Ghiorse had stopped cooking professionally by the time she had moved back to her hometown of Greenwich in 2014; years of cooking at scale had been physically demanding and stressful, and she was ready to expand her knowledge and skills. But she felt she had lost her platform to connect with the food system in an impactful way.

She began learning about the area’s food system and volunteering with local endeavors like the town’s sustainability committee. The committee helps guide Greenwich in advancing sustainable policies and practices that impact its natural environment, economy, and community. As chair of the committee’s food systems sector, she noticed “a gap,” she says, “in general awareness of the deeply ingrained, harmful impacts of our industrial food system.”

So, in 2020, she founded The Foodshed Network (TFN), an educational and convening platform to encourage residents in her hometown of Greenwich, CT, and surrounding Fairfield County to become food system changemakers.

“Our food system is so complicated,” says Ghiorse. “It’s very important to know and understand the impacts of our industrial system and then to understand the huge amounts of creativity, connectivity, and community that happens around food.”

Living in the activist hotbed of San Francisco’s Mission District helped her realize the connection between systemic racism and food access. “It’s fraught with deeply rooted practices of exploitation,” says Ghiorse, “beginning with the enslavement of Africans, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, and extraction of soil watersheds, and natural and social ecosystems.

“I learned about the importance of bridge building, network weaving, cross pollinating between initiatives, and convening people around food, and,” she emphasizes, “using the power of gathering as a lever for social change and healing.”

To address all of these distinct yet intersecting issues, TFN is made up of several sub-organizations, including the Greenwich Food Alliance (GFA), The Foodshed Forum, and a resource library. The GFA is a community of practice, assembling business leaders and government officials in an informal group bound by shared interests and expertise. Members network, share ideas, and learn about issues and advocate for policy surrounding food, such as making SNAP benefits available at nearby farmers markets. The Foodshed Forum is the educational arm, partnering with organizations to host events such as a current three-part lecture series entitled “Heritage Foodways: Seed, Hearth & Taste” at local libraries.

The resource library, available on the website, offers a wealth of information including Thirty Ways to be a Food System Changemaker, concrete suggestions people can take to be changemakers. There’s also a monthly newsletter.

Ghiorse runs TFN full-time; it’s self-funded on a shoestring budget, but she is working towards non-profit status and finding a fiscal sponsor so she can begin fundraising.

Myra Klockenbrick, land and water Sector chair of the Greenwich Sustainability Committee and co-director of Greenwich Pollinator Pathway, credits Ghiorse with bringing up a conversation that is not natural to Greenwich. Although Greenwich is particularly affluent, the town has initiatives such as community gardens and a food pantry, as 29 percent of the community experiences financial hardship.

“She’s really deepened our awareness of the diversity in our population,” says Klockenbrick. “She has this knack and grace of not being on her high horse, but educating us deeply about our food system, both good and bad in ways that aren’t scolding but always uplifting.”

“Ali’s brought this food system conversation to Greenwich,” says Sarah Coccaro, the Town of Greenwich’s assistant director of environmental affairs. “There was conversation around food systems,” she adds, “but there wasn’t any framing or awareness of the food system with a sort of equitable racial justice lens on it.”

Coccaro says food systems topics are being integrated into conversations within the town’s Conservation committee, and that she sees the context that TFN offers helping residents understand the industrial food system’s impact. She mentions a new Grow A Row effort in which community members grow an extra row of food in their gardens to donate. “People are starting to connect dots around food systems and how it needs to change and what they can do on a local level or regional level,” she says, “and I’m proud to see that change happening.”

Ghiorse aspires to create a culture shift where food, land, and seed sovereignty are the norm. That’s “the North Star for me, where people and community reclaim our collective commons,” she sas. “That’s fertile soil, clean waterways, and nutrient-rich woodlands that are accessible and available to everyone as a human right. That’s foundational.”

The post Spotlight On a Network Aiming to Make Everyone a Food Changemaker appeared first on Modern Farmer.

When farmers in cold climates take a well-earned winter rest, their communities still want local produce. Grocery chains provide food through winter, shipping goods from across the world, but this is expensive and can weaken local self-reliance and food security. Having no local options makes a town more dependent on outside food sources that the community does not control, and it reduces the amount of dollars staying local. It also renders Fairbanks less food secure because, like other rural towns in cold climates, it is at the end of a long, tenuous supply chain with a high chance of disruption from too much snow on hundreds of miles of roads to shipping delays as seen during the COVID-19 pandemic. A lack of local produce during winter also means many farmers lose income from fall to spring.

Sam Knapp, a farmer in Fairbanks, has found a way to bridge that gap by building his own affordable, accessible cold storage. This has allowed him to sell his produce through one of the country’s harshest winters. He combines a science background with experience running his own farm, and after speaking with cold storage innovators across the country, he is sharing what he has learned in his new book, Beyond the Root Cellar.

Knapp has a B.S. in chemistry and physics. “My first job out of college was doing thermal modeling as an engineer. It is in my wheelhouse to think about heat transfer and phase change.” He then experimented with cold storage running a farm in Michigan. Knapp used Google Scholar to review studies on the storage needs of each vegetable he wanted to grow. For example, Knapp found that winter squash stores best after curing outside, which involves healing and hardening its rind, but curing will not happen in colder and wetter climates. To make up for uncontrollable wet and cold weather, Knapp introduced humidity control measures into his storage plans.

In 2020, Knapp moved to Fairbanks to start Offbeet Farm. There, he found farmers using root cellars and other cold storage techniques that were costeffective at temperatures well below zero degrees. But few farmers, if any, stored for more than a month or two. “Most farms here sell out by early September.”

So, Knapp set out to build a structure on his 1.5-acre farm that could store his produce through the entire winter, a time when temperatures drop to -40 degrees for weeks on end. The structure is 25 square feet, and looks like an ordinary outdoor shed, but it rests on specialized concrete forms that encase insulation and act as retaining walls. He now runs a successful over-winter Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) and sells his produce through March.

“I built this building myself, and the total infrastructure cost was about $55,000. I have the capability of storing 35,000 to 40,000 pounds of produce.” With around 120 CSA customers, Knapp currently stores 25,000 pounds of produce, and he plans to expand each year.

Knapp says cold storage provides additional revenue streams and work-life balance; both are hard to come by for small farmers. “Farmers around here get half the year off, and they enjoy that, but their growing season is intense. It’s rough. It’s hard to make it through that time. I rarely feel burnt out from farming.” With cold storage, farmers do not have to harvest and sell all of their produce within the short growing season. It also helps balance self-care and family.

Storability varies by product: While Knapp has found that he and his customers are still eating their cabbage into the summer of the following growing year, storing his onions has proven tougher. He is still searching for an onion varietal that can store well after almost 24 hours of sunlight during the subarctic summer, followed by a cold and damp fall.

Every farmer experiments, and Knapp is no exception. He’s made some surprising discoveries. For instance, Knapp had not anticipated the warmth made by the vegetables themselves. After being picked, vegetables still respirate, (that is, metabolize carbohydrates), and produce heat as a byproduct—so much so that even when outside temperatures hit -10 degrees, Knapp has to cool the unit to lower the inside temperature down to 32 degrees. “This last winter, there was one time when it was -25 out, and my cooling fans were turning on.”

