 So, welcome to Farming Matters and thanks for joining us here today. I am your host, Erin Schneider. I work with the North Central Region Sustainable Ag Research and Education Program, and I also farm in South Central Wisconsin, and today we are in for a treat. We are joined by Minister Erin Hopkins, who bears many hats, including that of a farmer. He is a Southside family farms, and he's here to share about his Sarah Farmer intergrant and ways in which he's connecting with youth in his community and growing food and the urban rural continuum, and you're in and around Columbus, Ohio, is that right, Minister Hopkins? Yes, that is correct. I am in the Southside of Columbus, Ohio. Been in this community where I currently live, about 35 years where I've raised my family at this residence. Yeah, I'm actually born in Oklahoma and Guthrie, Oklahoma, but I've lived in Columbus, Ohio all my life, but I've got the Southwestern roots. So, Minister Hopkins, I have to ask, then how did you find your way to Ohio, and then how then from there did you find your way to the Sarah Farmer intergrant program and what sort of led you to this project you did? Yeah. Thank you for asking. Yeah, my dad was in the Air Force, and he was stationed at Tinkerfield in Oklahoma, but I know we moved here when I was like two years old, and this is where we settled, and my dad actually retired out of the Air Force at Newark Air Force Base, which was very close to actually where I do farm in my rule, you know, where I applied for the Sarah Grant to do that work in that rural community, Newark is very much in that area. Most of the time in my community, farming or working in the soil and doing that type of work is associated with enslavement, and so it has a negative context, you know, that is associated with it, and so even in my community, I know because I was a Boy Scouts, I was in the Boy Scouts and read Boys Lifebooks. I'd always see about 4-H, but 4-H was never present in my community. The South Side has always been a challenged portion of Columbus, you know, they used to go, is it the South End? And we said no, this is not the end of things, this is the South Side, and there's the borders are far reaching on the South Side, and but, you know, it's always been a place of a diverse community, a community that even where I live, we are considered a food desert, that the local grocery store is more than two miles, and so there the food deserts are large, and so we end up with a lot of corner stores, a lot of corner stores that do not sell healthy fruits and vegetables, fresh food access is a challenge, as well as some other barriers, and you know, so even through our church, where I attend Family Missionary Baptist Church, we started learning this thing about sustainable ag and wanting to teach these young people that had no clue that they had family that were farmers, we started out building garden beds for grandmothers in the community, garden beds and fences, because there was a big disconnect between the seniors and the youth in this community, and we wanted to connect them where these youth could begin to hear the stories of grandma, you know, and what grandpa did, and this is the way we used to do it, and that they would understand where their food came from, and that was the beginning of the story, and I did not know that story about, you know, I didn't even realize that I lived in a food desert, and that people had barriers to fresh food access, and so that's where it really started, and wanting youth to understand in our community some of these barriers, so yes, our our CER grant was developed around wanting to educate, and so we said five youth from the, and so we had said five African American youth from our community to teach them about the sustainable agriculture of the black farmer, and to understanding about in-ground farming and sustainable farming practices in in rural areas, and so it was, we really wanted to have them in a rural environment to understand outside of the community where someone was farming that did not look like them, that they could understand even how their grandparents, some of their great-grandparents or some of the patriarchs of their family sustained their family through farming, and we wanted to help them understand that and doing it in a sustainable way, you know, with cover crops and, you know, drip irrigation, no-till practices. What was that like experiencing that transformation through the use eyes as well to like the people with this project? They were very receptive to it and we've been having fun with it, and they've worked at Farm Stand, and so we, because that's part of our CER project, is we also taught them marketing and merchandising and understanding sustainability from the other end, you know, how are you going to sustain your farm, you know, doing a crop plan and understanding the thing about crop rotation and building markets. That is actually Chase, that's one of my grandsons, and so he was out there before we started in the CER project and farming with Pop Pop, and so he was out there when we got those put up by Yoder, and so these are some of the seedlings that we grow. We grow pretty much, I'd say 75, 75% of our production is seedlings that we've grown. These are some of the