Local farmers reclaiming the valley’s rich agricultural history

in community stories

Excerpted from Growing a Revolution by Stett Holbrook in metroactive

Meghan Cole, manager of the Full Circle Farm in Sunnyvale, sees urban farming as part of a larger movement for change. Photograph by Felipe Buitrago

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.”

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How to create a green neighborhood group

in community stories

By Siel Ju

The Green Committee’s now a successful community group, but efforts to green Mar Vista didn’t always run so smoothly. The first year was rocky for the Green Committee. Formed back in early 2008, the three to five people on the committee, according to Sherri, had lots of well-intended intended ideas, but “no handle on where to start.” The group tried to connect the community through an educational booth with a speaker at the farmers’ market, but “it quickly became apparent that people weren’t going to make an appointment [to sit and listen to a speaker] on a Sunday at the farmers’ market,” Sherri says. “Nothing was really happening.”

That’s when the Green Committee decided to plan an event to introduce the neighborhood to the group. So in Fall 2008, the Green Committee took over the MVCC’s open community meeting, bringing in speakers to talk about everything from composting to solar power. “The turnout was unbelievable,” Sherri says. “And it gave people the chance to find out that there were so many like-minded people in the community.”

That event served as a wakeup call of sorts, opening the way for a big Mar Vista Green Garden Showcase (above are the showcase participants) in April this year, which let 1,000+ people take tours of 44 local lawns and gardens turned into drought-resistant or edible landscapes. Then came the Water Use Expo in July, featuring L.A. Councilmember Bill Rosendahl and actorvist Ed Begley, Jr.

All this greening work’s also gotten the Mar Vista community some nice eco-bonuses from the city, too. After all, city councilmembers are more likely to select a location where they know people will get behind the programs. “They knew we’d do a lot to make it happen,” Sherri says, pointing out Mar Vista’s not only a pilot area for the L.A. rainwater harvesting program — but also on the list for a pilot green street program.

Now the group’s come full circle. The farmers market booth gets steady traffic all day, with the experts and speakers talking one-on-one with residents about how they can apply eco-changes to their individual lives.

Was the Mar Vista community simply more green than other communities to begin with, thus making the Green Committee’s work easy? “I don’t think it’s that Mar Vista has more eco-friendly people than anywhere else,” says Sherri. “We’ve just found this channel to find each other.”

Want your neighborhood to have a Green Committee? All it takes is a few people, Sherri says. “It really is neighbor-to-neighbor. Find three or four people who are like minded, then approach the city council or neighborhood association.” Then let your neighbors know the new green group exists. “Hijack something that happens anyway and give it a green flavor,” Sherri advises.

And rest assured that it won’t always be the three or four of you pulling all the weight. “One important key to our success is that this is such a hands on community, with so many people willing to volunteer and contribute,” Sherri says. When we put on events, it truly seems effortless because so many people pitch in!”

excerpted from  How to create a green neighborhood group | MNN – Mother Nature Network.