Local Farming
By ANNIE CANTRELL
HARRISONBURG, Va. — From the backyard of her home in this city, Beth Schermerhorn, a senior at James Madison University (JMU), examined her homemade greenhouse of hay bales, old windows and pizza boxes, which she hopes will produce a healthy harvest of kale, a winter-green, in months to come.
A geography student, Schermerhorn spent last summer working as an intern at the nearby Radical Roots Community Farm, where she learned to grow vegetables using sustainable, ecologically-sound methods, as well as her own two hands. Seeing the process of food production from seed to harvest to dinner table, she said, opened her eyes to what people are consuming. Knowing how to produce what you eat is “part of the process of knowing where your food comes from,” she said in a recent interview.
Now, she's working with Dr. Wayne Teel, associate professor of JMU’s School of Integrated Science and Technology, on a class project to create a community supported farm on the grounds of the new Rockingham Memorial Hospital (RMH).
The farm is expected to provide mostly vegetables but also flowers, herbs, and fruits for the community and eventually RMH and JMU cafeterias. It is expected to be run by a collective of JMU faculty and students, and two paid staffers will manage it, seeking additional help from volunteers. Schermerhorn and Dr. Teel hope the farm is ready to open by 2010 but are waiting for RMH to build a road so that they can access the site.
JMU’s geography department also hopes that once the farm is open, it can be used to offer a course in sustainable agriculture methods.
The farm is among a growing number of community supported farms that have sprung up across the nation. Owing to growing anxiety about a variety of environmental issues, people increasingly are seeking out the locally and organically grown vegetables and fruits that community farms typically provide. Until recently, Schermerhorn said, people have been “really disconnected with food. If many people sat down and thought about what they’re eating, they wouldn’t.”
The project began in the spring of 2006, when RMH asked JMU’s geography department for ideas to green its campus. The new RMH is trying to become a LEED certified (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) campus. Dr. Teel asked for ideas from students in his sustainability and ecological perspectives class, in which Schermerhorn was enrolled. The class proposed that RMH use the remaining 175 acres of the 250-acre site for a community supported farm.
The RMH-based farm will be based around the same standards and practices as Radical Roots Community Farm, of Keezletown, Va. Operated by David and Lee O’Neill, Radical Roots uses a method known as community-supported agriculture (CSA) to support its growing season. At the beginning of each season community members buy shares to fund the startup costs of farming. In return, CSA members get a bushel of fresh produce weekly. Schermerhorn said that being a CSA member is empowering because “people have a stake in the farm and help it exist.”
According to Dr. Teel, CSA methods allow local farmers to flourish, since they do not have to worry about paying back loans at the end of the season and instead can expand their production with the money members are putting into the operations.
Most CSA farms use sustainable growing methods because their members expect a certain standard in the production of their food, according to David O’Neill. Radical Roots calls its food “ecologically grown,” because instead of using chemicals, pesticides and herbicides, growers fertilize with compost and use plants to attract beneficial insects.
Food production increasingly has become cause for concern. Dr. Wayne Teel said food bought and grown locally using sustainable methods has “less embedded energy.” He meant that within the production of the food, no fertilizers, pesticides, long distance transportation or storage has been used. Locally produced foods also are higher in nutrition because they're consumed closer to the day of harvest. Teel says that the “energy of food exceeds its energy of production” when grown sustainably because fewer resources go into producing the food but its quality is higher.
Like Schermerhorn, Allison Avery, a junior at JMU, worked as a summer intern at Radical Roots. She said that such farms strengthen the relationship consumers have with their food because they know the people who grow and harvest it. Avery found working at the farm to be rewarding because one puts so much physical effort into the soil and then gets to see the benefits of the harvest.
And Schermerhorn said she has high hopes for the RMH community farm. “I learned a lot about myself and how I have the capacity to grow food, ” she said. “And if I can do it, I really think that anyone can.”