Central Connecticut River Valley Institute, Inc. - Food Security

Original Proposal for the CCRVI Community Food Project

6 Warren Court
Shelburne Falls, MA 01370

Phone: 413-625-2525
Fax: 413-625-8485

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The Shelburne Falls Food Security Plan, the Perennial Food Project, and the Multifunctional Species Research Project

We humans live as part of the natural world, one member of a community much larger than our species alone.  The natural world feeds and sustains us, and our actions affect all other members of our community: we are all in this together.  Yet, most of us do not experience these realities either practically or existentially with any frequency, if at all.  One of the larger goals of the Central Connecticut River Valley Institute (“CCRVI”), of Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, is to foster the emergence of a culture which encourages and supports us to experience ourselves in these ways, to know ourselves as “native” to the places where we live. 

These positive principles and goals dovetail in our times with concerns about the security and sustainability of our food supply systems.  Large-scale, long term, interconnected challenges such as global climate change, peak oil, rising food and energy prices, the far-flung industrial food system, declining food quality and safety, and the concentration of food production in the hands of a few corporate agribusinesses leave small towns like Shelburne Falls vulnerable.  Thus, developing locally-owned, locally-controlled food systems for ourselves can simultaneously realize CCRVI’s goal to reconnect us to the natural world and each other.  Therefore, CCRVI has initiated its Community Food program.

Community Food initially encompasses three interrelated projects that build upon and support each other as a whole system and that will also serve as pilot projects and models for larger-scale implementation beyond the Village of Shelburne Falls:  the Shelburne Falls Food Security Plan, the Perennial Food Project, and the Multifunctional Species Research Project.  The first project will be undertaken in collaboration with the Conway School of Landscape Design and other local educational institutions.  The latter two projects will be primarily initiated and run by The Apios Institute, a subsidiary of CCRVI, which researches and educates the public about perennial food gardening.

The Shelburne Falls Food Security Plan

The Shelburne Falls Food Security Plan aims to: (1) estimate and characterize the minimum food requirements for the Village of Shelburne Falls, and; (2) provide at least one viable vision for how the Village can meet its food needs locally.  What do we eat through out the year?  What food production strategies and crops hold the most viability within the Village’s specific site conditions and social context?  What would a realistic maximum food production scenario look like on household and neighborhood scales?  What implications would this scenario have for the Village and the farms in the region?  What directions can and should the community take to feed ourselves successfully and happily?

Project Overview

• Estimate the current and future annual food needs of the Village and characterize the current “food shed” of the Village, that is:

- What do we eat and when?

- What are our basic food requirements and is everyone meeting their basic food needs?

- Where does our food come from now, at what financial and ecological costs?

- What local food supply sources exist, and what financial and ecological costs do they entail?

- What food growing and preservation skills do Village residents possess, and which of these skills are residents currently using?

CCRVI anticipates that these questions will be answered through some combination of research using demographic and nutritional data, public records, public meetings, and resident surveys and interviews. 

• Evaluate the potential for meeting the Village’s food needs within the Village itself by assessing the quality, character, and potential of the urban/suburban landscape and soils for food production.  This will include implementing a soil lead sampling program to assess soil lead levels on a Village-wide basis, as well as characterizing the different site conditions found within the Village and the potential crops suited to those conditions.

• Assess the community’s social and cultural conditions relative to the residents’ willingness, interest, skills, and time available to undertake home-based agriculture, participate in local food systems, and so on.

• Develop scenarios for meeting as much of the Village’s food needs as possible within the Village by developing schematic designs for one or more neighborhoods of Shelburne Falls as food-producing urban landscapes.  Each scenario will develop food budgets for the neighborhoods designed and describe the implications of the neighborhood scenario for the Village as a whole and for the Village’s need for food from surrounding farms and farms within and outside the region.

• Evaluate the farming community in the region immediately adjacent to Shelburne Falls in terms of their current and potential crop types, production levels, economic viability, and connection to the Village.

• Lay the groundwork for the future expansion of the Project to cover all of Western Franklin County and eventually spiraling out into all of Western Massachusetts, the rest of the Connecticut River Valley, and the rest of New England.

