Healthy Eaters, Strong Minds: What School Gardens Teach Kids

Paige Pfleger  ::  NPR  ::  10 August 2015

Tall brick walls conceal a colorful garden at Eastern Senior High School in
Washington, D.C., where students like Romario Bramwell, 17, harvest flowers
and produce. The program is run by City Blossoms, a nonprofit that brings
gardens to urban areas.     Lydia Thompson/NPR

School is still out for the summer, but at Eastern Senior High School in Washington, D.C., students are hard at work — outdoors.

In a garden filled with flowers and beds bursting with vegetables and herbs, nearly a dozen teenagers are harvesting vegetables for the weekend's farmers market.

Roshawn Little is going into her junior year at Eastern, and has been working in this garden for three years now. "I didn't really like bugs or dirt," Little says, thinking back to when she got started. "Well, I still don't really like bugs, but I like the dirt," she laughs. She gathers a handful of greens, yanks from the stem and pulls up a baseball-sized beet.

During the summer, Little gets paid to work Tuesday through Saturday from 9 a.m. until 2 p.m. with City Blossoms, a nonprofit that brings community gardens to schools, community centers and other places where kids gather in urban areas.

Little believes that working in the garden has taught her to try all sorts of new things — like eating different kinds of vegetables more often. And she's taken those healthy behaviors home with her. Little brings home vegetables from the garden, and she says her eating habits have encouraged her family to buy more fruits and vegetables.

Yanci Flores (left) and Roshawn Little harvest beets from the garden at
Eastern Senior High School on July 17.  Lydia Thompson/NPR

"We're a chubby family and we love to eat. Well, I do," she adds with a laugh. "We mainly live around liquor stores and snack stores. There aren't that many grocery stores. They're way out, and you have to drive so far" — a common problem in low-income urban areas. "It seems so pointless, when there are snack stores right there," she says.

City Blossoms is one of many groups across the country teaming up with local communities to install school gardens, like the one at Eastern, in areas with low access to fresh, healthy foods. These gardens, advocates say, are really an outdoor classroom where kids learn valuable lessons — not just about nutrition, but also about science and math, even business skills.

By The Books

Many of these groups have big ambitions to tackle complex problems. But there is research that shows the benefits of school gardens can be real and measurable, says Jeanne McCarty, the executive director of REAL School Gardens.

"There's a trend across the country where kids are not spending enough time outdoors, period," McCarty says.

Top Left: Nychele Williams, 15, gathers basil in the garden at Eastern Senior
High School. Bottom left: Yanci Flores rinses recently harvested beets.
Right: Carrots and beets are displayed at the Aya farmers market,
where students sell their produce on Saturdays.  Lydia Thompson/NPR

To counter that, the nonprofit, which operates in Texas and Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia, works with schools to create "learning gardens" and trains teachers on how to use them to get students engaged and boost academics. For example, the gardens can be used for math lessons — like calculating the area of a plant bed — or learning the science of how plants grow.

McCarty says REAL School Gardens — which has built nearly 100 gardens — is constantly evaluating the outcomes of its programs, and the numbers are encouraging.

She says partner schools have seen a 12 to 15 percent increase in the number of students passing standardized tests — not just those in the garden program, but schoolwide.

Students at Eastern Senior High School in Washington, D.C., trim
bouquets to sell at the farmers market.  Lydia Thompson/NPR

And 94 percent of teachers in the REAL School Garden programs reported seeing increased engagement from their students, according to an independent evaluation conducted by PEER Associates and funded by the Rainwater Charitable Foundation.

She says the benefits don't end with the students, either. Schools that installed learning gardens saw less teacher turnover, McCarty says.

Principal Margie Hernandez tells us she's seen the effect firsthand among her teachers.

"They start realizing that they need something to invigorate themselves, so they can invigorate their classrooms and invigorate their students," she says. Her school, Pershing Elementary in Dallas, has worked with REAL School Gardens since 2011.