While Knapp is proud of his innovations, he still relies on more established farmers in the area for best practices in storing and selling produce at a commercial scale through a Fairbanks winter. “Half of it is hard research. The other half is talking to other farmers.” Building cold storage also comes with up-front investment and risk. “It seems very risky at the start, (to put) all this money down to get into it in the first place.”

To learn how others got over this risk and technical difficulty, Knapp interviewed cold-storage innovators from Winnipeg to North Carolina in Beyond the Root Cellar. It also shares practical know-how, ultimately showing that cold storage is within reach for all farmers. For example, readers learn that many farmers can take advantage of their existing summer storage facilities.

“Many people are primed to do this already,” he says. “You can start storing 3,000 to 5,000 pounds of produce by investing a couple thousand bucks just converting some space you already have.”

Never one to get ahead of himself, Knapp also points out that, in every interview, he heard the same touchstone: “Start small.” Knapps book, Beyond the Root Cellar, will be released November 14.

The post Meet the Modern Farmer Cracking Cold Storage in the Coldest Places appeared first on Modern Farmer.

They are tulip snails, a mollusk found in the sandy bottoms of shallow pools along the south eastern coast of the US. And while they may not be the typical fare you expect at a swanky seafood restaurant in the US, at Seabird, they sit proudly alongside menu classics such as crab, yellowfin tuna and oysters. 

Seabird, in Wilmington, NC, is a sustainable seafood place that utilizes foraging to get many of its ingredients—and to act as an opportunity for education. Rather than rely only on farmed fish or wild caught fish that is shipped from ports across the world, Neff tries to work with local food, which can create a bit of uncertainty in the menu. Ordering 50 pounds of swordfish from a distributor is a fairly straightforward process. But with local fishing and foraging, you’re working with a wild population, and you’re not guaranteed to find what you set out for. You’re also limited by the seasonality of the food. 

 “I think everybody knows that tomatoes or okra or cabbages are seasonal,” says chef and owner Dean Neff. “But I don’t know that everyone knows the seasonality of oysters or speckled sea trout. Being able to have conversations about that and about sustainability with seafood was important to us.” 

Neff opened the restaurant in 2021 with his partner, and he started working with foragers to access local ingredients at sustainable levels. That’s when he met Ana Shellem of Shell’em Seafood, a coastal forager and sustainable fisher who works along the coastline of Masonboro Island. Shellem began foraging five years ago, after many years of harvesting wild shellfish. As a conservationist, Shellem is careful when and where she harvests, only bringing in what is in season and in small quantities. “When you eat wild and in season…I only eat oysters in season, even though with farmed oysters, you can eat them year round. But I think everything is at its finest when it’s in season. Eating a tomato in the winter is not as exciting as eating a tomato in the summer and appreciating the flavor profiles.”

Most shellfish seasons have to do with their cycle of breeding and molting, normally coinciding with water temperature. For instance, stone crabs along the east coast are out of season in the summer months, when the crabs will molt, shedding their shells and pumping the warm sea water in and out of their bodies to create new exoskeletons. It’s when the crabs have shed their shells that they can mate, creating nests for their egg sacs. That mating and molting will be done by October, and the season will pick up again then. It’s similar for lobsters. Over the summer, lobsters will migrate into warmer, shallower water to feed and molt, which makes them easier to catch. However, a lobster without its hard shell is trickier to transport, so the peak of lobster season is often earlier in the springtime or in December, before the waters get too cold. 

Each organism in the ocean, just like on land, has a season of rest, regrowth, or stasis, followed by a season of abundance. As consumers, we’re often used to eating strawberries in January or oysters in June. But to truly be aligned with seasonality, Shellem and Neff say, is to widen your palate and embrace other options. 

“It’s amazing to work with James Beard chefs that are educated and able to experiment with obscure things, like the tulip snails that Dean’s been working with, or North Carolina whelks. The seaweeds I get to bring him are really fun, like the sea bean or prickly pear cactus,” says Shellem. “I’ll even drop off samples so they can make a staff meal, just to educate their staff as well. It is so much fun to see so many people so passionate about the same thing with the same goal.”

But here’s where it gets tricky. Eating seasonally or prioritizing local foods is not just about trying new things. It’s also about learning what the limitations are and sometimes, living with disappointment. Foragers on land, for instance, will only take a certain number of mushrooms in a patch, to ensure sufficient regrowth. For Shellem, the same principle applies to seafood. She gathers what she needs for her restaurants and leaves the rest to flourish. That can make for an uncomfortable conversation at the dinner table. “When we were first opening, we explained to the servers that we’re going to run out of a particular fish tonight, and for some people that gives them anxiety,” says Neff. “But I think that should make you happy. Because that’s the nature of a sustainable restaurant; supplies are limited. We will be constantly changing.” For Neff, leaning into that change, and getting his customers used to it, is key. 

For Shellem, the lesson is more blunt but arguably more widely applicable. “I think if people could be more comfortable with being told ‘no’ sometimes, that would be awesome.” 

As for the tulip snails, Neff says they’ve been popular, and they’ve even had customers come in specifically looking for the snails. “We had people come all the way from France, not too long ago, and they said their main agenda was to eat at the restaurant,” which Neff concedes is a lot of pressure on one dinner order. However, it also means his message is spreading. “It meant so much to them to try [an ingredient] so unique that they’ve never had before.” 

The post Meet the Modern Chef and Forager Duo Bringing Snails to the Menu appeared first on Modern Farmer.

In a span of less than 10 minutes, no fewer than five people open the doors of the bright yellow community fridge and pantry just outside the Medlock Park neighborhood in Decatur, Georgia. Most come here searching for fresh food and produce, or personal products such as toothpaste or diapers, donated by the community.

“I come here about three times a week,” says Anne. She depends on the food, especially fresh produce, to supplement her diet. “If it wasn’t for this fridge, I definitely wouldn’t get to eat as healthy as I do,” she says. “It’s amazing what people donate.” 

The community fridge, known as ATLFreeFridge, stands in front of North Decatur Presbyterian Church. The goal is to provide free food and help reduce food waste. It’s open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and anybody can take or donate food.

The ATLFreeFridge was one of six installed in 2020 as part of the volunteer initiative Free99Fridge started by former Atlantan and activist Latisha Springer. Her goal was to maintain community fridges and pantries across metro Atlanta to help combat food insecurity and waste. (Springer ran the program until she left Atlanta to pursue other opportunities.) Initially, all of the fridges were a success.

But unlike the fridge at the church, the others depended on local businesses such as coffee shops and breweries for their spaces and electricity. When Springer left the program, the fridge sponsors had to choose whether to keep their fridges or close them down. Only North Decatur Presbyterian Church chose to keep its fridge, renaming it ATLFreeFridge.

Today, volunteers install, clean and monitor the ATLFreeFridge. They donate the food, hygiene products and dry goods, and make sure no food is expired or goes bad. Most of the fresh food comes from the neighboring community, although a team of volunteers coordinate food pickups from local restaurants, farms, and grocery stores that also provide tons of fresh food.

