 Hello, and welcome to Farming Matters, a video series of the North Central Sustainable Egg Research and Education or SAIR program. I'm Erin Schneider. I am a farmer and the administrative associate with the North Central Sustainable Egg Research and Education Program. And I am here today with Marie Flanagan, a co-host of Farming Matters, the producer of the show. Hi, Marie. Hi. And I'm also here. We are very lucky to have Beth Neff with us. Beth wears many different hats and one of them is a farmer and she is here to share about her project. And Beth, I will just let you take it from here. I know you have a lot of experiences to share from what's going on in St. Louis and where you've been. And after that, we'll get a chance to just highlight and celebrate the work you're doing on the ground in St. Louis. Okay. So welcome to the Marsh Cooperative. Our project was neighborhood-based cooperative market gardening in Corandallette, St. Louis, Missouri. Corandallette is a severely disinvested neighborhood in St. Louis. And our project was founded by a mother-daughter team, myself and my daughter, as a social arts performance project. So we established a team of collaborators, five of whom became board members, with this, the idea of exploring ways in which food could become an organizing anchor for sustainable community development, and climate resilience. So we did a lot of research around the city of St. Louis and finally found what we believe to be the perfect site for our project. I used the proceeds from the sale of my farm in Indiana and we purchased this long vacant, a decade vacant, multi-use property in Corandallette on a main artery in Corandallette. The property consisted of three upstairs apartments, a diner, a former diner, the inside of the diner, and just left as it had been for 40 years. It was a big open space that had been a dining room for them and that we removed all of the remnants of that. And very fortunately for us, a large vacant lot out back that we developed then into a labyrinth permaculture garden. So we spent the first year and a half renovating the building. It was in very bad condition for both residency and for public space. And in early, in 2018 and early 2019, we held a series of community meetings to try to figure out what types of building uses the neighborhood would respond to. Everyone wanted the diner to be reopened and so we developed the idea of creating a cooperatively managed diner and grocery. And then in the spring of 2019, our region was hit by a severe Mississippi River flooding. We're about a quarter mile from the Mississippi River here, and we suffered extensive damage. That damage took us an entire year, pretty much to recover. But during that time, we worked to develop an online platform for our grocery cooperative. We thought that would be maybe a good way to start. And so we built a website where people could purchase any products that we had access to directly for themselves, and that we would divide it among the various members. This website is still operating. And we launched the online food co-op exactly one week before the first COVID shutdown of 2020, so March 2020. So for that period of time, we continued with exclusively online sales and curbside pickup, but the main efforts were based on the fact that we were inundated with a huge demand for mutual aid food supplies. And we devoted many hours and resources to filling that need. We also made a sliding scale of groceries that we acquired through the cooperative and from our gardens and other local producers made that available to the neighborhood by holding weekly outdoor markets. So several things became clear to us during this period. The first was that we needed to make the fresh food we were growing and preparing from other vendors more widely available. And one way to do that was to open a brick and mortar grocery store. The second was that we needed to grow more food directly in the neighborhood, because one of the primary things we were learning from our neighbors is that there was a severe shortage of fair wage jobs and sustainable food resources. And the third was that we wanted to involve more people in the process of producing that food through democratic collaboration. So we were able to pursue the first objective of opening a brick and mortar store with a successful grant application to the Healthy Food Funding Initiative. And we had also had extremely positive responses to organizing around the cooperative diner before flooding and COVID hit. It generated a lot of interest. And so we thought, well, we can apply that same energy and concept to the network of community gardens. And that is what motivated the application to the to SARE for a grant to create a worker owned urban farming cooperative that grows food for consumer co-op and the broader community. We basically followed the process that we had outlined in the grant. As we engaged in this process. So the first step was to engage the neighborhood in this project through a variety of events, you know, sort of test people's desire around and understanding of what community food production would look like, issues of food equity, fair employment, how we make decisions together. And then the next step was to. So we sent out, we created an application, a number of events where people were invited to participate, combination of work days meetings sharing of food, just to get people involved and excited about what could happen. You know, just a variety of different kinds of events. Including, you know, outdoor barbecues music, just anything to to engage people in the process. We were able then to build a team that was comprised primarily of nine non binary and women identified people of color, who described themselves through our application process as having personal experience with food and security, and interest and collaborative decision making, and were located in the neighborhood. And so this group of people took on a task of developing transforming a grassy, you know, just sort of vacant double lot into viable food production by doing the planning together. Setting up preparing and then learning how to market our produce so we held a number of work days. We established the site with a combination of like mulching techniques, cardboard newspaper, we hauled in massive amounts of chips, massive amounts of compost, and created gardening beds to establish our new face. So the planting began in the early spring of March 2021 with our new team, some of whom were Spanish speakers, some of people who had no experience with gardening before, and worked through what collaborative decision making processes were like, and also what our relationship to the