Tag Archive | farming

Educating Teens About Food and the Farm Through New City Neighbors

Mar27

Note! New City Farm will be our produce anchor at this year’s Southeast Area Farmers Market! Reposted from Rapid Growth Media.

This article is part of Rapid Growth’s Voices of Youth series, which features content created by Kent County youth in partnership with Rapid Growth staff mentors, as well as feature stories by adult writers that examine issues of importance to local youth. 

Learning about nutrition, cooking, and food scarcity helps prepare youth for adult life and deepens their empathy. New City Neighbors, a Grand Rapids-based nonprofit, gives area teens that head start and connects them with impactful experiences. 

With three farms across the area and a cafe to serve the community, kids learn agricultural skills and make food alongside their peers. Helping urban youth learn about agricultural development and preservation is key to NCN, which recently secured a five-acre urban space on Ball Avenue NE to expand.

Ricardo Tavárez is in his sixth year as NCN executive director. He hopes more inner-city teens can learn about producing food from farm to table. 

“We take food for granted sometimes, and when our youth learn about food prep or about growing healthy food, they also learn about food scarcity in our community,” he says.

The work at NCN is not just about teaching about these real-world issues, it’s about supplying the community with food to eat — and healthy food, at that. Youth in the NCN program are helping families who need food get farm-to-table meals. 

Nate Engle, of the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (MDARD), sees three main benefits to fresh food from the farm being supplied to neighborhoods: economic impact, health benefits, and social aspect. 

“We are what we eat, and if we eat more healthy foods, more often, chances are we’re comparatively healthier,” he says.  

Recognizing how economic impact and social aspects intersect is also important. 

“There’s a higher chance you know the person who delivers those fresh foods or knows the person that grows them, or you get them and then take them to your grandma or an elderly neighbor,” he says. “Food systems that are more local in nature strengthen local communities by building relationships.”

In essence, NCN empowers teens to create better relationships with their community. Tavárez agrees. 

“Being able to bring healthy food to someone helps them build a relationship with the farmers who are actually growing the food,” he said.” There’s not a third party that’s selling them the food. They actually get to interact with the people who grew it.” 

Why New City Neighbors is Youth-Oriented

Part of NCN’s mission is “empowering youth to reach their full potential.” 

“We intentionally focus on youth because we believe that they’re not just the leaders of tomorrow, but they’re the leaders of today,” Tavárez says.

With the right resources, he says, youth can enact change.

“We believe that youth in our neighborhood have ideas that are worth listening to; that they can shape the community for the better; and that they often know more about the social issues that need to be changed in our community than we do. So we want to empower them to have a good starting place to tackle some of those issues and shape our community for the better,” he says.

Engle elaborates on how programs like those NCN offers can help the younger generation later in life.

“Agriculture and food also represent a pathway for youth to grow careers,” he says. “Young people can get training and higher education to become chemists, biologists, veterinarians, plant pathologists, soil scientists, agronomists, supply chain and logistics managers, or any number of other professions.”

These are just a few of the career options that benefit from the training that NCN gives its employees, whether they be farm apprentices or cafe workers. These opportunities soon will expand, as the recent purchase of urban farmland allows the organization to reach more inner-city teens and serve more of the community. NCN has already worked with over 200 youth employees, a number that will grow with this new development.

The Future of New City Neighbors

The Ball Avenue farm was only acquired last fall, but the second phase of the organization’s plan is already in motion. 

The “On Solid Ground” campaign is now in its farm-development phase, where donations are used to buy agricultural equipment. By 2026, the goal is to have the space ready for the third phase, where a farm education center will be fully fitted to teach local youth about agriculture in an environmentally sustainable manner.

Tavárez hopes the community is ready for the space to be maintained as one of the last few urban green spaces in the Creston area. 

“We’re very excited to develop [it], keep it green, and use it to take our youth empowerment to the next level,” he says. “We’re hoping to get a lot of excitement and energy from our community to continue supporting us.” 

The benefits of this campaign don’t end there. Engle speaks to how important it is to conserve these spaces, and how Grand Rapids is at the forefront of urban agriculture development.

“Healthy urban places are symbiotic with healthy rural places,” he says. “If you have vibrant cities, you probably have vibrant rural communities outside them. We see challenges when we sprawl with our developments … We want dense urban cities in Michigan, and we want healthy rural cities and villages surrounded by productive farms and forestry land.”

Whether or not you are a teen, you can help NCN and preserve urban agriculture across the city. Engle recommends contacting the Urban Agriculture Committee and asking if you can attend a meeting. The Kent County Agricultural Preservation Board also holds meetings where you can get questions answered.

In addition to donating, you can volunteer at the New City Farm or become a shareholder and receive fresh, farm-grown vegetables. Current opportunities for youth include a farm apprentice program; applications are on NCN’s website. 

