Reflections on KFH's Community Fair

July 4th weekend holds a special place in our hearts as it’s the anniversary of when we opened Sweet Beet Farm Stand back in 2015 - the genesis of all the Kearsarge Food Hub, home of Sweet Beet, would become.

Since then, it’s been a tradition to create space to gather this time of year, with our vibrant local food system at the heart of it.

At this special event, we saw our vision and our mission come alive. We created a space - free and open to all - for the community to gather. We offered wholesome and engaging activities for folks of all ages to play and learn. We saw dear friends and met new ones. We ate delicious food featuring locally grown and lovingly prepared ingredients!

Thank you to all of the friends who joined us for this lovely day!

Special thanks to community partners for making the day so magical:

• Evergreen Healing Arts - fairyland was amazing! 

• Decatur Creek - the music was absolutely lovely, as always.

• Abenaki Trails Project and Hopkinton Historical Society - the community really enjoyed learning about the Abenaki Seeds Project and all your amazing work.

• Broken Boat Farm - everybody adored the goats and we love your mission of environmentally friendly landscaping!

• Warner Public Market - the exquisite food system art project was equal parts bizarre and fun!

• Bradford Energy Committee - thank you for bringing Plastic Free July to the Kearsarge area.

• Nathan Wechsler & Company  - thank you for sponsoring the event!

And last but certainly not least, thank you to our Community Engagement Committee for organizing this lovely event, to the volunteers and staff members who brought it all to life! It’s a whole lot of work, and absolutely worth it.

We look forward to the next opportunity to gather.

Earth Love at the Sweet Beet

Happy Earth Day, friends!

One of our core values at the Sweet Beet is promoting the health and vitality of the Earth. We do this through environmentally restorative measures of our own, and also by partnering with producers that intentionally practice sustainability in a variety of ways, from farming methods to packaging choices. 

Let’s dig into some of the specific ways that Sweet Beet and our amazing partners are working to care for the Earth, one step at time! 

Compostables

You may have noticed over the past several months that more and more greens from Sweet Beet Farm are coming to the market in small plastic cases. The cool thing about that, is that these are specially designed compostable plastic clamshells made by something called PLA plastic.

What is PLA plastic? 

Well there’s a lot of science that goes into this explanation that might be a bit too much to fully get into here, but if you follow this link you can learn much more about them, at your leisure. To simplify, PLA plastic is bioplastic material that is sourced from plants (instead of fossil fuels like regular plastic), synthesized into usable material, and is biodegradable when its journey through useful life is complete. PLA plastics require 65% less energy than producing conventional plastics, generates 68% fewer greenhouse gasses, and contains no toxins (source). Return your clamshells to us here at the Sweet Beet and we’ll get them to the proper composting facility.

Additionally, all of our bowls, plates and utensils in Sweet Beet Café are also compostable, and we use paper bags for produce and grocery bags. Our bags are not wax coated, which means that they too are biodegradable. Though, paper products of course use trees so we always encourage folks to bring their own reusable bags.

Reusables

Our milk comes in glass bottles from Contoocook creamery, and other producers use glass bottles for things like yogurt. Recently we’ve seen producers struggling to source packing materials like glass bottles due to supply chain issues, but our vendors have stepped up to that challenge and either found other earth friendly material. Abbot Hill Creamery, for instance, has transitioned to a corn based compostable packaging for their yogurt. Some vendors are committed to sourcing glass bottles despite price hikes and an increased effort to consistently find them. 

And to support our dear customers in cutting back on single use waste in the home and in life, we have a lovely selection of sustainable goods like insulated water bottles, bamboo utensil sets, stainless steel containers, and more. 

Farming Practices

Beyond packaging in the market, another aspect that we highly value is farming practices that build soil and nourish local lands. Living soil is the foundation of nutritious foods. On Sweet Beet Farm, for example, we aim to disturb the soil as little as possible to support its own aliveness and vitality. So, let it be! And when we need to work with the soil, we use minimum tillage practices and employ tools that have as little impact as possible. 

We use a permanent raised bed system on Sweet Beet Farm, and emulate the natural systems of the forest to create the conditions for a thriving ecosystem. That means covering the soil with mulch, cover crops, and dense planting of a diverse range of crops. This provides a canopy of protection to the soil, which prevents erosion, nutrient depletion, runoff, and so much more. We’re bringing in local, organic materials to feed the soil, which in turn feeds the crops that feed our community, and always letting it rest as part of our farming strategy. 

A sea of green cover crops nourishing the soil!

The aliveness of our soils all around the planet provide the irreplaceable foundation from which healthy, happy plants and nutritious foods can grow. But unfortunately, soil health hangs in the balance due largely to the extractive methods of the industrial food system. Some estimates suggest that we have just 60 harvests left worth of topsoil around the globe.

Beyond that, soil holds carbon, which is a critical function in helping to reverse the effects of a warming climate and imbalanced carbon system. 

All of this adds up to mean that supporting farms that support healthy soils is more important than ever before and has a huge impact. In addition to our own farm, many of our farm partners at the Sweet Beet are also prioritizing soil health as part of their farming strategy. 

Sweet Beet was founded on the idea that food is a powerful lever for effecting the change that our Earth and all of its inhabitants need most right now. We are grateful for local agriculture, the local food community, and the enterprises that center sustainability and empower us to make choices that demonstrate love and care for Earth in our every day lives.

It is, after all, home to all of us and utterly irreplaceable.

#earthdayiseveryday

Reducing plastic and saving time on the farm with the paper pot system

On Sweet Beet Farm we’re obsessed with the paper pot transplanter! It is such an incredible tool for a whole host of reasons. This Earth Month especially, we’re celebrating the paper pot transplanter as an essential small farm tool that reduces waste, saves time, and helps us grow lots of organic food with less impact on the land.

The paper pot transplanter is a tool that assists in the growing process from seed to planting. It is a low-impact, hand-powered system that allows us to start seeds and transplant them into the ground using less plastic and with far less time input. It’s really a win for all situation!

Learn more about how the paper pot transplanter has transformed our farming systems on Sweet Beet Farm in the following two part video series.

Part 1: Reducing On-Farm Plastic in the seeding room with the paper pot!

Part 2: Save time AND reduce plastic in your seeding process with the paper pot!

We hope you enjoy these short videos on what the paper pot is and how it’s transformed life on Sweet Beet Farm! We’re all about finding the tools that help us save time, reduce waste, and have as little impact on the Earth as possible while growing nutritious foods for our community.

You can support our nonprofit work on our organic farm and in the local food system with a donation today!

Black History Month: Community Healing & Food Sovereignty

February is Black History Month, and we here at the Kearsarge Food Hub want to take a moment to explore some of the ways that the Black community has done incredible work toward community care, food sovereignty, and environmental stewardship. 

Black folks in the United States have historically been, and still are, disproportionately impacted by inequitable food systems, poor labor conditions within the agricultural and national food system, economic pressures, and environmental degradation. However, the Black community has also been wildly resilient despite those injustices, and we want to showcase that resilience as well as some organizations that are currently doing incredible work in the realms of community healing and food sovereignty. 

One area in which the Kearsarge Food Hub is working to learn and grow into is our food sovereignty initiatives. Community gardens are one aspect of this programming that we are working on implementing both in our immediate community of Bradford, but also in further reaching spaces like with the Tray it Forward program with FEED Kearsarge! In doing this work, we are building upon a tradition established generations ago, by communities acting out of necessity and a deep care for their fellow people.

As Julie Loosigian of Sweet Beet Farm and Kearsarge Food Hub’s education team writes in “Community Gardens: Growing More Than Food” on the Kearsarge Food Hub Blog: 

“There was the gardening practiced by enslaved African Americans in order to supplement their often meager and non-nutritious provisions. Charles Ball, a former enslaved man, describes in his 1853 book Slavery in the United States, what are often termed “slave gardens”; “the people are allowed to make patches, as they are called—that is gardens, in some remote and unprofitable part of the estate, generally in the woods, in which they plant corn, potatoes, pumpkins, melons, [etc.] for themselves” (p. 128). According to Ball, each family often had their own garden space; likely, such family units included extended family, and tending tasks were shared among the group.”  

This work that has roots in history has continued throughout generations to the present day, where there are many dedicated communities and organizations working to nourish, heal, and sustain their community members. 

We want to take the time to re-highlight some organizations we have previously mentioned that are doing incredible work at cultivating food sovereignty so that our audience can check that work out, and hopefully support it as well!

FRESH START FARMS IN MANCHESTER, NEW HAMPSHIRE: 

Fresh Start Farms is a branch of the Organization of Refugee and Immigrant Success (ORIS), headquartered in Manchester, New Hampshire. ORIS is a nonprofit with the mission to “aid in the resettlement of refugees and immigrants in New Hampshire by providing assistance, training, resources, and opportunities that promote self-sufficiency.” (Mission Statement on ORIS webpage). Fresh Start Farms contributes to that mission with a goal of promoting land tenure and equity for New American farmers, wherein immigrant and refugee farmers can provide culturally appropriate foods for their communities as well as economically support themselves. 

THE SOMALI BANTU COMMUNITY ASSOCIATION IN MAINE 

Since 2005 The Somali Bantu Community Association’s mission has been “to provide vital transitional services, advocacy, and programming that empowers members of the refugee community to uphold cultural identity and thrive in their new life here in Lewiston, Maine.” -- Somali Bantu Community Association

Liberation Farms, a community farming program of the SBCA, exists with the goal of providing “new American families struggling with food insecurity with the tools and resources to grow healthy, culturally-appropriate foods for themselves and their community. This investment in growing nourishes body and soul as farmers ground into familiar traditions and meaningfully utilize their agricultural roots as they build new homes here in Maine.”  --SBCA webpage

Over the past summer, the SBCA raised the necessary funds to secure farmland in Maine. “The Agrarian Commons holds land in perpetuity, protected against future development, and conveys equitable, renewable leases to farmers and communities for 99+ renewable years.” This was a massive step toward food sovereignty, however the work continues and the members of the SBCA continue to work tirelessly toward their goals. You can read more about the SBCA and Liberation Farms here on their website. 

THE SUSU COMMUNITY FARM IN BRATTLEBORO VERMONT: 

And finally, we want to take the time to showcase the folks at SUSU Botanica (previously known as the SUSU Healing Collective) in Brattleboro, Vermont, who, in the time since we last wrote about them, have officially been able to launch the SUSU CommUNITY Farm. 

“The SUSU commUNITY Farm is a Afro Indigenous stewarded farm and land based healing center in Southern Vermont that elevates Vermont’s land and foodways. We do this by co-creating a life affirming and culturally relevant platform for Black, Indigenous, People of color, youth, under resourced folx, and allies to thrive and experience safety and connection while beginning to develop the tools and agency to heal from the trauma of colonization.Through collective commUNITY we aspire to co-create an equitable and just culture for the global majority to thrive in Vermont that centers access to safe and affirming food, commUNITY, and job opportunities.”

SUSU commUNITY Farm creates health equity by offering culturally relevant spaces that center earth based and afro-indigenous health and healing traditions as well as reclaiming and centering the wisdom, stories, and legacies of our ancestors.” – (SUSU commUNITY Farm: About)

When we previously highlighted the SUSU Botanica, they were fundraising to purchase land upon which to create a community farm that would work toward multiple ends. Their hope was a space where BIPOC folks could come and work on healing their relationships to the land, and healing through working with the land. Additionally, the products of the garden would go toward feeding and nourishing that community. Furthermore, the idea of a Heritage Garden was also an important aspect to the work to begin at the SUSU commUNITY Farm:

"We're planning to have multiple different gardens grown just for traditional lineage and heritage throughout the African diaspora, growing in a way that's aligned with the way our ancestors have grown food," Arnold.” – (Amber Arnold, co-executive director at SUSU as quoted by Chris Mays in the Brattleboro Reformer, March 5, 2021). 

We are excited to say that the money has been successfully raised to purchase land for the commUNITY farm. Now, the folks at SUSU are working to plan for the upcoming season, with goals such as raising enough funds to hire a second armer, build healthy soil on land that has been worked as a hay field for years, establish community gardens full of culturally relevant heirloom crops, increase their CSA share, and run the free CSA program for another full 20 week season in 2022. Please visit their website here to learn more about and donate to the outstanding, revolutionary, and healing work that this organization and community are doing.

We hope you can check out the amazing work being done by these organizations!

The what, when, how, and why of grafting tomato plants!

