store within four to five miles,” says Derrek Williams, manager of Fixed Route Transportation Services for Flint’s Mass Transportation Authority (MTA). In a city where42 percent of residents live below the poverty level, many households can’t afford a car to drive to a grocery store across town or outside the city limits.

“Our staff met to talk about what we could do to help people,” says Edgar H. Benning, the Flint MTA’s general manager and CEO, who grew up on the east side of Flint. “We had a real challenge on our hands.”

Last April, Benning and his team introduced a new bus route serving east-side neighborhoods called Rides to Groceries, which takes passengers to the east-side grocery stores, Kroger in the northeast and to Walmart in the southeast. (While the bus also stops near a new grocery store called Fresh Choice Market, few riders patronize the store because of its higher prices.) To make the bus affordable for as many people as possible, the MTA reduced the normal bus rate by half, to just $0.85 each way.

The new bus route took a while to catch on. “The people really didn’t know how to receive it, because no one tailors a bus for a neighborhood,” Williams says. “Our biggest challenge has been getting the people out to ride and understanding that this ride is set up for the grocery store.”

The MTA, which employs a staff of 470 people, launched a publicity campaign by handing out flyers, talking to block clubs, and knocking on doors. Special bus signs with grocery carts dot the route, and recently, the bus was wrapped with a colorful image that includes a shopping cart, fresh produce, and contact information.

In the early days of the new route, an MTA bus driver noticed one rider who was taking the bus almost every day and bringing home only one or two small bags. When the driver told Benning about the woman, he realized she was shopping every day because she couldn’t carry a week’s worth of groceries from the bus stop to her home.

Wondering if other riders had the same problem, Benning sent several of his staff into the neighborhoods to interview passengers. They found that some people had trouble maneuvering from the bus stop to their homes, Benning says.

In response, he decided to develop another option: “We offered another level of service, which would allow people to go from their home to the store,” he said. For $2.25 each way, residents living off the main route can call and schedule pickups and drop-offs at their homes. Similar to the bus route, the call-in service, which relies on a separate vehicle, is available all day, Monday through Saturday.

According to Benning, ridership has grown from 235 people the first month to about 900 per month more recently. “Not only do we have people who use it daily to go shopping, but we also have people who work at those stores and use it,” he says.

Frequent bus rider and Walmart employee Violetta Allen, who used to walk more than two miles both ways to shop and go to work, says she finds the new bus service helpful. “I used to walk from Center Road to work at Walmart,” she says. “The shopper bus brings me all the way out here. Now I don’t have to carry my groceries so far when I get off of work.”

The MTA plans to expand the service to the other side of town and introduce call-in program riders to grocery minibuses. Benning says the MTA has to adapt to the needs of an isolated and aging population. “In some cases, they go to the corner drug stores and are living off what’s on those the shelves,” he says.

The Rides to Groceries bus costs $6,000 per month to operate. Because the fares don’t offset that new cost, Benning has sought funding from the community and from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. So far, the Kroger Foundation donated $15,000; Walmart gave $1,000; and United Way of Genesee County gave $5,000.

“If we wait until the money’s there, we will never get it,” Benning says. “Let’s put it out [there], make it work, and figure out how to fund it.”

Published on CivilEats by Chris Hardman

 

What Detroiters are Doing with Discarded Tires

| ChrisHardmanWriter

ONE 2014 MORNING on Detroit’s northeast side, residents along Mapleridge were horrified to find that 10,000 tires had been stuffed into a row of abandoned houses on their street. The tires were stacked from floor to ceiling, piled in alleyways and jammed into garages. The fire hazard was high, and the disregard for neighborhood safety was disturbing. In the days that followed, community leaders organized a cleanup effort that took 30 volunteers 6 hours to haul the illegally dumped tires onto the curb for the city to pick up.

Tires figure prominently in the lives of Detroiters, and not because they live in the Motor City. There are just so many of them — illegally dumped in vacant lots, stuffed in abandoned buildings, discarded carelessly throughout neighborhoods. Some estimates put the number of tires littering Detroit’s neighborhoods at as many as 1 million.

Tires are considered a hazardous material, and as a result, they can cost as much as $2 each to safely dispose of. So it’s not surprising that unscrupulous tire haulers have been using Detroit’s vacant buildings and lots as their own personal dumping grounds for years.

