Financing Our Foodshed (15 page)
Read Financing Our Foodshed Online
Authors: Carol Peppe Hewitt
Tucker, Giles, and Ginger took a slightly more formal approach. Together they worked out the terms of a short-term, low-interest loan, and signed a Promissory Note sealing the deal.
As we got up to leave, Giles asked Tucker for a favor. He’s a great fan of beef tongue. Could he put in an order for the next tongue that Tucker had for sale? Tucker was happy to oblige. And it gave the two a good excuse to see each other again soon.
I couldn’t help but think how much Tucker’s dad would have enjoyed those hours spent swapping stories on the porch that morning. I like to think he was listening in, full of pride and admiration.
I ran into Tucker later that afternoon. He was heading out to pick up his new skid steer, and he could hardly wait to climb into his
truck. He had the face of an excited, brave 15-year-old, heading off with trailers and trucks to get his first herd of cows.
From their website:
Homegrown City Farms is run by Collier Reeves and Maryah Smith-Overman, who came together to start this project through their shared interest in food, the environment, and growing things. The goal of Homegrown is to create a way for urban food production to sustain us economically, to build community, to encourage support for small-scale, local food production, and to help pave the way toward urban farming becoming a career.
I first met Collier when she was living and working on a farm up the road from me. She immediately struck me as a no-nonsense kind of person. Hard-working, focused, and capable. And I heard that her partner, Maryah, was looking for some part-time work.
I needed help, so I hired her.
In the pottery business my husband and I own and run, we need lots of extra help three times a year — when we fire, then sell, a kiln load of pottery. Mark needs extra hands to pack and unpack the massive wood-burning kiln with 1,500–2,000 pots. He also needs help during the four-day firing. A week later, after the unpacking, there are several days when we need all hands on deck to get the pots cleaned up, on the shelves, and priced to sell, before the “doors open” on Saturday at 9
AM
. I line up a crew to run the four checkout tables. Many are loyal friends who have been doing this for us for a couple of decades. The Kiln Opening, as we call it, runs for two weekends. Then we take a deep breath — and it’s time for Mark and his apprentice to start making pots for the next kiln load. I’m not a potter. But for the last 30 years, I’ve managed the business side of things: the bookkeeping, the mailing list of about 7,000 people, and an email list of 3,500. I’ve taught myself to do the email blasts and to fiddle
with the website to keep it updated. But I still need occasional help. Especially for Kiln Openings.
These events are huge undertakings, but we’ve done it so many times in the last 25 years that we just put our heads down and make it happen. Good help makes it so much easier. And Maryah was some of the best help we’ve ever had.
Then there’s the food. About a couple hundred folks come out on the first Saturday, and fifty or so on the other three days. It just wouldn’t be right not to give them something to eat after they’ve come all that way. So, I put out homemade cookies, local cheeses, fresh fruit, and whatever else I can come up with that’s in season at the time.
Nowadays, I source as much as I can from our Slow Money borrowers. Customers come and linger, talking pots and potters, kilns and clay bodies, and just enjoying this peaceful spot at the end of a dead end road in rural North Carolina. Many return again and again, we know them well, and we have now raised a few generations that drink their morning coffee from one of Mark’s mugs and eat off his plates and bowls.
I recruited Maryah to help me measure and take photographs of some of the pottery. She was also savvy with the computer programs I use. She helped with whatever needed doing. Although she was clearly overskilled for the jobs I gave her, she handled my requests with grace and efficiency, and was always a pleasure to work with.
In truth, Maryah is a talented craftsperson herself. She worked for over five years as a fine woodworker. She ran a small solo woodworking business in Asheville, NC, fulfilled a six-month fellowship at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship in Maine, and worked for a very successful furniture maker in Philadelphia. She continues to create new work and teaches woodworking each summer in Maine.
When I heard that Collier and Maryah had decided to leave Chatham County and move up to the big city of Durham, I was definitely sad to lose them, but equally curious as to what venture might
be enticing them to leave. The social scene in Durham is certainly a draw, but it turned out that urban farming was an even bigger pull.
They wanted to create a network of urban farms that they would run themselves. They also wanted to start a garden installation service that would plant and maintain edible landscaping for people who want to grow food rather than flowers. “What if you could pay a farmer for a consultation, just as you would a landscape designer?” Collier asks. “Vegetable gardens are worth it.”
Collier described it in an email she sent me in the spring of 2012:
I want to build an urban farm. I have been intensely focused on food and food security since getting into farming 11 years ago. I studied sustainable agriculture in college and realized afterward that farming wasn’t a viable option for me because I didn’t have access to land. So, after college I began landscaping and doing other land-based work — trail work, field instructor, etc. There was something about installing landscapes for purely aesthetic reasons that really got to me. I saw so much potential in the space to be productive — for people, for wildlife, and for the soil. I began daydreaming of what landscapes that were designed to be productive and beautiful could look like. And I got intensely interested in the concept of urban farming...
