By Helen Brady, President, Friends of Hilltop Hanover Farm and Environmental Center
The receipt of a generous grant from the Community Catalyst Fund allowed the Friends of Hilltop Hanover Farm and Environmental Center, Inc. buy the necessary vegetable seeds, soil amendments and supplies to plant our first Community Supported Agriculture program.
Hilltop Hanover Farm and Environmental Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, is a regional education center that offers programs on healthy and sustainable food production, and teaches skills for small-scale suburban and urban farming, illustrating sustainable living practices for regional and local communities. The farm features demonstration models for backyard farming, rainwater harvesting, composting, and green-roof technology. Visitors can hike the farm’s 3.5 miles of woodland trails; picnic on the farm grounds; buy a CSA share, purchase produce from a farm stand and at U-Pick; or attend numerous classes and lectures. The Farm offers tours, classes and field trips to school groups, garden clubs, and scout troops, with specific emphasis on agricultural preservation, drinking water protection, and the promotion of environmental stewardship. The farm is open to the public, harnessed 1,700 volunteer hours in 2010, and donated 4 tons (est. value $18,000) of produce to regional food pantries.
Purchased in 2003 by Westchester County for watershed protection, and agricultural education, due to budgetary constraints within the County the Farm lost 50% of its funding for the fiscal year 2011, the loss of funding eliminated the budget for seasonal employees and horticultural supplies. To save and support the Center, the Friends group was established in June 2010, with the goal of fully funding and operating the Farm. The Friends is working cooperatively with Westchester County to reach the goal within three years.
The $3,000 grant towards seeds, soil amendments and supplies was the “seed money” that allowed us to start a Community Agriculture Share (CSA) program of 100 members. A CSA affords farm customers the opportunity to become farm supporters by committing before the growing season to buy a share of the farm’s produce, in our case members receive 20 weeks of vegetables from June to October. This arrangement helps the farm better plan for the season, particularly in the area of staffing. Through the sale of CSA memberships the Friends raised over $60,000, critical income for 2011. With the income we hired 6 local seasonal staff, and provided needed working capital.
It is clear that the financial return on investment for this grant is outstanding, but it is equally important to highlight the impact the grant has had within the community; local food, local involvement, and local jobs at a Farm that teaches sustainability.
Thanks to a generous grant from the Community Catalyst Fund, Eat Local, Inc. was able to purchase lumber, fencing, water barrels, and soil for a large, beautiful garden in the wooded and rocky soils of Ringwood, NJ.The project started in 2010 as a charity garden organized by Girl Scout Troop 369. The girl scouts helped till soil and plant a garden at the Community Presbyterian Church at145 Carletondale Road. With the support of the church Session and donations from Eat Local and various local organizations, this service project supplied fresh healthy tomatoes, cucumber, lettuce and beans to the food pantry located in the same campus.
At the end of 2010, Eat Local received a grant for $2,500 to expand the charity garden into a full fledged community garden accommodating 27 families to grow their own food in the raised beds of a sunny, fenced area with great water access.
Eat Local received ample support from local businesses, including a machine for a day from CLC Landscaping who scraped the top layer of weeds from the proposed lot. Andersen Forest Products arranged for a great discount on untreated clean lumber with which to build raised garden beds. Boy Scout Troop 76 donated their time to build raised beds.
The Borough of Ringwood donated the rich, black, composted leaf mulch with which to fill the beds. They also donated the machine to move soil from the pile to the beds, saving the volunteers much hard labor.
The news of the project spread like wildfire through the advertising efforts of Eat Local. Families fell in love with the idea and snatched up the plots quickly, contributing a small fee for the yearly upkeep of the garden. Each family joined a committee, such as communications, events, education, fences, water, soil, pests, and so on. Families worked with great enthusiasm to install the fencing, fill beds with soil and to even extend the project by building a small school garden in the pre-school playground adjacent to the garden.
The energy of the families grew from a feeling of camaraderie developed during several work parties and family holiday parties. Families shared gardening details and bragging rights over the tallest sunflowers or the fattest onions. Children conducted a “Most Beautiful Garden” contest and chose the winner to receive a silver trowel.
