 Well, welcome to the Farmers' Forum Saturday session. I am Patrick Byers, Horticulture Specialist with the University of Missouri Extension and our next presenter is Dan Kenney on the topic of growing a future, preparing tomorrow's sustainable growers today. So let's welcome Dan. Thank you very much. Good morning. I want to thank Sarah and I also would like to thank Small Farm Magazine for having this event today and giving me an opportunity to come all the way from Northern Illinois to share with you about what we're doing up there. Today I'm going to talk a little bit about the history of our project and then where we are now and where we hope to go. We're very early in our project and so the SAIR grant that we were given, we're in the process of using right now and I'll go into more detail about that. One of the things I wanted to ask is how many of you are actually farmers in the crowd? A couple of you. Well, I wanted to bring up something I thought about this morning is that we have something in common, possibly, is that we're both non-profits. I grew up on a small farm in Illinois, Central Illinois, and we had 180 acres as I was growing up as a child and my father had to take a job as a night watchman in order to stay farming. Then when I turned, I was born in 1953, so in the 60s, he had to get out of farming because he couldn't keep going two jobs at once and so we moved into town. Other than one summer that I took off from my summer work, I usually worked in a factory during the summer and one summer I decided I was just going to garden all summer, which was very upsetting to my father, but I spent the summer gardening and from that experience is what kind of fuels what I'm doing now and in a way what I'm doing now is going back to my roots without going back to farming per se and you'll see that as we go along. For me, I'm a teacher, I teach fourth grade and so my whole life has been about futures, preparing others for futures and so I always am thinking ahead in terms of planning ahead and one of the things that struck me was when I was working with my students and I'm from DeKalb, Illinois, which is 60 miles west of Chicago. It's a university town, Northern Illinois University is located there. We have a population around 40,000. We're connected to another town, which is Sycamore, Illinois, which has a population around 17,000 and the entire county is 100,000 people. We're right on the edge of the collar counties around Chicago so we have a lot of rural area around us and it's all large agricultural farms. We're the largest hog producer in the state of Illinois our county is yet you can drive around the county all day and never see a hog and so when I grew up, as I said, I was on 180 acres, we had cattle, we had hogs, we rotated them, we grass fed them, all that and so you know it was a very different world that these students were growing up in that I was working with and so one of the things I wanted to introduce them to was the idea of where their food comes from because they had a total disconnect from that. So our project is to use school and community gardens to teach responsibility, leadership skills, business planning, marketing, sustainable agricultural methods and social service learning. Students will learn from CSA farmers, that's what our SAR grants being used for is to pay for a young man that's worked three years on CSA farms to work with the students and educate them about what organic farming is, what sustainable farming is and the participants will learn about health benefits and eating fresh, wholesome produce. Now in our county, as I mentioned, while we're relocated, we have about 14% of our residents, around 15,000 of them in our county, that are considered food insecure. When you think about that in a county that's predominantly agricultural, it's quite a comment to make. In terms of the food deserts, you may have heard that term where people don't have access easily to fresh, wholesome food. We have that situation right in the rural areas as well. 51% of our students are considered low income and qualify for free and reduced lunch. Some of our schools even have 65% of the students qualifying for free and reduced lunch. What that translates into is if you don't know where your next meal is coming from and you have $2 or $3 for your entire family for a day for food and you rely on food pantries, most of that food is all going to be prepared, canned, boxed, so on and so you don't get a chance to have fresh, wholesome vegetables. One of the stories that has always moved me emotionally about this project is that I'm on the chair of the board of our local homeless shelter and one homeless woman said to me, you mean after all this time, after all these days of going hungry, you mean to tell me that food grows out of the ground? In the kids that I work with, the same thing, they didn't have an idea even where tomatoes came from or once I remember pulling a carrot out of the ground, this little girl's eyes got really big. I thought she was going to faint. So in 2006, I was working at the middle school at that time with seventh and eighth grade students who had kicked out of class because they weren't paying attention. So they were put in what's called in-school suspension, which was in a room upstairs. It used to be a locker room. They had put some study carols into it and there was no windows, no fresh air, and we were in there for the rest of the day with them having nothing to do. So a lot of them also were their family members or relatives were involved with gangs and they had that kind of future ahead of them. So I decided to get some grants and I got a grant from our local community development foundation, also from teaching tolerance, which is with the Southern Law Poverty Center and some other support, and we put in some gardens behind the middle school with those students. And these are the gardens today. They're 10 by 10, three 10 by 10 raised beds. And since that time, we've been keeping this going with students and volunteers and it's probably produced well over a ton of food in itself, just that one garden. Then I moved to fourth grade, as I mentioned before, and I put in a small classroom garden with my students in fourth grade. And then the next year, another teacher wanted to get involved and so we decided to expand it and to take in a larger