Update: David got out of jail and the farmers are undaunted.  They’re going back to the Gill Tract on Saturday the 18th!

I just found out today that David Grefrath was arrested two days ago when the police raided Occupy the Farm yet again.  I went through and picked a few of the best of the many insightful things that David had to say during my interview with him and a few others on Nov. 5 of 2012, just a few days before UC plowed under their crops last year.

Hopefully David will be out of jail and back to the great work he does very soon.

Click here for the video: David Grefrath, Nov. 5, 2012

I got some great answers to this question over the last year and a half, but I knew there was one place I could go where everyone would have the politics of food in the front of their minds: Occupy the Farm.

My visit to Berkeley and Oakland happily coincided with a visit to the campus by Wendell Barry. Even better, when I showed up to Mr. Barry’s speech, I was delighted that he was supported by a panel of luminaries: Michael Pollen, Miguel Altieri, and Robert Hass, former poet laureate of the US. The conversation that ensued was extremely compelling – I’ve written a separate blog entry on what was said and my reaction to it here.

I had been pursuing Mr. Altieri for an interview since the beginning of the project, and after the panel I was able to convince him to squeeze an interview into his hectic schedule. Altieri, a Chilean who now lives in the US, is both an agricultural scientist focusing on small and organic farms and an outspoken critic of industrial farming and the capitalist system that supports it. He has also been directly involved with the Gill Tract (where Occupy the Farm is located) for more than two decades. The insights he provided, as well as the hard facts and figures he had to support his arguments, were very compelling and will help to support some of the central arguments of the film.

I first caught up to David Grefrath, one of the core organizers of Occupy the Farm, where he lives at the aptly named Fort Awesome, a cooperative house with a large beautiful garden which he helps to maintain. When I made it out to the farm on Sunday the 4^th of November, I sat down with David, Milo and Mia to hear stories about everything that has happened in the months since the occupation of the Gill Tract began on Earth Day 2012.

From the point of view of the Occupy movement, which until Occupy Sandy had been painted by the mainstream media as fading and irrelevant, the feeling of several people I talked to was that Occupy the Farm was the most positive aspect of Occupy that they’d been involved in. I heard over and over about how working together growing plants and having your hands in the dirt every day was literally grounding and calming, so that the infighting that has done so much damage to other Occupations around the country was almost nonexistent at Occupy the Farm. As one young woman put it: “Every Occupy needs its own farm!”

The story of Occupy the Farm would easily be enough to fill a feature-length documentary all by itself, but what I took away from the interview was not so much the answer to the political question that I came looking for, but instead was how much community they had built at the Gill Tract, and how quickly. As Milo put it: “I’ve grown more community than I’ve grown actual plants here.” As I head into post-production on the film, I can’t think of a better message to have in the front of my mind, because that’s one of the most powerful common denominators that I’ve seen, everywhere in the world: wherever you have people working together on urban farms, you have stronger urban communities.

Thanks much to Hayley Steele for helping to coordinate my visit to the Bay Area, as well as to Mr. Altieri and all the great folks I met at Occupy the Farm!

Terra Nova is one of the only student-run CSAs in the country.  Paul told me that the key to the project’s success has been including the student farmers in every decision, from day one when they opened up the first seed catalogs together, to major decisions on the direction the farm has taken over the years.  From talking to several long-term students, I can see that he’s succeeded in creating a sense of ownership.  Students have helped build greenhouses and an earthen pizza oven, among other projects, and they are all very dedicated to the farm.

Michael Morton, for example, graduated from Terra Nova over a year ago but he still makes it back regularly to help out.  He has a unique perspective on food and health because he’s now working as a paramedic-in-training with a local firehouse, so he sees the connection between the types of food that people are eating and their overall health when he goes on calls to patients’ homes and sees the empty fast food wrappers lying nearby, while the patients are being treated for heart disease or diabetes.

In addition to the CSA, Terra Nova provides large quantities of produce to other schools in the district.  The week that I was there, they harvested over 10,000 cherry tomatoes, so the volume is getting impressive.  They recently expanded to a second location and have been getting interest from other school districts in Oregon and across the country.  Terra Nova is one of many projects that are part of a growing movement to improve and localize school nutrition, from Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution to Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard to Michelle Obama’s White House garden to Paul Hudak’s student-run Community Farm right here in Portland!

At the end of the interview I asked Britta to show me some low-power LED grow lights that she’d gotten to tinker with as the community works to make them usable on Windowfarms. This made for some fun light sabre photos. We are allowed to have fun while we work on saving the world, right?