“It was a new idea here when I first heard about it,” says Monique. “It was unusual because it was a mutual aid project instead of a non-profit. It was so smart and done with respect. There were no questions asked whether you were donating or coming for food.”

But neighbors in Medlock Park had a lot of questions early on. They expressed their concerns to the church and volunteer coordinators about things such as sanitation, people lingering at the fridge, and homeless encampments that began popping up. Most reservations, though, were about safety around the neighborhood. Those were exacerbated in 2022 after a man who appeared to be having a mental health crisis threw the contents of the fridge into the street, some at passing cars. 

That’s why, Nancy Gathany, a church member on the ATLFreeFridge executive committee, says the church doubled down to keep the fridge rather than close it. “I’m sure it was stressful for the other commercial businesses [hosting fridges] because they become magnets for unhoused people,” she says. “But it’s hard to ignore the needs of so many people coming to our fridge. It hits you in the face.” 

Co-pastor Rev. David Lewicki held a meeting in October 2022 to address community fears. They’ve since established rules for fridge shoppers, including new boundaries on the campus grounds, although there’s rarely a time without someone loitering around the fridge. The church also now enforces no overnight sleeping, but it still happens off church grounds on occasion. 

North Decatur Presbyterian now provides local resource information, including temporary housing, legal assistance, employment services, and child and pet care, to users and has designated parking spaces to address concerns about traffic.

Perhaps the biggest change is the church now has a dedicated case manager for anyone who needs assistance. He’s available once a week and sees about four clients on average, helping them get health care, housing, and employment. 

“The congregation is very supportive of the case manager,” says Gathany. “We are really trying to get the shoppers past their struggles.” Between August 2023 and March 2024, he had nearly 100 client meetings, Gathany says, and assisted several families get off the streets.

Of course, not all the shoppers at the fridge are homeless. Gathany says the fridge feeds more families who come in cars, but they have so many singles who come on foot, and are down on their luck. The 2020 poverty rate in Dekalb County for children aged 5-17 was 26.6 percent, much higher than the state average of 18.8 percent. That number improved to 18.6 percent in 2022 (the latest numbers available), but it’s still higher than the state average of 16.3 percent. And with poverty comes food insecurity, whether it’s because of lack of money, long waits for SNAP benefits, or a lack of transportation.

And, according to Feeding America, the number of food-insecure children in Dekalb County where the fridge is located hovered around 21 percent in 2022 (the latest numbers available), much higher than the county’s overall rate of 11.2 percent.

“What many don’t realize is that some of these people are coming from the neighborhood,” says Monique. “Sometimes, people are ashamed that they don’t have enough money for food. The fridge is one great place they can go for it.”

Still, some neighbors who support the fridge are still hesitant to do so. “Those who are gathering there are a deterrent to my donating,” says local Kern Thompson. “I can only assume that I’m not the only person who’s cut back donating because of their presence.” The fridge has become a hangout, of sorts, which can be both a good and bad thing when it comes to prospective donations. 

Medlock resident Monica Morgan says that’s one reason she consistently donates. “Every time I’ve been there, there’s such a need,” she explains. “There are people waiting—families—who are just down on their luck. But I’ve never felt uncomfortable dropping off food. All the people seem very grateful.”

Today, nearly four years to the day the fridge was first installed, there is still support for the ATLFreeFridge. 

But it’s not without controversy. During the writing of this piece, on July 9, the fridge was vandalized again. An unknown person cut the electrical wire, destroying the fridge and taking it out of commission for nearly a week until volunteers could find a new one. Gathany says she has no idea who did it or why, but that doesn’t change the demonstrated need.

“The fact that we even need this fridge shows us where our society is failing,” says Gathany. “Everybody is having a hard time, not just the homeless. There’s never going to be anything that 100 percent of the community supports. But the church is doing this because it’s the church’s business.” 

The post This Community Fridge is the Only One Left in Atlanta—and the Need is Growing appeared first on Modern Farmer.

That’s 17 million households experiencing food insecurity in a country that throws out more food than any other country in the world—120 billion pounds every year, equivalent to almost 40 percent of the entire US food supply. That’s 325 pounds of wasted food per person.

In other words, no one in the US should be going hungry. There is plenty of food to go around. It’s just a matter of getting it to hungry people before it gets to the dump to rot and, in the process, produces large quantities of methane that contributes an estimated eight percent to global carbon emissions. 

While we all wait (not holding our breath) for the government to creak into action, a network of community activists has emerged in small towns and huge cities alike to help get food to the people who most need it. Every community has different needs, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution, which makes this highly individualized approach more effective than many of the larger-scale, generic, government-sponsored options out there. 

Seacoast Fridge partners with local farms and food trucks

“A colleague told me about the growth of community fridges that offer free food to anyone who needs it, no questions asked,” says Whitney Blethen, recalling the early months of the pandemic, when it was becoming increasingly clear that people were getting hungrier and resources were getting leaner. “I work in a nonprofit that combats childhood hunger, and I’m married to a chef, so it felt like a natural outgrowth.”

Together with Katie Guay and Dave Vargas, Blethen founded the Seacoast Fridge in Kittery, Maine in 2021. 

“We discovered that the Good Samaritan Food Donation Act protects people operating free fridges, which made us feel like there was no risk and only benefits,” says Blethen. 

They reached out to the local rotary club so that they could “piggyback” on their general liability insurance, which covered a wide range of potential injuries or accidents that could occur when picking up or delivering food. Eventually, they partnered with Red’s Good Vibes, a free mobile food truck and nonprofit based in Portsmouth, N.H., which aligns with their mission and has expanded their reach.

“That has been a game changer,” says Blethen. “They already had a network of farms, and because we all have backgrounds in food safety and liability, we began labeling foods early on with ingredients and use-by dates to prevent any issues.” 

In the beginning, their one fridge would be emptied in about 72 hours. Now, they have plans for 24 fridges this year, with turnovers currently at up to four times per day per fridge. Their mission has grown along with the size of their operation, and it now includes 150 volunteers. They’ve also started food rescue programs with farms and restaurants, where “some farms allow CSA members to add $5 to their order. They use that to fund additional drop-offs for us.”

In addition to the fresh food, Seacoast offers seasonally appropriate pantry items, from sunblock and tick spray to socks and gloves. 

“We also work with our local Land Trust, and they have kids tending gardens,” says Blethen. “All of the food then gets donated to fridges or pantries. It’s great for everyone, including the kids.”

To learn more, donate or find a free fridge in Maine or New Hampshire, follow Seacoast on Instagram at @seacoastfridge. 

Sweet Tooth Community Fridge takes advantage of tax credits to pay farmers

“In Iowa, our legislature is hostile to poor people,” says Monika Owczarski. “With the city doing nothing substantial to fight poverty and our own situation, we knew we had to do something.”