Rebecca Lemos-Otero (right), co-founder and co-executive
director of City Blossoms, helps Erwin Tcheliebou, 15,
pick flowers to sell at the farmers market. Behind her is a
wall featuring the painted portraits of Eastern Senior High
students who have worked in the garden.  Lydia Thompson/NPR

And for her students — who come from predominantly low-income backgrounds — the experience can be a nutritional eye-opener, Hernandez says. "It totally changed my kids' perceptions of where food comes from, and what it takes to produce food."

If They Grow It, They'll Eat It

Many studies have found that kids are more likely to eat fruits and vegetables if they help garden them. That's part of the motivating principle behind Colorado-based Denver Urban Gardens, or DUG, a school garden program that puts a heavy emphasis on having kids taste the produce they grow.

DUG has 13 garden programs at schools where more than 90 percent of the students qualify for free and reduced-price lunches. Some of the produce that students grow then gets sold to the school cafeteria. That way, kids can recognize the fruits (and vegetables) of their labor in the lunch line. DUG has found that 73 percent of the students who work in the school garden reported increasing their actual consumption of produce.

Rebecca Andruszka, who works with DUG, says her friend's children will only eat vegetables from the garden at school — not from the grocery store.

"I think it's just that it seems less foreign when you're a part of the growing process," Andruska says.

A Business Education

In D.C., the kids of City Blossoms are also part of the business process: They take their produce to farmers markets.

On a recent weekend at the Aya farmers market in Southwest D.C., the kids' table is decorated with handmade signs that read "onions" and "garlic," with little pictures drawn beside them. The kids greet customers warmly, shaking their hands and calling them "sir" or "ma'am."

Roshawn Little mans the table, inviting people to try their herbed salt with bread. Working at the market has helped her practice her public speaking skills, she says. Plus, it teaches her business and money skills.

Roshawn Little (left) invites customer Nate Kohring to try the herbed salt
with bread at the Aya farmers market on Saturday.  Lydia Thompson/NPR

"I used to spend money on anything, mainly junk food," Little says. "Now, as I'm working here, I learned how to use my money more responsibly."

Homemade signs decorate the table at the Aya farmers market,
where the kids of City Blossoms sell their produce
on Saturdays.  Lydia Thompson/NPR

Nadine Joyner of Nutrition Synergies LLC, a nutrition education company, has a booth next to the kids at the market. She often buys produce from them to incorporate into her quiches. She says she's constantly impressed by the kids' knowledge of what they're selling — they know how to grow it, how to prepare it, and how to cook it.

"It's a very impressive thing to see young urban entrepreneurs," Joyner says, looking over at the kids. "It's a refreshing thing."

Joyner believes that teaching young people the importance of healthy eating will have long-term payoffs.

"The payoff is exponential, because they'll be young mothers or young fathers someday, and they'll feed their children based on what they've learned now," she says.

Students from Eastern Senior High School in Washington, D.C.,
sell vegetables, soaps and salts at the Aya farmers market
on July 25.  Lydia Thompson/NPR

But the kids aren't thinking of that bigger picture. Instead, they're just enjoying the little things, like the way their hands smell after harvesting herbs, or the satisfying crunch of a freshly picked carrot.

Urban Farming Hits Major League Baseball Stadiums

Steve Holt, TakePart   ::  EcoWatch  ::  16 July 2015 

As fans sitting on the third baseline streamed into Boston’s Fenway Park for the Red Sox home opener, they were greeted with the sight of 1,800 square feet of raised beds on a formerly unused 5,000-square-foot rooftop. “Fenway Farms” initially will grow fresh vegetables not typically found in baseball stadiums—arugula, Swiss chard and broccoli rabe, for instance—for use by the chefs at the EMC Club kitchen, just 25 feet away.

Boston’s Fenway Park has 1,800 square feet of raised beds on a formerly unused 5,000-square-foot rooftop. Photo credit: Maureen White

The ballpark may not conjure images of health and sustainability—and certainly not innovation in urban agriculture—but a handful of Major League clubs just may change that, and in the process give new meaning to “farm teams.” This season, the Red Sox join the Colorado Rockies, the San Diego Padres and the San Francisco Giants in starting to grow a portion of their stadium concessions in on-site farms and gardens.

The farm’s location is highly visible to many of the roughly 37,000 fans who fill the ballpark for the team’s 81 home games and the handful of concerts and other events to which Fenway plays host—a potential influence that is not lost on Chris Knight, the team’s manager of facility planning and services.