“It tears me up, because we are talking about families,” says Audra Carson, native Detroiter and founder of De-tread, a start-up working to collect and dispose of Detroit’s abandoned tires. “People who aren’t from here or people who are disconnected, don’t realize that even if there are abandoned houses, there are still families living [nearby].”

Carson lists the dangers of abandoned tires in Detroit neighborhoods: piles of tires attract and provide homes for rodents; tires are highly flammable and create fires that are hard to extinguish; tires collect standing water that breeds insects that can carry disease.

Carson is so concerned about tires in the city that she left her two-decade career in corporate Detroit to launch De-tread in 2009. During her first cleanup project, with the Osborn Neighborhood Alliance in October of 2012, De-tread and a team of volunteers picked up 313 tires in less than 30 minutes.

Key to Carson’s strategy is to get the community involved in the actual hands-on challenge of tire removal. For her second cleanup, she returned to Osborn with a grant from the Skillman Foundation. De-tread, along with 50 volunteers, managed to get rid of 2,500 tires, hiring a licensed hauler to take them away and have the tires processed according to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality standards. “To be able to make that instant impact in a neighborhood is extremely rewarding,” Carson says.

Now De-tread is developing products to make from abandoned tires. “Once the rubber is in a certain form it can be molded into anything. Think about sandals, kitchen items. It runs the gamut of what can be done,” Carson says. “Where I want to be is funky, cool. We’re talking about furniture. We’re talking about apparel.” Carson plans to do more than just get rid of tires. She wants to use them to create manufacturing jobs for people in the city.

In another part of Detroit, Reverend Faith Fowler is already using abandoned tires to create jobs for people in her neighborhood. She is the Executive Director of Cass Community Social Services, which runs Cass Green Industries (CGI), a small business that employs people who face barriers to employment — some are homeless, recovering from addiction, or dealing with chronic health conditions.

“The recession was hitting Detroit hard but especially our people in terms of employment,” Reverend Fowler explains. “None of my people had cars so they couldn’t get to where the jobs were, and if they were able to finagle a ride, they weren’t considered because there were so many people who had been laid off of other jobs with great resumes that our folks didn’t stand a chance.”

Fowler began to search for a small business idea that would be self-sustaining and cheap to start. When she read an article about woven mud mats made out of recycled tires, she knew she had found the right product for Detroit. “We have tires everywhere,” she says. “Talk about a free resource.”

By employing homeless veterans, ex-cons, or chronically ill people, CGI relies on the talents of a population that is often overlooked. Fowler is proud that some of her employees have used CGI as a stepping stone to full-time, better paying jobs.

To create even more jobs CGI introduced a new product in 2014. Detroit Treads sandals are made out of the tire treads that are left over from making mud mats. The sandals were an instant hit. In the first 4 months CGI sold $82,000 worth of sandals at $25 a pair. By leveraging the power of social media, Cass Green Industries has sold products in every state and in five foreign countries.

Typically Green Industries is lucky to break even. Last year the business brought in $120,000 in sales from tire products as well as coasters handmade from recycled glass. Reverend Fowler points out that the business is there to create jobs, and currently Green Industries employs 20 people part time making $9 an hour. “Not only are they making money, they are making the city better,” she says.

It’s nearly impossible for the city of Detroit — which covers 138 square miles — to keep up with the tire problem. In sparsely populated neighborhoods with rows of abandoned houses, there are just too many places to hide. “These tire companies are looking for an area where there are abandoned homes and a very low population. So they have no eyes and ears watching them,” says Detroit Department of Neighborhoods District 4 Manager and lifelong Detroit resident Odell Tate.

As part of Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan’s “Every neighborhood has a future” initiative, Tate works with community leaders, churches, and neighborhood watch programs to solve the problem of blight in District 4. “We have been very fortunate to have strong community block clubs and associations that radar and monitor tire situations,” he says. Vigilance and community cooperation are the keys to success in Tate’s district, where residents work closely with the police to report any suspicious activity.

In April 2015, the Duggan administration introduced the Improve Detroit mobile app as an easy and convenient way for citizens to let city hall know about problems in the city.  Using the app, residents with smartphones can report potholes, missing traffic signs, and illegal dumping. They can pinpoint the exact location of the problem and even submit a photo.