Starting in 2016, Owczarski operated a pop-up food stand near her urban farm, Sweet Tooth Farm, in Des Moines. As soon as she could get authorized, she began accepting food stamps. During the pandemic, Owczarski saw a noticeable increase in need and a decrease in formal support. Then, in 2021, the city changed the rules about farming and Owczarski went from having more than an acre in production to having about three city blocks.

“We were left with one-tenth of the space, which meant we couldn’t produce enough for our restaurant clients and our weekly CSA,” says Owczarski. “Then, a soup kitchen near us got shut down.” That was the last straw for Owczarski. 

She reached out to other nonprofits, farmers and food organizations and began giving out free food to anyone who wanted it, no questions asked, with one fridge. It was the first fridge in the state. And it actually helps Owczarski pay the bills after her CSA and farming model got turned upside down.

“The [Farm to Food Donation Tax Credit] program pays farmers for the food they donate,” she explains, adding that they also get donations from restaurants, caterers and others with an excess of food that might otherwise get tossed in the landfill.

Now, the network has 16 fridges, but it is totally decentralized.

“In the last 30 days alone, we have rescued 200,000 pounds of food that would have otherwise been thrown out,” says Owczarski. “Every neighborhood’s needs are different, with some needing no pork for religious reasons and others needing more of one thing or another just because of the community they’re serving.”

The biggest challenge, says Owczarski, has been the climate. 

“We had to figure out a way to prevent the fridges from shorting out on days that are -40 degrees,” says Owczarski. “We insulate the fridges, build shelters and even have safe fireproof infrared heaters that turn on when the temperature gets below a certain threshold.”

To learn more, donate and find fridges around Des Moines, follow @sweetthoothfarmdscm on Instagram. 

Free Food Fridge looks to the nonprofit world 

Jammella Anderson founded Free Food Fridge Albany during the pandemic.

“Access to fresh foods and produce has been an issue for years in Albany and beyond because of structural racism and redlining,” says Anderson. “The pandemic made that worse for everyone, and people who were managing to get by before but were residing on an income cliff suddenly found themselves without options during the pandemic.”

If someone makes just $10 above the cutoff for receiving SNAP or other income-based benefits, they are out of luck, they explain. That means “a lot of people going hungry,” says Anderson. 

Seeing what was happening in Albany, the part-time doula and yoga instructor went into action, putting out a call to followers on Instagram and snagging a free fridge from Lowe’s and a location for their first fridge on Elm Street in Albany in the process. 

Free Food Fridge has grown considerably since 2020, and by the end of the summer, there will be 21 fridges around Albany. Donations roll in from individuals and farmers. Some contributions are regular, others are one-time only, some are in the form of food and others are in the form of money. 

“Our next phase is officially becoming a nonprofit because we are volunteer run and creating a mobile grocery that can shuttle around Albany, travel to all of our fridge locations and serve as a pop-up at farmers markets and food justice organizations,” says Anderson. 

They are also trying to change the way we discuss food access. 

“You can’t say that a hungry person looks like this or underserved communities look like that,” says Anderson. “We need to change that dialogue because, just like there isn’t one solution to hunger, there isn’t one type of hungry person or underserved community.”

To learn more, donate and find fridges in Albany, follow Free Food Fridge Albany on Instagram. 

RVA Community Fridge for Kids gathers on social media 

“I grew up with community fridges in New Orleans, but that wasn’t really done here,” says RVA Community Fridges founder Taylor Scott. “And I saw SNAP Benefits getting cut in Richmond, and all of these historically redlined areas without access to a grocery store or other resources, and I knew I had to do something.”

The project started small, as a literal overgrowth of tomatoes threatened to take over her apartment during the pandemic. She looked for a community fridge to which to donate her bounty, in the hopes that her fresh-grown produce could help provide fresh produce to underserved areas. 

But Scott couldn’t find any community fridges. She reached out to a neighborhood bakery in Church Hill and it agreed to host a fridge. It went up in January 2021. “As soon as we filled it, it would empty out,” says Scott. “Now, we have 14 fridges, and the entire community is involved. We have more than 300 volunteers helping us buy food and operate, not counting people who just drop stuff off at fridges.”

Scott communicates with the volunteers, farms, caterers and chefs who donate food that might otherwise go to the landfill through the communication platform Discord and the social media groups she has set up. Their fridges and the pantries with household goods attached sometimes empty out in as little as 30 minutes. 

“I love seeing how these fridges are bringing our community together,” says Scott. “Some neighborhoods are in absolute food deserts, and raising awareness among people in Richmond who wouldn’t otherwise realize what has been going on in these neighborhoods, while feeding people and fighting food waste, has been incredible.”

Scott says the group is in the process of applying to be an official nonprofit. To learn more, donate and find a fridge, follow RVA Community Fridges on Instagram. 

The post On the Ground With the Volunteers Running Community Fridges appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Photography by Emma Kazaryan.

In February 2020, Thadeaus Umpster opened his first community fridge—right in front of the building where he lives in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn. Since then, he’s helped many others find fridges and organize donations. He calls it an an anarchist network of community fridges and mutual aid. These fridges address twin problems—hunger and waste—but Thadeaus says they are more than that. They are a place where neighbors get to know each other and community bonds are formed.

The day starts like many—with an almost empty fridge.

Fridge volunteers meet in the Brooklyn Navy yards for a large pick up from the mutual aid organization One Community. Part of the donation is made up of lychees. Lots and lots of lychees.

On the loading dock, volunteers sort and load everything that will fit in their trusty red truck.

After a short drive to the fridge in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bed Stuy, Andrea and her red truck take a break. New volunteers arrive and the unloading begins.

Neighbors stop to help unload and do a bit of shopping.

Fitting everything inside is a special challenge but a fully stocked fridge is a thing of beauty that supports and is supported by this community.

The fridge is stocked. Volunteers have gone home. Thadaeus coordinates the next donation.

Each day, across the country, volunteers like Thadeaus help build community and feed their neighbors through dedicated attention to community fridges. To find out how you can do the same, visit Community Fridges 101.

The post A Day in the Life of a Community Fridge appeared first on Modern Farmer.

The selection has not only introduced Martinez to new ingredients, such as eggplant, but she’s learned to cook with them thanks to her children, who receive free classes through their school. “They make broccoli soup. They like cauliflower,” she says. “You don’t think of kids liking Brussels sprouts and these kids love them now.”

The pantry is just one location in Second Harvest Food Bank of Orange County’s network of nearly 300 distribution sites; the 41-year-old organization serves an average of 430,000 people per month who are experiencing food insecurity.

About three years ago, the southern California food bank added something novel to its system: a 40-acre farm. 

At Harvest Solutions Farm in Irvine, fresh produce is grown specifically to be distributed to Second Harvest’s partners such as the school pantry. Since its inception in August 2021, the property has produced more than five million pounds of nutritious food for the surrounding community.

“There is a symbolism in the fact that we are growing [locally] , that we are growing food right here that is going from farm to food bank to table in 48 to 72 hours,” says Second Harvest CEO Claudia Bonilla Keller. “Those that need the most help are getting some of the best food that we could ever hope to procure.”

