Adam talked about farming in a way that only a farmer could – what the dirt smelled like, what the birds sounded like, how he liked the way the humidity felt, and how his mind got to relax when he sat on a tractor.

A farmer’s season starts long before the first seed is planted and Adam knew that. Standing outside his trailer, steadying his balance with his cane, he had already begun farming. Five thousand miles away and without a dime, Adam had been planning and constructing every detail of his farm – his plants, the soil mix, the containers, the irrigation system, how the berries would be grown and harvested and sold.

Adam’s body had taken a beating in Iraq but his spirit was strong and he knew he had something that he could focus on and that the hard physical and mental work he needed to farm was going to heal him.

The Farmer-Veteran Coalition was honored to help buy Adam his first plants, pots and potting mix. Our friend Deborah Beebe popped up with the name “Red, White and Blueberry.” As Adam wrote this morning, “The soil is fertile in Florida; FVC planted a seed and now is watching it rapidly grow.” We urge all the public support for Adam’s farm possible.

– Michael O’Gorman, FVC Founder and Project Director

*********** PRESS RELEASE ***********

Farming Project Invites Veterans to Work and Learn

Jacksonville, FL April 23, 2010

Former Army Sergeant Adam Burke, founder and director of Veterans Farm, wants to provide paying work and horticulture therapy for fellow disabled veterans. Last year, Adam and his wife Michele began raising and marketing “Red, White and Blueberries” in central Florida with support from the Farmer Veteran Coalition (www.farmvetco.org), which specializes in helping veterans find livelihoods in the food and farming sector.

This year money raised by Work Vessels for Veterans (www.workvesselsforveterans.org) has enabled Adam to secure 8 acres of land outside of Jacksonville where he plans to expand Veterans Farm to include other berries and organic vegetables while providing more job opportunities for disabled veterans. WVFV serves as Veterans Farm’s non-profit fiscal sponsor.

“Horticulture therapy by way of the blueberry farm helped my recovery so much that I thought it would only be greedy not to share it with others who have suffered so much,” Adam said. “It was nice to have other disabled veterans out there. We stick together and work as a team.”

Adam grew up on a family farm in Central Florida. The first member of his family to not go directly into farming, he joined the US Army instead, serving from 1995-2004. He served in Iraq with Operation Iraqi Freedom from December 2002 until March of 2004, when mortar fire near Balad gave him his second and most serious injury, earning him the Purple Heart.

Adam relates, “When I returned home I found it difficult going through the VA to get help for my TBI and PTSD. The psychologist and psychiatrist kept telling me that I needed to find a way to relieve stress. One of the best things I remember from my childhood was growing up on a farm. I remembered being in the outdoors and enjoying working with others. I remember the sound of the birds and the mist from the sprinklers, the wind and the calming effect it had on me.”

Adam says that his next step in developing Veterans Farm on its new land is to raise money to purchase the blueberry bushes and pine bark so that he can accept his first group of disabled veterans to train and operate the farm. He is also seeking donations of equipment to help complete the project. He plans to make his farm fully self-sustaining.

Adam Burke can be contacted via his website (www.veteransfarm.com) or email (veteransfarm@yahoo.com) or telephone (352-217-1662).

All donations for Veterans Farm through WVFV are tax deductible will go directly to helping disabled veterans and their recovery.

Release by the Farmer-Veteran Coalition Media Project, funded by Lewis Black

Along with two documentary film makers, I taped interviews with Nick and with Jim Dunlop and his wife, Rebecca Thistlethwaite. Nick served with the Marines in the Mideast in the capacity of Hospital Corpsman. His candid description of his transition and his growing faith that he can make a good career in agriculture demonstrates the kind of determination that a stint as a combat Corpsman must have required.

The opening and closing music (Impromptu in A) is the creation of the artist DoKashiteru, and is shared with us through the Creative Commons Attribution, Noncommercial (3.0) license.

With “special emphasis on resources for small farms, organic farming, direct marketing, and building local food systems.” The site is an effort by Taylor Reid and Jim Bingen of the Department of Community, Agriculture, Recreation, and Resource Studies at Michigan State University. (emphasis mine)

The site has many pages including Finding Land, Jobs and Internships, Training Programs and Business Planning. It also offers a Farmers Discussion Forum.

Worth checking out whether you’re a new farmer or an experienced one trying to keep up with the latest research.

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 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.

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.

…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.