Sweet Beet Farm and Education team Julie and Pierre sat down to explore the world of grafting tomato plants! We hope you find this video and short outline helpful for you in determining how to try out grating at home or on your farm!

5 resources that have been the guiding posts of our operation:

1. Dave Trumble and Good Earth Farm (taught us how to graft)

2. Jean Martin Fortier: The Market Gardener

   1. The foundation model; highly influenced by Eliot Coleman

3. Curtis Stone: Urban farming

   1. Land access problems/accessibility to all 

4. Ben Hartman: Lean farming

   1. Business sense to the farmer & reducing mooda (waste of energy)

5. Andrew Mefferd: The greenhouse and hoophouse grower's handbook (Maine) 

What is grafting? Grafting or graftage is a horticultural technique whereby tissues of plants are joined so as to continue their growth together. The upper part of the combined plant is called the scion while the lower part is called the rootstock. You choose the scion for it’s fruiting properties and the rootstock for its soil born disease resistance.

How we got started with grafting & why are we hosting a webinar? 

• A core value of ours on Sweet Beet Farm and at Kearsarge Food Hub learning as we grow, and this means community building and transparency throughout our process of figuring stuff out. We are new to grafting, have learned a lot so far, and are excited to continue in the learning process

• We employ market gardening and intensive growing techniques, because:

  • Our intention is to grow nutritious food with soil health in mind on a small plot of land (less than 2 acres) while making a fair wage doing so. 

  • There are no RIGHT ways but rather models that have been adapted to the environment where they exist. 

• Protected Culture is key

• In cold climates we need protected culture!

  • High tunnels, green houses, hoop houses, row cover, mini-tunnels and much more

  • Allows farmers and home gardeners to extend the growing season and with the power of technology be able to grow year round

  • Creates more opportunities for healthy foods to be produced in our home communities

  • Grafted tomatoes are grown in protective cultures

• The importance of tomatoes for a small market garden

• The most important, profitable crop for small farms 

• Grafting can take tomatoes to another level of profitability 

Advantages of grafting: 

• Soil-born disease resistance

• Plants are more vigorous & produce over a longer period of time (flattens the production curve)

• Yields can increase by up to 50%

• Andrew Mefferd: “When I worked at Johnny's Selected Seeds, I did the grafting and ran rootstock trials at the research farm. For many of those years, the trials were conducted in unheated hoop houses. Most combinations yielded a 30 to 50 percent increase over the ungrafted top variety grown as a comparison— and that was without soil borne disease taking a toll on ungrafted tomato plants.” 
  

Disadvantages of Grafting

• Will not protect from airborne diseases

• It takes time- ½  day of set up and grafting for 100 plants. Subsequent monitoring and adjusting - 30 minutes a day for weeks. 

• Growing 4 times as much tomatoes to account for as low as 50% success rate and seeds are expensive!---Especially greenhouse bred varieties 

Equipment required (for more specifics check out Johnny’s grafting kit)

• Healing  chamber

• Grow lights for babies

• Clean cutting equipment (what is it?)

• Sterilizers 

• Clips

• Stakes

Process

• Start seeds for both rootstock and scion plant ahead of time to do a trial run to see if your timing is right to get both plants to the same diameter for grafting

• How to choose which ones to graft?

  • So many options! Depends on the varieties you want to grow, the environment you’re growing in, and what your problems have been. Search catalogs and reach out to seed suppliers for advice 

• Grafting happens roughly 3 weeks after planting seeds

• Top chop method: chopping the tops of the plants, at the same angle, to then clip the scion on top of the rootstock

• Put into healing chamber so grafted plants can fuse together into one plant

Post-grafting considerations

• Keep in healing chamber for 3-4 days

• Fourth day, we give 20 minutes of light and 20 minutes of fresh air 

• Increased a bit each day, it’s a bit of an experiment

• 6th day, bottom watered, made sure they soaked up water

• By then, 3 hours of light and some air

• A week and half later, 12 hours of light and 1.5 hours of air 

• 2 weeks later, we took them out and treated them like normal plants 

• Very important - don’t bury the grafting scar when you plant them!

For questions, get in touch with Pierre or Julie!

Now seeking applicants for our Farmer Apprentice Program! Learn more & apply.

Staff Spotlight! Cameron Huftalen, Sweet Beet Market Lead

Time for a Staff Spotlight! Cameron Huftalen is market team lead in Sweet Beet Market. They've taken tremendous initiative and leadership in shaping the heart and direction of the market since June of 2020. We sat down with Cam to learn more about them and their role and passions related to the nonprofit work we do here at the Kearsarge Food Hub. Cam provides vision and leadership in key areas like equity and food sovereignty, areas where we put into practice one of our core values: learning as we grow! And we do indeed have a lot of learning and growing to do. Thank you for taking the time to share your perspective, Cam!

Please enjoy this interview and short video series with Cameron Huftalen.

Q: Tell us a little about you and your background! Where’d you grow up, what are your hobbies, what did you study in college?

A: So I grew up in Henniker, just about fifteen minutes away from Sweet Beet. My mom’s entire family is from there and used to have a dairy farm, my uncle still has an orchard, pumpkin patch, and Intervale Farm Pancake House. My dad is from Rhode Island but has been in New Hampshire for a while now. I grew up doing a LOT of sports, but like the worst sports for a parent to have to deal with (downhill ski racing, horseback riding, etc). I was a goalie in just about every team sport I played, which led to a lot of nice bruising but I hear that’s good for character building. I went to college at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine where I got degrees in History and European Studies, with an additional concentration in Archaeology and Material Culture. 

Q: What is your role at the Kearsarge Food Hub and when did you join the team?

Cameron describes their role and day to day work as market team lead.

A: I am currently one of our leads in Sweet Beet Market! I joined KFH in the beginning of June 2020, originally planning to do a short seasonal shift of work and then ended up sticking around way beyond that. Right now I coordinate a lot of Sweet Beet Market’s operations. 

Q: What is most interesting to you about your job here?

A: I think that just getting to know the local food system has been really interesting. It’s not something that I thought a lot about prior to working with this organization. I knew, obviously, that there were farmers around (I mean like I said, my family used to farm) but I don’t think I ever spent a lot of time thinking about the scope of that and the interconnectedness of the whole system, so getting to be involved with and learn about that has been really cool. 

Q: What is most challenging about your job?

Cameron talks about the challenges of developing equity in our local food system.

A: The current paradigm we live in, on a national scale, makes some of the work we do challenging (that feels like an understatement haha). The systems in place are inequitable on a large scale, and that trickles down into the smaller functions we see in our own community. One of our key values here is paying our farmers and makers what they feel is fair compensation for their products. That’s how we’re able to support smaller scale operations with practices and values that align with ours. The flip side of that, however, is that when we then sell those items, there’s an issue of inaccessibility that we have to grapple with.

Historically we’ve talked a lot about the “hidden costs” of cheaper, more mass produced products (i.e. human rights violations, environmental damage, etc)– but that doesn’t negate the very real fact that for a lot of people, they are cheaper in comparison to what we have the ability to offer right now and it’s imperative that we acknowledge that. The challenge that we’ve been working through is how do we support the people and practices that we want to in order to combat the larger overarching destructive and inequitable systems, while also recognizing those systems make it very hard for many folks to engage with our market and products over the more accessible larger scale outlets and items, even if they want to purchase local goods.

I think it’s really important to acknowledge that it’s an area for growth within our market, but at the moment a struggle that is still felt by folks in our community that we want to connect with and for whom we want to be available. 

Q: What issue or issues are you most interested in that relate to the KFH mission?

A: Throughout college, because I was working with a lot of history and archaeology, I got to learn about a lot of important structural inequities and how they’ve developed over time. Concepts like race, class, gender, religion, age, sexual orientation, and many more were lenses that I worked with often in terms of historical and contemporary analysis. The work that I did with archaeology, for example, focused specifically on a very important methodology that was specifically decolonizing – Indigenous Archaeology.

This is a methodology that seeks to decolonize the field of archaeology by acknowledging the harm and inherent colonialism within the discipline, and working to combat that harm by prioritizing communities’ desires and knowledge. It seeks to return power to communities that have suffered due to decisions made through archaeology (i.e. legislative decisions such as land rights) and the inherent trauma of having someone outside of your culture explain your stories without any input or consent from you. Key tenets of Indigenous Archeology include creating relationships with communities based upon healthy and clear communication, respect, and the prioritization of what these communities and people want with regards to archeological study and dissemination of findings. 

Archaeology is the study of material culture, but through that, it’s an attempt to tell stories about people and their lives – their daily practices, what they ate, what sorts of things were important to them, what families and relationships were like, all sorts of pieces that come together to paint a picture of a person or community’s life. It brings up a critical question of who should be telling these stories and how/if that information should be disseminated. There’s a very real trend within archaeology of people coming into communities, excavating, gaining recognition in academia for their findings, and then not sharing any of that knowledge or any benefits that come from it with the community they were studying. This methodology works to replace that harmful trend by placing the interests of the community first.

Cameron describes food sovereignty and what it means to them that KFH strives to grow in this area.

Decolonization within activism is very important to me, and I think that it’s something that KFH is really working toward – where I see a big connection between my interests and the organization’s work, is with the steps toward supporting food sovereignty.

Food sovereignty, like Indigenous archaeology, is about recognizing systems that have been used to marginalize particular groups of people, and working to address and dismantle them while also cultivating community and cultural revitalization. Food sovereignty is not the same thing as food security, and I think that KFH’s transition from focusing on addressing food insecurity in the community to supporting food sovereignty is really cool and gives me a lot of hope and inspiration for the work going forward.

What I want our organization to be able to do is not just donate food to people, but to go beyond that and to recognize our positionality as a majority white and privileged group of people in our non-profit, and to utilize the power that comes with those identities to support programs like seed sharing, community gardens, and LandBack initiatives that seek to empower people and help to preserve and sustain cultures by restoring resources and power that have been systemically withheld from many communities. As an organization, we’re working on better understanding our positionality in the local food system and striving to provide the communities we work with the support that they want, rather than what we think they need.

These are issue that truly deserve many more words, but given the fact that this is meant to be a staff spotlight and not a TED talk I think I’m going to cap it here. However, PLEASE if you’re interested or want to talk, reach out to me (I’m usually in the market!) because this is something I’m really invested in/want to create more discussion around and would love to get into many more of the complex details.

Q: What’s the best thing about Sweet Beet / KFH customers and supporters?

A: Something that I have really enjoyed has been the community with a lot of the folks that are coming in and engaging with us. There’s a sense of connection with a lot of people, and a shared sense of values that has been really great to witness and to take part in. 

Q: What’s something you’ve learned about the local food system since you’ve started your work with KFH?

Cameron talks about learning about the community connections behind the food.

A: I touched briefly on it before but just the fact that there is such a local food system has been something really cool to learn about. I knew from fleeting visits to farmers markets or social media that there were local farms, but getting to know the people who are growing and raising and making in the surrounding area on both a business and personal level has been really wonderful. I now know a ton more about local meat agriculture – which is something I never really even gave two seconds of thought to prior to working with KFH. 

Q: What direction or area would you like to see the Kearsarge Food Hub grow into or improve in?

A: Again, I’m looping back to previous answers but I think that finding creative ways to address our inaccessibility would be something I’d like to see us grow within. I think that when we talk about things like our values and what practices of growing that we want to support it’s all well and good, but to someone with an income that can’t partake in purchasing those goods it does nothing.

Cam describes how Sweet Beet Market factors into the larger Kearsarge Food Hub nonprofit.

What we don’t want to do is shut the door on members of our community, and I think that in recent months we’ve really ramped up discussions about that internally and we’re hoping to get more programs and systems in place to be able to address those issues while also still supporting the small scale local folks that are making these products for us. It’s a really complicated issue and somewhat of a balancing act but I’m excited to see how we can figure out some solutions going forward. In addition to that, looping back to food sovereignty, I’d really like to see us do more in that vein, particularly to create and strengthen more partnerships with communities in the area that are doing that important work, and leveraging the position that we have to assist with those goals. 

Q: What are you eating these days?

A: A LOT of curries right now!! And I say curries, but what I mean by that is dumping a lot of tofu, chickpeas, lentils, potatoes, etc into a pan along with tomatoes, lots of spices, and sometimes some coconut milk, and pouring it all over a big pile of rice. The common denominator with all the different variations I’ve been making is that my mother cannot eat them because they are too spicy (I am incredibly heavy handed with the cayenne jar, I know this about myself, and honestly, I’m ok with it). 

Q: What are you reading right now?