Most food banks operate by gathering unwanted and donated food and distributing them to food pantries and other programs so the people who need the sustenance are able to access it. But those donations can be tenuous. Recently, inflation and supply chain issues have made it even more difficult to maintain operations—particularly at a level that addresses the rising need. 

Seventeen million US households experienced food insecurity at some point in 2022, according to the US Department of Agriculture, a number that grew as a result of the pandemic. 

Harvest Solutions Farm, which operates on University of California South Coast Research and Extension Center (REC) land, grows various crops throughout the year—from cabbage and broccoli to zucchini and watermelon—that is then harvested and driven two miles to the food bank’s warehouse, allowing the organization to quickly distribute the perishable goods throughout the county. 

It’s a symbiotic relationship. Second Harvest gains access to free land (the organization pays for water use and some equipment), and the soil health of UC’s otherwise unused plots is supported. Because the farm relies primarily on volunteers—an average of 170 per week—there’s also an educational component: The community has the chance to connect with farming and food in a way that shopping at a grocery store can’t offer. “People are losing touch with agriculture,” says Darren Haver, director of the REC system and interim director of South Coast REC. “This partnership allows a lot of volunteers that would have never set foot in an agricultural field to actually experience it and learn about it and have a greater understanding of that.” 

Volunteers, in turn, help make the project economically feasible. “The most innovative thing about it is the produce is affordable to a food bank, to us, because the labor is done by volunteers and that allows us to take [the food] in at prices that are competitive with the state co-op, (under 30 cents per pound on average, on par with the California Association of Food Banks),” says Keller. “It’s a relatively small part of our supply chain in all honesty, but it is one that we 100 percent control.”

The farm also reinforces Second Harvest’s mission to provide dignified access to food and nutritional security, which is not only making sure people like Martinez and her family have consistent access to food but ensuring that the fare is truly healthy. “It’s something that is not only going to feed your family but nourish your family,” says Keller.

Although Harvest Solutions isn’t the first of its kind (other farm-to-food-bank programs exist across the country, including at Seeds of Hope in Los Angeles, South Plains Food Bank in Texas and Golden Harvest Food Bank in Georgia), the scale of the farm is unique. And it’s something those involved think can be replicated elsewhere, particularly with strong partnerships in place.

“The model that we’ve had around the country and almost around the world is that our expired, rejected, quality-impacted foods are made available to food banks at discounted prices or for free and we pat ourselves on the back thinking that we’re addressing waste,” says A.G. Kawamura, the former secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture and chairman of the nonprofit Solutions for Urban Agriculture. Kawamura, a farmer himself, started other, smaller versions of Harvest Solutions and was integral in getting the project up and running. Within a season, he says, efforts like this one can “really attack the problem of hunger head-on and make such a big dent in it immediately.”

This matters to community members such as Martinez, who was homeless with her five kids for about two years. Some of the food banks she visited would give her canned food, for which she didn’t have the ability to open, eat or cook. She would return to the places that had fresh produce.

The family has been settled in an apartment for two years, and the school-based pantry has been incredibly beneficial to her, both for the convenience (it’s accessible year-round) and the quality and variety of the produce. Her kids sometimes walk straight to the kitchen to show her their latest cooking skills. The weekly box also allows her to stretch her budget to other necessities, such as proteins beyond chicken, which is what her budget limited her to before. “This program,” she says, “has helped me tremendously in a lot of ways.”

The post Spotlight On the Community Fridge and Pantry Growing Its Own Produce appeared first on Modern Farmer.

So, you want to get involved in a community fridge, but you’re not sure where to start. You’ve come to the right place.

Finding a fridge

You can search for a fridge in your neighborhood with databases like this one from Freedge. You might have luck finding one near you or a fridge to visit on your next vacation. You can also search for community fridges in your area on platforms such as Instagram, where many groups stay active. And some groups, like in New York, also share maps of their specific city. 

Once you’ve found a fridge at which you’d like to volunteer, the best thing to do, organizers say, is just to show up. “Get to meet the other people who volunteer or the people who use it, and have conversations with them about what they need and what they’re looking for,” says Victoria Jayne, with South Philadelphia Community Fridge. 

Think about what you’re able to offer. Do you have a car? You could help with deliveries of food. Maybe you don’t drive, but you have a spare hour or two every week. One of the most consistently needed jobs is cleaning and maintenance of the fridge. Bring a sponge and paper towels and help out with a few minutes of scrubbing. 

If you don’t have time for regular volunteering, you can still help with the most important part of the community fridge—the food. If you’re doing your grocery shopping, pick up a few extra items to fill the shelves. Do you frequently have work meetings where there are tons of leftovers? Bring them to the fridge. The film and TV industries are notorious for having extra food every day, for instance. Can you connect the organizers to a restaurant or grocery store interested in donating food on a regular basis?

What should you bring?

There are a few things to keep in mind when stocking a free fridge. First, label things, even if it’s just some masking tape or a sharpie. “You’re doing a great thing,” says Julie Haire with Los Angeles Community Fridges. “We love the sentiment, but you also should realize [the food] will be thrown out if it’s not labeled.” Even if you know what that food item is by looking, not everyone will, and they also won’t know when it was made or when it expires. It’s also important to think about how people might be able to eat the food. If it’s in a can or needs to be heated up, that might be OK for some of your neighbors. But unhoused folks are unlikely to have access to cooking utensils. For that reason, Haire says that “grab and go” foods are the best options.

Also, fridges are not your dumping ground for inedible food or ingredients past their prime. A good rule of thumb is to put yourself in the shoes of someone going to the fridge. Would you choose that item? If the answer is no, it’s better saved for the compost bin. 

Starting a fridge

But what if there isn’t a community fridge in your area? You’re in luck. You get to be the person who starts one. 

First, check out if there are fridges in other cities in your state or province. They may be able to help you start a chapter in your city, and you can become a member of their team. Many mutual aid groups are happy to bring on more folks who align with their mission and can help spread the word even further. 

You might even be able to become part of an established group such as Freedge through its fiscal sponsorship. If you want to be a nonprofit to be protected under legislation such as the Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, but the process is onerous for a group your size, you could see if a sponsorship would help. “You find an existing nonprofit that says ‘OK, you’re a part of my nonprofit now,’ and all you have to do is report every year with financial statements,” says Ernst Bertone Oehninger, founder of Freedge. As Oehninger found out, a sponsorship is often a great way for smaller groups to get started while still working together under the same umbrella organization. 

Then, go over the resources. Many established fridge groups have FAQs available online to help you get started. Freedge even shares legal guidelines, to help you figure out everything you need to know when it comes to health and safety, as well as your responsibility when it comes to hosting. 

Choose a location

You will need a fridge, a way to plug it in and a host. For some, this is in front of the apartment building; for others, a community center. Oehninger says location is key. “If you are in a place that is more downtown or has a good supply of food services around, then your work as a volunteer is easier [when it comes to stocking the fridge], but it’s more difficult to clean, because of the high turnover,” he says. Ultimately, though, your fridge needs to be accessible. Think about where it might be best seen from all angles and by people both walking or driving by. 

Organizers tell us they frequently find free refrigerators on Craigslist or Facebook, but they especially like models with a glass door for people to easily see what’s inside.