The events committee of the garden is planning a Ribbon Cutting ceremony for the garden which will include the Ringwood Mayor cutting the ribbon, a blessing of the harvest, a poem, and dedication of the garden. Later in the season, the families will gather for a twilight harvest dinner. Families will bring a dish of food from their garden, listen to the music of a talented garden guitarist, and enjoy the fruits of their labor.
Committee members have contributed articles to a monthly newsletter that includes photos of the garden build, growing tips on tomatoes, school garden successes and other details of the project.
For the most part, the families of the Ringwood Community Garden had been hindered in their garden attempts by endless wildlife challenges including bears, deer, turkeys, groundhogs, and even beaver. They have struggled with the rocky soil of Ringwood, and a rigid tree ordinance that keeps most yards wooded. The garden has been an oasis for them, allowing a home-grown food source, and the confidence of their own organic food system. The families are dedicated and delighted with their amazing garden, and grateful to the Community Catalyst Fund for making it possible.
With support from the Community Catalyst Fund,Southeast Elementary School’s Garden Project started last summer (2010), has continued through to this spring (2011), and will continue through the summer. The garden is a raised bed measuring 20 feet by 24 feet with a surrounding fence that is attached to the side of the school building. It is conveniently located near the school kitchen and close to where the students exit the building for recess. Often, students can be seen standing at the fence admiring produce such as strawberries, pumpkins, beans, eggplant, tomatoes, and green peppers, all at different stages of growth.
All of this did not happen by a miracle, but through school community partnership and old-fashioned “elbow grease.” Initially, the lumber for the raised beds was purchased and then assembled by school staff. High school students dug the fence pole holes and rolled and hung the wire fence. The Town Recycling Coordinator helped sift compost that was used to enrich the soil. In addition, the Town Garage delivered a load of top soil. Together the raised bed was filled and enriched. Seeds were purchased last year and again this year. These seeds were planted in the school greenhouse by the students in the “Green Thumbs” Club, a second-grade teacher, and the Food Service Manager, who then placed seed starter kits all over available windowsills hoping to expand the garden with a “square foot” and “climbing” method for season 2011.
Last harvest season was very successful. Students were able to sample tomatoes, peppers, strawberries, rhubarb, squash, cucumbers, eggplant and beans. This season is sure to be a success as well, providing the complete experience as a lesson.
By Jennifer Andrews
Director of Program Planning and Coordination, Clean Air-Cool Planet
CA-CP achieved a milestone last week with the unveiling of the new online CHEFS tool, in Denver, at the annual campus sustainability conference hosted by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE).
CHEFS, or Charting Emissions from Food Services, is a platform that will foster more North American life cycle studies of food production and a tool that will eventually allow institutions to assess the life cycle carbon impact of their food services.
With project partner ARAMARK and CHEFS pilot school New York University, Claire Roby led a workshop in Denver on the newly-released CHEFS tool, which included a lively discussion of the ways in which users expect to benefit from CHEFS and suggestions for its continued evolution. The workshop presented findings from the work done to date with twelve pilot schools collecting and analyzing dining service purchase and operations data, and outlined next steps for the program over the next 6-9 months:
A second pilot project: We will be recruiting at least a dozen new organizations, representing not only higher education but business and government, to participate in a facilitated process of data gathering and analysis, and provide their feedback about how CA-CP can provide additional or improved CHEFS functionality and support resources to aid them in measuring their “foodprints”
Launch of a large public research initiative: In early 2011 we will be publishing a “research agenda” highlighting the most important data gaps and research opportunities related to North American food systems, and engaging both academic and industry partners to see the research accomplished (and the resulting data integrated into the CHEFS tool)
Integration with the Campus Carbon Calculator when the Calculator is brought online in 2011
On our website, you can get more information or go straight to the beta too. Also, you can learn more about how this could be a useful tool for you in a free webinar this Thursday afternoon or later in November. Register online today!
It’s still a work in progress, but we’re very pleased with the level of excitement and eagerness to participate we’ve already heard from the audience at AASHE, and everyone else who has seen the new tool. We look forward to the opportunities to build upon it in the months to come.