A: I am reading a ton of books right now because I’m trying to coach myself back into reading. Once I got out of college I sort of fell out of it and even then I was reading a lot of academic texts (which I still am). Currently I have a few goings including Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune, Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames, This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, I Slept with Joey Ramone by Mickey Leigh, and Please Kill Me by Gillian McCain and Legs McNeil. So I’ve got a pretty good spread going but I’m always down for more recommendations or to talk about books!

Q: What’s your favorite product in Sweet Beet Market?

A: Ginger Brew has been a favorite of mine since I started here, and recently (I say recently but this came in last summer) the hot momo sauce. 

Q: What’s your favorite product in Sweet Beet Café?

A: Breakfast sandwiches are my go-to because a breakfast sandwich can really never be bad but I gotta say the Sweet Beet Cafe breakfast sandwiches are out of this world good. As far as drinks go I love an iced latte (either a mocha or a ginger, usually), and I LOVE the Capetown Sunset tea from White Heron. 

Q: If you could get one message out to the masses, what would it be?

A: “Be Good to Yourself” which I’ve stolen from Ed Larson from the Brighter Side Podcast but really… that’s what I’d say, I think. I think we need a little more of that in all of our lives. It’s really easy to get stuck in a rut of worrying about what we’re doing or not doing, but underneath all of that you’ve got to be good to yourself because if you’re not then it doesn’t really matter how much you’re doing because it probably won’t be effective. You’ve got to take care of yourself to be able to also take care of other people and projects. I might also be biased because I’ve fallen off taking care of myself recently and, guess what, I’m really feeling it! So I’m trying to incorporate a few more things into my day that I know help me to function at a better level (water, stretching, sleeping enough, all those things you really think are so basic but turns out they aren’t!) so that I can keep doing the work that I care about and know that I’m able to put something productive into that work.

Community Care through Food Security and Access!

The Community FREEdge: A Pilot Project 

This past summer the Kearsarge Food Hub put out some feelers in the community for a donation of a refrigerator. We wanted to experiment with having a community fridge on the porch here at the Sweet Beet, to stock with fresh local foods for neighbors to access any time. 

This idea was originally recommended to us by long time volunteer and food hub friend Kaylin. There has been a growing movement around the country to set up these sites, sometimes referred to as FREEdge’s - FREE fridge - for folks to grab what they need any time, no questions asked.

The FREEdge on the porch at Sweet Beet

Many people answered the call of donating a refrigerator, and we ended up getting one from our friends at Colby-Sawyer College. We reached out to our partner Laura at the Bradford Food Pantry to strategize how best to implement this new community resource given all her experience serving folks in town. She was so excited about the idea, having had a similar idea herself. The pantry is open on Wednesdays from 5:30-7:30, and though Laura and other volunteers commonly help folks access food outside those hours, there is a lot of room to grow in terms of increasing food availability.

We’ve been working closely with Laura and the Bradford Food Pantry for years, donating fresh fruits and vegetables sourced from local farms, and building and maintaining a small community garden on site at the pantry.

Laura remarks, “The Bradford food pantry has been working with Sweet Beets [the Kearsarge Food Hub] for several years to provide fresh fruit and vegetables to the residents of Bradford who are in need of a helping hand. As a non profit food pantry run mainly by donations, without the assistance of Sweet Beets we would not be able to provide healthy alternatives to these families. We depend monthly on their generous and kind donations.”

The FREEdge is very much an extension of our support to the pantry and their clients. To start, rather than broadcasting this service widely, Laura suggested that she connect directly with the families she serves to let them know about the FREEdge. Starting slow, we wanted to test the capacity of this resource and ensure it would help families right here in our own town, first and foremost. We also reached out to other groups in town like the local police station to let them know that there may be some activity on the porch, as folks are welcome to access the fridge any time they needed, 24/7.

Our role here at the hub is to stock the FREEdge regularly with locally sourced produce, meat and bread. Laura also comes by to stock from time to time. Together, we’ve made sure the FREEge is cleaned and stocked, and we send photos of what’s inside each week to Laura so she can pass if on to her clients.

Over these past couple months, we’ve noticed that this resource is absolutely being utilized. We’ve heard from Laura and folks stopping by that people are finding it incredibly helpful and supportive to be able to come by anytime and grab what they need.The next step is to build a winterized enclosure to keep the FREEdge through all the New Hampshire seasons!

We still consider this a pilot project and are learning what capacity this resource has to serve more folks in the Kearsarge area. While we do hope that it can grow to serve more neighbors, we are prioritizing our relationship with Laura and the Bradford Food Pantry to connect directly with local families experiencing food insecurity before we publish this resource more widely.

The Future of Food Security at the Kearsarge Food Hub

Jake, first KFH Farmer Apprentice and now Food Security Manager

As of October 2021, the Kearsarge Food Hub created a brand new position designed to take food access initiatives like this to the next level. Our new Food Security Manager, Jake, is responsible for ordering weekly from hyper-local farms to stock Sweet Beet Market, supplying local food pantries, and caring for the FREEdge. 

Jake was our first Farmer Apprentice, which was an immersive program into regenerative farming to feed the community. When that program ended, KFH created this Food Security Manager Position for Jake. We were lucky enough that he wanted to stick around and join the food hub team long term, and he’s been doing an amazing job! While we’ve been growing our food access initiative and donation program steadily over the past 6 years, we’ve never had a job specifically focusing on hyper-local ordering and food donations in this way. This represents beautiful, sustainable growth for our nonprofit efforts!

Another exciting program related to the FREEdge is the shared FEED (Food Expansion, education and distribution) Kearsarge initiative, of which Kearsarge Food Hub is a founding member.

FEED Kearsarge partners, and specifically food hub friend and community partner Andy Jeffrey, have recently taken on gleaning projects in the Kearsarge area this fall to rescue food from local fields. Folks have reached out with an abundance of produce that they simply cannot manage to harvest and Andy has led the way in mobilizing Kearsarge Neighborhood partners volunteers and Colby-Sawyer College students to get out here and harvest hundreds of pounds of food that then make their way to Kearsarge Food Hub for storage and distribution. This process is called gleaning - gathering leftover grain or produce after a harvest.

So far, 600 pounds of potatoes and 800 pounds of carrots have made their way to Jake, who then ensures their proper storage and distribution to food access sites including the FREEdge. 

There is a lot of impact emanating from these food security efforts and community partnerships. Our number one hope here at the Kearsarge Food Hub is not only to support small farms and get more fresh foods into local homes, but to show all neighbors that they are supported and cared for. That is the heart of community resilience.

Kiddos & Connections in the Garden!

2021 First Graders at their first visit to Sweet Beet Farm.

Whoa, we can’t believe it’s been six years since we started helping the Bradford First Graders with their Plants and Seeds science unit! They’ve been making the trek down to Sweet Beet Farm Stand every fall and spring to get their hands dirty and get inspired to eat, and maybe even grow their own, fresh veggies. In the winter, we visit them in class to further study seeds, and in the spring they harvest a big salad to serve to the rest of the school.

This year things are a little different because we have some new staff members helping to educate these kiddos in the garden. Farmer apprentices Cassie and Jake welcomed them to what we now refer to as the Baby Beet Farm, our downtown farm location at the old farm stand. Staff member Julie joined us, too, as she has a special interest in educating youngsters.

The program is blossoming with connections to not only the food growing in the ground, but Earth cycles and community partnerships that make our food possible!

But don’t just take our word for it…take a behind the scenes look in the garden below!

We absolutely adore our connections with students of all ages and we believe these connections are at the heart of community resilience.

And we have our monthly donors to thank for making programs like these possible!

Folks who give to our nonprofit each and every month offer solid ground from which we are able to grow our service to the community. Our monthly donors provide us with a predictable stream of revenue that allows us to plan everything from our cash flow to expansion of programs. 

Our sustainable growth relies on our monthly donors. Won’t you consider becoming a monthly donor today at the $5, $15 or $25 a month level? It’s quick and easy to do right here!

Thank you for tuning in, friends! We can’t do it without you.

Community Garden Spotlight: A New Space at River Valley Community College

In 2020, a group of community organizations, including the Kearsarge Food Hub, came together to address food insecurity and mental health concerns in the Kearsarge region of New Hampshire exacerbated by the pandemic and co-created the FEED (Food Expansion, Education, Distribution) Kearsarge initiative. Under this collaborative umbrella, we launched the Tray it Forward program to distribute seedling trays to families in need and community garden sites, followed by gardening education to help folks reclaim the knowledge of how to grow our own food and connect with nature and community through gardening.

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When Alice arrived in New Hampshire from Virginia, she admittedly didn’t know much about growing food. As a new AmeriCorps member at River Valley Community College (RVCC) assigned to focus on food security, she was put in charge of the college’s free food pantry and was determined to start a community garden on campus. 

“Learning how to grow food was a skill I really wanted to learn,” Alice said. “And I was happy to discover that plants naturally want to grow, too—it’s definitely not as complicated or precarious as I thought it would be!”

She is the main driver behind the school’s new raised beds, which were built this spring and supplied with free plants through FEED Kearsarge’s Tray it Forward program. The produce is collected by passers-by straight from the garden or harvested by Alice and placed in the food pantry fridge, free for whomever on campus needs it.

The new community garden at River Valley Community College in Claremont, NH (Photo Credit: Alice)

In order to encourage participation and bolster people’s confidence regarding just what to do with the fresh produce, Alice has been putting together healthy recipes and cooking tips that utilize both the fresh produce and the pantry’s available shelf-stable goods. 

“Large scale, industrial style agriculture is obviously horrible and not sustainable,” explains Alice. “There’s really no long-term future in the current food system in America as it stands, and I think it’s great that we are shifting away from a dependence on it and towards more local and community growers, even more so now after COVID. Food sovereignty is so powerful and brings me so much happiness to play a small part in!”

And Alice has big dreams for the space. Right now, it functions mainly as a victory garden, but future visions include a community gathering space that’s open to the broader Claremont community, featuring both communal and individual plots. A compost pile would “bring everything full circle,” she says. She also sees it functioning as a part of the school’s educational efforts, including science classes that could explore the world of healthy soil and nursing and health science students that could use the space to tap into the food-as-medicine movement.

Alice and the garden at RVCC were just one of the recipients of the more than 360 Tray it Forward trays that KFH and the other FEED Kearsarge partners distributed this spring. 

”As we pull out of the COVID crisis,” explains Hanna, KFH’s Creative Director of Community Engagement, “the FEED Kearsarge partners are still committed to advancing not only food security in our region, but community connections that build trust and resilience.” That’s food sovereignty!

Written by Julie Loosigian

Community Gardens: Growing More than Food

Community gardens—defined loosely as shared green spaces that are communally tended—seem to be popping up everywhere lately, including three new gardens right here in Bradford. But what exactly are they? And what do they have to do with the Kearsarge Food Hub?

A Brief History

Smithsonian Gardens describes the first community garden in the United States as an effort by the mayor of Detroit to combat hunger brought on by the economic recession of the 1890s. The vacant lot gardens, known as “[Mayor] Pingree’s Potato Patches,” came with seeds, tools, and growing instructions printed in three languages for the city’s largely Polish and German immigrants.

An 1896 photo of Mayor Pingree (fourth from the left) and others in “Pingree’s Potato Patches” (Accessed from https://communityofgardens.si.edu/exhibits/show/historycommunitygardens/vacantlot)

The success of Mayor Pingree’s program inspired other efforts around the country. One such effort was spearheaded by an early advocate of school gardens, Fannie Griscom Parsons, who in 1902 turned a desolate dumping-ground near NYC’s Central Park into orderly rows of plots called the “Children’s School Farm.” Unlike the efforts in Detroit, Parsons emphasized process over product; with little mention of what happened to the produce, the gardens were managed and tended by school children in order to have them develop values like cooperation, self-respect, and good citizenship. 

The program was hailed a great success, and Parsons went on to direct the newly-created Bureau of School Farms before becoming involved in the victory garden movement that emerged during World War I (1914-1918). Originally called “war gardens” or “liberty gardens,” President Wilson called on Americans to help ward off potential food shortages during the war by planting gardens wherever possible, and Americans took up the call. Such efforts were redoubled during World War II (1941-1945), and in 1943, 40% of America’s produce was grown in victory gardens. 

I wonder, though, if Smithsonian Gardens didn’t define community garden too narrowly in trying to identify the first one in the United States. 