I also finally visited the famous Brooklyn Grange rooftop farm. Having grown up on a farm in Idaho, I can tell you that an acre of farmland perched on the top of a building in New York looks a whole lot bigger than an acre of land in the middle of a field. I interviewed two of the principals at the farm: co-founder Anastasia and new addition Mike. Both of their stories illustrated the joy that comes from putting your beliefs into action.

Anastasia had been interested in food politics ever since her time at Vassar College, but she’s gotten an incredible amount of satisfaction after being “bitten by the doing bug” and farming, rather than just writing about food policy. With her partners, they have proven that small-scale urban farming is financially sustainable in New York; another example to support the argument that for-profit is the way to go to really scale up urban agriculture.

Mike’s story was also pretty amazing. Just a year ago he was working in corporate advertising while at the same time becoming more and more involved in food advocacy and starting to buy some of his food directly from farmers as well as growing his own. “I realized that the work that I was doing at my previous job was actually directly conflicting with my own personal beliefs where by day I was in an office wearing a suit on meetings with Kraft Inc. corporate heads and then by night I was an activist trying to run campaigns against Kraft.” Now that he’s switched over to full time work at the farm, he says he couldn’t be happier.

All in all, my time in New York really energized me and helped me to refine some of the “big picture” messages that I want to get across in the film.

Thanks much to Destiny at Windowfarms for her help and to my guide and host Victoria Smith.

Faraway Farms: Chronicling Urban Agriculture Around the World

The Lower Ninth is still fairly depopulated seven years after Katrina. Sometimes only one or two houses on a block are occupied, sometimes none. In other words, there’s lots of space for farming.  Nate Turner (yep that’s his real name) and his crew run an urban farm at Blair Grocery that is one part farming, one part education, and several parts community building. They have a constant stream of volunteers coming through from the local area and from universities and church groups from all over the country. While I was there, Alternative Spring Break students were on site from universities in Virginia, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Blair’s after-school program is an argument for community building and the profit motive when it comes to urban farming. All the students I met were African-American high school students, some of whom had been coming there consistently for two or three years. In addition to urban farming, the school teaches life skills in engaging ways. One day they were deconstructing a rap video and another day they were looking at what it means to be a strong woman by looking at poetry by women authors. Needless to say, urban farming also teaches plenty of life skills. When I interviewed some of the students, they said that two things kept them coming back: the community of fellow students and the $50 weekly paycheck they get for the work they do. Although Blair has gotten several big grants, they are bringing money in, too: they sell sprouts, arugula, tomatoes, and other vegetables to restaurants, at a Co-op, and at local farmer’s markets. They also have an aquaponics system up and running, with local fish from the Mississippi in the tank at the bottom and two levels of plants up top.

The Urban Farm at Blair Grocery really is an oasis in the middle of a recovery, and the endless stream of volunteers is only one testament to their success – the stronger proof is in the changes that they’ve brought about in the young people they work with. Some of these kids are the ones you’ve heard of that didn’t know the names of a lot of vegetables a few years ago, and now they want to grow up to be botanists and farmers.

I also had a chance to interview the legendary Macon Fry (everyone I interviewed there seemed to have a memorable name) while I was in town . Macon has been in New Orleans since the early 80s and has been a teacher and advisor to a whole generation of farmers. One tidbit I took away from our conversation: unlike many jobs where you feel like you’re banging your head up against a wall or wondering if you’re really doing anything worthwhile, farming pays back: “All you have to do to see what you’ve just accomplished is look over your shoulder and look at the row of seeds you just planted, or look over at the row you planted last week that’s already sprouting up.” Macon was humble, too – when I said I’d heard he was the godfather of urbam farming in the Big Easy, he was quick to tell me all about the guy who taught him everything he knows.

From what I saw, Macon Fry and Nat Turner are both living up to their oversized names by leading through example. These guys aren’t just talking the talk; they have their hands in the rich Louisiana soil every day.

Thanks very much to my fixer, Virginia Currie, and my hosts in New Orleans: Lisa, Jesse, Emily and Adam.  Couldn’t have done it without you!

More of my photos from the New Orleans shoot are here on Flickr.

Cuba is a special case. Many are now familiar with the fact that the end of the Cold War ushered in a period of extreme deprivation in Cuba, when its strong economic ties with the Soviet Bloc and Easter Europe were cut almost overnight. This is what Cubans call “The Special Period”. But as Nelson (a rabbit “rancher” that I met at his home in Havana) put it, “In Cuba, it’s always a special period.” Cubans could begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel by about 1999, but there have been two recessions since then, and of course the US economic embargo against the island continues to this day.