area so that each classroom in our building could have their own five by 10 raised bed lot. So we took up the sod because this building was built in the year 2000. This is all cornfields at one time. And as you know, when they develop, develop, they take them in, take off all the great topsoil, pack down all the soil. And so we went through the work of taking up the sod. I now have learned other ways of doing it, so I don't do that anymore, but very often. Then we had a parent volunteer who had construction skills. They built the raised beds for us. Again, we had grant money and support for that from the DeKalb Education Foundation and others. I started an afterschool program called the Green Club. It's his fourth and fifth grade students. And so they help prepare the ground and get it ready for filling the boxes. We had dirt brought in by the school district. And then we had a planting day when we had all the classes come out at different times during a two day period to plant their garden beds. And we had volunteers come in from the master gardener program, University of Illinois Extension master gardener program, as well as other volunteers. At one time, this at this particular moment, I don't know many how many classes are out there. But at one point, we had almost 100 students out there at one time, each working in their own individual beds. One of the things, of course, this whole experience teaches kids is cooperation. And this is an example, I we had this huge pile of wood chips, we put wood chips around all the raised beds. And the kids on their own came up with this idea of making a driveway through the middle of the pile, so that they could fill the wheelbarrow going down the middle. And they covered up they surrounded all the raised beds as well as did some landscaping around the building. So anyway, this is how the garden ended up then. And that's the way it looks pretty much today. We have 11 raised beds there plus a center area. And each classroom, as I said, has their own bed. So as I mentioned, our project is pretty small. But I mean, young, we just got started this year. And we raised about a ton and a half of food this year. And it was all donated food to food pantries, other than what the kids took home themselves. And that wasn't just from that garden. This is from our other projects that we have we have 16 garden sites that we put in this year. Well, two of them we had existing. So 14 went in this year, seven schools, nine community sites, over 100 beds. All of them are about five by 10 in size. We got 5,000 square feet of garden space. And right now we're working with another small, smaller town that's near DeKalb about a mile away. And they have four acres of vacant land that they're going to give us. And so that's where we're going to start putting in some hoop houses and and do some more growing of vegetables there. One of our community locations is in that small town where we put in raised beds where people could pay a certain amount of rent each year, each growing season for use of those beds. And so they want to expand that. And also we'll have a lot of space now to grow more food for the community. We one of the things I was trying to think what could I give to you in terms of practicality that you could take back to your own areas. And one of the things I would say is it's really important to just put your idea out there. Because what I've been affected by a lot is how many people come forward and want to get involved. As Levi mentioned that there's a lot going on right now with this issue of sustainable agricultural local food systems, that whole thing. And so there's a lot of we were approached by the DeKalb Public Library. And so now we're going to take over one of the vacant lots that they own. And we're going to turn that into garden space, as well as a learning area for the kids during the summer. Our local community college, that's another partnership that you could form no matter where you're located is they they've also approached us and then we're working out a partnership with them to have the hoop houses, green houses there at the community college, as well as have some interns available to us to use and to work with. Northern Illinois University as I mentioned is in our town. They have environmental studies department. Again, we're going to have some interns from there working with us, as well as there's a lot of environmental student groups on these campuses, usually that want to get involved and volunteer and things like that, and also a preschool that we're going to have a garden at next next year. One of the important partnerships that we have is with our local hospital and our local YMCA. There's a program called pioneering healthy communities. And that program is a federal grant, which is in the area of around a hundred and some thousand dollars all together that they brought in with this federal grant. And part of their initiative is walkable community and rightable community, more bike paths, more walking paths, things like that. But the other initiative is community gardens. So ours, our project started first and then they heard about what we were doing. They approached us and asked if we could partner with them. And so now we're working together with them. And that's how we got our 501C three statuses through the YMCA. Instead of the establishment our own, we went under their umbrella for the for that status. And so then we we get grant money from them as well. So again, this is how we would do it. We would go to an area. Now this is where we didn't take up the side. We would go to an area, lay out where the garden beds are going to go. And then we put down cardboard in the bottom and then fill them up with compost and soil. We have a local farmer who has spent about half a million dollars on developing composting operation on his farm. He uses his corn stalks. He uses leaves from surrounding communities as well as horse manure. He has a whole big operation where he makes these great big long wind rows of compost. He's been very generous with us in terms of working together and making that compost available to us. And that's the way the garden looked during the summer. Didn't turn out very well that picture, but they they produced on a regular basis over about over a hundred pounds of produce every week for food pantries. Then we