Green City Growers Just Got Greener!

Here at Green City Growers we strive to do business in an environmentally responsible way.

We source organic seeds, and practice organic growing from compost to pest control. Now we’ve found a new way to reduce our environmental impact while increasing the quality of our service. We’re happy to announce that we are now working with Read Custom Soils in Canton, Ma. Through Read we receive soil in reusable bags which are sent back to Read and promptly reused. As you can imagine, this greatly reduces the waste of throw away bags. After all, we go through a lot of soil here at GCG!

We’re also happy that this new source is more local than our old supplier in Vermont and that they mix the soil for us, which reduces the prep time here at the office, making our lives easier through the busy spring season.

We have many new exciting developments in the works. Stay tuned for more updates from your friendly neighborhood backyard farmers!

Special MOS Food Inc. Screening

Jessie Banhazl, Green City Grower's Managing Director/Owner was invited to take part in a panel discussion following Harvard Pilgrim's (HPHC)/MOS's special screening of "Food, Inc." The conversation was moderated by Louisa Kasden (health & lifestyle journalist) featuring Gary Hirshberg, Founder/CE-Yo of Stonyfield Farm and Jody Adams, Founder & Executive Chef of Rialto. In addition, Judith Frampton, RN VP of Medical Management for HPHC and David Sittenfeld, the MOS's Forum Program Manager offered their comments at the beginning of the screening, warning of the potential "discomfort" some of the images would generate as well as the great opportunity we had to engage with the panelists.

If you're at all interested in food and asking questions about where it all comes from then watching this movie is probably a good thing. If you've already read Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, Eric Schlosser, and others and the well-known books "Omnivore's Dilemma", "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" and "Fast Food Nation" then you probably will not learn anything new, and just might reinforce what you already know; that our industrialized food system is good at what it does, create "food" and "food-like-substances", and has generated many unintended consequences along the way.

This not a movie review (click here for Roger Ebert's and David Edelstein's reviews) or a synopsis, it is a brief overview of some of the interesting topics and themes.

What was so fascinating about this film is the fact that there is no one bogeyman that we can both finger and pin the blame on. Sure, it's easy to target Monsanto, McDonald's, Wal-Mart, IBP, Smithfield, Cargill, and any number of large companies for suing farmers to protect their patented seeds, providing salty, sweet, and fattening food that we are hard-wired to desire, and making aisles and aisles (the average supermarket contains ~47,000 products) of inexpensive products available. But, didn't the market demand this? Sort of; policy decisions, most notably the continued subsidization of corn and soybean production, the raw materials that end up in many manufactured foods, contribute to our poor eating habits and the environmental and animal welfare issued illuminated in the film.

It's easy to notice the revolving door from industry trade associations and companies to the federal agencies that are charged with regulating these industries, the FDA and the USDA. At one point in the film, we see business cards with Federal officials' titles on the screen flip over to display their "corporate" alter-egos; it was quite interesting. It's easy to blame the politicians for appointing these "regulators". It's easy to blame the billions paid to lobbyists to represent the interests of the large companies at the expense of the average American consumer/taxpayer. What about the consumers that demand affordable food (in the US we pay the lowest proportion of our earnings for food in the world)? Ultimately, it is not one thing, person, or organization that we need to stop or change, but the system we are all part of, the way we treat what we put into our bodies, the level of consciousness we dedicate to what we eat, how it's grown and harvested, and our role in the political processes that create the systems we are all part of.

Upon the completion of the film, the crowd filling Cahner's Auditorium was invited to ask questions of the panelists and continue the conversation about food. There were some good comments and without providing a transcript of the event here's some of the key points made by the panelists:

• Jessie of Green City Growers: We're continuing to use our business as an educational tool for individuals and businesses, building and maintaining raised-bed organic farms in people's backyards and helping them understand that they can indeed grow their own food. They're also very interested in working with schools (an issue currently focused on by Slowfood USA), helping them grow healthy food, teaching them where it comes from, and creating young advocates for locally produced food. We certainly have challenges of scaling, considering the logistical needs of a distributed farming model. We're collaborating with MIT graduate students to use appropriate technologies that support our mission for sustainable food production.
• Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Farm: The consumer is king. He made continued good points that as much as the industrialized food system appears like an overwhelming giant, we have the power to vote for the food we want with every dollar we spend. He also reminded us, "do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good." Yes, the organic food industry is not necessarily energy neutral and free from the same issues that afflict the traditional industrialized food economy, and it is moving us in the right direction.
• Jody Adams of Rialto: Jody talked about the balance she seeks to achieve (a very difficult one) between meeting customers' dining expectations and maintaining her mission to healthy eating. She commented on the serving sizes of protein in her entrees, specifically following nutritional guidelines for portion size and sometimes not meeting the expectations of her customers. It can be a delicate balance seeking to guide your customers' behavior without making them feel patronized.