youth from our CER project, and they came from Columbus Alternative High School. They weren't the high school that we had identified in the grant, but they were doing an internship there from from COS is what that's called, and so these two young men have gone on to college, and so the one is at OU, and he wants to be an agricultural engineer, and the other one is electrical engineer, and the young lady, the young lady, Jada is, she's in college at Columbus State, and so they were all three part of our CER project, and this is one of our land bank properties. There's actually a high tunnel on this property, but you're looking west, and it is on the east side, and that's Jerry, my right-hand man. This is at the high tunnel in Johnstown, and I don't know if you could notice the discoloration in that, in the landscape fabric there. We got a lot of water in the high tunnels, and so that was a challenge from the heavy rain events. This high tunnel would flood, and so I don't know, it's my cursor showing me doing that, and so you can see how compact this soil looks right here, and it was this stuff, and so it's heavy clay out there. We did not, we didn't understand it, it was heavy clay, and then how do we amend it, and so those are some of the things that we were talking to the youth, and we were learning together. It looks like we got some seeds we put in there. Oh, I know what that was. That was the first time we, I think that was, I don't know, that's the first time we used a cedar. So we did have a project where we used a, it wasn't the, wasn't the expensive one. We got one now, but then we did that with an Earthway, and so we helped them learn about using an Earthway cedar, and even burning these holes, and so the youth got to experience this, and why? Using the agricultural length, you know, the fabric, and for weed, they quickly like, oh, we need fabric down, you know, that weeding, they weren't drilled up on that weeding, and so this is the backside of Ms. Julia Lynn Walker. She is a partner at On The Share Project with me. She is a, she has a agro-academy and in Bronzeville, Bronzeville agro-academy as well as Bronzeville Farmers Market, and so it's on the near east side of Columbus, but very much in a community that is diverse like mine, and so this picture here was actually at South High School, and so you see at this time the students, you know, it was facial protection 100%, and so we were there engaging the youth, and so I see some of them, so this may have been like the next year, because I see they don't all have them, but when we made in rows into the high school, these are eighth graders, yeah, they did have, they did mask, and so this is another one of our, this is our first, our first land bank property, you can see this is much our little learning pavilion, and you can kind of see through the fence here is some benches, and you remember I said about green spaces, bling places for conversations, well before any of that stuff got there, and all of these beds, this is like six years of keep adding on we used to have mother, grandmothers come and they would sit on the bench and we would tell the stories, and so this photo is actually out of a project Columbus College of Art and Design is doing wayfinding for us, and so this is just one of the presentations they made, but that is not the one we're going with, and so actually this weekend we will be inciting, we will be installing the first of our wayfinding signage from out of a 614 beautification grant that is providing wayfinding, we have like four of these, five of these spaces within one block of each other in our community, including I've got pictures of our farm stand, this is a rendering of our farm stand, and so I do have pictures of it up, but this is a rendering that farm stand is on some commercial property that is owned by the Groty family of Donatos, and so the Donatos, first Donatos was on that land is still there on Thurman Avenue, and so they are great partners in our work, I believe these were the students that did that with CCAD, and these were the designers of that project, so I'll do them one there, this is another out of Johnstown, and this is, we learned how to take a BCS tiller and to form these beds and form these beds, I tilled the heck out of them, the first year, I did, you know, we were doing tilling and I took that BCS and I did a whole video talking about how loomy I was, oh look at this, this is wonderful, and we came back out that next spring after the winter, and all that water, and it was just standing, and it was like soupy mud, and you would sink, and it was so much clay, and so that summer, it turned those beds into like concrete, and that's when we really started understanding, you know, about no till and overtilling and soil amending and organic material, and so I think that's what we are doing here is preparing to add organic material to those beds, and so there are pictures where we're doing this, this is another one of our inner city gardens, this is a healing garden, that is Austin, he is one of our, he came from OSU, natural resources, like a master's class, and so he has graduated in May, oh my gosh, we're still missing Austin, he was a tremendous help to us, and he loved working with the