What this means in terms of urban agriculture is that Cuba, out of necessity, made tremendous leaps and bounds in the 90s, and they have continued to refine and improve their urban farming infrastructure since then. In some Cuban cities, up to 80% of the fruits and vegetables consumed in the city are grown in the city. In Havana this is closer to 50%, which is still very impressive for a city of more than 2 million people.

The reason this is particularly relevant for us in the “developed world” is that the story of Cuba is not like that of many developing countries in Africa and Asia and even elsewhere in Latin America. Until the end of the Cold War, Cuba was very much a developed country with a highly educated population. Then they went through what some observers have called an artificial peak-oil collapse. The Cuban people responded with creativity and intelligence to this unprecedented new challenge. In addition to urban agriculture, they’ve found countless other ways to be more self-sufficient and use less energy. It’s not surprising, then, that a 2006 World Wildlife Fundy study found that Cuba is the only country on the planet that can be considered sustainable.

What is becoming more and more clear is that we in the devoloped world are not living sustainably, and that therefore, inevitably, we will eventually have our own special period. Many people say that going to Cuba is like taking a time machine to the past. In some ways this is true – vintage cars from the 50s are still everywhere. But after my visit, I’m inclined to argue that Cuba is indeed a time machine, but not to the past: instead, it’s a glimpse into a future where we in the developed world are producing more of our food and living more sustainably. Cuba is therefore invaluable for us to learn from as we chart our own course to become more sustainable in preparation for the challenges that await us. Even those vintage cars are an example of reusing and recycling. On the outside they’re pure 1950s America – Ford, Chevrolet, Dodge – but on the inside they’re mostly running on repurposed Japanese and Soviet engines. Nobody in Cuba gets a new car when their two year lease is up.

I interviewed Roberto Perez Rivero for the film while I was in Cuba. In the last few years he has travelled extensively to give presentations about the Cuban story as well as to teach permaculture workshops in Latin America, Asia, Australia, Canada, and the US. He had a lot of great things to say that gave me new insights into what I’ve seen around the world in the last several months, and his perspective will definitely inform the film as it takes shape during post-production.

Along the way, the whole system supports a community of over 100,000 fish and conventional farmers living in dozens of villages.  This system has been in place since the 1850s.  While the West was busily developing the system of treatment plants where waste is treated with chemicals, the bheris have been steadily producing hundreds of tons of vegetables and fish every year.  While not applicable everywhere, there’s no doubt that many cities in the developed world could build a similar system.

In Addis Ababa, my guide is Nico, who works for DAI doing urban farming throughout Ethiopia, contracted by USAID.  They work almost entirely with populations who are affected by HIV/AIDS.  Studies show that the nutrients you get from vegetables improve the efficacy of the antiretroviral drugs that HIV-positive people take to avoid getting AIDS.  Studies also show that overall health improves when people’s diets include regular servings of fruits and vegetables.  What studies have a harder time showing is the intangibles, how growing your own food as part of a community of fellow farmers improves your quality of life and your mental health.  But of course the intangibles are all that people talk about.  One woman said that before she joined the project, she rarely left her home.  Now she and her daughter come to work their plot together and she grows enough to feed herself and her children and sell the surplus.  Sometimes American tax dollars are well-spent after all.

DAI also runs numerous school-gardening projects.  At one of them I met Waldemariam.  His father was killed when he was young, and his mother sent him to the capital for school from the village where he was born.  After a time working as a servant and a brief period on the streets, he found a more stable home and a mentor who helped him to enter school.  At his high school he became involved in urban farming.  Many of the students who initially signed up for the program dropped out over time, but Waldemariam showed the patience and dedication required to succeed as an urban farmer.  One of the first things he bought with the money he made selling vegetables was a flashlight and a supply of batteries, so that he could continue studying after dark; the family with whom he was staying were unable to afford electricity after dark, which in Addis is around 6:30 PM all year.  He studied like this, by flashlight, for two years after his father passed away, until recently when he was able to move in with neighbors who have electricity.  Now 17, his dream is to become a doctor, and his physics teacher told me he has what it takes to make it: this term he earned a 3.7 GPA and received one of the only A’s in physics.

Thanks much to Nico, Cherinet Gidi of The Social Welfare Development Association and the rest of the crew who helped out with the shoot in Addis!  And thanks especially to Weldemariam for sharing his story with me.

http://www.documentary.org/community/IDA-resources/fiscal_sponsorship_donate?film_id=3864