FVC’s target number for veterans attending the career fair was modest – we were hoping for at least 50.

In fact, 136 registered in advance or at the door to seek new jobs or career direction. They represented military generations going back to WWII, with many Viet Nam veterans as well as younger vets with service in the past decade.

We introduced this video at the career fair.

FOOD & FARMING

VETERANS CAREER FAIR

March 5, 2010 * 9 AM – 4 PM

Veterans Memorial Building

1351 Maple Avenue, Santa Rosa

Event Coordinator: Linda Speel  -   linda (at) farmvetco.org

FOR DETAILS, CLICK HERE

At the New Jersey Veterans Affairs Medical Center near Newark, there are vegetable gardens, cared for by patients who find the process of tending living plants for feeding others to be a healing way of interacting with the world. In this article from the New York Times, “After War, Finding Peace and Calm in a Garden,” reporter Peter Applebome describes how the idea of starting a gardening program came into being.

photo by Richard Perry/The New York Times

It began with Jan Zientek, who specializes in urban gardening with the Rutgers Cooperative Extension in Roseland, and Thurston Mangrum, a 70-year-old Air Force veteran, who was in a substance abuse treatment program at the medical center.

Five years ago, Mr. Mangrum took a course that Mr. Zientek taught to residents of the Newark Housing Authority and later joined its master gardener program.

Mr. Mangrum figured, even with severe limitations of space, why not do something similar at the medical center? The veterans did some landscaping and ground work and then began tilling 20-by-50-foot plots between the buildings that had been converted from grass to raised vegetable beds.

Over 1,000 pounds of vegetables were harvested this past summer, all given to vets at the center and to a cafe in town that caters to veterans. This alone would make the gardening worthwhile, but the opportunity to work in the garden brings other rewards.

For many of the veterans, the experience has been less about growing food and more about learning about themselves. So Mr. Mourning has felt a special kinship with Josh Urban, a 30-year-old Iraq and Afghanistan veteran who also suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. He had also found himself isolated, unable to fully reintegrate into the world outside the war zone, until tilling the soil with his fellow veterans helped him make his peace with life back home.

Patrick Corcoran, who served with the Marines in Lebanon, said: “It just lowers the volume in my head. It allows me to think on a rational level.”

n August, the Farmer-Veteran Coalition sponsored a “field trip” to a large organic vegetable farming operation in Baja, Mexico.

Vets visit an Ensenada, Mexico, tomato growhouse

Watch a slide show of the vets at school and play on the Baja coast.

Adam and Michelle with new blueberry plants

Adam Burke was the first person in his family who didn’t go directly into farming. His life’s path took him away from the family farm that he grew up on in Sumter County, Florida and across the world to the battlefields of Iraq, then back home on a stretcher. Now, after several difficult years of hard work, tenacity and relearning how to walk and talk, Adam and his wife Michele are back on the farm.

Adam was injured twice in Iraq. After recovering from his first injury, he returned to combat. Then, three days before his fifteen-month tour was to end in 2004, he took a mortar hit while serving in Balad, in the middle of the Sunni triangle.

I still have shrapnel riddled throughout my head and body,” he says. “I have been undergoing treatment and therapy with the VA System and the progress is slow and tiresome.”

Adam suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and vertigo. He walks with a cane to catch his falls. He has a 100% disability rating. A lesser person might take his disability pay and give up, but Adam not only wants to farm, he wants to help other vets.

Adam and Michele are putting together a very unique blueberry farm. They are planting two-year-old high-bush varieties in thirty-gallon containers. “That way guys can pick in wheelchairs or if they have just one arm,” he says. Their five-acre blueberry farm will serve as a sanctuary for other vets, offering employment, healing and an endless supply of nature’s most delicious antioxidant.

Adam’s commitment to the Farmer Veteran Coalition goes beyond his own farm. While receiving treatment at the VA in California this spring, Adam called farmers in his Florida hometown to see who needed help. When he found farms looking for labor, Adam asked the Florida VA to send over some vets. Two of them got work washing and boiling green peanuts for Michele’s father’s roadside stand.

AdamBurkeStoryJuly21_2009 (pdf)

Pollan is author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, a New York Times bestseller. His previous books include The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (2001); A Place of My Own (1997); and Second Nature (1991). He’s also a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine.

In this talk from last April, presented in San Francisco as part of the Long Now Seminars speaker series, he presents the premise, as described on the Fora TV site, that “Farming has become an occupation and cultural force of the past. Michael Pollan’s talk promoted the premise — and hope — that farming can become an occupation and force of the future. In the past century American farmers were given the assignment to produce lots of calories cheaply, and they did. They became the most productive humans on earth. A single farmer in Iowa could feed 150 of his neighbors. That is a true modern miracle.”

This is about making agriculture sustainable.

This video takes one hour and twenty-six minutes (1:26) to watch, but you can choose to watch only short segments, as provided if you click the Full Program link.