I’d be remiss not to acknowledge the agricultural practices of this land’s Indigenous peoples, who have been present for millennia. Techniques and crops of course varied among Native nations, but the communal tending of crops seems likely the norm. According to Christina Gish Hill, an associate professor of anthropology at Iowa State University, one facet of the US government’s systematic removal of Indigenous peoples from their land was allotment policies, which “assigned small plots to nuclear families, further limiting Native Americans’ access to land and preventing them from using communal farming practices.” (Read that piece, “Regrowing Indigenous Agriculture Could Nourish People, Cultures and the Land,” here.)

Then there was the gardening practiced by enslaved African Americans in order to supplement their often meager and non-nutritious provisions. Charles Ball, a former enslaved man, describes in his 1853 book Slavery in the United States, what are often termed “slave gardens”; “the people are allowed to make patches, as they are called—that is gardens, in some remote and unprofitable part of the estate, generally in the woods, in which they plant corn, potatoes, pumpkins, melons, [etc.] for themselves” (p. 128). According to Ball, each family often had their own garden space; likely, such family units included extended family, and tending tasks were shared among the group.  

Common-sense tells us that the practice of growing food cooperatively in shared spaces far pre-dates the term community garden, and though the modes and outcomes have varied, a central through-line remains: these spaces help us nourish our connections with our community, with each other, and with the earth. 

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Many Shapes and Many Names

Common community garden models, which are often meshed and combined, are as follows.

• Plot-based community gardens are what usually come to mind when we think of community gardens. These gardens simply provide people with access to a plot of land. Tools and other resources are often shared, but plots are tended individually and produce is kept by the grower.

• At collective gardens, community members work together to tend one large garden, and growers share what they produce. Extra emphasis is usually placed on connection, skill-sharing, and community-building. A great local example of this type of gardening is GrowTeams, a program by ShiftMeals, in Vermont.

• Educational or teaching gardens are gardens at which the main purpose is education. These are common at schools, where growing food is secondary to learning, exploration, and experimentation.

• At victory gardens (also called donation gardens or giving gardens), the goal is to grow as much food as possible for those who need it. Whether the gardens are managed by one person or by a team of volunteers, the produce is donated to food banks or otherwise distributed to whomever needs it. These gardens not only increase local food security but they provide what can be rare at food banks—fresh, local produce straight from the ground.

• Help-yourself gardens and edible landscaping are two sides of the same garden-coin; the food grown in these spaces (garden plots, window boxes, fruit trees in parks, etc.) is available to anyone and everyone, food insecure or not. They are often situated in areas with heavy foot traffic and usually feature signs that inform passers-by of what is ready to harvest. Examples of this type of gardening include Edible Brattleboro and the Upper Valley Apple Corps.

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The new victory garden at Bradford’s food pantry, summer 2021 (Photo credit: Julie Loosigian)

The Gardens of the Food Hub

Victory gardens once again made their way to the forefront during the COVID-19 pandemic. Victory gardens (and community gardens in general) exist at the confluence of food sovereignty and security, learning, and community; they fit seamlessly with the mission of KFH, which is to reinvigorate our community within a restorative local food system through cultivating food sovereignty, growing engaged learners, and nurturing community. 

The timing was right and the movement was a perfect fit, so in the spring of 2020, KFH, together with the other members of the FEED (food expansion, education, and distribution) Kearsarge Partnership, helped bring the victory garden movement to Bradford. 

Through a program called the Victory Garden Revival, three new victory gardens in Bradford were constructed. These gardens were situated in key community areas, including at the food bank and the elementary school. The gardens were supplied with plants through another FEED Kearsarge program, Tray it Forward, through which the partners distribute free trays of seedlings to those in need and community gardens in the Kearsarge and surrounding area. 

The victory gardens in Bradford were established not only to help increase local food security, they have secondary goals, including to bolster community members’ ability to grow their own food. This dynamism is common in community gardens, where one space often serves more than one purpose, and structure, participants, terminology, designs, and sizes can vary greatly from garden to garden.

We’re still navigating how these gardens can best serve our community. True to our guiding values, we are always learning as we grow! We’re working closely with our partners to identify the needs of folks throughout the community, and co-creating unique programs to meet those needs. Stay tuned for updates on this ongoing work!

As a nonprofit organization, community supporters make this work possible. Please consider making a contribution today!

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Written by Julie Loosigian

Tray it Forward Update: In Meg's Garden

In 2020, a group of community organizations in the Kearsarge region of New Hampshire came together to address food insecurity and mental health concerns exacerbated by the pandemic and created the FEED (Food Expansion, Education, Distribution) Kearsarge initiative. Under this collaborative umbrella, we launched the Tray it Forward program to distribute seedling trays to families in need, followed by gardening education to help folks reclaim the knowledge of how to grow their own food and connect with nature and community through gardening.

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Warner resident Meg is a two-year Tray It Forward veteran.  Meg’s garden consists exclusively of containers, with some clever repurposing of large plastic bins included. She has moved frequently and has a collection of green storage tubs which she repurposed for her veggie garden by drilling holes in the bottom. With the extensive rains we have had this year, she’s considering drilling holes in the sides, too! As a bonus, Meg plans to put the lids on the containers and move them inside over the winter to extend her investment for next season.

Meg reports that her 2021 Tray It Forward gardening experience is much improved over 2020. Of course, she learned from last years’ experience, but Meg also did her homework over the winter with lots of container growing research, observing the suns’ pattern over her garden space, and realizing that protection from the wind was important where her containers are situated. Meg also took to heart the advice she was given when her tray of seedlings was delivered in May. “Container size matters and so does the quality of the soil. I was grateful to receive compost with this years’ tray and I decided to make my investment in soil,” shared Meg. She also said that the booklet from Professor Leon Malan and the Colby-Sawyer group that was provided with the seedlings was hugely helpful, as are the weekly newsletters that are emailed to her.

Based on her Tray It Forward container gardening experience, Meg has a few tips to pass along. She’s using torn old soft sheets to serve as ties for veggies that need to be staked. She purchased a bag of inexpensive plastic knives from a dollar store to use as plant markers.  Meg is also learning what nutrients plants need and is feeding her tomatoes and eggplants weekly. She’s using dried chicken manure that she purchased at the hardware store but cautions anyone about leaving that product overnight in your car! 

Meg’s research and care has certainly paid off for her second year of Tray It Forward. Her terraced container garden is a work of art that would be the envy of farmers and gardeners anywhere!  She plans to put what she’s learned into further improvements next year. Part of Meg’s research led her to follow Colette O'Neill at Bealtaine Cottage in Ireland on YouTube. Based on Colette’s advice, Meg plans to grow lettuce in hanging containers in 2022 that she will put along the fencing she uses as wind protection.  

As our visit with Meg was coming to a close, she noted that she hadn’t seen any monarch butterflies this summer while she was quoting Colette O’Neill, sharing, “When you plant with Mother Earth magical things happen.”  On queue, a monarch landed on a cone flower in Meg’s garden.

Written by friend and community all-star Dorothy Jeffrey

Thank you, Dorothy!

Growing Farmers: How the KFH Farmer Apprentice Program got started and why it matters

Part 3: Meet Cassie and Jake! 

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this blog series, we learned that the average age of a farmer in the US is about 57 years old, and small family farms are disappearing at an alarming rate as big farms get bigger and take over the industry. And we learned that this trend is hurting farmers, local economies, the environment, and our local food future.

So the question becomes, how do we break down barriers to farming and support young people getting into this critical profession, specifically into organic farming that actively cares for the land and local communities?

We have to create a new narrative, one that demonstrates how dynamic, fulfilling, and viable this livelihood can be. We have to reach young people with these new stories and, if at all possible, give them an immersive experience into what farming could be in this modern era.

This is exactly what the KFH Farmer Apprentice program is all about, and at the heart of it all, is Cassie and Jake.

Cassie and Jake eager to get started on their own slice of Sweet Beet Farm.

With Environmental Science degrees under their belts, Cassie and Jake graduated from Colby-Sawyer College with a fascination for farming. This interest was initially sparked in college, where they encountered farming in several ways through a long standing partnership between the college and us here at the Kearsarge Food Hub (KFH). 

Through field trips, classroom talks, volunteer opportunities, and summer internships at KFH, Cassie and Jake got a taste of farming and came to understand a little more about how local food moves through the community. When they graduated, they expressed wanting to dig even deeper into this field, and the seed of an idea for a Farmer Apprentice Program was planted.

This created the perfect opportunity for KFH to start doing something we’ve wanted to do since our inception - actually grow more farmers.

This is a dream that we share with our beloved community, including Dorothy and Andy Jeffrey who became part of the team that helped shepherd this new and exciting program into existence. Through collaborative efforts between KFH, The Jeffrey’s, Colby-Sawyer College, and Cassie and Jake themselves, the first ever Farmer Apprentice Program was born.

This program is uniquely designed to support potential new farmers with access to land, education, community, mentorship, technical assistance, business support, and access to markets, including our own Sweet Beet Market, in order to get real life experience and gain a true sense of what it means to be a modern farmer.

And one absolutely critical component of this program is that it is paid. Cassie and Jake are being compensated for a five month stint of running their operating their own slice of Sweet Beet Farm. They are also receiving up to 10 hours of direct mentorship each and every week from the KFH crew, including co-founder and Sweet Beet Farm manager Pierre Hahn, as well as CSC professor in Environmental Studies, Leon Malan. 

This mentorship does not, however, sacrifice one of the primary goals of the program, which is to foster autonomy for the apprentices and nurture their leadership skills, such as decisiveness, creative problem solving, and strategic thinking. 

Cassie and Jake will be the first to tell you from their experience that creative problem solving is the name of the game when it comes to farming, and they’ve been in the driver's seat of this experience from day one navigating through all sorts of interesting problems AND successes.

Putting new plastic on the high tunnel (background) and devising a new system for storing drip tape (foreground).

To support this program, we repurposed the old farm stand building and field, where the food hub first got started with Sweet Beet Farm Stand, into an educational center and learning farm. This ½ acre plot of land, which includes a field, a 30’ x 70’ high tunnel, and a 10’ x 20’ low tunnel, is the perfect size, with several diverse growing settings, to test out farming as a livelihood.

Cassie and Jake cleaned up the field, gathered and organized the equipment, dove into business and crop planning, and started planting seeds. They’ve been keeping journals to document the process, and it certainly has not all been smooth sailing. The problems they face on the farm are some of the richest sources for learning.

One major issue has been pests, squash beetles and cucumber beetles to be exact. To address the issue, Cassie and Jake started handpicking beetles and eggs and spraying with organic, low impact neem oil. When that didn’t quite do the trick, they were forced to spray pyganic, which is still an organic method, but just much more intense and can affect populations of the good bugs as well as the pests. Nevertheless, Cassie and Jake really had no choice if they were going to salvage their squash plants. Luckily, this method ultimately worked to help keep the pests at bay. 

Squash beetle, ugh!

According to Jake, at the beginning of July they “lost about 10 plants to these pests, and it has taken a lot of work to manage their population.” He goes on to explain that “consistent handpicking of eggs and beetles have shown us one of the reasons why organic food is so expensive. The amount of effort it takes to avoid using chemicals is really beginning to strike home with me.”

This is an incredibly important theme when it comes to organic food production - incentivizing organic practices and properly compensating farmers for their hard work is absolutely essential, and yet this can make the price of that food inaccessible to many neighbors. Learning how to close the affordability gap while supporting farmers with fair prices is a central pursuit of ours here at the Kearsarge Food Hub (and if we flip the issue on its head, rather than calling organic food expensive, we might say that conventional practices cut corners and externalize costs to produce falsely cheap food...this topic is worthy of its own three part blog series!) 

While on their farmer apprentice journey, Cassie and Jake have been active in helping Sweet Beet Farm become certified organic. As environmentalists, they’ve come to deeply understand how important regenerative farming practices are when it comes to building healthy soils to grow healthy foods, emulating nature as much as possible, properly stewarding resources,  and working in harmony with the surrounding landscape. Being immersed in the organic farming process has given them a deep appreciation for how much thought, care, and energy goes into intentional and sustainable agriculture.

Cassie plants peppers in the high tunnel after much preparation of the soil, including soil testing and adding appropriate organic amendments like compost.

And at the same time, they’ve been introduced to key tools that make many jobs on the farm a whole lot easier. Jake muses, “Using the transplanting tools such as the Jang seeder and the paper pot transplanted has been incredible! These forms of technology are truly revolutionary for this field (no pun intended).” 