The answer is never simple and straight-forward. There are multiple actors in this on-going real-time play and their roles change based upon the winds of the global economy and the political leanings of administrations and the public.

At Green City Growers, we're striving to create a local business that contributed to the well-being of our customers, our employees, the communities we work in, and the environment we are all a part of. Perhaps we'll be building a mini-farm in your (or your company's) backyard in the near future.

Thank you for reading, and remember that the money you spend on food makes a difference.

Companies & Green City Growers

This is taken directly from the Wickedlocal website, and we should have had it up months ago. As part time "marketing guy", Renewacycle apologizes.

An organic farm is sprouting on Route 9, within sight of thousands of commuters.

In an effort to promote a healthy lifestyle, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care is offering its employees the chance to learn how to grow organic vegetables at its Wellesley and Quincy offices. Partnering with Green City Growers, a Somerville-based group specializing in building farms in urban locations, more than 50 employees have signed up to be a part of the project. Their harvest will be donated to Second Helping, a Greater Boston Food Bank program.

“This organic farm started with the notion that people don’t know how to use food that’s whole and fresh,” said Judith Frampton, the company’s vice president of medical management. “My hope for the company, for the people that are volunteering, [is] that some learn how to garden that didn’t know how to before, but that everybody learns how to use nutritious, whole food in ways they never knew before.”

This is the first time Harvard Pilgrim has gone the route of farming. Frampton said the program will be a test run and if it goes well, the company will encourage its members to try and grow their own organic peppers and eggplants. The farming not only encourages people to eat locally and more healthily, but it also gets employees out of the office during warm summer days. “I just jumped to it,” said Yvonne Kantak, who works in general accounting. “I love gardening. I find it very calming.”

At the company’s Wellesley headquarters, more than a half-dozen wooden frames have been installed in the lawn. While most of the beds lay flat on the ground, two are raised to about waist height, for employees who have bad backs or knees and can’t bend down to tend to the vegetables. Each frame is divided into 16 sections, with different plants growing in each square.

“Harvard Pilgrim is the first health-care provider to ever do this,” said Green City Growers co-founder Jessie Banhazl. “It’s the first corporation that we’ve worked with and, I think, that is doing anything similar in Massachusetts. The … prospect of doing something on this large of a scale was really exciting for us.”

This past Monday, Banhazl stopped by the Wellesley headquarters to check up on the vegetables. She showed volunteers how to mulch the plants. Throughout the summer, members from Green City Growers will also come by to offer advice and helpful tips to the volunteers. “The beauty of this, too, is that we’ve got volunteers from across the company, but also from a wide range of gardening experience,” Frampton said, who has grown peppers and tomatoes before, but not much else. “We’re going to have people with lots of experience and people who have never put their fingers in the dirt before.”

Harvard Pilgrim plans to donate around $25,000 in produce to Second Helping, said Frampton. Although the summer has been rainy and not the best weather for growing plants in, Banhazl said she still expects a strong harvest.

Frampton said the farm will last through the fall. There will be tasting sessions and lessons on how to cook what is being grown. She said Harvard Pilgrim would be interested in joining with local schools and sponsor educational programs around healthy, locally grown, organic food.

“This is a commitment,” she said. “We are definitely going to keep doing this.”

Kantak and co-workers Andra Barnette and Linda Fei were enthusiastic about the vegetable beds. Wearing gardening gloves from home, the three women walked around to each frame, carefully tending to individual plants. In some cases, the seeds had been planted too close to one another and were separated. The ladies also put mulch around every plant.