By Bill Burtis
Manager, Communications and Special Projects, Clean Air-Cool Planet
Why? Oh, come on! Because I wouldn’t have to change anything – not a single bulb (unless I wanted to save money!). I wouldn’t have to worry about what I eat (unless I wanted to stay healthy!) or where it came from (unless I wanted to support local businesses, American businesses!). I could turn up the heat, turn down the air conditioning (Well, I’d have to get some, first.), and drive as much as I wanted. (Unless I wanted to reduce air pollution and US dependence on foreign oil!).
No effort involved. Status quo.
I want it to be true, for starters, that global warming isn’t real – or isn’t happening. Unfortunately, there is a lot of direct observation and solid research out there that makes it pretty obvious to me, as a sentient being, that I’m not going to get what I want.
There is, for instance, the news this week from the National Snow and Ice Data Center that Arctic sea ice extent and volume (how much heat-absorbing ocean it covers, and how thickly) are both at record (though not record-breaking, for extent) lows. There is also news, this week, from NASA GISS that January through August land and ocean temperatures this year ties that period in 1998 for warmest on record. And we are hearing pretty dire reports about what those warm water temperatures are doing to coral reefs around the world, as bleaching is reaching record levels as well.
Quite a dip in Arctic sea ice this summer, (NSIDC photo)
And then there are three hurricanes in the Atlantic, all at the same time.
So, I am willing to settle for it’s not our fault. It’s the sun, the Earth’s orbit, some natural cycle that isn’t quite discernible even to careful scientists. But this doesn’t help me much, because whatever it is, it is, and it seems to be getting worse.
Meanwhile, as if on the another planet, the political discourse on the subject is getting worse, as well.
Riding solo on climate policy: Senator Jay Rockefeller
Senator Jay Rockefeller (a Democrat from West Virginia) says he’ll get enough votes to pass a Senate resolution blocking the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases – which is currently the only chance we have left (since the Senate decided not to deal with this hot potato before the mid-term elections) to do anything about global warming on the federal level.
This is the same senator who, five days ago, said about climate-change deniers in his home, coal state “burying one’s head in the sand is not a solution and can only backfire.”
There is something here about the pot and kettle – but in this case, they are both black.
And then there is the new Republican pledge: “I will not believe in climate change or global warming or whatever it’s called and I will resist every attempt to do anything about it, no matter what the science says.” Or something like that.
This is one piece of the political armor somewhat mainstream Rs are adopting to protect them from their cousins, the “baggers” to their right, who are attempting to revive the Flat Earth Society in their rush (no pun intended) to corner every looney market they can so that Fox News will keep talking about them incessantly.
And the Democrats? For a while there, it looked like that might run over to the same rail and capsize the US political system in a sea of fear. They were ready to give ground on all kinds of things – taxes, environment, health care – to protect their chances. And climate and energy would be given up like… climate and energy.
So, just at the time when we’ve reached a new pinnacle of bad news on the climate it front, it was looking very grim.
By Chad Devoe
Guest Blogger
Groton Central School, Groton, NY
Groton Central School is a rural district in the Finger Lakes Region of New York, with an enrollment of about 1,000 students. 2010 represented the third growing season for the GCS “Student Farm”. A year prior to its inception, we started a school-wide composting program (“Rot-in-Groton”) and composted on-site behind the school.
People started asking what would be done with the finished compost and a school garden seemed like the logical answer so students could see and take part in the complete recycling loop. We started with a 25’ x 25’ plot of grass that was roto-tilled into a decent garden. It was a rough and weedy start but it paved the way for future improvements. The garden attracted many volunteers since this was (and still is) the only community garden in Groton.
“Rot-in-Groton” Composting Video (dated back a few years)
Teachers and students volunteered their time as well as the Groton Girl Scout Troop, Rotary Club, and Youth Department to improve this valuable asset. Some produce was (and still is) used at the student-run Groton Farmer’s Market. Most produce, however, is planned so that harvest occurs in spring and fall so as much food as possible is used in the school cafeteria, offering students fresh and local organic produce at no additional charge to them. This year we are providing lettuce, spinach, garlic, melons, string beans, peas, winter/summer squash, beets, corn, potatoes, peppers, onions, and tomatoes to the cafeteria. Our food service director is very supportive and appreciative of our efforts since he is a gardener himself. Some preparation will be done by study hall students this year to minimize any extra work for the food service workers. This is a great learning experience in itself.