“We have such a platform here at this level of sports and at Fenway Park—this is one way we can make an impact for the environment and nutrition,” he said.

When the first vegetables and herbs were harvested in early May, Fenway Farms contributed its part to a long-term push at the ballpark to operate more sustainably—and a more recent emphasis on integrating healthy food into concessions. Knight said the idea for the farm came from Linda Pizzuti Henry, wife of Sox co-owner John Henry. Last summer, the founders ofGreen City Growers—a company converting unused space into farms and gardens—met with Henry to pitch ideas for turning that dream into a reality.

The process “picked up quickly” from there, said Green City Growers founder, Jessie Banhazl, with the team picking out a site on the front-office roof and growers meeting with chefs at the seasonally inspired EMC Club to come up with a lineup of veggies to grow. Recover Green Roofs began construction and farm installation in mid-March, and plants went into the newly poured soil last week—just in time for the first home game of the season.

Photo credit: Maureen White

“It’s wild. We’re really, really, really excited about this,” said Banhazl, whose company will maintain the farm. “This particular project is the coolest and most widespread reach that we’ve ever seen with an urban agriculture project.”

The foray by the Red Sox into urban agriculture is unusual among modern professional baseball teams—but the team is not the first to catch the grow-your-own bug. In 2012, at the stadium chef’s request, San Diego Padres head groundskeeper Luke Yoder planted more than a dozen hot pepper and tomato plants in the Petco Park bullpen. In 2013, the Colorado Rockies, working with their catering contractor, Aramark, installed a 600-square-foot kitchen garden near Gate A at Coors Field, which sprouts an assortment of flowers, herbs, and other vegetables. Much of the food harvested from “The GaRden” is found in dishes at the stadium’s premier Mountain Ranch Club.

Last season, the San Francisco Giants and Bon Appétit Management built The Garden at AT&T Park, a 4,320-square-foot dining pavilion serving produce grown in several nearby gardens and a high-yield vertical farm. (There was even a bit of controversy when the Padres took issue with Giants’ marketing claiming to have the majors’ first farm, claims that were later retracted). The Garden pavilion contains two food concepts: The Hearth Table uses only gluten-free ingredients, while The Garden Table serves vegetarian offerings. Bartenders even integrate fresh-grown herbs into the cocktails. Don’t worry, you can still get your all-beef hot dog at The Garden, but Laura Braley, spokesperson for Bon Appétit Management, said the ballpark simply wants to provide alternatives for fans seeking a more nutritious meal and sees the on-site farm as a way to inspire fans to think about the source of their food.

Photo credit: Maureen White

“It’s fun to get a salad or a flatbread and literally see the ingredients growing right there,” she said, adding that prices in The Garden have remained consistent with other offerings at AT&T Park.

While the Sox, Rockies, Padres and Giants lead the majors in progressive food and nutrition policies, other clubs appear to be competing for the most outrageous offerings on the other end of the health spectrum. At Rangers Stadium in Texas, for instance, fans this season will be able to dine on a deep-fried “S’mOreo” (exactly what it sounds like), chicken-fried corn on the cob, and bacon-flavored cotton candy. The Arizona Diamondbacks this season introduced theChurro Dog: a churro inside a chocolate-frosted long-john doughnut, topped with ice cream, whipped cream, and both chocolate and caramel syrups.

Photo credit: Green City Growers

Make no mistake: Sox and Giants fans still have their pick of less-than-nutritious stadium foods. Neither club would provide data on how well their healthier offerings have been selling, but a 2014 study of a healthy-food overhaul of a concession stand at a high-school athletics facility found that the changes had no negative effect on concessions sales and even improved overall satisfaction among parents. Varsity football is a world away from Major League Baseball, sure, but with dining trends tend toward healthier food nationally, there is both interest and demand that these programs could tap into.

Besides nutritional and environmental goals for their farms, the Giants and Red Sox have strong educational outreach programs. The Giants earlier this year unveiled plans to use The Garden at AT&T Park as an outdoor nutrition and agricultural classroom for children on non–game days, giving kids a chance to learn the importance of healthy eating. Boston has similar plans for youth enrichment—and even dreams of farming in other parts of the ballpark—as soon as farm operations are streamlined and crops are coming up.