Curb Appeal

Dress it up. A plain fridge is a sad fridge. Think about the curb appeal of your fridge. You’re likely to get more attention and more community engagement with a fridge that looks appealing. For some groups, such as Los Angeles Community Fridges, that means decorating each fridge in a different design and ensuring fridges can hold community bulletins and notices.

Next, it’s important to think about how the fridge might be exposed to the elements and what that might look like. You can find instructions from many groups on how to build a fridge shelter, which is a relatively simple process but can help protect your fridge in the long run. 

Build a team

Think of the fridge as a community resource that isn’t just about combating waste and hunger, but is a place that can bring a neighborhood together. Ask people to join you. There are many ways volunteers can help: pick and deliveries, stocking, cleaning, coordination, finding new donation partners, social media

Fill it up

Lastly, but most importantly, it’s time to stock the fridge. Donations from individuals are always appreciated, but the best way to keep the fridge regularly stocked is to form agreements with businesses that would otherwise throw away their food. In New York City, there’s a partnership with local Panera Bread locations, which nets the fridges a regular supply of pastries and baked goods. Other groups we spoke with talked about setting up agreements with local or chain grocery stores or restaurants. 

If you’re looking for advice on how to approach a business about a partnership, the team at Los Angeles Community Fridges has sample scripts you can use.

But, ultimately, no matter what you are able to do for a fridge, Jayne says getting involved at any level is a help. “It’s really important to have that volunteer base, where you have a group of people who are really committed, because it is work to keep one running and it does require a community.” 

The post Community Fridges 101 appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Preventing waste is one of the main motivations that drives Umpster and has been for the almost 30 years he’s been organizing in his Brooklyn neighborhoods, but it’s not his only one. 

Umpster knows what it’s like to be hungry. As a teenager, he began volunteering with Food Not Bombs, a mutual-aid group dedicated to feeding folks in his community. But when his shift was over, he would “load up my bag with food, instant oatmeal and stuff like that, to get me through the weekend before I went back to school.” 

But it wasn’t until 2020 that Umpster opened his first community fridge- right in front of the building where he lives. In Bed Stuy, Umpster’s neighborhood in Brooklyn, food insecurity and access was already a problem when the pandemic hit. By February, Umpster could see more of his neighbors struggling to feed themselves and their families.

At first, he mostly promoted the fridge and its offerings in the free section of Craigslist. “I’d be like, ‘we got a bunch of free bagels today, a bunch of salad greens…come by the fridge, take what you want, leave what you want,” says Umpster. The fridge began gaining traction in his neighborhood, and he began promoting it on other social platforms such as Instagram. Then, one of his posts was reshared by a popular local radio station, and it took off. 

Umpster got a call from a friend in neighboring Crown Heights and Flatbush and then the Bronx who wanted to start a fridge, so he helped find a few on Craigslist and fill them with food. “Before long, people were setting up fridges without even getting in touch with me, which is awesome. People just started moving.” The mutual-aid network In Our Hearts NYC  helped organize groups and fridges where each neighborhood runs independently but they are all in contact with each other. Umpster describes the group as collectively or “anarchistically” organized, meaning there’s no hierarchy. 

For many, the community fridge serves multiple purposes. It’s a tangible way to help your neighborhood, as food prices continue to rise, and it helps reduce food waste. But it’s also a meeting place and community space, a way to start a conversation with your neighbors. “I have these really tight connections and bonds with people who live on my specific block. And there are a lot of people who I used to just kind of nod to when I went down the street and maybe wave and smile, maybe say hello. And now we know each other intimately. We spend holidays together, we work together on projects, and it’s pretty incredible. The neighborhood comes to the fridge a lot,” says Umpster.

Where it all started

Community fridges have been around for a while. They go by different names, such as “free fridge” or “community pantry,” but the aims are pretty simple. First, they help to alleviate food waste, and second, they directly address food insecurity. 

The rates of food insecurity shot up during the pandemic, with two peaks. The first was at the start of the pandemic, as people lost jobs and so much was up in the air. And the second peak happened once COVID supports ran out. In 2022, 17 million households in the US reported trouble finding food, which is additionally frustrating considering the amount of food that ends up in landfills. 

The amount of food waste in North America is staggering. In the US, close to 40 percent of food is wasted, with 92 billion pounds of food thrown away each year. Canadians create 50 million tonnes of food waste every year, but there are estimates that more than half of that waste could be prevented.

That’s where community fridges come in. 

The food comes to fridges in one of three main ways. Ideally, organizers have consistent larger donations from grocery stores and other retailers. If a grocer has a load of apples, juice boxes or lettuce and they know it will pass the sell-by date, they will often partner with a community fridge. Volunteers will pick up the load of food and stock the fridges as food becomes available. Then there are individual donations. These can be leftovers from your dinner or a loaf of bread you grabbed at the grocery store that you don’t need. For many fridges, neighbors can pick up what they need and drop off what they have to give. Lastly, there are the restaurant donations. Just like retail stores, some restaurants partner with community fridges to pick up unsold meals and redistribute them. 

Independent fridges exist everywhere, with more than 600 recorded across the UK. In Canada, there are fridges in nearly every province; likewise in every state across the US. There are fridges in Singapore, Australia, Sweden and myriad other countries. Eighteen states across the US, including North Carolina, Colorado and Iowa, have even introduced legal protections for community members who run the fridges. Those protections are helpful, as most of the fridges are run by volunteers—this is a solution led by community members for community members, so volunteers often live in the neighborhood. They help clean the fridge, stock it and do regular checks to make sure everything is working properly.

Unsurprisingly, some of the biggest cities in the US have the most active networks of community fridges. In New York City, there are fridges across all five boroughs. One of the best tools they have is social media. The volunteers have text threads, a Signal chat, and they post often on Instagram, TikTok and other platforms. In their chat, they are often coordinating pickups of food from restaurants or retail stores and deliveries to various fridges around the city. 

The blueprint

There’s no one way to run a community fridge. But if you’re looking for a blueprint, start with Davis, California. 

About a decade ago, when Ernst Oehninger was a grad student at the University of California, Davis, he put a fridge in his yard. It was a shared house; he lived there with other UC Davis students, and they had an extra fridge. Why not put it outside, where it was accessible, and share food with their neighbors, some of whom were other students?

That fridge lasted for a few months, and it was refilled by Oehninger, his housemates and, occasionally, some neighbors. He was feeding people in his neighborhood, and his community was coming together. But, things got serious after a few months. Some neighbors complained; they had some worries that having a free fridge would encourage unhoused people to frequent the neighborhood, and that it would in turn be a safety concern. That didn’t happen, says Oehninger, but there was some pushback. 

“We started having food safety inspectors called, since we didn’t have any food safety licenses. So, the fridge was shut down,” he says. What was frustrating, he recalls, is that what was considered appropriate by one health inspector might be condemned by another; there were no guidelines for community fridges at the time. But, by that point, he was invested in the project. Oehninger spent a year, with his housemates and friends, researching and negotiating with the health department, trying to find a way to have a free fridge on their property. 

