Blessing the Hands that Feed Us (36 page)

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Supports local, sustainable family farms to thrive and be economically viable

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Protects and cares for farmers and farmworkers

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Honors stories of food and farm legacy through community voices

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Respects farm animals

Healthy People

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Provides healthy food for all

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Ensures the health and well-being of all people, inclusive of race and class

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Connects people and the food system, from field to fork

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Connects people and land to promote health and wellness

Sustainable Ecosystems

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Sustains and grows a healthy environment

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Promotes an ecological ethic

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Enhances biodiversity

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Promotes agricultural and food distribution practices that mitigate climate change

Thriving Local Economies

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Creates local jobs and builds long-term economic vitality within the food system

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Builds local wealth

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Promotes sustainable development while strengthening local food systems

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Includes infrastructure that supports community and environmental health.
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This led me on a fascinating journey to conversations with old friends and new and to a meeting with more than fifty people involved in the food system on Whidbey. With each conversation I got more clues—and discovered more roadblocks. This next section takes you on this hunt with me—and points to reasonable, actionable hope that, as relational eaters, you and I can steer our ship of food toward flourishing regional food systems.

Being relational to the core, my first stop on the research train would be to find the local experts. Next stop—since I believe that all serious change begins in conversation among people who care—would be to set up what's called a “multistakeholder dialogue.” For that I needed my experts to identify the stakeholders, the members of my Whidbey food system—the farmers, ranchers, foodies, gardeners, marketers, activists, purchasing agents, educators, and more.

Providentially, right about then I sat down with Maryon Attwood, by vocation a potter, by profession working to integrate the Whidbey food system, and by instinct a practical visionary whose key talent is her ability to create systems out of loose networks, to get a hodgepodge of individuals into mutually beneficial alliances.

When I first met her, Maryon was working for the Northwest Agricultural Business Center, a nonprofit seeking to increase profits for agricultural businesses—farmers, distributors, processors, and markets. She helped develop the Whidbey Grown brand to distinguish our local producers in a competitive marketplace. Maryon's patient systems work impressed me. She later helped get the Greenbank Farm New Farmer Training Center off the ground. This program trains half a dozen young people a year in the whole spectrum of farming skills, from planting to marketing to writing a business plan.

When I began thinking and writing about the food system, I turned to Maryon to give me the lay of the land, so to speak. We hitched ourselves up on the bar stools at my kitchen counter, wrapped our hands around cups of hot tea, and got to know each other. When I tendered my idea of getting the whole food and farming system in a room for a day for a “Can we feed ourselves?” conversation, Maryon said the magic words: “Let's do it.” I had a partner in relational hope.

We put out the call to our networks for help. The perfect planning team assembled effortlessly.

Judy Feldman at that time ran the Washington State University/Island County 4-H program, though she has since moved on to becoming executive director of the nonprofit Greenbank Farm.

Karen Lazarus, a professor at Antioch University in Seattle, had cowritten, with Judy, Maryon, and two others, a report,
Exploring Island County's Food System,
which became my research bible. They'd started out to do an apparently simple job—identify all the growers on the island and put them on a map for all to see. As they ferreted out farmers, though, they realized these individuals were part of an as yet unmapped food system—the soils, crops, history, and laws as well as the farms, farmers, and crops. If we are to feed ourselves from here, we need to know what actually
is
here.

Jean Singer also taught at Antioch and brought two other key pieces to the table. First, she is a professional facilitator (as is Karen). Second, she and her partner, Dyanne, are members of a social group in Maxwelton Valley that evolved into a micro food cooperative, with each member growing different crops to share with the group. They rarely need to go to the store during the growing half of the year.

Terra Anderson also has a goal of growing all her family's food on their ten acres, but as one dedicated gardener (plus husband with tractor).

Britt Conn joined the circle too; she and Eric, you will remember, have a farm where they grow for CSA customers and the farmers' market. She was at the time the coordinator of the Sustainable Whidbey Coalition.

Rhiannon Fisher committed to cooking all the food! When asked why she was so committed to sustainability she said, “I'm a mom.” One of her many dreams is to do that asset map of the island, so Food 2020 was right up her alley.

Later I reflected on the composition of that group meeting in the back room of the South Whidbey Commons, a teen-run coffeehouse and bookstore. All of us were growers, some for ourselves, some for families, some for market. We were all tenders of community—educators, writers, facilitators, executive directors, moms. And we were all systems thinkers, people able to see how things link together, how everything is part of the whole.

We called our event Food 2020 and we posited the outrageous: that 50 percent of the food eaten on the island would be grown on the island by 2020.

Given how outlandish that goal was, it's a miracle that sixty busy, practical people involved in food and farming showed up. On a sunny day in May no less!

Jean and Karen designed the day, using several tools from their facilitation bag of tricks—moving people among small groups for conversations and gathering the whole group for discussion.

They asked me to seed the visioning part of the day with a brief meditation.

“It's 2020. Good morning. Open your eyes. Fifty percent of the food we eat here on Whidbey grows here. Look around. Where is food grown? What is grown? Who grows it? How does it get to market? What do we eat? How is the soil tended? Water? Waste? Kitchens? Restaurants? Processing? What do you see, smell, hear, taste, feel? Don't worry how we got here, just cruise around (bike, foot, car, golf cart—anything works) and marvel.”

After ten minutes of silence, we huddled in small groups and talked about what we'd imagined. We each scribbled specific visions on Post-its. We then gathered at a wall covered with butcher paper, put up our Post-its, arranged the ideas in patterns, and stepped back to marvel at our shared vision of the future.

Here's a snapshot.