While the first veggies won’t be ready to harvest for a few more weeks, Banhazl said she caught glimpses of the the farm’s potential influence on opening day. As she watched child after child run up to the railing and see the new beds for the first time, she saw something come alive in them.

“They’d say, ‘Oh my God, the Red Sox have a farm?’” she recalled. “We should do this, Mom!”

How a German Village Created an Independent Grid and a Renewable Energy Future

Laurie Guevara- Stone  ::  Rocky Mountain Institute  ::  February 20, 2014

Regardless of debate about the success of Germany’s renewables revolution, there is no denying that a small town in the corner of rural eastern Germany, 40 miles south of Berlin, may be one of the best examples of decentralized self-sufficiency.

Feldheim (population: 150), in the cash-strapped state of Brandenburg, was a communist collective farm back when Germany was still divided into East and West. Now, it is a model renewable energy village putting into practice Germany’s vision of a renewably powered future.

In 1995, a local entrepreneur paid for Feldheim’s first wind turbine. As farmers started to worry when prices for their milk, potatoes, and beets began to fall and energy prices started to rise, they learned they could earn cash by renting their land to energy companies wanting to install a wind turbine. A local renewable energy company, Energiequelle GmbH, saw the potential as well, and decided to install a wind farm in Feldheim. Forty-three wind turbines with an installed capacity of 74.1 megawatt (MW) soon dotted the Feldheim landscape, providing income to farmers who leased their land to the energy company.

Renewable fervor was catching on, and in 2008 Energiequelle bought a 111-acre former Soviet military site about five miles from Feldheim, cleaned up the toxic military waste and hidden ammunition and constructed a 284-panel solar farm that produces over 2,700 MW hours per year. Its power is fed into the grid at the feed-in-tariff rate.

Photo credit: Energiequelle

That same year, the town of Feldheim and Energiequelle established a joint venture, called Feldheim Energie GmbH & Co. The new company built a biogas factory that converts pig manure and unused corn into heat, taking advantage of the community’s 700 pigs and 1,700 acres of arable farmland. The biogas plant is fed from the town’s agricultural cooperative and produces of electricity a year. A 400-kilowatt, wood-chip furnace fueled by the byproduct of forest thinning helps to firm the power from wind and biogas.

By 2009 Feldheim was producing all its own energy with renewable sources. Residents then wanted to take things a step further and free themselves from the large utility company, E.on, which was supplying the grid.

E.on refused to either sell or lease the part of its energy grid that ran through Feldheim. So the people took the matter into their own hands, and decided to build their own. Each of the 150 residents contributed 3,000 Euros (~$4,000 at today’s exchange rates) so that they could build their own smart grid. With help from Energiequelle and financing from the European Union and government subsidies, the smart grid was completed in 2010, making Feldheim then the only town in Germany with its own mini-grid. This allows the locally produced heat and electricity to be fed straight to consumers and gives them control over their electrical prices, which are set at community meetings.

They now pay 31 percent less for electricity and 10 percent less for heating than before. The town consumes less than one percent of the electricity produced annually by its wind turbines and solar panels, selling the rest back to the market. This lowers their electricity bills to around half the national average. The biogas plant not only sells electricity back to the market, but also supplies the entire community with heating, saving over 160,000 liters of heating oil each year. As an added benefit, the plant produces over three million gallons of high-quality fertilizer annually that the agricultural cooperative uses.

Feldheim has also installed a plug-and-pay EV charging station in the town center, and next plans to install a 10-MW battery later this year. The storage will help balance the community microgrid’s generation and load.

There are now more wind turbines than houses in the town. While residents don’t mind the noise or aesthetics of the wind turbines, there has been some opposition from neighboring towns, which didn’t—until recently—directly benefit from the wind farm. “In order to make neighbors feel more at ease with the wind farm, we are offering power at a special rate,” Energiequelle spokesman Werner Frohwitter told Rocky Mountain Institute. “Our aim is to let as many people as possible directly benefit from our turbines, thus encouraging social acceptance for renewable energies.”