In addition to eyes on the street, Tate says surveillance cameras would be a good way to find out who is dumping in Detroit. “If we’re able to catch one of the tire companies, and we can make them an example, I think that would put the rest of them on notice,” Tate says. “[The residents] are fed up with companies coming in and disrespecting the neighborhood by dumping tires.”

Published on BeltMagazine by Chris Hardman

 

Detroit Farmers Build a Better CSA

| ChrisHardmanWriter

ON PAPER, the community supported agriculture (CSA) subscription model is an ideal partnership. Members of the community support the farmer by paying for their produce in one lump sum before the harvest and then receive a weekly box of food during the growing season. In some cases, CSA boxes can provide up to four-fifths of a family’s diet.

But boxes can also be inconsistent—one week a customer can be overloaded with squash or kale, and the next week have none at all. The model also can have some downsides for farmers, who not only need to grow a diverse set of crops, but also spend time packing weekly produce boxes and staffing member pick up stations. And despite the upfront investment by CSA members, many such farmers are still struggling to make ends meet. (A 2014 Massachusetts study found that 81 percent of full-time CSA farmers aren’t earning a living wage.)

To address these issues, a group of young farmers in Detroit started a cooperative CSA in 2012 called City Commons. The five urban farms—Fields of Plenty, Food Field, Buffalo Street Farm, Vinewood Knoll, and Singing Tree Garden—contribute to the weekly box and are paid based on how much produce they supply. By pooling their resources, they decrease their workload and risk and provide their customers with a more reliable, varied collection of produce every week.

City Commons boxes always have between eight and 10 items so customer don’t get overwhelmed with too much of one or two vegetables. And with careful planning in the winter, City Commons farmers make sure they have enough variety to fill their customer’s needs. “[That diversity] is part of why the cooperative model creates such a consistent product,” says Alice Bagley of Fields of Plenty. By the end of the season, members will have received about 50 different types of fruits, vegetables, and herbs.

City Commons’ membership grew from 13 to 60 members between their first and second year of business, and rose to 90 members last year. (This year, they limited membership to 65, because one of their founding farmers moved away and another is having a baby.) The original group of farmers met while working for the Greening of Detroit. Each had previous experience with CSAs and a shared philosophy for sustainable farming.

Once a week, member farmers send an e-mail list of available produce to crop coordinator and Vinewood Knoll owner Elizabeth Phillips. She then calculates how much product each farmer needs to contribute to fill customer boxes. “The beauty of the cooperative is if I only have greens, I have four other farmers back me up providing other things,” Phillips says.

Each farmer also has a role in running the business. For example Bagley manages the books, and Link from Food Field responds to e-mail inquiries. “Our administrative work is what we give back to the cooperative,” Phillips says. “We don’t get paid for those jobs.” With no administrative costs, City Commons is able to keep their prices at $450 for a 20-weeks full share and $230 for a half share.

“We want to make sure the food we are growing is accessible to the community we’re in,” says Buffalo Street Farm’s Chris McGrane. He grows food on the east side of Detroit in a neighborhood that is mixed with abandoned, run down homes, and older, inhabited ones, and says that most of his neighborhood relies on some type of food assistance. As a result, City Commons has to be able to accept Michigan Bridge cards from Michigan’s electronic food assistance program. McGrane says about half of City Commons’ customers are from Detroit, and the other half work in the city.

The support the cooperative CSA provides to farmers is invaluable. “Farming is kind of lonely,” says Phillips. “It’s just nice seeing someone every week who is going through the same thing and supporting you.” If one farmer needs to take some time off, the other farmers pitch in as needed. “You don’t have to have that 24/7 marriage to the farm,” says McGrane.

A known customer base also gives the farmer more time to spend on farming instead of marketing. “You know [the produce is] going to get sold,” says Bagley of Fields of Plenty. “At the beginning of the season, I already knew that I had 65 customers waiting to eat the things I was growing.”

Published on CivilEats 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.”

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An Urban Farmer Breaks New Ground in Flint

| ChrisHardmanWriter

THIRTY-YEAR-OLD Roxanne Adair is a trailblazer. In 2010, she and a friend started Flint River Farm in Flint, Michigan, a city where urban farming isn’t the norm. Adair’s background was in fisheries, wildlife, and biology, and she used the knowledge gained working at the Genesee County Land bank to buy and rent city lots, totaling nearly three acres, in the heart of Flint.