community would be through a neighborhood gardening process. So lots of conversation, lots of work, and lots of food. We had a successful garden. Definitely weed issues involved in year one of a garden space that used to be a grassy lot. We are in the second year of that and most of those issues have presently been mitigated so our food production then was transformed into a way that people could access it, both through the grocery store which opened in July of that year. We continue to do the outdoor market, and we also continue to be involved in mutual aid food activities where food would just be gathered and sent out to people in bundles, along with groceries. So this is our new grocery store and display of some of the produce that we produced in our two gardens, the one here at Marsh, and the new garden, we call it the Minnesota garden because it's at 7200 Minnesota and, you know, building traffic so I think that some of the questions you had asked was, you know, what kind of results like what what was our most impressive result. And I would definitely say that the relationship that we're building in the community has been an important part of that. We do produce a lot of prepared foods now, a combination of the produce that's produced anything left over from the gardens and also we order from regional suppliers and so anything that we nothing goes to waste at Marsh. We just everything gets transformed into some kind of a food product so you know we all learn together how to make focaccia dough and we have our, you know, special products that people are excited about. We have a lot of volunteer groups that come out to help in the garden so we've made a lot of great connections and partnerships with other organizations who are interested in what's happening at Marsh. College classes. You know there's a with every project I think there's kind of a surface level of oh this is what we're doing and this you know is how it appears from the outside and what it looks like to the community. But there's also sort of a deeper level of you know what are we, you know, a conceptual framework of degrowth and climate resilience and post capitalism and you know these these issues. There's a chance to be able to provide so many different access points for people just depending on where they're coming from and what they're most interested in so this project has been like tremendous in that regard. A little bit of media attention, it's always nice so newspaper, television. Yeah, it's been pretty cool response. And I should just say that something that's really been important for us to learn, especially with collaborative project like this one is that everyone is going to come to this with a different set of priorities, a different focus, especially with a very complex project like what are people most interested in some people were very focused on food production learning farming skills, you know, sort of the labor aspect of it, earning a good wage to to work. Others were more interested in sort of the cooperative structures you know how do you make decision decisions, how do you communicate in a group. And that the other very strong emphasis that came out of the particular group that we put together was outreach to food insecure patrons of the grocery store and the outdoor market and the development of the sliding scale model so that that is still a work in progress we're always tweaking and changing, but the, the whole concept and the way that it would operate and the communication about it evolved out of this group process so that that felt really powerful, and also as a really important learning experience just to respond to the wide variety of needs and interests of the people involved and to be like nimble and flexible in our planning model. And then you asked for advice, always a little shaky but I think the most important advice. At this point in time you know just coming out of this process is to have some kind of an idea plan for what comes next you know what are you going to do once the grant funds are gone or extended. For example, you keep the momentum going of a project that you started. How will you ensure that the shared commitments that you've established in these relationships have a foundation for continuing and moving forward. I think that especially in relational economic situations, people that have become involved want to be part of next steps, and it's pretty essential to incorporate them into planning and to pursue strategies to access the resources to make those steps happen. So that comes up when people are talking about urban farming and and Sarah soil quality and soil issues often come up as a concern. Can you talk at all about any of the soil quality or concerns you had working in an urban environment testing you had to do. That's another excellent question I think there's a huge concern here about toxicity. A lot of vacant lots are places where buildings existed before and in some cases the they were basically just pushed into a basement. So we have absolutely you know lead arsenic. You know they're a lot cold burning at one point there's there is a lot of toxicity. We just built up as best we could. We didn't want to expend a lot of resource sources a lot of people do boxes, you know, like kind of that raised bed gardening. We created a situation where we're just not really digging into the original soil at all so we have added probably the newest gardens probably have like 12 to 18 inches of compost on top, and the older spaces. Like there's two feet of compost. So to me, you just brought up like one of the most important issues with both urban farming and you know what our sort of a climate response is going to be. And that is where is the compost going to be coming from how are we going to create enough compost if we're going to restore places that have been, you know, sort of poorly managed in the past, and we're also going to create like, you know, carbon absorption. We're also going to create massive amounts of compost, or the need for massive amounts of compost and I've had this conversation also with other local agencies and organizations that are looking at that and water, like access to water, as being pretty essential sort of like baseline issues to deal with as we move more into urban agriculture. I wanted to ask to if you wanted to just share with our, our listeners and viewers like one another thread in there that came up with this sliding scale or pay what you can model at that because it's sort of the theme there is coops helping coops right here in community help me know how what did you notice or observe or however you want to respond to this or about how do you beat the farmers