All the renewable projects also created jobs. While other villages in the economically depressed state of Brandenburg have roughly a 30 percent unemployment rate, Feldheim virtually erased its unemployment. Most residents work in the biogas plant or maintain the wind and solar farms. And the town, which has not a single museum or restaurant, has seen an influx of visitors. Three thousand people visit the small town of 150 each year. This has prompted the foundation of a new organization, Förderverein des Neuen Energieforums Feldheim (Friends of the New Energies Forum Feldheim), which is converting an old inn into a renewable energy information and training center. The hope is that when the center opens in the fall of 2014 it will bring even more visitors to Feldheim, generating more jobs and income for the villagers.

Feldheim has proven that a high-renewables energy future is possible today. “There have been and are still occurring remarkable changes (in Feldheim),” says Frohwitter. The small town is thriving thanks to its confidence in renewable energy technologies.

Revolutionary Family Shows True Meaning of Self-Reliance

Cole Mellino  ::  EcoWatch  ::  23 January 2015 

Think you can’t grow much food in an urban area? Think again. One family’s 4,000 square foot farm in Pasadena, California “not only feeds a family but revolutionizes the idea of what can be done in a very unlikely place—the middle of a city.” KCET reporter Val Zavala gives us a glimpse into the Dervaes family’s Path to Freedom Urban Homestead. “I brought the country to the city rather than having to go out to the country,” said Jules Dervaes, who created the farm with his three adult children, Justin, Anais and Jordanne.

This urban homestead produces 6,000 pounds of food a year.

They grow almost all of the food they need. Ninety percent of their all-organic, vegetarian dietcomes from their garden. The operation involves 400 varieties of vegetables, fruits and edible flowers, which is 6,000 pounds of food a year. They raise eight chickens, four ducks and two goats, which provide them with eggs and milk. Chefs from high-end restaurants come directly to their house to buy their excess.

When asked if he had any doubts in the beginning, Jules admits he did. “I kept thinking this place was too small. There’s no way that we are going to be able to feed ourselves, plus I never thought we’d be able to grow the vegetables for the market,” he said. Dervaes decided to embark on this endeavor because he was concerned about what was in his and his children’s food. He wanted them to eat organic, GMO-free food, and he knew the best way to ensure that was to grow it himself.

The Dervaes’ say they love their homesteading lifestyle and couldn’t imagine it any other way.

The family has a solar panel on the roof that provides all of their electricity. Not that they use much. Most of their “gizmos,” says Anais, “are hand-powered” like their hand-crank smoothie maker. That puts their electricity bill at about $12 per month. Their car runs on biodiesel, which they make from vegetable waste that restaurants drop off at their house for free. These people have all the hook ups.

But it’s not all sunshine and flowers (though they have plenty of both). The Dervaes’ work very hard, make roughly $20,000 a year and have to deal with weather-related disasters, pests, disease and now climate change. Justin said, “we’ve been gardening so long that you can sense things are off. We have this little bug, the Junebug, that comes out in June, but now it doesn’t come out until July, August and September—so something is off.” Water is also a serious issue. With the drought in California, Jules has relied on clay pot irrigation, an ancient form of irrigation, to conserve water.

All that hard work is well worth it when the family sits down to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

By growing all of their food themselves, except staples such as wheat, rice and oats, they are able to eat fresh and delicious, organic food for $2 a day per person. They have attracted a lot of attention since they began homesteading in the mid 1980s. Many homesteaders have emulated their model. They offer workshops and events on their farm, and they even have a blog. They are proof of the bounty you can grow on one-tenth of an acre.

Watch here as KCET’s Zavala reports on this revolutionary family:

French Supermarket Highlights Ugly Fruits and Veggies Instead of Wasting Them

Brandon Baker  ::  EcoWatch  :: 22 July 2014

        

Have you ever unloaded your groceries only to discover that you accidentally picked up a potato that looked kind of like a rhinoceros head?
How about one of those oranges that has a less-than-appetizing, squiggly design on its head? These mistakes happen, but hopefully you weren’t compelled to simply throw the produce away.

Even if you didn’t, plenty of other people did. About 300 million tons of fruits and vegetables are thrown away each year, and you can bet that includes the ugly ones. Instead of following suit, Intermarché, France’s third-largest supermarket chain, did the exact opposite.

