Local farmers reclaiming the valley’s rich agricultural history

Excerpted from Growing a Revolution by Stett Holbrook in metroactive

Meghan Cole, manager of the Full Circle Farm in Sunnyvale. Photograph by Felipe Buitrago

Like much of Silicon Valley, Full Circle Farm was once an orchard, but the rows of Santa Rosa plum trees were plowed under when the orchard was in full blossom one spring in the early 1960s. The Santa Clara Unified School District bought the land and used it as an informal athletic field.

When the school district later considered selling the undeveloped parcel, it was valued at $60 million. That’s a huge sum of money for a cash-strapped district, but thanks to grassroots community support and former school board member Teresa O’Neill, who championed the idea of a community farm early on, the district saw another use for the land and decided not to sell out to developers.

“To me that’s the most amazing part of the story,” says Liz Snyder, interim executive director of Sustainable Community Gardens, the nonprofit group that runs the farm. “In Silicon Valley, where land was being gobbled by development, that was a minor miracle.”

The school district now leases the land to Sustainable Community Gardens. The organization also runs the 1-acre Charles Street Garden, which it leases from the city of Sunnyvale. The first tree planted at Full Circle Farm was a plum tree in honor of O’Neill and the orchard that once stood there. The farm has become many things to many people. Students get their hands dirty as they learn about the source of their food and what makes it grow. Last year, 1,200 students spent time on the farm.

With the planned construction of an on-site kitchen, Snyder, an earnest, soft-spoken woman, hopes to incorporate food grown on the farm into the school district’s food-service program. That would allow them to unplug, at least in part, from the national school-lunch program’s notoriously inferior menu of frozen heat-and-serve meals. She wants to replace 50 percent of what the school cafeterias now serve with produce from the farm.

The farm also provides fresh produce to the community at its thrice-weekly farm stand and community-supported agriculture (CSA) program. Local restaurants buy some of the produce. In addition, the farm attracts a wide range of volunteers who simply want to learn to grow vegetables and literally reap what they sow. The farm and its half-acre garden where schools and local residents can experiment and plant on a smaller scale has proved so popular that there are often more volunteers than work.

“Instead of going out to fast food, I can I cook with my own food that I learn to grow here,” says Kristal Caidoy, 20, a De Anza College student and volunteer.

Snyder studied the relationship between community food systems, exposure to food-marketing messages and childhood nutrition at Oxford University. For her, the farm and the support it has received are part of a national shift in the way we think about food: “I think we’re absolutely at a tipping point where urban agriculture is going to be more commonplace. … I think it’s a change in awareness at the community level and [a desire] to know where your food comes from.”

With concerns about food safety, E.coli outbreaks and simply a desire for better-tasting food, locally grown food “offers a pretty solid alternative,” she says. “Eating closer to the plant is an easy way to eat healthy. You can stop fretting and just eat from the farm.”

The cost and access to land are the greatest obstacles to projects like Full Circle Farm, but with the ebbing of development pressure because of the down economy, along with what Snyder sees as a growing appreciation of locally grown food, urban agriculture has suddenly become more attractive than ever before.

“Now might be the time,” she says optimistically.

Farm manager Meghan Cole, 29, became a farmer, in part, because of her desire to be part of “something real, something that has meaning.” She grew up in the suburbs of St. Louis but worked on farms in rural Missouri and North Carolina before moving to Silicon Valley. Early on, she noticed an improvement in her health and vitality after eating what she grew. It still seems to be working for her. Her default expression is a blissed-out grin.

Walking the farm, wearing cutoff Carhartt overalls, with her braided blonde hair tucked into a green Mao cap, Cole sees her work in urban farming as part of a larger movement. “I’m part of something hopeful that’s trying to create change,” she says.

And Cole says that change means growing healthier food and forging a greater sense of community between growers and consumers: “Food is central. It connects us. It’s something we all have in common. It is who we are.”

Urban agriculture isn’t new, but the idea has been given new life by a coalescence of factors. The aforementioned food-safety concerns, the growing awareness of the harmful effects of food production on the environment, the popularity of farmers markets, the works by “good food” advocates like Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan and movies like Food Inc. and Super Size Me have all propelled us toward this “tipping point” moment. Urban farms also offer low-income communities access to fresh produce, job training and a potential source of income.

While most of the pressure for change has occurred at the grassroots level, the recently planted White House garden is hastening the change. Last month, President Barack Obama floated the idea of starting a White House farmers market to sell produce from the garden and local farms, as well as creating distribution networks to get locally grown food in the schools.

In a recent interview on National Public Radio, Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food and the best-known critic of the ills of the industrial food system, commented on the impact of Michelle Obama’s involvement in the White House garden.

“There’s now a garden in Buckingham Palace,” he said. “People are planting gardens all over America. … I think [the Obamas] understand that before you can begin to change this food system, you need to raise consciousness about it because, for a lot of people, the food system works just fine. There’s plenty of cheap and abundant food. The fact that it makes people sick, the fact that it takes an enormous toll on the environment, on animals, on workers, isn’t really clear to everybody, so that there’s a kind of raising of consciousness that needs to happen. And I think that Michelle Obama is playing a very important role in that.”

Read the full story: Local farmers reclaiming the valley’s rich agricultural history | News & Culture in Silicon Valley, CA | Feature Story. By Stett Holbrook