The grocery stores up and down the island are all hybrids, plenty of industrial food but so much locally grown food you'd think they were co-ops: meats, vegetables, and fruits, plus staples like grains, beans, and flour, plus foraged foods like chanterelles and nettles, plus canned and bottled foods like sauces, wines, jellies, soups, honey. Given the rise in the prices of oil and gas, prices for local foods are finally competitive. You can swing by any farm to buy fresh veggies at their self-serve stand—but backyard gardeners also set out their excess for purchase. Micro food networks have formed among neighbors who together plan what each will grow—and share. Restaurants focus their menus on what's fresh—or what is stored over winter. Whidbey is a culinary tourism destination, with solar-powered tour buses meeting the ferries for a series of gastronomic and educational adventures.

In addition to home delivery systems, we have two food hubs, north and south. Trucks fan out every day, picking up produce from farms, bringing it to the hub, putting together orders to stock the restaurants and grocers, as well as filling orders from the hospital, schools, and the naval air station. Each hub has a retail section where people can buy fresh food and enjoy a soup and bread lunch (the bread made from fresh-milled local flour leavened by sourdough starter from our free-range wild yeast spores and lactic-acid bacteria).

The big box stores all carry local food too—Walmart, Safeway. In fact, in 2020 Walmart sponsors three young farmers a year at the Greenbank Farm New Farmer Training Center and has partnered with WILC—Whidbey Island Local Compost—giving them all their discarded produce.

All the schools have their own gardens, run by students and forming the basis of school lunches. The hospital actually has its own farm and farmer to provide healthy greens daily.

Indeed, food is everywhere. We bring potluck dishes to most events—performances, lectures, church, fund-raisers, and dances. Everyone eats and no one goes hungry (a goal we were already reaching in 2011 through our web of caring organizations). We are food-prosperous (which actually means hopeful!), with jobs in agriculture, food service, farm and garden supplies, and related industries supporting island families. Banks, investment groups, and small-time lenders have all opened the faucet of financial support for many dozens of food and farming businesses.

Not only is there no hunger but people appreciate every bite—and take fewer of them. Food is more precious because it's overall more expensive—and the local food is grown by people we know. As happened in Cuba after Russia withdrew its oil shipments, we are all thinner and more able. In fact, we are sick less and treat most illnesses with patience, rest, and locally formulated tonics, infusions, roots, and leaves—though we also still rely on surgery and antibiotics as needed. Some farms grow medicinal plants exclusively.

With oil now tripled in price, we produce more energy locally from the sun, winds, tides, and biomass (including poop), but it's pricey too, so some have returned to animal power—oxen and horses—to run their farms. With demand for locally grown food soaring, more five- to ten-acre farms are actively using permaculture, biodynamic, organic, and agro-ecological strategies to grow food intensively. Farming itself is no longer a marginal profession since the economics of the global food system have shifted due to declining fertility, changing weather patterns, and rising energy costs. It's just more cost-effective to source food regionally.

Some hobby farmers have given up their city homes and moved here lock, stock, and (rain) barrel. Tax breaks for putting at least 50 percent of their property in agriculture encouraged some of them to even give five-year leases to young farmers who grow food for them and the community. All this means the average age of farmers on Whidbey is now under fifty, and the longtime farmers find themselves in demand as educators and mentors to flocks of people in their twenties eager to learn farming and grow food. The Greenbank Farm New Farmer Training Center now graduates fifty farmers a year and Skagit Valley College has a certificate program in organic farming as well. Most farms have a seed-saving program, cultivating seeds that flourish in our microclimates. Besides Walmart waste, WILC converts all island organic waste into good soil. In fact, composting toilets are now legal as third bathrooms.

Bottom line: In 2020 we now have the capacity to provide one thousand calories a day of nutritious, delicious, seasonal food for all our people—who, by the way, have learned to design their daily menus around what we can produce.

The next step after visioning was “back casting”—standing in that 2020 vision and telling the story, year by year, of how we got here from 2011. That was harder. Our doubting, discouraged minds spoke up then: Impossible! They won't let us! We don't have the money! Who will do it?

I gave folks three “. . . and then a miracle happened” cards so they could think in terms of possibility rather than drudgery. Even so, when we put our ideas on a time line and contemplated the work before us, many felt anticipatory exhaustion—and slowly filtered out of the building, saying their gardens were calling.

By three
P.M.
, when it was time to form working groups, 60 percent of the participants were gone. Still, three groups formed: farmer cooperatives, finance mechanisms for farming, and establishing a multistakeholder food policy council.

And then . . . nothing happened. Apparently. But that is from the point of view of the industrial food system.

Now, two years after this meeting when “nothing really happened,” I can see many new shoots and swelling buds of projects—a grain cooperative, a composting business, and more. W.I.L.L. is up and running with more than $200,000 in individual loans made so far. A grant has come through for a commercial kitchen at the county fairground. Several more restaurants now serve local menus. Two new farmers' markets opened, a new sheep-milk dairy is licensed, a farmer bought dry-pack equipment to package her lavender, a conference on thriving communities focused on food drew people from across the region. An alliance between Good Cheer Food Bank and several other organizations, called Fresh Food for the Table, has begun paying a young farming couple to grow vegetables for the food bank all year long. CSAs are multiplying.

I believe that the Food 2020 exercise fed our imaginations, gave us hope, seeded alliances and friendships, and created a mental map we each carry about how the people who live here can live from here. We are moving not like an organization but like an ecosystem. That speaks of wisdom. We are cultivating, not manufacturing, a local food future.

You could say, “Oh, it was just a few Post-its. Most people left, having better things to do on a sunny afternoon in May.” Or you can understand that we could now see our food system working, and see seeds in action.