FVC’s Veterans Organic Farming Educational Retreat  took place Memorial Day weekend. Sixteen aspiring farmers with military service backgrounds attended and all day Saturday and Sunday they were informed by experts in organic farming, training and certification. FVC provided accommodations, food and transportation to the venues, all around Santa Cruz, CA. Here are most of the attendees and FVC staff, posing amidst the organic berry bushes of Swanton Berry Farm. Jim Cochran, the founder, is in the center rear:

Photo by Susanna Frohman.

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.

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.”

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.