[Our Farm] will also serve as a meeting place for community workshops, as well as be an example of intensive food production in urban areas. We plan to also provide home vegetable garden design, installations, and maintenance services for the summer and fall seasons.
So, when they were able to secure the use of a quarter acre in East Durham, they took it and began to plant Homegrown City Farms. They planned to start out serving a 15-member CSA and several local farm-to-table restaurants.
As she alluded to in her email, Collier wasn’t new to farming. Her degree is in environmental studies with a concentration in sustainable
agriculture from Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, NC. Warren Wilson College is unusual in that it requires students to spend time outside the classroom in community service and on campus work crews. Collier chose to be part of the Farm Crew that maintained a 300-acre farm of cattle, pig, and chicken livestock. She also was on the Garden Crew that managed a 3-acre organic vegetable garden. After leaving Warren Wilson, Collier worked for landscapers and the National Park Service, and she did back-country trail work in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming as an Americorps crew leader.
CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture)
CSAs are becoming popular. In these programs, the customer purchases “a share” of the season’s harvest up front, which then translates into a weekly bag or box of food from a particular farmer or a group of local food producers. Members pick up their shares at a designated time and place, or, in some cases, it is delivered to the member’s home. CSAs usual focus on produce, but many now include eggs, meat, bread, coffee, and local cheese — along with recipes for how to use the wonderful bounty.
The website for Homegrown City Farms, the name she and Maryah chose for their new urban farm project, states:
We are motivated by the belief that urban farming should and can be a common livelihood here in the US. We grow in Durham to feed Durham! We live in an agriculturally rich area here in the Piedmont, but there is a lot of underused land, especially in urban areas. We are passionate about food. It is important to us to utilize the resources that we have, and to create networks in order to make locally grown food affordable and accessible.
But to get this urban farming business off the ground, they needed capital to purchase tools and supplies. Up until then, they had financed the project with savings and part-time incomes.
At the Kiln Opening, Maryah had met Patrick from Reliable Cheese and Angelina from Angelina’s Kitchen, both of whom were Slow Money entrepreneurs. She wondered if Slow Money could help Homegrown City Farms as well.
Maryah and Collier’s goals were exactly in line with our Slow Money mission of increasing soil fertility and providing more access to sustainably grown local food. It wasn’t hard to think of someone who would be interested in meeting them and hearing more about their project.
I’d known Seth Moser-Katz for several years. He first showed up as a volunteer at the Coffee Barn that I run twice a year at the Shakori Hills GrassRoots Festival of Music and Dance. While he put in his 12 volunteer hours of selling coffee, making hot chocolate, and wiping down counters and tables, we got to chatting. He was a sophomore at UNC at the time, majoring in multimedia journalism. His thinking went beyond environmentalism to what he called “extra-environmentalism,” which sees civilization on its current scale as unsustainable. He and a few friends had started an online radio, podcast, blog, and video series called “The Extraenvironmentalist” to raise awareness about how unsustainable our social, environmental, and economic systems are — and to propose alternatives.
credit: Mimi schiffman.
Over the next two years, I was pleased that when I asked him back to work in the Coffee Barn, he returned several times.
Then he sent me an email asking about Slow Money. He had graduated and was working at Duke University in Durham. His friend Abi had started Abilicious Bakery, and when she told him she had been able to cover the cost of her mixer and oven thanks to the help of Slow Money loans, he was intrigued.
Seth understands the power of money in our ecosystem and wanted to get involved with Slow Money. I thought he might enjoy learning about Homegrown City Farms, so we arranged a time for him to meet these two industrious women and visit their quarteracre plot.
Tucked into East Durham, the farm sits in an enclave between two major roads. It is a very diverse neighborhood with its collection of houses built in the early 1900s for people who worked at the nearby cotton, wood, and textile mills. The farm is part of a three-acre parcel that includes a pond and a small woodland. Not far beyond that is a four-lane highway.
Seth and I found our way to the farm on a late February afternoon. Seth’s mother, who was also curious about Slow Money, had joined us. As we found our way behind clusters of houses, suddenly there was a fenced-in, cleared expanse, and we could see outlined rows of garden beds waiting to be tilled. With the help of a friendly work party, the sod had already been taken off to reveal bare dirt. The basic layout of the gardens was already visible, and the requisite deer fencing was up. It was impressive to see, given how little time they had been there. Collier and Maryah gave us a tour of their young farm and explained where and what they intended to plant.
Sunset came quickly on that winter day. When it was too dark to see, we headed to Foster’s Market and found an empty table. Seth’s
mother and I sat back and listened. Here were three young adults, connecting over a commitment to making this planet a better place and finding a way to put their values into practice.
