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.

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)

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.

John Robb is a former USAF pilot in special ops, an author, entrepreneur and writer of the blog Global Guerrillas, where he writes mainly about two topics that at first seem completely unrelated: the future of warfare and resilient communities. His thinking about future scenarios is highly regarded since he wrote Brave New War in 2007, and his views on climate change and its impacts on our lifestyle are well-informed.

Resiliency in the face of changes in climate, economics and politics requires that we concentrate more on local farming and gardening to ensure our food supplies. These, Robb says, are key survival skills, far too rare today for our needs tomorrow. Clearly there are openings for innovative approaches to traditional farming practice that may better fit real situations in a changing world.

Here’s an example of Robb’s blogging on the subject:

Our collective food supply is one of the most centralized, and vulnerable, systems on our (now mostly urban) planet. Not only is the production accomplished by a tiny minority of the population (less than 3% in the US) and reliant on a small number of generic crops (particularly corn), the resources necessary to produce it — from arable land to energy to water — are in short supply. This implies that the following factors will cause a shift from centralized to decentralized local farming:

• Hard disruptions. Shortage. For example, global demand drains domestic markets of available supplies (we’ve seen this recently). Pandemic, pestilence, severe energy shock, etc.
• Soft disruptions. Affordability. Availability. Transportation becomes increasingly expensive. Prices gyrate upwards. Minor disruptions from tainted supplies to terrorism to brown outs.
• Income generation. A need to generate extra income due to depleted opportunity and income (the income of the average person in the US hasn’t seen any growth since 1974 and globalization may put the remainder at risk).

Rent a Farmer
The return to local agriculture within suburban and urban environments won’t be a redux of amateur gardening nor will it be done on local traditional farms (mostly, long since paved over). Instead it will feature high tech, intense, and energy efficient efforts on clusters of small plots. In short, it will buffer families from the risk of soft and hard disruptions as well as provide an opportunity for income generation. In fact, we are already seeing signs of resilience entrepreneurs in this space. One example is SPIN (small plot intensive) farming, a company that has optimized/packaged techniques for suburban/urban farmers. Elements include:

• The aggregation of plots near demand. SPIN farmers cut deals with the owners of suburban yards and/or unused spaces to put together viable acreage for farming. Local landowners are paid in kind (produce).
• Intensive utilization of plots. Optimization of plots to generate the highest possible yields depending climate, sun, and rainfall. Low energy methods are preferable since they maximize profitability. There is also an ability to leverage local utilities for water and electricity without any infrastructure expense.
• High value products. A focus on products that cost the most and are the most valuable to local buyers (restaurants and farmers markets). Freshness premiums and fuel cost ratios are important variables.

NOTE: Does a SPIN-like approach work?
Early indications are that it works. An interesting study done by Urban Partners for the city of Philadelphia indicates that a fully ramped up effort can generate upwards of $120,000 a year in sales and $60,000 in net income.

How it Will Accelerate
Factors that will accelerate local farming include (in addition to the acceleration of effort due to negative pressure, like those listed above):

• Open source tinkering networks. Everything from the optimization of crop layouts to low cost DIY farming equipment.
• Clustering. Shared equipment, insight, etc. While some of this can be achieved via online connections, local physical connections improve productivity.
• Community support and demand. Relaxation of zoning/community regulations against yard conversions, support for a farmer’s market, etc.

This story was recently carried by National Public Radio where it aired as Wary Of Wall Street? Invest In A Dairy Farm. The premise:

…some as yet undefined portion of capital should be steered toward smaller, local farms and businesses that are friendly to the environment.

The story begins with a description of a young dairy farmer, Dante Hesse, who rents land and a barn outside of New York City and sells organic milk at $5 a quart in the city. He could sell much more if he could afford to build his own processing plant, but needs investors to grow his business.

“We feel pretty strongly at this point that there are a lot of people out there who are interested in helping, and the way the economy is now, one argument might be that it’s a bad time to be doing something like this,” Hesse says. “But I think the inverse is true, that it’s actually a good time because people are scared of the stock market, and they know that food is a vital part of survival. And local food is going to become very important in the very near future.”

Woody Tasch is the venture capitalist who founded Slow Money to find investors for such businesses.

Colin, with his wife Karen, runs Archi’s Acres in Valley, CA.

In this audio recording, you can hear Colin describe how he transitioned from combat in Iraq to managing a successful small-scale farming operation near San Diego.

Matt Mccue, who has been one of FVAs best examples and most eloquent spokespersons, has started a new CSA (Community-supported Agriculture) business in Suisun Valley, California. According to their new blog, Shooting Star CSA (Matt and his partner Lilly Schneider) “will be growing a diversified mix of over 35 different vegetable crops, everything from radishes to peppers.”

Congratulations Matt and Lilly!

The number of family farms may be shrinking, but there’s hope in the number of young people who are becoming new farmers. A story carried on WNYC out of New York City covers small farming operations in the American Northeast.

REPORTER: US Department of Agriculture census figures show the number of people under 35 who are operating small and medium-sized farms increased 14 percent between 1997 and 2002, the latest year data was available. In a less scientific fashion, Greg Swartz has noticed the youth wave, too, at his group’s 26th annual conference. Swartz is the executive director of NOFA, the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York.

SWARTZ: We broke a really great record in the past year with more than 1,000 attendees. and historically, the attendees were gray…gray haired. We saw an amazing number of younger folks that were interested in becoming farmers, that were beginning farmers already and that were interested in activist and advocacy roles that are needed to build a local food system.

The story focuses on Kaycee Wimbish, a former school teacher, and her business partner Owen O’Connor who together run Awesome Farm, 90 miles north of the city. They learned the ropes working for several seasons at an already working farm, then secured their own land next door and went independent.

O’CONNOR: We’ve got a lot of inspired models of people that are making a living off farming…we’re not talking about fortunes, but are making a living off farming, are feeling good about it, are not running themselves into the ground in the process

WIMBISH: I kinda feel we’re in a groove now and are on top of things, and there are fewer surprises. but in the beginning it was just like…’whaaat?’ Sorta like my first year of teaching!

George was the keynote speaker at the benefit. A humble man who has worked his own family’s farm for decades – growing mostly soybeans and corn at a relatively small scale compared to the industrial farming operations surrounding him in Iowa – George has studied the history and politics of that have driven most families out of farming. He’s highly supportive of the idea of a rebirth of small farms and an influx of worthy farmers coming directly out of military service.

In this 3-minute video clip of his speech, George quotes Kenneth Bolding, an agro-economist who, in the 1960s, represented the thinkng about replacing family farms with corporate farming operations. Bolding compared this displacement of family farmers with squeezing toothpaste out of a tube – the thicker the toothpaste, the more pressure would be required. At the end of the quote was the proposition:

“If you can’t get people out of agriculture easily, you’re going to have to do farmers severe injustice in order to solve the problem of allocation.”