The chain has launched the “Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables” campaign, giving the hideous produce its own aisle, labels and placement on store receipts. And just because the veggies and fruits weren’t exactly easy on the eyes, they were sold for a whopping 30 percent discount!



Intermarché took things even further by packaging soups and juices using only the “inglorious” fruits and vegetables.

The chain took a gamble on the unseemly, but it worked. Each store sold an average of 1.2 tons during the first two days of the campaign. Stores also experienced a 24-percent uptick in store traffic.

None of that would have happened if the store and its customers had simply done the status quo—tossing veggies or fruits that look a little … different.

Homestead Hamlets: Neighborhood Gardens That Create Community Food Security

Showcasing edible landscaping techniques, the neighborhood gardens started by residents of one Nebraska block helped build community food security.

Tim Rinne  ::  Mother Earth News  ::  April/May 2014

Author Tim Rinne and his wife, Kay Walter, tend crops growing in the Hawley Hamlet hoop house.   Photo by Lincoln Journal Star

For 10 years, I obsessed about the threat of climate change on an intellectual, theoretical level. But it wasn’t until the personal implications of climate change began to dawn on me — how it would disrupt my daily routine and the world I took for granted — that the full horror of our situation finally sank in. And in early 2009, a realization hit me, right in the stomach: I didn’t have the first clue about my food supply. I didn’t know where it came from or how it was grown.

Isn’t that a way of life that’s just asking for trouble?

I decided to make a change. Or, rather, many small changes.

Inklings of a Neighborhood Garden Plan

Although I’d toyed with the idea for years, buying some land and moving to the country wasn’t a viable option. My wife, Kay, and I both worked less than a mile from our home in Lincoln, Neb., and we concluded that the carbon footprint of a longer commute every day would only compound our ecological woes.

About that time, our close friend Linda happened upon a workshop on “Cohousing and Intentional Communities.” Linda was smitten with the idea of a community homestead — a group of like-minded people choosing to live in close proximity to each other in order to share resources, collectively work in gardens, and strive to lessen their load on the planet. After talking the idea over, the plan of repurposing an older neighborhood such as the one Kay and I lived in seemed the most sensible course to our ambitious trio. So, Linda and her husband, Ed, sold their home and moved onto our block, just two doors down.

Suddenly, we’d doubled our numbers. A seed was sprouting.

Kay and I decided to mortgage our home to purchase and renovate a “problem property” that was four doors down from us. We would establish a neighborhood garden there as soon as the lease for the existing tenants was up, and then we’d renovate the house and rent it out again. With this, our property stake in the block increased again, though we didn’t yet have a clear vision of what we could do.

Somewhere in my browsings, I stumbled across the concept of Edible Landscaping and discovered a book by that name written by Rosalind Creasy. She posed a question that was to forever change our lives (and our lawn): Why, she asked, do we always plant things we can’t eat?

I thought of our considerable corner lot. For 22 years, I’d dutifully mowed our grass and meticulously tended our trees and bushes — not one of which produced edible fruits. In my entire yard, apart from a little tomato plot, there wasn’t a single food plant. I wondered why. Peach and cherry trees produce blossoms that are every bit as lovely as those of ornamentals — and you get something to eat besides. Strawberry beds make lovely ground cover, and the tangy little gems provide a delicious enticement to passers-by.

A plan began solidifying in my mind. Our home, I vowed, was going to become a lawn-free edible landscape — even the public right-of-way area, which city ordinance deems “sidewalk space.” Kay and I would create a model of what a food-producing urban lot could look like that other people could then emulate and adapt for their own properties (after they saw it and got over the shock).

Nobody has to move to the country — and most of us can’t, anyway. We can stay put and turn our lawns into productive neighborhood gardens. (To read more about sustainable city living, check out our Guide to Urban Homesteading. — MOTHER EARTH NEWS)

Urban Homesteading

That first gardening season, in 2009, we spaded half of our lawn under and planted vegetables, with the remaining grass falling to the spade the following year. I quickly learned how much I didn’t know. What I really needed if I intended to garden on this scale, Kay wisely counseled, was a Master Gardener course. I promptly enrolled, and I learned more in the first four months of 2010 than I’d absorbed in my previous 30 years as a homeowner.