“I think it’s just a wonderful project,” Barnette said. “If it will get other companies to start thinking the same way, it would be really good. Plus, you get to come out in the sunshine and feel like you’re doing something good.”

Post Cheap Energy: Food From the Backyard

As an ad-hoc/occasional member of the Green City Growers team, I'm clearly interested in the concept of local food production. I've also taken an interest in the concept of peak oil, not so much for the "end of the world" elements that some might believe in but because of the re-localization of our economies that it will hasten. Seems that the former Chief Strategist of CIBC World Markets Jeff Rubin agrees. In his new book "Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller" Mr. Rubin spends some time on the future of food in a world made smaller by expensive shipping fuel. On page 221,

Where is the food of the future going to come from? Your own backyard. That shift in food supply is already starting to take place. An increasingly carbon-conscious and energy-conscious food consumer in North America is already clamoring for more homegrown food. Not only does replacing foreign food with local food save energy, but in the process it reduces carbon emissions - a double win in an economy that not only had to contend with triple-digit oil prices but that will soon put a price on burning oil as well.

Seems like Green City Growers is on the forefront (along with many other organizations like Growing Power, Farm Fresh Rhode Island, BALLE, Slowfood, etc.) of a post cheap energy food infrastructure.

View From the Crowd (Urban Intensive Clinic 5/23)

I guess I'm a "part-time" member of the Green City Growers (GCG) team, working on a business plan with a team of fellow BGI students based upon GCG's business. Of course, I know little to nothing about farming or gardening besides gleaning information about our incredibly energy intensive and "unhealthy" industrial food system from reports like this one from the Post Carbon Institute and (of course) Michael Pollan's and Mark Bittman's books on the massive changes required in our industrialized food system.

Anyway, I decided to stop by at the Heartbeat Collective in Jamaica Plain for a little while at the Urban Intensive Workshop and see what it's all about. Most of my work with GCG has been through e-mails and phone calls with Jessie and Gabe, and for all my hemming and hawing about local food, I'd yet to plant a single seedling in anything. In fact, the Cyclamen I bought for work lasted a few months before I managed to kill it (I think with too much water, at least that's what Joe the Gardener thought).

It was great! There were about ten "students" there listening to Gabe passionately talk about the creation of urban food systems. Jessie mixed up a great salad along with a vegan pasta salad for lunch. Then we dove in and built a 4'x4' raised bed complete with soil mixing (1/3 Intervale diverse compost. 1/3 sphagnum peat, 1/3 coarse horticultural vermiculite - the "lite" is for more than one reason!). I loved the fact that Gabe talked about the fact that the materials going into the construction of the bed were NOT local nor sustainable; the wood came from Home Depot (GCG is working on gaining access to New England Fir), the Intervale compost is from The Intervale Center in Burlington, VT, the peat's from somewhere in the UK (GCG would prefer to use a material derived from coconut shells, but its availability is spotty and it comes from the East Indies) and the vermiculite...who knows.

GCG is acting, not waiting for the perfect solution; they'll help develop it.

The hands on construction project of the bed was great, and we all pitched in to the completion. Their commitment to making a micro-farm that has the best possible odds of success for the urban farmer (or one of their customers) was clear to me. They used the best possible soil mixture for this climate, planted their own starts, and installed a timed irrigation system to ensure the proper plant hydration.

Now, to develop a solar powered rain catchment with a timer system to provide the watering system (the WPI geek in me is re-emerging!)

Market Research (Call to Action!)

So, for those of you in the Boston area (or elsewhere for that matter) that are interested in what Green City Growers is doing and would like to assist in our business development efforts, do we have the job for you! Seriously, some crazy & creative sustainable MBA students at the Bainbridge Graduate Institute in Seattle, WA (there's two members of the team here in the northeast) are working on an entrepreneurship project in tandem with Green City Growers. They've put together a short survey on people's food buying habits, perceptions about food, and even some info on yard-care. So, click here to take the survey, take a few minutes (5-10 to be exact) to let us know what you think. I am certain your insight will be very helpful as we ramp this business up heading into the spring of 2009. Oh, and at the end of the survey, you have the chance to stay connected as well as enter to win some tasty treats from Dancing Deer right here in Boston, MA

Oh, and look what Wegman's is up to with gardening & kids.

In case you missed it, here's the survey link again.