Finding the right tools that save on time and labor, without sacrificing regenerative practices, is a big part of making a small organic farm viable. Another critical component is planning and strategy. From crop planning to budgeting to sending crops to market, there is a whole lot that goes on behind the scenes of a viable small scale market garden.

In fact, when asked what’s been the most helpful in terms of support from the food hub, Cassie and Jake both agree that getting a sense of the planning is a huge benefit to them, and it is something they might not have otherwise learned about if they would have gotten started on their own. 

Jake notes that “If it wasn’t for soil tests, amendment spreadsheets, and garden planning, it would be incredibly difficult to farm efficiently.” Cassie explains that she  “learned from France more about produce standards, wholesale prices, and how to fill out packing slips for deliveries.” 

Cassie, Jake, and Professor Malan setting things up on the farm early in the season.

It’s not just about throwing plants in the ground and hanging out outside. And it’s not even about laboring tirelessly from sun up to sun down. Farming is a rich, challenging, and fulfilling career full of opportunities to grow and flourish, not only for the plants but for the humans at the helm. 

As the first ever KFH Farmers Apprentices, Cassie and Jake will tell you that they haven’t “stopped learning since we began”. Here at the Kearsarge Food Hub, we are committed to cultivating, growing, and nourishing the next generation of farmers, so this feedback is music to our ears. We are learning so much, too.

You can help empower and equip the next generation of farmers by becoming a monthly donor to the Kearsarge Food Hub at any level. Sign on at the $10/month or higher level by August 1st and you could win a $100 gift card to Sweet Beet Market and the soon to open Café!

GROW WITH US! Become a monthly donor today (be sure to select the monthly option!) Your donation makes all the difference!

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Farmer Apprentice Videos

Watch all our videos on the Farmer Apprentice YouTube playlist!

Read Part 1 of this blog series: We need more farmers!

Read Part 2 of this blog series: Learning as we grow Sweet Beet Farm

Growing Farmers: How the KFH Farmer Apprentice Program got started and why it matters

PART 2: Learning as we grow on Sweet Beet Farm

Check out Part I of the Growing Farmers series to learn about why it’s so important to grow farmers!

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In the spring of 2015, some very new, bright eyed farmers started eagerly digging into the dirt. A field covered in grass, that used to be a farm many moons ago, now returning to that purpose with a handful of novices at the helm - the cofounders of the Kearsarge Food Hub and this initial pilot project, creating Sweet Beet Farm and Sweet Beet Farm Stand.

Year one on Sweet Beet Farm: Digging in the dirt -planting onions!

We dug gratefully, having been lent the land by a supportive community member and friend, a special place to learn how to grow our own food on Greenhouse Lane in Bradford, NH. We turned over the field with hand tools like a pickaxe and a shovel, as well as with the conventional tractor method, not yet having learned lower impact methods that help maintain more vibrant soil. Occasionally we dug up some old relics of the fields’ former lives - nails, pieces of tools, bits of glass bottles, and indistinct twists of metal.

We’d all touched upon farming in one way or another, having briefly worked on a farm, experimented through school internships, or perhaps from working in fine dining and taking particular interest in fresh, local ingredients. While our hearts were big and beaming with joy to be learning all we could about actually growing our own food, we had little to no clue about what we were doing.

Onion Farmers (but we grow other stuff too!)

And the onions. Ohhh the onions. Have you ever planted onions? You start by seeding them indoors, so they grow into little adolescents before you transplant them into the ground, though still quite tiny and wispy. About some time in late April, if you’re growing hundreds of onions and you’re planting them by hand (like we were), be sure to block out a couple weeks with a couple bodies to get the job done from start to finish.

That’s what we did on Sweet Beet Farm, and by the end of what felt like forever only planting onions, we took on a new identity: Onion Farmers (but we grow other stuff, too). 


And that’s how we did it for several years, until we discovered a remarkable tool in the spring of 2020 - the Paper Pot Transplanter. 

The paper pot transplanter is a simple, low impact tool that starts with seeding the onions (and other things) into a special paper rubric. Once they are big enough to transplant, the paper grid fits snuggly into the transplanter that then digs into the soil, methodically unfolds the paper grid, and plants the onions as you simply roll the machine down the field. A job that used to take two weeks now takes two hours, and you have 800 onions in the ground, with no gasoline or electricity used in the process.

Here’s the paper pot transplanter doing its thing!

It’s this kind of technology that we’ve been diligently hunting for over the past 6 years of growing Sweet Beet Farm from the ground up. As a program of the Kearsarge Food Hub, the mission of the farm is to explore and implement regenerative farming practices that care for the land while producing delicious, nutrient dense foods to help feed our community. 

Our influences on the farm range from local partners like Kearsarge Gore Farm, Greenhill Collective, and NOFA-NH, to strategic market gardeners like Jean-Martin Fortier, Ben Hartman, and Curtis Stone, to traditions and mindsets embodied by Indige nous cultures that actively revere and restore the natural world to balance while recognizing humans place within it.

We acknowledge that our work takes place on N’dakinna, which is the traditional ancestral homeland of the Abenaki, Pennacook and Wabanaki Peoples past and present. We acknowledge and honor with gratitude the land and waterways and the Alnobak (people) who have stewarded N’dakinna throughout the generations. The roots of this place are an everlasting reservoir of inspiration for us, and our relationship with the local Native community continues to grow.

Learning from these sources, we’ve gratefully implemented key systems like cover cropping and crop rotation to build and feed soils, utilizing low impact tools that help get the job done with less energy, labor, and waste, and generally exploring how to produce quality, organic foods that are ready for market.

And as we’ve been learning, testing, digesting, and refining our systems on Sweet Beet Farm, we’ve been experimenting with ways to include more people in this journey, believing that knowledge about growing food leads to not only food security, but food sovereignty.  

1st Graders help weed and feed the soils of our raised beds at Sweet Beet Farm’s original farm stand location.

Learning as we grow, the farm is an educational center for sharing and expanding our collective knowledge base around restorative agriculture. As such, we welcome students of all ages - from 1st grade to college level to lifelong learners - to feed their curiosity around where food comes from and how to grow it in harmony with Nature (rather than the extractive and destructive methods that unfortunately characterize much of the industrial food system that stocks the supermarkets).

And since the very beginning, a goal of ours has always been to not only grow food, but to grow farmers.

Over the past handful of years, we’ve been learning more and more about the tragic loss of small farms and how farmers are aging out of the profession with fewer and fewer people taking it on (as documented in Part I of this blog series). As a nonprofit organization working to strengthen the local food system, we knew we had to do something about this. Yet, it wasn’t until recently, this year in fact, that we felt like we had a solid foundation from which we could actually train new and beginning farmers (an entirely different ball game than simply welcoming people to come dig in the dirt with us).

With five years of enthusiastic trial and error running Sweet Beet Farm under our belts, the Kearsarge Food Hub crew finally felt equipped to pass down the knowledge gleaned from extensive research and development in the field onto aspiring farmers as they consider starting their own real life venture. 

In fact, we felt more than equipped - we approach it as a sacred duty to help a new generation of farmers step into this profession with the right knowhow to make it both viable and fulfilling. If we are to fulfill our mission of reinvigorating our community within a restorative local food system, then actively inspiring and equipping the next generation of farmers is a critical pursuit. 

And it’s not just about learning how to plant onions, either. It’s business development, budgeting, crop planning, and so much more that goes into developing and managing a successful small farm. In fact, when you look at the analysis of why we need more farmers in Part I of this series, a lack of business planning is a leading barrier reported by new and beginning farmers. This might be the most fundamental area to train our new farmers in, and it’s connected to the tools and methods you employ on the farm. As we’ve learned, certain tools and systems can not only support soil health and environmental vibrancy, but can also save you time and money, like the paper pot transplanter saving you dozens of hours planting onions. When developing a viable farm business, this is key. 

Taking all of this into account, it was quite serendipitous that in the Spring of 2021, two fantastic candidates - Cassie and Jake - had just graduated from Colby-Sawyer College and were thinking about trying farming as a career. They were ready to absorb all they could about running a small farm, and we were ready to teach them all that we’ve learned so far.

Cassie and Jake just starting out with the first ever KFH Farmer Apprentice Program!

Together, we were about to embark on something new, exciting, and, as far as we were all concerned, completely necessary: the first ever KFH Farmer Apprentice Program. 

YOU can support this important work with a donation to our nonprofit today! Help your gift go the extra mile - make it monthly!

Check out Part III of this series: A spotlight on Cassie and Jake and the KFH Farmer Apprentice Program!

Read Part I: We need more farmers!

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Resources for farmers:

• The Market Gardeners by Jean-Martin Fortier

• The Urban Farmer by Curtis Stone

• The Lean Farm by Ben Hartman

• Soul Fire Farm
  

Growing Farmers: How the KFH Farmer Apprentice Program got started and why it matters

PART 1: We need more farmers!

Did you know that one of the threats to continued access to fresh local food is the decreasing number of farmers? Out of necessity, folks are holding onto their farms longer and having trouble passing it on to the next generation. Young people and other potential farmers face enormous barriers to enter into the profession given the current agricultural landscape. Put simply: We desperately need more farmers. 

In the United States, the average age of a farmer is 57.5 years old according to the 2017 census. An aging farmer population is not limited to the US - it’s a global issue. “In the UK, the average age of a farmer is 59. In Kenya, it is 60. And in Japan, with the highest average age for a farmer, it is 67.” (BBC). 

And it’s not just farmers we are losing - farms are disappearing, too. “The nation lost more than 100,000 farms between 2011 and 2018; 12,000 of those between 2017 and 2018 alone” according to a Time article that explores how and why small American farmers are being wiped off the map as we trend toward bigger and fewer farms. 

This has enormous implications for our physical health, environmental wellbeing, and the economic viability of communities across the country. According to a MIC article aptly titled Why the US Desperately Needs More Millennial Farmers, “The decline of farming will lead to fewer food choices and an increased risk of a degradation of quality in the food supply system.” That makes perfect sense - less people growing food, and greater concentration of food production in the hands of a few large companies, leads to fewer options and a serious threat to quality and viability for local food systems. 

KFH friend Rowan has been volunteering on Sweet Beet Farm with his mom since he was a baby!

That being said, a revitalization of small farms can bring about measurable benefits. Small and particularly organic farms hold enormous potential for working in harmony with nature, building healthy soils, storing carbon, and keeping ecological systems like the carbon and water cycles in balance. “With more modern, entrepreneurial farmers and smaller farms spread out over regions, there is more food diversity as well as a lower risk for big agricultural companies to take over.” (MIC)

Furthermore, small organic farms can contribute to economic flourishing. A 2016 Penn State Study found that a “county’s poverty rate drops by 1.3 percentage points and the median household income increases $2,094 when the county is part of an ‘organic hotspot.’“ That is, more organic farms in and around a county is a powerful economic development tool that helps lift neighbors out of poverty and increases the median household income. That’s pretty remarkable! 

We know that smaller farms spread out over regions contribute to food diversity, environmental restoration, and economic prosperity. So the critical question becomes: how do we get more folks to get into farming?

To get more people into farming, we have to identify and address the barriers that prohibit new farmers from getting started. According to an article by Agriculture.com, contributing sources like the National Young Farmers Coalition 20217 survey, and anyone just getting started in the farming world, the top three barriers to entry for new and beginning farmers are:

1. Access to land; 

2. student loan debt and other financial obstacles; and 

3. a lack of business planning and supportive tools to help a new farming enterprise succeed. 

Beyond these top three barriers, there is another, more insidious challenge; to tackle a deep seeded stigma around farming, specifically the widely propagated story of an old white guy in overalls breaking his back in the field from sun up to sun down for little money.

We have to tell a different story about farming, a more accurate story of what farming looks like in the 21st century. Modern farming is an entrepreneurial endeavor filled with possibilities for creative and innovative use of technology, with high potential for economic viability, and enormous benefits for personal and community wellbeing.

Colby-Sawyer College Students help clean potatoes and onions - with smiles!

Telling new stories about farming has been a central goal of the Kearsarge Food Hub (KFH) since its inception in 2015. And with all of this mounting data of how we need more farmers, and how beneficial small organic farms are to communities in so many ways, there is definitely a need to reach young people with these stories as they determine what their life’s work will be.

Kearsarge Food Hub has been working alongside Colby-Sawyer College to introduce farming to college students over the past six years, providing hands-on experiences with local food that can change the way young people view and interact with agriculture.

In an effort to take this educational partnership to the next level, the food hub and the college set out to develop the first ever Farmer Apprenticeship program in the spring of 2021 to actually grow more farmers! 