Food hubs try to grow local farms

Harvest Public Media  ::  17 July 2013  ::  www.harvestpublicmedia.org

Author:  Sean Powers is a reporter at WILL in Urbana, Ill.

Marty Travis, right, started the Stewards of the Land food hub in 2005. His son Will, left, helps him transport food from local farms to area restaurants. (Sean Powers for Harvest Public Media) 

Restaurants across the country have jumped on the local food bandwagon. They’re trying to source more of their produce from nearby farms, but it's not easy. Enter: Food hubs.

Food hubs are popping up across the country. These food processing and distribution centers make it easier for restaurants, grocery stores and others to buy local food. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that there are more than 220 of them in 40 states plus the District of Columbia.

Food hubs connect producers to consumers. They're not only helping struggling farms, but also bringing in new talent to agriculture.

Donna O’Shaughnessy and her husband, Keith Parrish, are first-generation farmers in rural Chatsworth, Ill., about two hours south of Chicago. They sell dairy and meat, and raise a host of animals, including cows, about 50 red waddle hogs, and a few colorful peacocks.

“Because we’re certified organic, we cannot use any herbicides or pesticides,” she explained. “Peacocks love ticks. They eat lots and lots of ticks.”

O’Shaughnessy was a full-time nurse for many years, while her husband focused on the farm. They ended each year in the red. But business took off about five years ago, with restaurant owners as far away as Chicago putting in order requests.

“For years, we did not think we could ever be self-supportive, totally sustainable – that we would always need my nursing income,” O’Shaughnessy said. “But then when things really started to pick up with, we made that decision I would retire from nursing and ironically, that’s when we started to turn a profit because I was able to do the marketing.”

How fracking hurts animals & aquatic life

EcoWatch  ::  January 30, 2014

Many people know the issues with fracking when it comes to water and air pollution, but animals are also at risk. Two studies in the last two years, show how farm animals and aquatic life are impacted by fracking.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

Farm Animals

A study by two Cornell University researchers indicates the process of hydraulic fracturing deep shale to release natural gas may be linked to shortened lifespan and reduced or mutated reproduction in cattle—and maybe humans.

Without knowing exactly what chemicals are being used, and in what quantities, it is difficult to perform laboratory-style experiments on, say lab rats. But farm animals are captive, surrounded by electric and barbed wire fences.

And when fracking wastewater is spilled across their pasture and into their drinking water, and they start dying and birthing dead calves, one can become suspicious that there is a connection.

Which is what the Cornell researchers found during a year-long study of farm animals, based primarily on interviews with animal owners and veterinarians in six states: Colorado, Louisiana, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas.

“Animals can nevertheless serve as sentinels for human health impacts,” the report, Impacts of Gas Drilling on Human and Animal Health, notes. “Animals, particularly livestock, remain in a confined area and, in some cases, are continually exposed to an environmental threat.”

A dairy farmer shares her story about fracking: “What have we done?”

Shared by Public Herald on October 30, 2012 

In the early spring of 2006, a nice man was in the area, promoting a chance to dream of better times for Bradford County and its farmers. There was promise of jobs for everyone and the farmer would generate money from signing a lease, and if a gas well was drilled on the farmer’s property he would become rich.

Two years passed with little activity. By now, the older leases were about to expire, gas companies were beginning to drill, and excitement was in the air. Here, the majority of farmers signed early, receiving $5- $85/per acre. There was this belief that the person with the gas well would become the next “shaleionaires.” We later found out small acre properties started signing leases at $2,500/ per acre.

By the spring of 2009, there was uneasiness among some of the farmers who had a gas well drilled on their property. The local newspaper was reporting contamination found in water wells, death occurring on a gas pad and the farmer was facing the fact that he could lose his farm due to a lawsuit based on the gas companies operation. For myself, I was thinking that our lucky neighbor was going to become the next Millionaire, because they had the gas well drilled on them. Soon my mind changed. Those farmers were facing penalties lodged against them, due to their land becoming industrial use instead of agricultural use.