This is the work: agriculture and community

Liam Cody directs our Orchard Gardens Farm and Community Garden. The smallest of our four neighborhood farms, it still pumps out food for a 50 member CSA and 5,000/year for the Missoula Food Bank. But our work is more than that. Listen to why (or read the transcript below!).

—Genevieve

When the affordable housing development Orchard Gardens was initially conceived, the land where the farm is today was first envisioned as a residential parking lot. Luckily, plans changed and much of the parking was instead put underneath the building, leaving space for our small farm to be born.

When people think about small, sustainably-minded farms, I think many imagine quiet backroads, where you can hear insects whine and plants rustle in the summer heat. At Orchard this really only happens at about 3pm, when the traffic on Reserve is so backed-up people can't do anything but stare down at our farm. We're also right at the end of the Milwaukee bike path, visible to dog-walkers, people exercising past people towing their lives behind them in carts. With nothing else to do but sit in traffic, people look over and see a giant red building, decorated with pigeons; and next to it is the verdant square, Orchard Gardens Farm.

I think for some people this hubbub may sound unappealing, but what I love about our location is that I really feel we work amongst an incredibly wide cross-section of Missoulians.

The term I like to use for our work is 'community agriculture'. And to illustrate this term, think about a family farm, where the goals are fairly clear. To simplify: one needs to produce enough food to create a decent living. And, as many family farms in Western Montana do, embed that goal with your values as much as you can.

At Orchard we have production goals too: 50 family CSA, a 5,000 pound donation commitment to the Missoula Food Bank each year. And we run a low-cost produce market where residents at Orchard Gardens get half off already low-priced vegetables from our farm.

But what differentiates community agriculture is that our goal isn't just to crank out vegetables. It's to involve our community in growing those vegetables. So, often we are doing this work alongside adult volunteers, who may not be volunteering because they really love farming. In fact, what I've found is many volunteers are new in town, or are somewhat isolated in their lives and seeking connection. They look forward to coming out each week because it is where they find community.

And for our neighbors at Orchard Gardens we are many things. Sometimes we help people jump their cars, or pause in our work because someone's leaning on the fence telling us about a problem with a neighbor. We also get a lot of gardening questions and sometimes residents volunteer at the farm or have community garden plots at our site. Now and then I play mortician at Orchard: a resident brings me a mortally wounded pigeon in a paper bag and I end its life and bury it in our compost pile.

We are a constant out here from March to the end of October. And each week I love to see families come to our market and spend eight or ten dollars, often with SNAP benefits, and come away with a bag of produce that would make Good Food Store shoppers jealous.

As I see it, our job is to make sure we grow beautiful food AND create an environment where people who come to the farm feel we are there for them, feel a sense of belonging, that it's okay to make mistakes and learn. Ultimately, we offer a place for people to make a tangible, material difference in others' lives by giving their time to this place.

And again, we balance these moments of connection and community building with a tangible output in mind, which is the land's well-being and production in order to help people in our community access high quality, locally grown produce. Our goal is to have integrity in our growing methods, create pollinator habitat, use manure we source carefully, avoid pesticides, and rotate our crops.

We also do a lot of cover cropping, planting seeds, not to harvest them, but in order to build organic matter and nutrients in the soil.

As important as those methods are, to paraphrase Josh Slotnick, one of GCH's founders, 'in community agriculture, growing food is a context and a vehicle for creating culture and community. It's not the end product itself.' I'll try to unpack this idea.

One of the most important populations we work with at Orchard are the kids who live there. There's a pack of them. Around the same age, friends to one another most of the time, and they're pretty much omnipresent at the farm in the summer. They have a really special bond with my dog, Graham, a shelter mutt who rolls on his back at the gate when he sees someone coming, as if they came just for him.

In some respects, a lot of these kids have tough home lives. Many have a single parent or live at Orchard with a relative. Last summer one kid walked onto the farm and told me his mom was asleep, he was locked out of the house and hadn't eaten breakfast. So I stopped what I was doing in the middle of harvesting food for our CSA, and I told him to hang out, I'd grab him some carrots and he could stay as long as he needed. These moments can be jarring. But I try to slow down, because being there for him is the work just as growing food is.

There are two kids in particular who have been coming out to the farm longer than I have worked there and I know them pretty well now. They're ages 10 and 8. Some of their art is hanging inside our barn including a really incredible 2-D rendering of Graham. They come from a single parent house and I've learned a bit about their life in the kind of snippets kids offhandedly mention.

A Mom they can't see. Time spent without stable housing.

Their dad is one of our best customers at the farm stand every week. The kids love kohlrabi and salad turnips, and demonstrate bravery trying vegetables some of our CSA members could learn from. They guide new kids who they bring to the farm, explaining how to walk in the pathways, to ask before picking vegetables.

I should note, it isn't always easy with them. It has taken a lot of practice over the years for them to learn the rules and respect the space, and, like all people, they slip up sometimes. But if you stopped by today, these two would act as if it's all the most obvious stuff in the world.

There's a day that stands out to me from last year. It was a mid-August hazy afternoon and Reserve was so quiet you could hear the irrigation lines clicking. Our cover crop was tall. Tall enough to practically hide a couple kids and a dog in what must've felt like a jungle of buckwheat, crimson clover, and oats. I looked up and I could hear them playing and catch glimpses of them in all the green.

One of our volunteers was watching too and said to me, "Dang that's what forming core memories looks like."

And today I think about these kids, a decade or less into life, who already harbor core memories that will remain complicated their whole lives. The kind of memories that ache in some ways forever.

And then I think about this - here they are, forming another kind of core memory, on a piece of land that could have been a parking lot, in a field of cover crop planted to build our soil. Our growing space becomes a foundation for memory so pure these kids may wonder later in life if they dreamed it.

And not only does the memory belong to these kids, but in some sense the place does. Because it's safe and it's wonderful, the way your backyard should be.

What I take from this, is that when any of us set out to impact our community, we often can't anticipate how deep that will go. And what I've experienced is that food access is most effective when it becomes more than just a quest for healthier nutrition or more productive soil. It's most effective when people are invited to play a part in creating the community they want. When people value and support sustaining these places, that turns our work into a vehicle to create community. And on the ground, what that looks like, is creating memory, history, a love for a place and its integrity through the process of growing food.

And I'm reminded of this power when one of the kids asked me last March, when the cover crop would be tall enough for hiding.

That kind of impact doesn't just happen though. It's the kids, the residents, volunteers, our staff, and so many other people here in Missoula, who experience Orchard Gardens and find something in the place and in the work, and add their mark to it. These are the people who transform it each year. By holding that duality in mind every day – that this place is two things at once – agriculture and community – we extend the possibilities for what our work can do, far beyond what is immediately clear and beautiful about growing food for our community.

I hope you will join us in making this happen.