Check out Part 2 of this blog series to take an in depth look at how the Kearsarge Food Hub became equipped to offer a Farmer Apprentice Program in the first place and what it means for our community!

YOU can help us grow more farmers by joining our Grow With Us Monthly giving program! It's quick and easy to right here: https://bit.ly/GivetoKFH Your donation of $5, $15 $25 dollars each month will provide sustainable funding to support this critical work here in New Hampshire.

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SOURCES:

• US Organic Hotspots and their benefit to local economies, 2016 Penn State Study

• 2017 Census - farmers and producers

• Census results are in - we need more farmers!, Youngfarmers.org

• Why the US desperately needs more farmers, Mic.com

• The aging crisis threatening farming, BBC

• Small American Farmers Debt Crisis Extinction, Time.com

• Barriers for Beginning Farmers, Agriculture.com

Tray it Forward: Food Sovereignty and Community Connections through Gardening

“I love to grow my own vegetables every year but it's so expensive to do so. When I have a garden I can eat what I can and all extra goes to friends and family! That's the fun in gardening - it’s the sharing later!! Thank you so much for doing this program!!”

Gardening is a beautiful way to not only grow food and contribute to your own food sovereignty, but to connect with nature and cultivate personal wellbeing on many levels.

And FEED Kearsarge partners believe it’s a powerful way to build community, too. 

FEED (Food Expansion, Education, Distribution) Kearsarge is a shared partnership that was co-created in response to COVID in the spring of 2020. The guiding mission is to increase food sovereignty and community connection in the Kearsarge and surrounding area of New Hampshire. Looking for a way to help, the partners decided that helping people grow their own gardens was an impactful way to join together and create resilience in a time of crisis. 

“Our neighbors 8 month old was just diagnosed with cancer 2 days ago. She will not have time to grow a garden and finances will be hard. I would like to provide as much fresh healthy produce as I can to support them in their time of need.”

The reality is, gardening can be expensive, time consuming, and challenging, especially at the beginning when you are just getting started. This makes it inaccessible to many neighbors who don’t have the time or money to get their gardening dreams to take root. With a little help at the outset, folks can get major returns on a small home garden in the form of beautiful and delicious produce!

That’s the impetus behind the Tray it Forward program. It’s designed to help more community members, specifically neighbors in need, start home gardens with the help of donated seedlings and supplies, with ongoing outreach and educational support.

“I participated last year and provided produce and herbs bouquets on a weekly basis to 9 families in my neighborhood.”

Tray it Forward is a unique program created by FEED Kearsarge Partners where community-supported seedling trays (in a pay it forward fashion) grown on Spring Ledge Farm make their way into the community, along with supplies like compost and an informational gardening guide to make the growing season more successful. 

“Thank you so much for offering this again. Last year I grew wonderful veggies and herbs in containers and sent up my gratitude with every delicious bite! Please know that you provide a comforting presence to all of us in need of that extra layer of kindness and dependability that good neighbors are known for.”

Volunteers help deliver trays to families in need on Tray Delivery Day, May 26th 2021.

In the spring of 2021, the second annual Tray it Forward program produced 375 seedling trays containing 7,824 plants that made their way to families in need and community garden sites in 12+ local towns with the help of over 50 volunteers. There was a large garden tray for a backyard garden and a small tray option for folks with more limited space.

And it's more than just numbers. It's real impact.

“I had so much success last year! My son loved gardening with me and eating all of the fresh produce we harvested.”

“We are planting this for our local food shelf which my husband runs. Thanks so much!”

“Last years tray was Amazing, best success with a garden to date!”


“So excited! I did this last year and had so many veggies!”

“This is WONDERFUL!!”

In the wake of COVID, we've all been searching for ways to build community resilience. According to Kearsarge Food Hub board chair Leon Malan, community resilience can look like:

"…a local farm using their time, resources and efforts to plant over 300 trays of vegetable seedlings. It is a food hub using their resources to organize and promote the event. It is a neighborhood organization using volunteers to empower people. It is dozens of committed individuals volunteering their time to bag compost, deliver trays of seedlings, organize communication materials and asking “how can I help.” It is a coalition of community organizations – hospitals, food pantries, colleges, churches, food markets…… all committing their resources to solve a local issue (food sovereignty in this case).” 

That is what FEED Kearsarge is all about.

Thank you to everyone who joined together for this worthy cause of generating connection, excitement, and food through home and community gardens. Special thanks to the community members that sponsored the trays with their donations, to Vermont Compost for supplying the compost, and the Contoocook Carry Community Fund for donating 25 large containers to help neighbors test out growing on their porch.

It’s the small moments of seeing each other and helping one another add up to make a big impact. This is how we build trust, and trust is what makes a community truly resilient.

We look forward to following up with the folks who received this year’s trays, hearing their stories, and sharing them with you. Stay tuned! 

Taking Climate Action through Food

Climate change and environmental degradation have been prevalent topics of discussion throughout the course of many of our lives. Older generations have lived to see seasonal weather patterns become exponentially less predictable over the years, in addition to experiencing warmer winters, and storms of unprecedented magnitude. Younger generations now have discussions of the environment and climate change worked into school curriculums. 

Now, in 2021, people are crossing generational and geographical boundaries to talk about the changing world we live in, what the future will look like, and what we can come together to achieve. 

The discussions around climate change can be overwhelming for many people, simply due to the scope of the challenge we face. And one thing is for sure - large corporations and governmental entities have a major role to play in addressing and remedying climate change.  Most of us do not have a direct line with which to change corporate or governmental policy, which contributes to that feeling of frustrated overwhelmingness. There are certainly movements and organizations working to pressure these entities to change, and while joining and supporting them is an option, there are also ways to take action in small and big ways in our everyday lives.

There are things we can do to have an impact on our immediate environment. We here at the Kearsarge Food Hub believe in the power of community, and wanted to take some time to remind you of the power you have to make a difference, both within this community or others you may be a part of. Supporting and investing in local supply chains is a critical way to claim this power and reinforce systems that are in line with our values when it comes to not only mitigating climate change, but actively caring for and living in harmony with this beautiful and dynamic planet we call home. 

Setting the Scene: 

In order to know how we have the power to start shifting the culture around food production and climate change in our own communities, it is important to understand the connection that the food system has to climate!

In an 2019 article that kicked off their roundtable on food, agriculture, and climate change, Civil Eats quoted John Foley (the executive director of Project Drawdown) saying, “the food and agriculture system altogether is about 24 percent, we think, of our total emissions of greenhouse gases.” That is a mind boggling number! But when you start to break down the components that add up to that number, it starts to make more sense. He goes on to comment that the three main contributors to that percentage accumulation are deforestation, methane emissions (such as those from farming cattle), and nitrous oxide from fertilizers. 

Agriculture accounts for over 70-80% of tropical deforestation for products like beef, soy, and palm oil (ourworldindata.org). Chemical fertilizers and pesticides, monocrops, and heavy machinery are destroying topsoil at an alarming rate - if we continue to degrade the soil at the rate we are now, the world could run out of topsoil in about 60 years, according to Maria-Helena Semedo of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization. Furthermore, in the United States we waste between 30- 40%% of the food that flows through the supply chain (USDA), which most often ends up in landfills and contributes to that 24% of greenhouse gas emissions. And these figures don’t even take into account the direct cost on human health and social justice.

What this does tell us is business as usual in agriculture is a leading cause of climate change and environmental degradation. And if 40% of the food grown in that system is thrown away while 1 and 6 children in the US are food insecure (feedingamerica.org), then not only are these systems highly destructive, but wildly ineffective. 

Like many other organizations and individuals invested in environmental well being, Kearsarge Food Hub is not willing to sit back and accept business as usual in the current industrial agricultural system. This system is toxic and extractive, and is actively destroying ecological health, human wellbeing, social justice, and our collective present and future. There is not one problem to be addressed but a system of complex problems that have common roots in how we grow, eat and share food. And while pressure must be put on the entities that continue to drive industrial agriculture forward in order to make meaningful change at a large scale, we must also simultaneously create a local food system based on a different set of values.

Local food is not a panacea for all the ills of the modern world, and not even for the industrial food system. What a regenerative local food system does is create an alternative - an opportunity for folks to divest from the industrial food system and put resources into local systems that are capable of greater transparency, nimbleness, equity, and innovation. And the idea of a regenerative food system is not a new idea -- indigenous foodways in North America historically and contemporarily have prioritized a reciprocal relationship with the land, and we are grateful to the work those communities have done and continue to do in the fight against the harmful industrial agricultural methods. We want to invite you along with us in honoring that work, by doing what we can in our communities. 

Your Food, Your Power: 

When you have a strong and local line to the farms where your food comes from, there is more transparency available surrounding how that food was grown or raised. If you know your farmers, you can see their practices and whether or not they are in alignment with your values.

To circle back to the emissions from the industrial agricultural system, investing in small scale local meat truly makes a difference. This is why we really appreciate the farmers raising meat throughout our state, and prioritize their products in Sweet Beet Market. Not only are animals raised in environments where their wellbeing is prioritized, smaller scale farming leads to fewer harmful emissions and better waste integration. Additionally, when those smaller farms are able to rotate the pastures on which they graze their animals, they help maintain environmental wellbeing through soil health!

Speaking of soil health, here at KFH we prioritize caring for the soil on our own Sweet Beet Farm, where we are learning how to build and nurture soil with regenerative farming practices that we are gratefully learning from many valued teachers and traditions. Crop rotation, cover crops, and organic inputs contribute to vibrant, living soil, which not only helps sequester carbon and cultivate healthy microbiomes, but also produces some darn tasty and nutritious food!

Making connections with local organizations working to promote organic agriculture and sustainability is also key when it comes to creating a network of sustainability, such as the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New Hampshire, The New Hampshire Food Alliance,  local conservation districts,  the UNH Cooperative Extension and the Sustainability Institute. These organizations need support in order to continue their work helping farmers learn about, developing, and maintaining the practices that create meaningful environmental change through agriculture.

To complete the circle of learning and sharing, we are grateful to be in a position where we can bring students, interns, and volunteers into this work and spread education. After all, we are all just learning as we grow! Sharing the knowledge and information is a bedrock of resilience and collective climate action. While we discuss these efforts to cultivate soil health, it is imperative that we talk about how Native communities have done this all along, which provides critical inspiration for what’s possible when it comes to living in harmony with the land. 

All that being said here are some things that you can directly get involved with on a local level here in the Kearsarge area that help to push for a healthier world! 

Supporting local markets like our own Sweet Beet Market and our friends at Warner Public Market is a great option. The model for these markets is based on taking the time to source from many valued and trusted local producers, and maintaining the story of the food as it makes its way to your dinner table. Furthermore, these places take extra care to make use of the food that flows through the community, donating excess produce or otherwise taking the time to make use of it to reduce or even eliminate food waste. 

Getting out to local farmers markets is another way you can both get good, local produce and the opportunity to talk to farmers about what they are doing on their farms! Here’s a great map created by the UNH Cooperative Extension where you can find farms and farmers market locations throughout the state.

CSAs, or Community supported agriculture are another way to regularly get wonderful farm fresh goodies while also providing farmers with a reliable income to keep their farms thriving and putting those important practices to work. Our friends a Local Harvest CSA, Fresh Start Farms, Brookford Farm , and Terra Organics offer CSA options in our area - just to name a few! NH Community Seafood offers local fish shares from the NH coast - supporting sustainability in our oceans is a whole blog post of its own! 

It is undeniable that there are large systemic changes that need to be made in order to address the climate disaster that our world is facing. However, there are things that our community can do locally to help create a paradigm shift in climate justice while we also push for bigger structural shifts. Building a local food system ultimately means creating more control. It means having a chance at true food sovereignty, where every voice in the community can come together to collectively decide how to grow, eat, and share food based on a set of common values. If we value a clean and vibrant planet, then taking action through food is a critical place to start. 

Click here to donate to the Kearsarge Food Hub. Our donors make this work possible. Thank you!

Written by Cameron Huftalen
Edited by Hanna Flanders

What is Food Sovereignty?

Here at the Kearsarge Food Hub, our mission is to reinvigorate our community within a restorative local food system through cultivating food sovereignty, growing engaged learners, and nurturing community. This mission is a new iteration of what we’ve been working toward over the past five years, with the notable addition of the term food sovereignty.