And not just their property. Once they worked with the health department to produce guidelines, they started expanding into other neighborhoods, installing fridges at homes, outside of willing businesses or churches with food banks. By 2017, Oehninger’s project had grown large enough that he incorporated, which would allow him to get better insurance and be protected by laws such as the Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, which protects people who donate food from legal liability if someone gets ill. 

Just like that, Freedge was born. 

Oehninger and his team (he had enough community members come together at this point to have a team) started tracking other community fridges in the region. They found examples in the Bay Area and Los Angeles. Word started to spread, and people in other states began reaching out and asking for advice on how to start their own fridges. “There was one in Colorado we helped set up. There was another one in Texas, and there was one in DC. We put that one in touch with [a group] in Florida,” he says. They had started with about 20 fridges in their region before the pandemic. By 2021, they had a network of more than 400 fridges nationwide. 

Now, Freedge, an official nonprofit organization, acts as an unofficial overseer. It has a section on its website offering tips and guides to folks who want to start their own fridge, including food safety protocols and how to deal with health inspectors. There’s a group Slack channel for fridge coordinators across the country to chat with each other. Freedge still maps and tracks free fridges across the country and even gives out micro-grants to other groups that want to join its umbrella network to start a community fridge. 

The community is growing

During the pandemic, four new fridges popped up in Los Angeles. That’s now grown into Los Angeles Community Fridges (LACF), with more than a dozen locations. 

Julie Haire started volunteering with LACF in 2021, when the pandemic highlighted food insecurity around the country. Haire had always been focused on food waste, often dropping excess food off at local church pantries. But when she connected with LACF and saw how wide community fridges could spread, she was hooked. One of the most inspiring things, says Haire, is how LACF “deputizes the community” to help maintain each fridge. If a volunteer checks the Los Feliz fridge and finds that, for instance, someone threw mashed potatoes all over it, “we could put it up on Instagram and ask ‘can someone help us clean this?’ and luckily, someone from the community will go do it,” says Haire. “We put out the call, and the volunteers go in.” 

Film sets are a particularly fruitful source for fridges in Los Angeles and NYC. Craft services and catering from the film and television industries make a lot of food, and typically, a lot gets wasted. Haire and other fridge volunteers in LA try to connect with as many sets as possible to pick up that extra food—some of it straight from a fresh take. “I went to a filming, I think it was The L Word. And they were doing a grocery scene, and they had all of this really nice produce [in the background]. They had huge things of flour and Crisco and spices, all of this stuff that they would not know what to do with ]after filming].” Naturally, Haire was happy to take it off of producers’ hands when filming wrapped up.

South Philly Community Fridge (SPCF) in Philadelphia, started up in August of 2020 and has grown to include fridges at six locations, with a roster of about 75 volunteers. They’ve found a unique way to raise awareness of their fridges–merchandise, including mugs, sweatshirts and tote bags. All of the designs were conceived by local artists, and they are playful and eye-catching. “I was at a museum with my husband and he was wearing one of our shirts, and someone stopped us and said ‘we’re from New Jersey, and we want to start a community fridge. So we exchanged emails,” says SPCF’s Victoria Jayne. “We want to have fun with the merch. It’s fun to show up.” 

It’s also easy to grab attention from the community when the fridges are colorful and cute. Like many organizations, the LACF encourages community members to decorate and paint their fridges with eye-catching designs, posters, signs—anything to make them stand out and get people involved. The one in Inglewood has a motif of bananas; the Los Feliz fridge features a dancing hot dog with a top hat. It’s fun and quirky and highlights the fridges as a community project. 

Myth busting

There are some myths about who uses community fridges. The biggest one, says Jayne, is the idea that community fridges are for a specific type of person. 

“Something we really try to stress about mutual aid is that it’s here for everybody and anyone. It doesn’t have to be something that’s means tested,” she says, meaning that there’s no prerequisite for using the fridge. No one is going to check your income level or try to determine how much food you “need.” Jayne says that, in her neighborhood, she’s seen people who work full time and don’t have access to traditional food pantries use the fridge or people without cars who can’t drive to out-of-the-way food banks. “Something that people have asked me or other volunteers in passing is ‘how do you know the person who’s taking food really needs that?’ and I’m like, ‘I haven’t met anyone who didn’t need to eat to live.’”

Another myth that Haire works to bust in Los Angeles is the idea that a fridge will attract unhoused people to the neighborhood in the first place. “We have a fridge in Eagle Rock that is outside of a community center, and neighbors complain all the time because of the homeless problem. And we’re like, is it the fridge? Or is it that it’s 2024 and we’re experiencing unprecedented numbers of people living on the streets right now?” For Haire, those are even stronger reasons to continue the fridges, not a reason to stop. 

The fog has lifted

Although the Philadelphia group started during the beginning of the COVID pandemic, Jayne says the need has only grown since then. In August of 2020, there were job losses and many struggled getting to the grocery store. But, there were also enhanced safety nets for people. “There was additional money for unemployment, additional money for SNAP, and there was the child tax credit,” says Jayne. “As we’ve come out of this period of active pandemic, we’ve seen those benefits taken away from people, and that’s resulted in significantly higher usage.” 

When Ernst Oehninger, from Freedge, thinks about the period just before the pandemic, he likens it to a fog that blanketed our collective consciousness before 2020 and dissipated in the midst of lockdowns and COVID protocols. As a community, many were confronted with the number of systemic issues facing everyone, from police brutality around the murder of George Floyd to lack of health care, climate change, and food insecurity. “People started thinking about how they were relying on the state for this or a corporation for that,” says Oehninger. “And a lot of people started realizing that they could work with their community instead.” While Oehninger says some of these issues are inherent to the US, he did clock an expansion of mutual aid programs globally during that time. 

Oehninger says part of what makes the fridges such an attractive option for users is the dignity it affords people. Sadly, there’s still a stigma attached to using a food bank, and there can be administrative hurdles in the process. “A free fridge doesn’t ask for my documents,” says Oehninger. Rather, it’s just a group of people coming together to help, no questions asked. 

As Jayne puts it, the fridge is an exercise in community. “There’s a Mariame Kaba quote that says ‘everything worthwhile is done with other people.’”

The post From Community, For Community: The Rise of the Free Fridge appeared first on Modern Farmer.

In Montclair’s Third Ward is a tiny farm with big community value.

In the summertime, Montclair Community Farms transforms its less-than-10,000-square-foot lot into a space with something for everyone: a garden education program for children, a job training site for teens, and a pop-up produce market for Essex County residents.

“People really love being here,” said Lana Mustafa, executive director of Montclair Community Farms. “It’s really developed into something really beautiful and productive and community-oriented.”

On a breezy afternoon in early June, bunches of lettuce, bok choy, parsley, and garlic scapes begin to sprout and ripen. Some are even ready to harvest. Mustafa and her team are preparing inventory for their Monday farmers market, where several dozen shoppers use their SNAP or WIC benefits to buy fresh produce.

READ: How to apply for food aid and assistance in New Jersey

But Mustafa said serving Essex County residents isn’t easy when governments don’t consider urban farming as a viable solution to bring affordable, fresh food to food-insecure communities.