The Perennial Food Project

When most people think about growing food, annual crops come to mind, that is, crops that grow for one season, go to seed and die or are harvested and must be planted from seed the next year.  This style of agriculture has dominated world agriculture for millennia, and, though it does feed the world currently, it represents a high-maintenance, high-energy-input approach that is highly destructive of soil and ecosystem health.  The use of perennial crops, those that live three or more years without replanting, is older than annual agriculture, and has great potential as an adjunct to annual agriculture.  Perennial crop systems can produce plenty of food at lower energetic and labor cost while rebuilding soil and ecosystem health.  One of the keys to such systems is the art of creating “polycultures” - patches of ground with more than one species growing in them at a time.  While perennial crops and polycultures have received little research attention or development, and are therefore most appropriate for home-scale gardens at the moment, a number of perennial crops which are worthy of propagation and active research exist.

The Perennial Food Project will propagate and research the culture of perennial food crops at a home-scale level in a semi-urban village context.  Here we mean the phrase “the culture of perennial food crops” in its broadest sense.  This project will investigate, develop, and spread the horticultural knowledge and practices required to grow perennial vegetables, herbs, edible flowers, small fruits, tree fruits, and nuts as integrated ecosystems in a village setting.  We will also mentor participant families in the harvest, cooking, and enjoyment of the perennial crops they learn to grow, to support a shift of the families’ cultures towards ways of life that include perennial food production.

We have partly modeled this multi-year project on the highly successful Heifer Project, where participants receive animals from the Heifer Project and then give the animals’ offspring to others in their community and train them in their care.  In this case, however, the participants will share perennial food plants and mentor others in their culture and use.  In this way, the project will propagate not only the plants, but the human culture that goes with them, into and around the Village, and then out of the Village into surrounding villages, towns, and cities.

We see this project as the initiation of, and pilot for, a much larger-scale and longer-term project intended to research, demonstrate, educate people about, and propagate regenerative perennial agriculture in temperate climates across the United States and the world.  By starting in a small town like Shelburne Falls, we hope to work out bugs in our systems and crystallize the strategies and methods needed to turn this kind of program into a more robust national and even worldwide program that operates along similar lines.

Project Overview

• Develop one or more standardized perennial polyculture designs for different kinds of gardens that can function as replicate trials of species, varieties, and polycultures during the project.  We will begin with a focus on herbaceous perennials (that is, non-woody plants that die back to the ground each year) and then add woody crops (that is, shrubs and trees) as the program develops.

• Select participating households. Begin with five households the first year, and double each year thereafter as participants become trainers and mentors for others and have plants to share.  Select households based on demonstrated level of commitment, interest, and persistence; openness to new food experiences; ability to cover a portion of the initial cost of the gardens (though we intend to provide subsidies);  desire and ability to work cooperatively; their social skills and attitudes; and their potential as future trainers and mentors.

• Evaluate participants’ sites for lead and other factors, and select garden sites.  We believe that garden site selection is a critical part of the project’s success, and plan to locate garden beds “in sight, in mind” as much as possible given site, family, and cultural constraints.  Each site will receive one multi-plant perennial bed as part of the program, but we will endeavor to integrate these beds into the participants’ landscapes so that they do not seem to be a separate element visually or practically.  The more integrated they seem aesthetically, the more integrated they are likely to be culturally in each household.

• Train participants to install the gardens and facilitate a cooperative “worknet” where each household helps each other household to install their perennial beds. This reduces installation costs and helps build community among participants, which we also believe will help the gardens to succeed socially and functionally.
 
• Mentor participants in garden and plant culture as well as the food culture of the crops over a period of two or three years through a series of mentoring visits that start with a higher frequency and gradually decrease over time.
 
• Mentor visits will also double as research data collection opportunities that monitor plant and the multi-plant designs’ performance over a period of three to four years.  Use this data to refine our standardized designs over time.  Research attention will also examine the human cultural side of the gardens, particular designs, and crops, such as flavor ratings and acceptance of new crops, attitude shifts and involvement in the gardens,  management and maintenance challenges and dynamics, and so on.  This data will also flow into perennial garden design refinements over time.

• As households and gardens mature, use them as propagation centers for both the plants and the culture by spreading plant divisions to new participants in the project and selecting among previous participants to find new mentors and trainers to expand the project.  Also work with local farmers to grow perennial plants for our standardized designs.

• Feed data and experience back into the program to refine species selections and  multi-plant bed designs, and to develop mentoring and training methods that are increasingly effective.

• In subsequent years, multiply first the number of participants in the project within Shelburne Falls, and then add communities, as plants, mentors, and funds become available: diversify the perennial bed designs, adding woody crops; spread the program to other communities; begin working with at-risk youth to help run the program; train mentors and participants in plant breeding and selection; involve professional researchers in experiments using the gardens that result; develop educational programs and tours using the demonstration gardens the project has created; publish results of and studies from the work.