also were approached by the city to turn in a vacant lot. This is our city hall in the background there. And so we turn in a vacant lot there into what we call the mayor's community garden. And again, we had to bring in all the supplies. We have to run the water hose all the way across from there about 400 feet of water hose from that building to our site. So those are some of the obstacles that you run up against. This is another elementary school. One of the one of the great experiences about all this was all of the different volunteers that would get involved all of different ages and backgrounds. This is our local Hispanic Community Center where we put in gardens there. And this is another really small village that's near DeKalb called Malta. And there we have a large elementary school there. And we put in gardens with raised beds there also. Some of the benefits of school gardens are that in addition to being connected again with the land and and learning about where your vegetables come from and where food really means is that they gain self-confidence along with leadership skills. They learned like I give the example of the wood chip pile. Just little things like that that you don't think about. One of the things Levi said is about kids not wanting to touch the dirt. That's one advantage of working at the elementary level is they're not they still love playing in the dirt. And to them it's a lot of fun. And so we had a lot of energy around that. And and and they also learn how to take responsibility for different different parts of the project. The other thing is that there's been a lot of studies done. Right now there's a lot of issues and education about data and keeping your annual yearly progress. You probably have heard about that with local school districts here where you have to have a certain number of test scores above a certain percentage of all your students in order for them to reach their goal for that year. And eventually there was they were changing it now but that was going to cut down on their funding from the federal government and from the state governments that they didn't make that annual yearly progress. So when you bring up a project like gardening with schools quite often they wouldn't be open to the idea because they felt it was taken away from the academics of it. But what we have found with doing a lot of research in the studies, studies show that their achievement scores actually go up when they're involved with projects like this. These types of hands-on projects and and makes learning more relevant to them in general. The students become more fit and healthy. They spend more time outdoors. That was another big issue. One of my students last year said to me, I said to him, I think it's Thanksgiving break. They ran about four or five days off. I said what are you going to do over break? Oh I can't wait for break. He said I'm going to be playing video games 24-7 you know indoors and not outdoors. And it's the the idea that I spent all my childhood outdoors and it's like just felt sad that these kids were missing that experience and this is one way of getting them back into that that kind of experience. They also learn about the food and the healthy food compared to unhealthy food. They also learn about giving back to the community. As I said all the excess that the students don't take home with them goes to food pantries, goes to one of our feeding sites. It's called feed them soup in our community and so it helps others as well. Then there's all these benefits that go along with the community gardens. Again it encourages self- reliance on the people in the neighborhoods. What we do is these schools are spread out throughout our community and we also have them in the neighboring community of Sycamore. And so the neighbors in the areas around the schools and around the community sites can get involved with growing their own food or just getting involved volunteering to make the food available to others who need it. It brings people together, beautifies the neighborhood. There's also been studies to show that it actually in these neighborhoods where they have community gardens crime rate actually goes down. None of our gardens have fences around them and we've had very little in the way of anybody coming in to take the food or any things with related to theft. Of course right now with the situation with the economy being able to reduce your food budget to be able to stretch your dollars and food is very important to a lot of people in these in these neighborhoods. And it preserves green space as well as providing opportunities for intergenerational cross-cultural connections. One of the things that we have is a lot of senior citizens who get involved wanting to work with the kids. That's a great experience because a lot of these kids don't have a lot of role models in their own families and so it helps them in that way too. So again it's about building relationships is really important. These are just some of the funders that we've had in our and all of these are local funders. You can go for national grants and SARA is the only national grant that we've ever been able to get because it's very difficult to get national grants or even regional grant. In a way SARA is a regional grant for us and so you know what I would encourage you to do if you have any desire to do anything like this is to reach out to the area around you. We've had banks be supportive of us with small grants. We've had the school district of course the hospital the YMCA, Kiwanis, civic clubs they all would like to get involved with these sorts of things and help. And one of the interesting things at the top of the list is the Douglas Lynn Roberts Foundation. You may have heard of DeKalb Seacorn I'm sure you probably have. Anybody here hear of DeKalb Seacorn? Okay that started out with this one small farming family called the Roberts family and they developed the Seacorn over time and then about 10 or 15 years ago now I guess they sold the business to Pfizer first and then Pfizer sold it to Monsanto and now it's the largest Seacorn available in the world. And so anyway they have been very supportive of this project as well. Again I think because they started out as small farmers themselves they identify with the idea of access to food they identify with the idea of how farming has changed