This process wasn’t easy. Flint’s history mirrors that of other rust belt cities. The city had a robust economy based in the auto industry until it began to decline in the 1970s. When General Motors closed multiple plants and cut thousands of jobs in Flint in 1989, work suddenly became scarce. As unemployment and crime increased, the media dubbed Flint “the Murder Capital” of the U.S.

Despite the city’s challenges, Adair and her partner jump-started their business with a grant from the Ruth Mott Foundation. Their goal was to create a sustainable business model for urban farming in Flint.

The farmers built hoop houses, produced enough vegetables to supply a multi-family community supported agriculture program (CSA), harvested honey from two beehives, and even tapped neighborhood maple trees to make syrup. They sold their organically grown produce at the Flint Farmers’ Market.

Since her partner left in 2012, Adair has continued to expand the farm on her own, and the space now occupies 17 city lots. Flint River Farm produces a wide array of heirloom crops, including apples, blackberries, strawberries, cherries, corn, melons, tomatoes, squash, dried beans, carrots, beets and Brussels sprouts—the list goes on and on.

frf joannas dadWhile Flint River Farm is filled with fresh produce, the neighborhood still faces its challenges. Across the street is a burned-out convenience store. The main drag, Saginaw Street, is a block away and is home to strip clubs, a pawn shop, and a liquor store.

Theft is a frequent problem on the farm, but Adair doesn’t begrudge her hungry visitors. “If you need [food] bad enough to steal it, you need it more than I do,” she says. But, she encourages people to reach out to her first: “Tell me and I will harvest it for you. I’ll wash it for you and have it ready.”

Vandals also come through the farm regularly, slashing the thick polyethylene walls of the hoop houses or spray painting gang paraphernalia on the sides. Repairs and replacements can cost thousands of dollars.

By and large, however, the long-time residents of the neighborhood have become Adair’s friends. They share tools, talk over the tomatoes, and collaborate on composting. Adair recalls that when she started the farm, she rarely saw the neighbors outside. “They would mow their lawn and then run back inside,” she says. Now people have planted flowers and are taking pride in their landscape. “I can’t take credit for that,” says Adair, “but I think [the farm] has caused people to come outside more and not hate their surroundings.”

Throughout the year, Adair shares her knowledge through community workshops, on topics as diverse as urban foraging, composting, maple syrup making, organic gardening, and season extension. Although she charges a small fee for the classes, Adair admits that she doesn’t turn anyone away. “There is a spirit in the city of Flint that I haven’t found anywhere else,” she says. “The people who have stayed have been through some really hard times. I have a respect for the struggle.”

Flint River Farm aims to address the city’s high unemployment rate by providing jobs to Flint residents. Using grant money, Adair hired local teenagers to farm and work at the farmers’ market. At the height of the growing season, she employed nine full-time staff members and two interns. As the farm moves toward self-sustainability, Adair hopes these jobs will become more permanent. When the farm first started, it was entirely grant-funded. This year grants accounted for only 40 percent of the operating costs.

To sustain the farm, Adair has diversified her product line. She has sold lip balm made from her bees’ wax, salad mixes from the hoop house, teas from dried herbs, eggs from her small flock of chickens, and nut butters she grinds herself. This month, she began selling bulk dried goods like organic oats and flour at her stand in the market. “I am confident that with bulk food bins we will be sustainable next year,” she says.

Last summer, the city threatened to confiscate the chickens Adair keeps at her house. Flint’s Blight Authority gave her 30 days to dispose of the birds. Adair used that opportunity to try to change a 1968 city ordinance that prohibits residential homeowners from keeping “fowl” on their property. She mobilized her support network, worked with the city council, and created a ”Friends of Flint Chickens” Facebook campaign.

On the last day, Adair sat on her front porch and waited for the police to come. She highly doubted that in a city with only three police officers on duty at a time, one of them would take time away from chasing drug dealers and thieves, to chase her chickens. She waited all day. No one came.

Like her chickens, Roxanne Adair is in Flint to stay.