youth, there's Ethan and Wyatt again, that is organic material that we got from Scott's, donated from Scott's Miracle Grow, that's Jada again, and she's kind of bashful, and there's Austin working, this is, this is that same first garden, looking at it from inside the garden, here's that learning pavilion, we have a small washing pack here, everything grown in raised beds, because there was a house there, and these houses were built pre 1960, and so they have lead paint, and so everything grown in these urban farms, you grow them in, it's recommended to have 8 to 12 inches of soil, and so we usually stroll for 14 inches, this picture is old enough, well no, Austin was here, we were adding, we were adding, what is that, it was bags of manure, and bags of manure, and hummus, and it was like brick hard, and so I think that's what, it's not just tilling it, so we were trying to break that up, so if someone were, you know, like you're, I mean I'm just looking at all, I don't know like when you slept through the last three years, but what would you offer if someone else was like seeing a blanket, you know, or not even a blanket, or just a lot in their city, or their neighborhood, and just like they can see the end result of sharing that food, and like all the steps in between, what would you offer as a tip for that you, like if we were to do this again, you're like oh I would definitely have done this, to like others trying to do that. Yeah, I definitely, and so just, and so the Extension office is a great resource in any, in any city, you know, through the land bank colleges, to connect with your Extension agent, you know, office, and then you know I'm a big advocate of Civic, because you know I'm a commissioner, and that thing of community, and so you see it going down, this is all community here, and this is at a food bank, and we established, so there's 12 of these beds now, and it's always about the resources in your community, I did a whole thing on acid-based community development, and understanding the assets in your community, and so yeah we're getting ready to build food system, and these are the young people, they had fun, and you definitely want to connect with the young people, you see they're smiling, they a little bashful, look like Chase, look like he's asleep over there, but these were some of the youth, we actually got some grant funding that actually partnered with our grant city council, gave us some funds, because we want to give the youth something to do, and some things to learn, and a lot of times you cannot do that without resources, and so you can see the older homes in this community, very much urban, this is one of the tours we went on, and so we took them to other, other farms where there were people that looked like them, that they can understand like oh wow you're a farmer too, and we took them to some rural farms where there were African-American farmers, and they just could not fathom that, you know, there was somebody that looks like me that's a farmer, got chickens and chickens out here running around, and stuff, and so they were learning composting there at this farm, and so yeah, so yeah just definitely connecting with the resources that are in the community, become aware of what the needs are, and I was actually at a Steiner summit yesterday, or Monday, Steiner summit, and we were in Cleveland, Ohio, and one of the things that came up is don't always assume that you have the right thing that everybody wants, you say go into a community, ask the community what the community wants, and so just don't think that because that's what you're growing, that's what they want, and make sure you connect with the community to see what the community wants, and so that's my wife there, plug for my wife, she's been a big one in helping, and so we definitely was talking to the young people about family, and their heritage, and building strong roots, and so very much a man of faith, and there were a lot of principles and practices that we were able to give them, and they didn't know they were being preached to, you know, so we slid some stuff in there, slid some stuff in there on them, and they didn't know, but yeah, it was fun, and yes, I would do it all over again in a heartbeat. Thank you, it sounds like you're amplifying it too, and your heart keeps growing in this project, and just how you walk the world, thank you. Yeah, this project that we're working on now, and this project that we're working on now is really big, and probably the most funding that I've ever asked for, but I believe the need is even greater now because of some of the challenges that we have going on in our community, and you know, we do need to give the youth some other options, you don't take a lot of land to have to be able to do to grow food, but you can even do companion planning and just understanding what you can do in small-scale farming, and doing it in ground, and doing it in a sustainable way, and that is what we wanted to teach, and I think we've been successful. Well thank you again. Yeah, well I've definitely enjoyed telling my story once again, and sharing and hearing from you guys, and just remember, farming matters. Likewise, we're hoisting a toast to you. Okay, you take care. It's so generous. Bye bye.