making, you know, what they are living wage from their produce sales and then also the work people in the grocery store and those who are able to pay what they can along the way and I just as a grower I'm like, wow, I'm so grateful you're dressing this head on and wow, how do you even start. Kind of the answer that is I have no idea. It's, it's, this is the, the primary economic challenge is, you know, to make transformation in what would be a fair and equitable economy in the middle of a totally extractive exploitative economy. So, it's a huge challenge, and we did start out, allowing people to decide how much they were going to pay. Because of the neighborhood that we are in, that was nothing for a lot of people. And we ended up giving away over $13,000 worth of product out of the grocery store. And we're, you know, sort of threatening our viability with that model. So that's one of the reasons why I said, you know, we sort of tweak this to. You know, you can pay 20% below or 20% above, and hopefully the balance comes in at cost so everything in the store is priced at a very low markup right around 12%, which we calculated is what it takes to cover, you know, basically keeping the lights on. And, you know, the most basic economic priority. One is that we operate as a not for profit. So that makes it so that we're not looking to extract any profit from the system. But we also need external funding, we need donations, we need grants, we need to be able to fund this from resources that come from outside of our existing system right now. So what do you feel like is transforming or growing out of this. Sarah projects into the next year. Yeah, no that that's a tremendous question. So, another Sarah Grant. We did apply again. And so we have a two year grant now. And to move this project to, you know, the center has been food. And I think that that still works for a framework, but to kind of have like the next ring, be a climate resilience. I think that more towards knowing our neighborhood, you know, sort of seeing kind of what we're up against in a lot of ways, not just us but sort of like systemically societally. These are the people, the precarious people are the ones who are going to be hurt first. You know we saw I included the slides of the flooding just because this is the kinds of thing that we're going to be seeing more and more often. And with this summer I mean it's kind of amazing that we, we are doing a Sarah project to kind of figure out how we can respond specifically to growing challenges but also to what kinds of like community and relational challenges they're going to be. So that is where we're headed with the focus of having like an actual like climate conference or symposium at the end of 2023 so about a little over a year from now. And I think it's an emotion that wanting to make sure people had the energy to continue going and to that next step, like where is your energy at right now and what gives is most alive for you as heading into this next phase of this project in the year. Well, I will answer honestly that my energy is very low. My expenditure of energy is extremely high. And that's sort of the reason for that. And I guess that's why my most important advice was to plan for what comes next, particularly with the, the HFI grant, which is a larger grant to get the grocery store open. It's not a large staff, and once that that process asked for, you know, budget projections out to five years, and those projections showed, you know, somewhat arbitrary but they showed that we would be breaking even at five years, and that seems to be true. So what do we do then between years two and five. And the answer is unfortunately that our team is much smaller than it was while we were being funded by the grant. We have fewer hours in the store than we were able to fund during that period of time. So we have had to scale back. And that is incredibly disappointing. You know, we sort of lost the farm actually has been able to keep going but but in regards to the grocery we lost sort of some of that building of skills and interest and investment and that sort of thing to the point where it kind of feels like some of that is going to be starting over again. So we were not necessarily we have a couple of people who, you know, we have some continuity. What happens then is that the founders have to plug in because, you know, I'm a volunteer. I'm not pulling from any salary from what's happening. And so my hours are the only thing really in some ways that keep that going you know with the cooking and the processing and that sort of thing and we also started a CSA this year as a strategy to kind of save the grocery store. So we have that membership. It's not on a sliding scale you know that's kind of our the privileged people redistribution of wealth basically supporting the rest of the system. But that you know, I'm sure you know is an exceedingly high amount of work. So, you know, preparing those shares, you know, twice a week because we people have two different pickups. It's a whole other activity really, and we sort of tacked it on in hopes that we would be able to keep everything else going. So, yeah, things are. Yeah, they're a little scary right now. I think what is there. Anything back that you want to just that feels left on set in your heart or in your mind about your project or this experience or this moment or really wonderful and exciting that we have a way of publicly providing resources for exploring these really important questions of sustainable agriculture. And I think that Sarah has made a outsize contribution to the positive research around sustainable agriculture to the actual just activity of people doing sustainable agriculture, and also to the public just assuming the baseline, you know that this is how agriculture could and should be done. And sort of that that knowledge so I, I really just honestly appreciate the funding and I also appreciate like what you guys are doing with this, because I do think just the more we talk about it and the more there, the more people have just an understanding that this, wow, you can do this like we can grow food like in our city or in our surrounding rural regions and that people that you know we can all contribute to what support for that looks like. So, I've appreciated being in relationship with this with Sarah as an institution for a long time, and it's making even more of an impact now to what we're doing. Okay, the gratitude and just really thank you for your time and much, much luck and success and good, good mojo to you and your neighborhood and the soil and all of it. Thank you so much. Yes, you are very. Yeah, we look forward to crossing paths again.