Amidst the wave of learning and unlearning that is currently sweeping our society, we have come to understand that the term food insecurity - a term we often use to describe the state of not knowing from where or when your next meal is coming - is inadequate. While we certainly do wish to contribute to food security for all members of our community, there is a deeper layer to work on, namely to empower each and every person to have control over their food, and the systems that cultivate it. 

An exploration into food sovereignty is also an exploration into racial justice. In the conventional food system, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities have been systematically denied the right to design and carry out their food systems in their own interests, while being disproportionately burdened with the labors of the food system at large.

We have a lot to learn in the realm of food sovereignty, and there are many folks and organizations who have been steeped in this work whom we turn to for leadership. In an effort to bring our community along this learning journey, we thought we would take this opportunity to introduce food sovereignty, if this idea is new to you, and highlight the voices that are leading this work. 

What is Food Sovereignty?

“Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts the aspirations and needs of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations.” 

-- Declaration of Nyéléni, the first global forum on food sovereignty, Mali, 2007.

There is an incredible inequity in the way that BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) communities have labored and been exploited in creating and sustaining the food system, and the success and profitability that White owners of agricultural corporations experience. Leah Penniman, author of Farming While Black and co-founder of Soul Fire Farm - a BIPOC-centered community farm committed to ending racism and injustice in the food system- comments in an interview with Zora, that “we can’t actually talk about farming and food without race. Farmers, as in landowning farm managers, are the Whitest profession in the United States, and being a farmworker is the Brownest profession in the United States.”

There is deeply traumatic history of genocide and displacement of Indigenous communities, suppression and eradication of traditional knowledge and cultural practices, and enslavement of Black people for forced agricultural labor that speak to this inequity. Yet this isn’t just a thing of the past. The current agro-industrial system relies on the exploited labor of people of color, land access inequities, and wealth disparities that favor White-owned ventures. 

Despite the foundational role that BIPOC have played and continue to play in the functioning of such a large system, these communities reap few benefits and face a disproportionate amount of poverty. Years of inequitable labor, governmental land grabs, gentrification, oppression of cultural heritage, mass incarceration, and other prongs of systemic racism have prevented BIPOC communities from access to healthy and culturally appropriate food. As a product of colonization, BIPOC have systematically been prevented from gaining the economic and physical resources and autonomy necessary to cultivate food and foodways that are in line with their cultural heritage and health and healing for their communities.

This is where Food Sovereignty and organizations working toward it come into play.

Food sovereignty represents control and consensus, where a community exercises its right to have agency over their own food systems. This opens the door to a revival of traditional food ways and to engage in a collective healing, where the voices of those who have historically been oppressed are able to rise to the surface and advocate for culturally appropriate food and food systems.  Food sovereignty is a way for communities to heal from generational trauma, revitalize cultural heritage that has been suppressed through centuries of white supremacy, and gain economic self-determination that they have historically been denied. 

Who is currently working toward food sovereignty and how you can support them: 

We believe every community should have a clear pathway to food sovereignty. Digging deeper into this work has rightfully prompted a lot of discussion within our organization about systemic inequities, both in our community and beyond. As a part of this we are stepping into the responsibility of recognizing whose voice isn’t currently represented in our work, and examining how we can better serve all members of the community. 

To be honest, our journey represents that of many White-operated businesses and organizations who are beginning to work toward addressing these issues. While KFH is new to approaching the work on an intentional, organizational level, there are many who have and continue to lead the conversation. As part of engaging in this work to create more equitable food systems, it is imperative we uplift their work and recognize how we benefit from their leadership. 

The Somali Bantu Community Association in Maine 

Since 2005 The Somali Bantu Community Association’s mission has been “to provide vital transitional services, advocacy, and programming that empowers members of the refugee community to uphold cultural identity and thrive in their new life here in Lewiston, Maine.” -- Somali Bantu Community Association

Liberation Farms, a community farming program of the SBCA, exists with the goal of providing “new American families struggling with food insecurity with the tools and resources to grow healthy, culturally-appropriate foods for themselves and their community. This investment in growing nourishes body and soul as farmers ground into familiar traditions and meaningfully utilize their agricultural roots as they build new homes here in Maine.”  --SBCA webpage

Over the past summer, the SBCA raised the necessary funds to secure farmland in Maine. “The Agrarian Commons holds land in perpetuity, protected against future development, and conveys equitable, renewable leases to farmers and communities for 99+ renewable years.” This was a massive step toward food sovereignty, however the work continues and the members of the SBCA continue to work tirelessly toward their goals. You can read more about the SBCA and Liberation Farms here on their website. 

The Susu Healing Collective in Brattleboro Vermont: 

“The SUSU Healing Collective's mission is to offer an affirming space for people to practice community reciprocity; The act of giving from a place of abundance and receiving  from a place of deep love and reverence while learning how to engage in community practices that dismantle systems of oppression and build systems of health, healing, wellness, and magic. The SUSU centers the voices, healing, and experiences of Black, Indigenous, People of Color and is committed to creating safer spaces for people to release trauma patterns of white supremacy, oppression, colonization, and westernized disconnection.” -- this and more can be found on the Susu Healing Collective website. 

Much like the SBCA, the incredible work of those at and in community with the SUSU Healing Collective’s has resulted in tangible successes. This past year they raised $20k to purchase CSA shares for 26 for BIPOC families in Brattleboro, and they look forward to continuing the work toward liberation in Vermont with goals of purchasing land to be held in perpetuity for the BIPOC community of Vermont. They continue to work toward their goal of “offering affirming spaces for Black, Indigenous, People of Color to thrive and experience safety while healing from the intergenerational trauma of systemic oppression” and build a multiracial commUNITY with sustainable relationships founded on reciprocity (read more about their mission and work here).  Part of this healing process would be the creation of the SUSU commUNITY Farm, a Black and Indigenous stewarded farm in Southern Vermont. You can learn more about the SUSU Healing Collective’s work, mission, and future goals toward food sovereignty by following this link to their new fundraising page where they can now accept tax deductible donations to aid them in their work. 

Fresh Start Farms in Manchester, New Hampshire: 

Fresh Start Farms is a branch of the Organization of Refugee and Immigrant Success (ORIS), headquartered in Manchester, New Hampshire. ORIS is a nonprofit with the mission to “aid in the resettlement of refugees and immigrants in New Hampshire by providing assistance, training, resources, and opportunities that promote self-sufficiency.” (Mission Statement on ORIS webpage). Fresh Start Farms contributes to that mission with a goal of promoting land tenure and equity for New American farmers, wherein immigrant and refugee farmers can provide culturally appropriate foods for their communities as well as economically support themselves. 

Kearsarge Food Hub is partnering with Fresh Start Farms to aggregate goods on their behalf and build a collaborative NH Food Hub network, alongside other statewide partners. 

Food Sovereignty in Our Community

All of the organizations mentioned in the above section have been working tirelessly toward food sovereignty in their communities. We are in a position to learn from their work and intentionally incorporate what we have learned into our organization going forward while making sure to credit, support, and repay the folks who live this work. As we go forward we want to continue uplifting the voices of those people and organizations while also working to address issues of food sovereignty in our community, through the work we do and networks we have.

This means doing things like redesigning our mission statement to promote food sovereignty over food security. It also means connecting with our community to promote education and discussion around decolonizing efforts like food security, like we hope to do with this post and an upcoming screening of the film Gather (a documentary about the growing movement among indigenous communities to reclaim their spiritual, cultural, and political identities through food sovereignty which you can register for right here!). 

This conversation is only the beginning.  We have work that we will continue to do, and much more to learn. However, what we hope this post has done is provide an avenue for you to learn about food sovereignty if you were previously unfamiliar, and showcase organizations that have been committed to this work in our community. We strive to join them in this work, and hope that you will likewise join us as we continue to work toward food sovereignty in the Kearsarge area. 

Written by Cameron Huftalen

Edited by Hanna Flanders

Taking Care in 2021

Editor’s Note: We wanted to offer this blog post to our community as a tool for managing life as we know it in this day and age, because things are so particularly difficult for so many of us right now. We ourselves here at KFH are diving deep into this notion of taking care, acknowledging the importance of prioritizing self care, because all of us are worthy of care and also because we wish to extend care to our families and communities. In writing this piece, so much came up about the intricacies of what taking care means. It brought up the question, what is wellness and who gets to define it? To assert that a certain kind of wellness applies to all people means falling into a trap of presuming that others share your exact needs, preferences, and capabilities. It is exactly this kind of oppressive attitude that social justice efforts are working to shine a light on and ultimately eliminate. And so, dear community, please do enjoy these thoughts on taking care from us here at KFH. Know that we are in a process of learning and unlearning, like all of us. And please, if you feel moved, offer your thoughts in the comments below so we may deepen and broaden the conversation around wellness and what it means to each of us as fully unique individuals. 

If 2020 taught us anything, it’s that uncertainty is the new normal. 

In addition to the hardships presented by COVID, the world as we know it is going through some hard and essential reckonings. As Charles Eisenstien puts it, we are in “the space between stories”. The old order is no longer acceptable. New stories are being written on many levels. One story in particular - one of interbeing and interconnection - is emerging to replace our false narrative of separation (from ourselves, from each other, from the natural world). We are living through a paradigm shift.

This is a very special, and indeed very challenging, time to be alive. Uncertainty and unrest is sure to continue as long as we are in this essential phase of shedding old narratives to grow into who we are meant to be. 

As hard as it is, it’s imperative that we lean into this process. We do ourselves, and our communities, a tremendous benefit to learn how to feel it all and continue to show up, even (especially) when it’s uncomfortable, hard, and unknown. 

To be able to do this, we must build our capacity to manage the intensity of our lives, of this lifetime in particular, and face the unknown with courage and resilience. As Dolly Parton puts it, “We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails.” We simply must take care of ourselves if we are to navigate these stormy seas. 

This is where self care comes into play. It’s a hot topic right now, but it’s not a fleeting trend. There are some really helpful and enduring elements here to consider.

Self care is the practice of taking action to preserve or improve one's own health by one’s own standards, not society’s. It’s not passive or fixed. It’s a verb, and it exists on a continuum that we each get to define for ourselves.Through practice, we can each come to more fully understand our own unique definition of health, sharpening the tools and honing the methods that contribute most to our own wellness. 

When misappropriated, self care becomes indulgent. When honest and intentional, it is restorative and encompasses the whole being: mind, body, and soul.

Self care becomes radical when you prioritize this practice over all else and adhere to it with unapologetic determination. 

Radical self care means taking our worth and wellness into our own hands, which are constantly being sold to us in the form of productivity standards, endless consumption, magic pills, diet protocols, and the list goes on and on. We are all affected by this constant barrage. When we take control of our own self care, then we aren’t profitable, and we aren’t living in constant fear that our fundamental wellness can be taken away. And that is a very radical act, indeed. 

It’s important to note that radical self care as a movement has origins in Black Activism, having deep roots in liberation and resistance in marginalized communities. Put best by the late activist Audre Lorde “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” In this sense, self care is correlated with survival in a society that routinely denies BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) communities basic services and care. Waking up to and actively addressing this inequity is indeed one of the most monumental tasks of our time.

Radical self care has another dimension, too, based in getting back to the basics. The meaning of radical for many centuries was related to its origins radicalis meaning "root.” Instead of being something extreme, radical referred to getting to the root of the problem. So in that sense, radical self care is very much about building a solid foundation of wellness, on your own terms, from the ground up. 

While we all have our own unique needs, there are at least 10 fundamental elements of self care that benefit many human beings:

1. Breathe: Our breath is our home. We can always come back to it to reground, connect, and refresh. Deep, cleansing belly breaths, breathing exercises, listening to our breath - is good for many people. 
   

2. Sleep: It’s the ultimate mystery and still completely irreplaceable. Quality sleep improves literally everything in our lives. 
   

3. Be nice to yourself: Think about how you would address others - coworkers, children, family, friends - when you encourage them and support them when they’re having a hard time. Now turn that onto yourself. Now give yourself a hug and say “I love you, self!”
   

4. Eat clean and nourishing foods: Touch your food, taste it, smell it, cook with it, learn about where it came from and who grew it. Share it with your friends and family (safely). This kind of connection nourishes at once our health and sense of place.
   

5. Move your body: Our bodies do so much for us and hold more than we know. Intentional movement every day goes a long way to help move through feelings, process experiences, and exercise our breath, organs, and muscles! So many things qualify as movement - chair dancing, walking, lifting weights, yoga, furiously cleaning your whole house - take your pick.
   