and have been very supportive of it. So our goals for the future my timekeeper isn't here I guess I'm doing okay. The goals for the future are to reconnect children to the land and nature as I mentioned before provide children the opportunity to learn about the origin of their food. Work toward a food secure community. One of the things we're going to be doing this winter is creating a local food security council. I'm going to get all the food pantries together get some of the faith-based organizations together and other nonprofits in our county. Get us all together in one place because right now our food pantries are all open at different times. They're located in churches and Salvation Army all different locations so people who don't have a lot of money who don't have a car who have to try to work part-time jobs and so on it's difficult for them to get to the food pantries. So we're going to see what we can do to try to figure out a better way to do this so that they have easy access. On a Thursday afternoon is the last time the food pantries open and then after that they don't have and if it's a holiday where there's nothing open on Mondays then they have four days sometimes to go without being having access to the food. And so one of the things we want to try to do is work at closing the food gap in our county. Some additional goals is one of the things I want to highlight is that we're going to be creating a sustainable farm and community sustainability learning center based at our high school. We have a new high school that was just built two years ago and it has 30 acres of land around the high school farmland and we're hoping to take that land and turn it into an actual working farm with using sustainable agricultural methods and create a CSA for the parents of the kids at the school so that they can have the produce from the farm. Any excess would go to the local feeding sites. Also one of our main goals is create a sustainable revenue stream. One of the things we teach the kids is about composting and all of our sites eventually will have compost piles so that we can start and especially that four acre site we hope to be able to do a large amount of composting and start bringing in some revenue in terms of collecting food scraps from local restaurants and local residents because we don't have municipal food scrap composting in our area and so we hope to be able to do that as a way of charge a little bit to pick up those food scraps from those individuals and those businesses and be able to use that as a revenue screen. We're also going to be establishing a community commercial kitchen for processing the food so that people farmers or local growers of one kind or another can rent the space go in there and do their own processing and make it available to the community for sale and they would pay a little bit of rent for that and that would be another possible small revenue stream. Levi already talked quite a bit about community food system and that as I mentioned that's one of the things we're working on in our county. One of the things you might want to bring up to with as you go for I don't know what it's like in Missouri but in Illinois we have 46 billion dollars a year spent on food and 85 percent of the fruits and vegetables consumed in Illinois could be grown in Illinois but that money is going out of Illinois. We only have about 20 percent or less than 20 about 2 percent of the money stays in the state for food and even though we're an agricultural state it goes out of the as you know your food usually travels 1500 miles before it gets to your plate. Here are some resources if you're interested in doing this on your own. There's the American Community Garden Association, University of Missouri has a community gardening toolkit on their website and the University of Illinois Extension Master Gardener program which is not relevant for you but you have one here in Missouri too. So one of the things I wanted to leave with you was that the important thing is if you were interested in doing something like this is always to be thinking in terms of what relationships you can build and who you can tap into and reach out to in your own community and to use all forms of communication. We have a Facebook page with over 200 members on it. We have our website. We have brochures. There's all kinds of ways to knock on people's doors. We go door to door in the neighborhoods around the gardens to reach out to people and get them involved. And one last thing as I mentioned earlier if you are a farmer and you're struggling to get by and you have all the headaches and you have all the struggles of a non-profit without any of the perks if you consider grants a perk. Most farmers are burdened with loans. What we get is grants. If you work in an educational component into what you're doing on your farms you are then can move into having a separate 501c3 non-profit as part of your business. Thank you. You did fine Dan and thank you very much. Is there a quick question or two you'd like to ask? There's one back there. This is one of the best programs I've ever seen especially in just one year you've been doing this. It must be more than just you. Did you use the American Community Garden Association or how many people actually got this thing rolling? That's a good question. Well we started in March of this year or February was our first meeting. Basically I used a network of friends already had but I got the word out through the newspaper article and we had our first meeting and it just kind of grew from there. We have about 25 people that make up a core committee that is like a steering committee for it and then from there we have as I mentioned we've had over the year probably 200 or more volunteers from Boy Scouts classroom the schools themselves have the kids involved with with planning the gardens and caring for the gardens and harvesting the gardens. If it's a community site like the Hispanic Center they have some of their own volunteers from the Hispanic Center take care of the garden. So it's a lot of volunteers right. So I don't get paid anything. I consider myself the director but I don't get paid anything. It's all volunteer work. Dan says he'll be out back for a little bit and so you can ask him questions back there if you want to. Thank you again Dan that was really a good program.