Luke Fann is a sophomore at City High Middle School, where he has been an editor since 2022 and a journalist since 2021 for the school newspaper, The City Voice. He writes about current events and technology. He also enjoys creative writing, especially fantasy and sci-fi. Luke has won several awards for his writing at MSU’s MIPA Summer Journalism Workshop for both Creative Storytelling and the Art of Storytelling.

Farmer Joel Salatin: Don’t dis your dinner dance partner

Jan18

Pigs express their pigness at Polyface Farm

Joel Salatin spoke Tuesday at Calvin College’s January Series

Author and fulltime alternative farmer in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, Joel Salatin began his talk with an analogy that likened our relationship to food to a relationship with a dance partner. In eras past, our relationship with this dinner dance partner was much more intimate. People spent a majority of their time dancing with their food—planting it, tending it, harvesting it, preserving it, cooking it and eating it at the table with friends and family.

Now we spend very little time with our dinner dance partner. Most of us don’t even sit down to a meal—instead we graze. “We have pulled away from this dinner dance partner. Others have stepped in very gladly to fill in this relationship deviation: Kraft, Monsanto, Taco Bell … the list goes on and on,” Salatin said. “As we have deviated from this historical intimacy, other entities  with dubious agendas have stepped in, corporations which take a fundamentally mechanical view towards food. Food is a biological thing, not a mechanical thing.”

Salatin said that we need to make our kitchens the heart of our homes again. He encouraged audience members to learn to can and cook from scratch–and to be compassionate with themselves. After all, a baby learning to walk falls down a lot at first. “Well, have you heard if it’s worth doing it’s worth doing right? We don’t do anything right at first … If it’s worth doing it’s worth doing poorly first.”

Salatin challenged Tuesday’s January Series audience to think small—microscopically small. He pointed out that two handfuls of fertile soil have more live organisms than there are people living on the earth. He noted that modern science sees agriculture as a mechanical endeavor rather than a relationship with life. Its disregard for the organisms living in soil has grown into a disregard for farm animals, as evidenced in CAFOs, and, ultimately, a disregard for human beings, as borne out by violence in our culture that especially impacts people perceived as “the other,” e.g. immigrants.

“The notion of life as a mechanical thing has led us to some really strange paradigms. Like soil is inert. Look in an electromicroscope. (You’ll see)  all kinds of microorganisms living . . . a community of amazing beings  . . . Everything that we are and we see is dependent on that invisible world.”

Instead of following the lead of the living, natural world, modern agriculture is looking for “Star Trek fantasy” answers to the increasingly complex problems that science-based agriculture has created. Salatin made reference to the US-Duh (USDA), as it continues to support corporations like Monsanto which are endangering all life on the planet in the name of profits.

“There are reasons why things are the way they are,” Salatin said. “When we view life as an inanimate structure, the culture takes that same kind of tyrannical view towards its own citizens and other cultures . . . we have gotten so mechanistic that we have left an ethical moral parameter.”

A working model

Joel Salatin at home on the free rangeSalatin’s Polyface Farm successfully flies in the face of modern agricultural science and its destructive “best” practices. One example, over the winter, cows contently amble into a shed to feed—and poop. As the manure piles up, corn is mixed into it and the feed bins are raised. As spring arrives, the pigs are allowed into the shed. As they happily root for corn, they aerate the manure, “fluffing it up” and aerating it, creating a fertile compost for the fields.

Salatin asked, “How do we create a habitat for the pig that allows the talents and gifts that God gave that creature? Put a moral ethic around it. Then we can innovate within the protective confines of humility. In CAFOs, there is no place for the expression of the gifts and talents of the pigs. They get bored, cannibalize each other. We are a culture that cannibalizes as a direct result of a food system that cannibalizes.”

At Polyface Farm, the free range chickens follow the cows, like birds follow herbivores in the wild. The cows here are herbivores. Cows at CAFOs are fed meat, often diseased meat. These types of practices not only subjugate livestock animals to lives of pain and misery, they also breed new diseases, for example, mad cow disease.

Salatin noted that if scientists wanted to create disease, cancer and sickness, the best way to do it would be to establish farms that specialized in only one species so pathogens wouldn’t have to adapt to variety. Then, crowd them up real tight so it’s easy for the pathogens to get from one animal to another. Next they would put the animals in a building with no fresh air or sunshine, as both can slow the growth of pathogens. The scientists would make sure the animals get no exercise, as that might boost their immune systems. They would further suppress the animals’ immune systems by injecting them with antibiotics and hormones. Last of all, they would feed the animals junk. This “experiment” describes today’s CAFO, describes modern, science based agriculture and describes our food system.

“We want a farm that builds soil, builds immune systems, builds nutrient density. Ultimately, as a farmer, I am in the land redemption business . . . (We need to) step in as loving land stewards, caretakers, as an expression of God’s grace, abundance and redemptive capacity. .. God is beautiful and we are supposed to extend his beauty into creation. I’ll bet he’s interested in the pigness of a pig. (We should) all commit ourselves to embracing our dinner dance partner and building a world that’s better than the one we inherited.”