The Multifunctional Species Research Project

The Apios Institute aims to help tens of thousands of people create healthy, functioning humanatural ecosystems that produce food and other products for people right in the places where they live.  For that to become a reality, we need to research and develop crops that have multiple ecosystem functions and direct human uses.  The Multifunctional Species Research Project will gather needed information to aid ecosystem gardeners in choosing existing species and cultivars (named, genetically uniform plant varieties within a species selected or bred for specific reasons) that perform multiple functions in their gardens, such as providing edible greens while also attracting beneficial insects and improving the soil. 

Hundreds of useful and functional species, many with numerous named cultivars, already exist in the landscape trade.  However, most of these species and varieties are known primarily for their ornamental value or their fruit quality, and little else is known about their ecological functions.  For example, a number of cultivars exist for a suite of edible sea kales (Crambe species), sorrels (Rumex and Oxyria species), bellflowers (Campanula species), and violets (Viola species), and these have not yet been evaluated for their flavor, productivity, cultural characteristics as crops, effectiveness as ground covers against various weeds, and so on.  Viola alone has 400 species and probably well over 1,000 cultivars, at least some of which are edible from root to flower, and none of which have been evaluated for edibility, flavor, or yield in any formal fashion that we can tell so far.

Similarly, common yarrow, Achillea millefolium, is one of 31 Achillea species recognized in North America, and by itself has dozens of named cultivars.  The species offers a number of medicinal properties, and reputedly acts as a “dynamic accumulator” of nutrients, gathering potassium and phosphorus from the deep soil and making it available to neighboring plants over time. As a member of the Aster family, it has multiple flowers on each floret that mature and provide nectar to short-throated insects over a long period, making it an excellent beneficial-insect-attracting plant.  However, we know of no studies of yarrow species and cultivars comparing their effectiveness at any of these non-ornamental functions and uses. Further, if we are to design polycultures well, we need much more information about the behavior, architecture, and rooting habits of all useful and functional species and varieties that can help garden designers create effective low-competition, overyielding, self-maintaining polycultures.

The Multifunctional Species Research Project will begin trials and evaluations of existing species and cultivars like the above for the multiple uses and functions forest gardeners expect so ecological designers can immediately use valuable plants, and we can establish which cultivars to use as breeding stock for improved varieties in the future. Selecting and developing new cultivars is not a part of this project.
 
We intend to involve small-scale gardeners and farmers in this work as much as possible, to create a distributed network of researchers working in many climates and soil types.  Besides providing valuable information on the performance of species and cultivars in different conditions, this approach will also propagate the skills needed to engender a widespread culture of experimenting and plant breeding in the gardening and farming public at large.  This intention responds to many factors in the current cultural, ecological, and political milieu, among them the increased dependency of communities on centralized bureaucratic institutions for basic needs, which is both unsustainable and increasingly maladaptive given the risks of climate change, peak oil, population growth, mass extinctions, and so on.  The pace of planetary degradation demands that thousands of people work on these research questions so we can, as a species, shift our behavior rapidly enough to prevent a human and natural calamity.  This approach to research also affirms the reality that many of the most significant crop advances in human history have arisen from skilled and observant practitioners, not only from professional researchers.

Project Overview

• Identify candidate species and varieties for initial research for the first round of work.  We will focus in the first round on herbaceous perennial species and varieties from the following functional groups and taxa: edibles: anise hyssop (Agastache), perennial onions (Allium), groundnuts (Apios), bellflowers (Campanula), goosefoots (Chenopodium), chicories (Cichorium), sea kales (Crambe), sunflowers (Helianthus), daylilies (Hemerocallis), miner’s lettuces (Montia), water celeries (Oenanthe), sorrels (Oxyria and Rumex), Solomon’s seals (Polygonatum), skirrets (Sium), violets (Viola); beneficial nectary plants: yarrows (Achillea), asters (Aster), golden stars (Chrysogonum), tickseeds (Coreopsis).  We will achieve easiest and fastest results using herbaceous perennials, compared to woodies, and these plants also fit more easily into small-scale garden beds for amateurs.  This will allow us to easily and rapidly incorporate them into the Perennial Food Project and maximize the chances for success of that work.  Once cooperative research networks have established, we can instigate and facilitate research on dynamic accumulators and nitrogen fixers, which are more challenging to study.

• Develop research protocols to help maintain consistency among the various observers in the project.

• Acquire plants or access to them and conduct basic observational research, in cooperation with established institutions when possible, and through our own networks when necessary.