To do so, the state must confront its complicated history of farming and pair it with long-term municipal investments – steps that some argue New Jersey has yet to take.

“We need the state of New Jersey to take urban [agriculture] seriously,” said Mustafa.

Again and again, Mustafa says, red tape has hindered her small farm’s ability to serve its community. Because she doesn’t have at least five acres, her application to join the federal Senior Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program – which would have enabled her to accept food vouchers from low-income seniors – was denied four times. It was only after extensive advocacy with other community groups that the U.S. Department of Agriculture approved her application in 2023.

The high cost of a permit (up to $5,000 annually) forced her to end her composting program this spring.

“What happens to this food waste now that we can’t accept it? It has to go back to the landfill,” said Mustafa, whose farm collects more than 8,000 pounds of food waste annually.

Emilio Panasci, co-founder and executive director of the Urban Agriculture Cooperative, said it’s no coincidence that urban farms located in and around Essex County’s seven food deserts get little to no municipal support.

READ: How Essex County falls short on food access (and how you can help)

“Consumer food access mirrors our patterns of segregation in this country, and that is a political as well as economic choice,” said Panasci. “It’s no accident that outside of a few struggling small farms and pop-up markets in the South Ward of Newark, there is very little if any high-quality, fresh food options – and those are available at premium prices – in our neighboring Maplewood or South Orange.”

Segregation in farming

While the practice of growing food can be traced back to Indigenous and Black agricultural practices, it was white farmers in New Jersey who benefitted the most from an agricultural economy built on slavery.

In the 1700s and 1800s, farmers in the “Garden State” relied on enslaved people to herd and slaughter animals, grow crops, maintain their meadowlands, and construct their farms. Even after slavery was abolished in New Jersey in 1866, white farmers created their own form of sharecropping called “cottaging,” where former enslaved Black people would provide labor in exchange for shelter and crops.

In her book Farming While Black, Leah Penniman details what happened next for farmers of color after Jim Crow and the passage of civil rights legislation.

“Urban farmers of color removed rubble, planted trees, installed vegetable beds, and built structures for community gatherings,” wrote Penniman about the rise of Black and Latinx farmers reviving agricultural traditions in the 1960s and 1970s.

Still, the legacy of segregation persists. A 2022 report from Rutgers University showed that urban farms in New Jersey tend to be clustered in areas with higher SNAP participation, where residents are more likely to be Black or Latinx. And in a county where white people make up less than one-third of the population, they own three-quarters of all urban farms in Essex County, according to a 2022 U.S. census of agriculture.

Fallon Davis, chair of the Black & Brown, Indigenous, Immigrant Farmers United (BIFU), said these inequities are “systemic by design.”

“We have to understand the system was never designed for Black and Brown people to live this long. It was never designed for us to thrive, survive, have families, and be these beautiful land beings.”

They explained the lack of support for urban farmers disproportionately targets Black neighborhoods in Essex County and perpetuates segregation.

“New Jersey hasn’t prioritized advocacy for urban farming, which would protect and feed Black folks,” they said.

Farming with no water on borrowed land

Several miles from Montclair Community Farms, Keven Porter’s farm in Newark has faced a slew of setbacks typical for urban farmers. For starters, he still lacks basic farming infrastructure – like running water.

More than a decade after establishing Rabbit Hole Farm, Porter is still trying to get the city of Newark to supply consistent water. For years, he’s had to call in favors from neighbors or ask the fire department to deliver water gallons.

“They’re just ignorant to the fact that we are a benefit,” said Porter, a Black farmer and Newark resident.

Porter and his partner co-founded Rabbit Hole Farm in 2013 through Newark’s Adopt-A-Lot program. Today, Rabbit Hole Farm is a 6,000-square-foot community hub in Newark’s South Ward that provides herbal education, wellness programs, and cooking classes to Newark residents, where more than half of its public school students are eligible for free or reduced lunch programs.

Porter’s farm faces another common challenge: he doesn’t own his farmland. Through Newark’s Adopt-A-Lot program, residents can use the city’s vacant lots but not own them, regardless of how long they’ve been tending to them.

Fallon Davis of BIFU also has a farm in Newark, run by their youth education nonprofit STEAM URBAN. They said Adopt-A-Lot is “a flawed system because [the city] can take it whenever they want.”

Both farmers have been working with the Trust for Public Land to explore how they can acquire their lots in Newark.

“If we figured out how to get people land ownership, if we taught people how to grow their own food, if we taught people how to advocate for themselves, it would single-handedly change our communities and they don’t want that,” Davis said.

Solutions focused on permanency

Panasci of the Urban Agriculture Cooperative said that long-term solutions that allow for food growing and local food markets in an urban environment are key.

“Our zoning is different here. Our density is different. When you combine that with the fact that we lack a cohesive urban agriculture policy at the local level.. it’s very hard for a farmer or farmer’s market to maintain land over time and … build infrastructure on it,” said Panasci.

On Fridays, Panasci and his team prepare farm boxes filled with kale, escarole, mushrooms, honey, and eggs. His organization sources inventory from more than 30 growers across the state before the team distributes the boxes to schools, food pantries, hospitals, and senior centers with limited access to fresh foods.

Panasci emphasized that municipal support is critical for urban farms, which are especially vulnerable to gentrification and displacement from developers.

“Farming is hard in general, but urban farming when there’s not necessarily a real city system for it… it’s almost set up to not work [and] to really undermine you,” said Panasci.

In the past few years, several bills have been introduced aimed at formalizing urban agriculture policies and sustaining the sector.

In January 2024, Assemblywoman Annette Quijano reintroduced a bill to establish an urban farming pilot program for emerging urban farms. Senator Teresa Ruiz and Senator Nellie Pou also reintroduced a bill that would establish an urban farming grant and loan program. Neither bill has made it out of committee for further consideration.

Jeanine Cava, executive director of the NJ Food Democracy Collaborative, points to the Massachusetts Healthy Food Incentive Program (HIP) as a potential model for what’s possible in New Jersey. This state-funded program reimburses SNAP users when they buy food from eligible HIP vendors.

“Right now, we don’t have dedicated state funding specifically for those kinds of incentives that incentivize people to buy locally produced food,” she said about the lack of permanent funding.

Davis of BIFU emphasized that Black and Brown farmers need to be at the center of any urban farming solution. BIFU’s statewide collective of 40 members plans to release their policy resolutions later this summer, which will include recommendations for land ownership and state funding for BIPOC farmers.

“We also need to give [politicians] some of the language of our ask… the community does need to do some work,” they said. “If you want your community to change, you gotta also advocate for your community.”

Learn more

Learn more about Montclair Community Farms and Rabbit Hole Farm’s upcoming programs and events.

You can also get involved with Urban Agriculture Cooperative, Black & Brown, Indigenous, Immigrant Farmers United, and NJ Food Democracy Collaborative via programming and advocacy opportunities.

The post Urban Farms are a Lifeline for Food-Insecure Residents. Will New Jersey Finally Make Them Permanent? appeared first on Modern Farmer.