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Detroit Company Creates Fresh Food Pit Stops

| ChrisHardmanWriter

IF YOU’RE ON THE HUNT for a fresh, ready-to-eat meal in Detroit, the best place to find it just might surprise you. Take the Sunoco station on Fort Street or the Victory Liquor and Food store on Warren Avenue. Amidst the Hot Cheetos and snack-sized Chips Ahoy cookies, you’ll find a cooler stocked with everything from fresh fruit and yogurt parfaits and spicy feta and hummus wraps to Thai chicken salads made with fresh, green lettuce—not the wilted iceberg you might expect.

The company behind the food might not be what you’d expect either. Fresh Corner Cafe (FCC) is a mission driven food and delivery service with the goal of making healthy food accessible to all Detroiters. To do this, they’ve turned to a most unlikely distribution center—neighborhood convenience stores.

For years, Detroit has been labeled a “food desert,” but that term is misleading. “It’s not that we don’t have grocery stores,” explains Detroit native and FCC co-founder Val Waller. “It’s that people have issues getting to them.”

According to a 2011 report from Data Driven Detroit, there are more than 115 grocery stores within Detroit’s city limits. In the years since that report was published, several high-profile grocery stores have opened stores in the city—including Whole Foods in June 2013 and Meijer in July 2013. But Detroit encompasses 138 square miles, the public transportation is undependable and some neighborhoods are simply not safe for walking. As a result, many Detroiters choose food from the closest of the more than 1,000 corner stores in the city.

“We’re trying to change the idea of what can be available in these spaces,” Waller explains. Initially FCC co-owner Noam Kimelman had to convince the shop owners that his products would sell. But Kimelman and Waller worked hard to build relationships with store owners and won over customers by providing free samples.

The idea for Fresh Corner Cafe came to Kimelman while he was studying at the University of Michigan. While working on his Masters of Health Management and Public Policy, he and his classmates came up with an idea for getting healthier food into urban areas. His first business, Get Fresh Detroit, launched in 2010 and offered for sale packets of food with fresh ingredients to make soup or stir fry. His goal was to make a gas station or convenience store a one-stop shop for fresh food ingredients. Kimelman soon learned that his customers were more interested in ready-to -eat meals, so he changed his business plan to offer pre-made meals.IMG_7849_edited-1

Kimelman recruited Waller, another U of M graduate, to join the company in 2011. Her degree in sociology and work experience in her family’s Detroit pizzeria have fueled her passion for creating an equitable local foodshed. She says access to good food should not be contingent on where someone lives.

Unlike most government interventions, says the Fresh Corner Café website, which “rely on big box retail to address healthy food access and obesity” the company’s goal is to “reduce barriers and uplift existing assets to provide a highly replicable and scalable solution with low capital requirements.”

Targeting convenience stores is an effective way to reach low-income shoppers. Fresh Corner Cafe sells to stores that are all certified to accept food assistance cards, also called Bridge cards. According to Data Driven Detroit, residents of Detroit spend twice as much of their Bridge card money at convenience stores as compared to the rest of Michigan‘s residents.

Fresh Corner Cafe works at a community level. They source fruit from Peaches and Greens, a locally owned produce market, and the wraps and salads come from Lunchtime Detroit, a sandwich shop. The staff lives locally and the drivers come from the communities to which they deliver. FCC delivers meals to 27 locations—including cafes, gas stations, and pharmacies—three times a week.

Currently the sales from the convenience stores do not generate enough revenue to turn a profit, so in order to keep the company sustainable, FCC expanded by placing their own self-serve to-go cafes in several Detroit workplaces. The company provides a fully-stocked refrigerator with a self-pay station and they stock and clean the shelves and handle all financial transactions. These workplace cafes makes it convenient for busy professionals to eat healthy and for businesses to provide fresh food to their employees.

So far, these strategies appear to be working. In August, Kimelman was recognized with a young entrepreneur SCORE award for pioneering the model and the company now employs six people.

Last year FCC sold some 30,000 meals bringing in $200,000 worth of revenue. Those numbers will continue to grow as FCC expands to more stores and offices. According to Waller, FCC plans to open their own certified kitchen, which will give them more control over ingredients and eventually allow them to introduce an organic line. “It is a social injustice for people to not have access to fresh food,” she says. “Detroiters are so used to not having things that they don’t even know how to ask for them.”

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