6. Feel it all: There is more evidence mounting to prove what ancient wisdom traditions and our intuition already knows - the only way to truly process our feelings is to move directly through them at your own pace. If this means canceling plans or changing things up sometimes, that’s ok. Let’s make this a normal and healthy thing to do. This also might mean that we need a guide, or many guides, to help us as we move through hard things within ourselves. 
   

7. Get outside: Connect to Nature, feel the sun on your face, breathe in fresh air. Feeling the healing power of nature reminds us of our connection within the greater scheme, it reminds us of our collective interbeing.
   

8. Drink Water: We are 60 percent water and our blood is 90 percent water. Water literally is life (deepest gratitude for Indigenous Wisdom that is helping to expound this important fact). Drinking enough water leads to more energy, clear headedness, better digestion, and so much more. In a spiritual sense, water has memory and it has a lot to teach us.
   

9. Connect with others: When we are feeling down, it’s easy to isolate. And yet, our relationships are a significant source of vitality and happiness. This is another element of wellness known to us intuitively and now being proven through science. It’s harder these days, but we have tools to stay connected to friends, family and community. Call someone up, play cards via zoom, go for a walk with a friend. Our relationships are the heart of our wellbeing.
   

10. Set boundaries: The reality of our daily lives is we only have so much time and energy to give. If we take inventory on our lives, responsibilities, relationships, etc, we can prioritize those more important - and learn to say no to the rest (without guilt!).

Of course, to have a chance at focusing on these fundamentals, slowing down is absolutely essential in our face paced modern world. The disruptions that arose with the COVID pandemic have caused unconscionable harm, and there are also valuable lessons learned. The value of slowing down and generally doing less is perhaps one of the most profound among them that some of us have been privileged enough to be able to learn. 

When things are in flux and largely uncertain, it can feel unsettling in many ways AND it can also be a profoundly hopeful time. It means things can change for the better. If we can learn to weather the storm, we can be available to help co-create a world that upholds our deepest, truest values. 

To engage in radical self care means to embrace our own humanity. It means affirming our basic needs by actively prioritizing them, allowing the practice to bring us back to our inherent wholeness. In this place of wholeness, we can find so much latitude and strength. We can thrive amongst the uncertainty. We can show up with our fullest potential to the work and the joy, the breakdowns and the breakthroughs. 

For those of you who want to save the world, we see you. We are you. And the truth is, it starts with each of us committing to saving ourselves.

Stay safe and be well, friends.

Here are a few resources and upcoming events to help us in our journey of Radical Self Care.

Connection 

• Shadows Fall North: A virtual screening of a documentary looking at Black History in New Hampshire, followed by a discussion. The wounds of racism must be tended to by all of us, and it has a particular effect on the food system. Please consider joining us and food system partners for this important event. 

• NOFA-NH Winter Conference: Connect and learn with the organic farming and gardening community in New Hampshire. 
  

Movement

• 90 day challenge: sign up and follow along with the NH Moves 90 Day Winter challenge. More your body, however you like to, for 90 
  

Nourishment

• Find farm fresh, seasonal, and clean foods at Sweet Beet Market. Now open for online shopping & safe, curbside pickup. 

• Purchase a CSA share from a local farm - pay now and reap the benefits come the summer months! It’s an investment in small farms and your future self. Learn more about NH farms.

This piece was written by Hanna Flanders.

Developing a Food Hub Network In New Hampshire

We know that to work toward greater food and farm security for the Kearsarge area, we must work in partnership with statewide and regional food system efforts. 

As 2019 came to a close, we wrapped up a two year research project with the USDA Local Food Promotion Program where we were conducting a needs and opportunities assessment for local food distribution in our area. Through that research, we came up with four recommendations to move toward greater distribution capacity and therefore food security. One of those recommendations was to establish a statewide food hub network to continue learning, sharing, and strengthening partnerships across organizations in New Hampshire (and one in Vermont - looking at you, Food Connects!)

Jessica Gorhan became the project leader for phase two of this research, which is being carried out through a USDA Specialty Crop Block Grant. She is doing a tremendous job exploring how we can harness the power of collaboration. The timing could not be better with all that is going on in the world.

Jessica writes:

One night, a couple of days into the pandemic stay at home orders, after listening to the news about the potential collapse of our food system I had a huge idea. COVID-19 was showing the world what many of us who work in the food system already knew, there are huge inequities, inefficiencies, and flaws. As a food systems consultant that specializes in developing networks and collective impact strategies, I immediately started drawing network charts of how we could restructure our food distribution system from many different channels and strengthen our local food supply chain.

The pandemic has provided a key opportunity to disrupt the current food system and allow for change and improvements.  Accomplishing this would mean local food would be more affordable, it would support more farmers, and local food would be accessible in retail environments for everyone. The next day I started to reach out to colleagues about this idea and we started dreaming about what our food system could be. Over the weeks to follow, just tossing the idea out to other colleagues we formed the Food Distribution Dreamers group.

Around the same time these conversations started I saw an ad from Kearsarge Food Hub and NH Food Alliance looking for a Project Manager to Develop a NH Food Hub Network. I was over the moon excited about the opportunity and it seemed so serendipitous! I immediately applied and was hired for the opportunity. My recent experience with co-founding a network and collective impact organization, Greater Nashua Food Council, and a recent consultant project I completed analyzing and mapping out Delaware’s food system, made me a great fit for the job. I was honored and thrilled to have the opportunity to work with Kearsarge Food Hub, NH Food Alliance, Belknap Food Shed, Fresh Start Farms, Food Connects, and Three River Farmers Alliance through a USDA Specialty Crop Block Grant won by Kearsarge Food Hub, to create a NH Food Hub Network.

The key objectives are to:

- Complete a SWOT analysis
- Conduct a logistical analysis of product movement
- Facilitate a network development retreat
- Develop an implementation plan.

We have completed the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis and found the five participating food hubs have very similar SWOTs. Through the initial logistical analysis, we have already identified some key opportunities for shared distribution.

The spike in local food sales through the food hubs has already created natural opportunities for the hubs to buy and sell from each other.  These opportunities have showed the importance of local food hubs and producers coming together to serve the community in a time of need and keep people safe.

Four out of the five hubs quickly shifted their sales models to offer curbside pickup and delivery to customers. The other hub ramped up it’s relationships with local food networks along the east coast, Eastern Food Hub Collaborative, to meet the increased demand in local food the other hubs were experiencing. This teamwork has led to the hubs successfully making sure NH community members have the food they need. 

The Food Distribution Dreamers Team continues to advise the work we are accomplishing through the NH Food Hub Network project. From this advice we are talking with small and medium size distributors to find out how we can build relationships and do business to increase the sales of local food to other institutions, wholesalers, and retailers. Local food supports our local economy and creates equitable work environments and equitable access to fresh, local, healthy food. These are things that I am passionate about, which is why I feel so blessed to be working with these teams on this project!

Thank you for your hard work and dedication strengthening local food networks, Jessica!

The Power of Local Food Systems

By Cameron Huftalen

As summer memories fade and fall shines bright outside our windows, we reflect on last August’s NH Eats Local. The Kearsarge Food Hub, New Hampshire Food Alliance, and many other organizations spent the month championing the wonderful web of local food that New Hampshire has to offer. Over the course of the month we heard story after moving story about local farms and organizations all working to provide quality products to their communities. For example, we heard from Jake Gehrung at the NH Food Alliance about the struggles that small fishing operations in the state face, and the hope for change that can come from building a cooperative young coalition of fishers invested in revitalizing the industry. In the same spirit, we at the Kearsarge Food Hub take time each week in our newsletter (Sweet Beet Weekly - sign up!) to highlight what our market partners are up to, to keep our communities strong and healthy. 

In past newsletters, we have featured local farms like Greenhill Farm and Kearsarge Gore Farm. Greenhill Collective Farm is a small, family run farm just down the street from us in Sutton, NH that consistently provides healthy and lovely produce for the community and grows with an ethos of regenerative agriculture. Kearsarge Gore Farm is a staple local provider in Warner. They not only keep the community fed with wonderful produce and sweets like maple syrup but are also responsible for giving many local folks their initiation into farm work, birthing life long appreciations for home grown produce and sustainable farming. In addition to these hyper-local farms, we also appreciate our network of partners that are a little farther than a drive down the road (but still pretty local!). For example, Deep Meadow Farm is just across the border in Vermont (only 27.5 miles away from Bradford) and provides us with a variety of wonderful organically grown vegetables week in and week out. 

These are just three of the dozens of the local partners we work with to help provide Sweet Beet Market, and the larger Kearsarge Food Hub network, with quality products. We prioritize partnerships with these local organizations because we know they care about the earth they farm on, the people they work with, and the community they provide for. We highlight them each week in our newsletter because we also want our community to support them in turn!  

Not only do we want to promote our local partners’ products, but we also want to promote what they are doing right as organizations with regards to the way they grow food and treat their essential workers. Local food systems allow for transparency where the global/industrial system does not. When we showcase our partners’ products, farming methods, and values, we help bridge the gap between consumer and producer. By building strong, local, community-based food systems we can enjoy wonderful products knowing exactly who made them, where, and how. NH Eats Local provided a platform and occasion for sharing stories about local food systems with our community back in August, but we want to continue that work and take time year-round to build a thriving local food system that is beneficial to those working to produce food, those benefiting from the fruits of their labor, and the land on which this food is grown. 

Attentiveness to sustainable, local food is more important than ever. At its core, the industrial agricultural complex relies upon exploitation — both of people and of natural resources. Conventional food chains routinely underpay and exploit their workers, allowing them to offer foods at much cheaper rates than other farms that compensate their workers fairly. In addition to a lack of care or support for their employees, industrial agriculture often neglects the limits and health of natural resources and the land from which it is mining a profit. This model is exacerbating the current crises we face on the national and global stages — racial injustice, climate change, and COVID-19. 

As COVID-19 threatens communities everywhere, fractures in the conventional food system are becoming even more apparent. The hidden costs of industrial agriculture are more visibly dire as the pandemic disrupts many folks’ routine of ‘normalcy.’  It’s apparent to more and more of us that the conventional systems are not capable of meeting this moment because they ultimately cause more harm than good to communities and to the environment. But they are systems that can be disrupted, and one way to do that is take control on the local level. 


This is where we want to invoke our community. If you’re reading this, it’s likely that you care about good food, sustainable farming, and a strong community. We want you to know that you have power to initiate the change that not only supports your local community, but also helps protect the global environment and people who face exploitation. No one person can single handedly disrupt harmful industrial agriculture alone, and very few people have the financial means or resources to eradicate issues like food insecurity or environmental damage on their own. However, if we become more educated about where our food comes from and the conditions under which it is produced, we can choose to invest in a more ethical and sustainable food system.

Collective change begins with individuals choosing to make a difference in their daily lives, and a few small changes go a long way when matched by others in the community! In addition to sharing stories, NH Eats Local also brought forth the $5 pledge. This pledge calls on New Hampshire residents to invest just five dollars per week into local foods. On the surface, reallocating five dollars per week toward local products instead of larger scale corporate products might not seem like it would make a difference, but that’s where the power of a community comes in!

If every person in New Hampshire chose to spend five dollars per week on local products, it would amount to an injection of over $338,000,000 back into the state economy. That’s $338,000,000 going back into the state we all live in, and back into the systems and organizations working to prioritize the health of the earth, their workers, and their communities. When you support local food, you have the power to normalize fair wages and care for the environment. By investing in these homegrown endeavors, you are receiving not only quality food, but you are also joining in a larger movement to change the food industry. Through this, you are both demonstrating a commitment to your own community and showing the industrial agricultural system that the current exploitive and harmful practices are no longer acceptable.

Here at the Kearsarge Food Hub, we envision a future with thriving local food systems. What does that look like? It looks like fair wages for workers all throughout the agricultural chain. It looks like healing relationships with the land on which we farm, and from which we derive so much nourishment and joy. A future with strong local food systems looks like a healthy state economy and the eradication of food insecurity in our communities. An abundant local food system also has larger global impacts, like the improved health of the environment due to reductions in carbon emissions from cross country shipping of products, as well as the push for fair wages and end to exploitation of farm workers across the nation. It is our hope that coming together to divest from large scale corporate endeavors by reinvigorating local systems can spark large scale changes to improve the quality of life for everyone. Our future vision is that of strong local food systems that provide work to those looking for it that is fairly compensated and completed under safe conditions, ultimately producing safe and nutritious foods for all.

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This piece was written by Cameron Huftalen, find more of their work at www.moving-the-goalposts.com or on twitter @CamHuftalen.