Part of the reason our current food production process is in trouble is that, in the interest of corporate profit we’ve stopped paying attention to what’s good for the land that grows that food. Our practices of planting every available acre, using precious irrigation water as if there was a bottomless supply, fertilizing with petro-chemicals and allowing our topsoil to erode have been the non-sustainable. Eventually, the required resources are depleted and the land stops producing.

Our emphasis at FVC is on promoting sustainable farming practices. Most veterans returning from war and the military, we believe, are looking for something to do that has lasting meaning – that is sustainable and live-giving.

So we’re grateful to have agencies like the National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service, that provide beginning farmers and experienced agricultural producers with guidelines, lessons, tips and best practices for planning and managing sustainable farming operations.

Known as ATTRA (it’s original name was Appropriate Technology Transfer for Rural Areas), the Information Service is “managed by the National Center for Appropriate Technology (NCAT) and is funded under a grant from the United States Department of Agriculture’s Rural Business-Cooperative Service. It provides information and other technical assistance to farmers, ranchers, Extension agents, educators, and others involved in sustainable agriculture in the United States.”

We’ve blogged here on several occasions about the emergence of training programs for new farmers. Here, for example, in Lehigh County, PA. And here, in New England. Now there’s a program starting up in Wisconsin, at Stoney Acres Farm in Athens. WSAW reports on the program in a video here on their website.

“We teach them certain skills but we also teach them sort of record-keeping and financial planning and how to plan a farm and show them our spreadsheets and they’re part of the operation, which is a little bit different,” said Catrina Becker of Stoney Acres Farms.

Becker says her and her husband believe training new farmers is important for the future of agriculture.

She feels as people learn more about where their food comes from, that knowledge has the power to transform food systems and allow small farmers to stay in business.

It’s not all about fighting in a mostly rural theatre where the natives are stuggling just to survive off of what they can grow. The Army has come to recognize that success can only be attained if soldiers are also helping citizen farmers support themselves.

In an article in Army Times that describes other changes in training for the First, we find the following:

One unique mission that recently was added to First Army’s training repertoire is preparing agribusiness development teams for deployments to Afghanistan.

The training program for the ADTs so far has been ad hoc because the mission is relatively new, said Maj. Gen. Mick Bednarek, commanding general of First Army’s Division East. But the training continues to evolve and become more refined as more teams are formed, and trainers are pulling together experts from the deploying team and its home state to help them address issues such as economics, agriculture, farming, soil and energy generation, he said.

When Col. John Smith, commander of Division East’s 158th Infantry Brigade, got the mission to train the Indiana Guard’s ADT, he raised his eyebrows, scratched his head and went to work developing a plan to combine war fighting with farming’s many complexities.

“I’m a boy from the city. I just thought it was a bunch of guys that were going to go out there and teach the Afghan farmers how to grow crops,” said Smith, who also trained ADTs from Texas and Tennessee.

Smith and his staff pulled together all the information they could about the first agribusiness teams to deploy to Afghanistan, enlisted the expertise of agricultural scientists at Indiana’s Purdue University and began to replicate Afghan farm land at the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center near Camp Atterbury, Ind.

“There isn’t any manual, there isn’t any guidance of how to train agribusiness development teams,” Bednarek said. “What we did … is figure it out, put the concepts on paper, form them and then physically make it happen and execute it well above the standard that anybody ever expected.”

Here’s another press account of the great work that Colin and Karen Archipley are doing down in Valley Center, CA. It’s great that they’re getting so much attention because they are a fantastic model for the mission of FVC.

Here are some quotes from the story in the North County Times.

The recycling process Archipley uses to grow bio-hydroponic organic basil may be part of thefuture of farming, especially in Southern California, where water is in increasingly short supply.

But for the men working with Archipley last week, their future is much more personal. The workers are part of a unique program coordinated by the Department of Veterans Affairs t

o offer a second chance, as well as a peaceful environment, to vets.

* * * * *

Archipley, 28, said he never imagined his small farm could help fellow veterans when he started the project in 2006 after returning from three tours in Iraq. Then again, while growing up in Northern California, he never thought he would be farmer.

“I didn’t have any background,” he said about farming. “My wife had an itch to move to Italy a couple of years ago, and I didn’t want to move out of the United States. But a friend said if you like Italy, you should check this place out.”

The rolling, open hills surrounding his farm looked enough like Tuscany for the couple, and Archipley and his wife, Karen, moved onto the property and began selling their avocados and basil at local farmer’s markets.

* * * * *

Archipley said he would like to see the program duplicated around the world, and he sees it having great potential for veterans returning from urban wars.

“Take an Iraq vet or an Afghanistan vet, where every roof was a potential danger,” he said. “What do you do? Come back and work in an urban environment? You can’t just put them in Wal-Mart and expect them to greet customers.”

The first six veterans through the program have been older than the typical Afghanistan and Iraq vets, but the program already has its own success stories. One of the first two men in the program was a homeless Desert Storm veteran, who now is employed by Archipley and living in a mobile home on the farm.