One Town’s Race for Sustainable Farming

“Grow Food Northampton came about when we as citizens learned that the city was interested in buying a farm for the purpose of turning it into recreational fields,” Lilly Lombard, Grow Food Northampton board president, told Organic Connections. “We did some quick research and discovered that the land was prime farmland—which means that it grows the highest yield of food for the least amount of energy.”

The land was also historically significant: some of it had actually been communally farmed by abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth back in the 1840s, along with 210 members of the Northampton Association of Education and Industry.

“We brought all this information to the table and it helped to move the political process toward finding a compromise use of the land, and actually to increase the scope of the preservation project to include not only that farm but the neighboring farm,” Lombard said. “Instead of a 37-acre tug of war, it ended up resulting in a 185-acre preservation project that met everyone’s needs.”

Of those acres, 117 are now targeted for sustainable farming—if the land can be purchased in time. A non-profit land conservation organization called the Trust for Public Land routinely purchases such property to keep it from being developed, and then sells it to local interests to continue it. The Trust for Public Land has obtained the farmland but must sell it by January 31, 2011. The buyers? Grow Food Northampton.

“We have a purchase option with the Trust for Public Land to buy up to 117 acres,” Lombard explained. “We have to tell them by December 27 how much land we’re going to go for and put a deposit down on that land. And then we have to come to the table with all of the funds at closing on January 31, 2011. It’s wicked, wicked quick.”

How far Lombard and her organization have come in meeting their goals shows how committed the Northampton community actually is. “We have only been fundraising since July 12 of this year,” Lombard continued. “As of today, we have raised $520,000, nearly all from our community. It speaks of our community’s alignment with the goals of Grow Food Northampton, which are to promote the fundamental need of food security by advancing sustainable agriculture. This means agriculture that will be there for us in the long run, that builds the soil, feeds the local mouths, and that approaches agriculture from a holistic perspective instead of just a one-way draw of resources and land to produce cheap food.”

Part of the efforts to build soil will utilize a process called remineralization, in which essential minerals are returned to the land to fortify it and provide vital nutrients. The project will have plenty of help from non-profit organization Remineralize the Earth (www.remineralize.org), which is located right there in Northampton.

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The Grow Food Northampton campaign has, by necessity, included a healthy dose of education. “It’s been a huge learning curve for the community,” Lombard said. “When we first came forward with our agricultural perspective on the value of this land, people didn’t understand what ‘prime farmland’ meant. To them, dirt was dirt. We had to introduce the idea that you steward soil—that open space protection is not just absence of development. No development is great, but the understanding that soil is a resource like water, air and trees was new to some people. Now I think the community is really getting it. To be fair, Northampton already has a really high level of appreciation for local agriculture; the next step was bringing it down to the level of soil.”

Part of the process has been hosting local events in which films such as Food, Inc., A Farm for the Future, The Future of Farming and Fresh are shown. Each event is followed by a panel discussion.

“You can’t just come in and start asking people for money to save farmland unless they get it—unless they really understand the value,” Lombard concluded. “Fortunately here, they now see that the benefit is not just a bucolic viewscape—where it’s sweet to drive by and see cows grazing on a field. They comprehend how vulnerable our current industrialized food system is, how lacking it is in providing the nutrients we need, and how unlikely it is to sustain us into the future as energy depletes. At that level, it becomes more compelling for people, and they start to seriously put their personal resources toward saving and promoting what they’ve got.”

To learn more about Grow Food Northampton, or to make a donation, visit the project’s website at www.growfoodnorthampton.com.