- Develop a network of gardeners and farmers willing to experiment with species and cultivars in the above list and to conduct basic observations and comparative studies of the same cultivars in different environments. 

- Conduct trainings in the culture and horticulture of the plants, as well as in scientific observation, record keeping, and the research protocols to ensure reasonable consistency between observers.  Apios staff may make visits to study sites as part of monitoring this work.

- Identify botanic gardens and other institutions where large numbers of the candidate taxa already exist, or who may be interested in working on these questions, and enlist cooperation using their resources, labor, and expertise.

- Observations may include: yield timing, quality, and quantity; flavor ratings (seasonal and as each plant ages); growth behavior; flowering times; ground cover characteristics; root pattern studies; and nectary-insect dynamics.

• Publish results in both scientific and popular press outlets, including The Apios Institute’s website, as feasible.

• Use the observational studies to guide the development of scientific studies that are more formal and in depth. 

• Develop relationships with independent researchers, or with institutions such as land grant universities, with whom to work out the deeper investigations: research questions, experimental designs, costs, grants, and labor pools.  Develop experiments that can involve ecological gardeners, from amateurs to hot heads, and their gardens.  Conduct such experiments, and publish the results.

Community Food Goals

1.  To help participants develop a deeper sense of being “native” to this place by engaging them in an on-going process which reveals the interconnections between humans and the part of the Earth they live within.

2.  To promote the availability of more high-quality, locally-grown food for our community by empowering people to grow some or all of their own food in their own yards using traditional gardening methods as well as perennial gardening - a method which ultimately requires less time and effort than traditional gardening.

3.  To encourage and strengthen bonds between people in their neighborhoods and community by creating mutually-beneficial activities, information, and food which can be shared with others.

4.  To develop effective Community Food systems and materials in the Shelburne Falls pilot project which then can be taken out to other communities, towns, and cities.

CCRVI’s and Community Food’s Underlying Principles

1.  We want to learn to become “native” to our “place” and to promote the emergence of a culture which encourages and supports people to experience themselves as “native” to their places.  [Wes Jackson, Becoming Native to This Place (see the detailed bibliographic information below), the entire book generally and Chapter 5 in particular] This means:

a.  we seek to create “coherent communit[ies which are] embedded in the ecological realities of [their] surrounding landscape” so that it is obvious that the community includes both the landscape and the people; [Becoming Native to This Place, page 3]

b.  we seek to engage in an on-going “conversation” with the landscape and each other to discover what truly works for the good of the whole over the long run; [Becoming Native to This Place, page 40, we’ve paraphrased the quote from Wendell Berry, and generally Chapter 4]

c.  we value technology and science and believe they should be subordinate to the human principles of connection, meaning, wholeness, health, soul, spirit, and consciousness; [Becoming Native to This Place, page 39, we’ve paraphrased]

d.  we start with creating highly-effective local food systems as the platform upon which our community is built; [Becoming Native to This Place, generally Chapter 3]

e.  we believe that using less energy and resources will help us develop a deeper sense of “nativeness” and we seek to discover a way “to earn our living and amuse ourselves with the least expense to our life support system”; [Becoming Native to This Place, page 5]

f.  we believe that all parts of the Universe are alive, conscious, and responsive and that we can learn to interact at deep levels with each part;  [Becoming Native to This Place, generally Chapter 3]

g.  we believe that human-scale activities provide us with the best chance of becoming and staying “native;” [Becoming Native to This Place, pages 2-3] and

h.  we believe that there is much to be learned from mimicking the success of the natural world and the wisdom and practices of those who have lived more closely with the natural world.  [Becoming Native to This Place, generally Chapter 3]

2.  We accept that we are profoundly ignorant of how to reclaim a deep awareness of our interconnectedness with our landscape so we start with small projects, develop redundant systems, and are always ready to reevaluate, tweak, backout, and/or start over as necessary.  [Becoming Native to This Place, we’ve paraphrased page 24]

3.  We seek to live our lives on contemporary sunlight instead of ancient sunlight.[Becoming Native to This Place, generally Chapter 1]

4.  We value each person in our community because we know that we are all part of a greater whole and thus inextricably connected.

Note:  We honor the wisdom of Wes Jackson, of The Land Institute, Salina, Kansas, as contained in his book, Becoming Native to This Place, (Counterpoint, Washington, D.C., 1994, 1996) which expressed so eloquently the principles which have been evolving inside us for many years.  The words we’ve used above to describe our principles are mostly Wes’.  As indicated above, some are direct quotes and others we’ve tweaked, summarized, paraphrased, and otherwise extracted into their present form.

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