After two successful growing seasons, it was time for an expansion of the garden so that we could make a larger impact on cafeteria food choices. Clean Air-Cool Planet’s Community Catalyst Fund helped bring about major improvements this year including a 20’ hoop house so we could extend our growing season by at least two months, a garden expansion to 45’ x 45’ with 23 raised beds, a new fence and gate, and the beginning of a fruit orchard. Additionally, the high school has added a 1/2 year science/health elective titled “Food, Land, and You”.
Learn more about raised garden beds from Earth Easy
This spring-semester class will focus on gardening and our food supply through the lens of sustainability. Funding will go towards purchasing supplies for this hands-on class including canning materials, fresh produce and ingredients for healthy cooking recipes, and seeds. These improvements would not have been possible without this funding! Future plans are to expand the fruit orchard, establish a bed of asparagus, and further integrate garden-based education into the curriculum.
By Julie Munro
Climate Fellow,
Clean Air-Cool Planet
Julie Munro is working with Claire Roby in Oklahoma on Charting Emissions from Food Services (CHEFS) and Greening Tulsa. A new graduate of American University in Washington, D.C., she was “very active in campaigning for campus sustainability and I helped to establish a community garden, farmers’ market, and Clean Energy Revolving Fund on campus.
In my last post, I encouraged readers to start considering and making consumption choices based on the lifetime environmental impacts of their diets.
Now, a confession: In today’s world, where nearly everything on the grocery store shelf seems to be five times removed from what it once was, it can be a struggle just to figure out what is in our food, let alone where these components originated. Plus, have you ever tried to ask a company to divulge this information? Good luck… you would think you were demanding classified government secrets!
So, my apologies … I always was a trickster! But don’t fret yet- there is good news in the environmental life cycle assessment (LCA) world and I’m happy to report that it begins with two of my favorite beverages- Tropicana Orange Juice and Fat Tire beer!
Am I saying that drinking beer will make you a more credible environmentalist? Potentially. In the past year, both Pepsi Co. and New Belgium Brewery (the makers of Tropicana and Fat Tire, respectively) have released certified carbon footprint data for the products. Both of these companies have paid private consulting firms to do the actual nitty-gritty environmental calculating. While Pepsi Co. chose to work with the UK-based Carbon Trust, the New Belgium Brewery enlisted the help of The Climate Conservancy, a California non-profit with the objective of creating a “consumer driven and market-based mechanism that promotes consumption of products with low GHG intensity.”
While the carbon footprint data for Tropicana and Fat Tire has been among the first released, this information for other products seems imminent. You’ve probably heard rumblings of Walmart’s July 2009 announcement that it would require its suppliers to provide carbon emissions information that could be communicated to customers through a label much like the nutrition labels on food products. If you’re like me, you heard about this initiative, were pleasantly shocked by and maybe a little suspicious of Walmart’s desire to make a green statement, and then disappointed by the lack of any visible change a year later.
After working this summer with LCA data and talking to the people who are helping corporations like Walmart make this goal a reality, a (small) piece of my heart goes out to the retail behemoth. A supply chain –which Walmart claims is responsible for more than 90 percent of its products emissions – cannot be made instantly transparent. On the other hand, if Walmart can’t succeed in this undertaking, how can we expect smaller businesses with fewer resources to accomplish this feat?
Wal-Mart Pledges to Cut Supply Chain Emissions 20M Metric Tons by 2015
In truth, it’s not really the specific numbers from the Tropicana and Fat Tire LCA studies that are of utmost importance (but then again, would a company really want to release information that would earn them bad press for horrible environmental behavior?). Instead, the completion of these reports demonstrates that companies that want to determine and report on their carbon emissions have new benchmark standards.
In its carbon footprint report for Fat Tire, The Climate Conservancy cited the “inevitable transition to a low carbon economy.” Well, yes, the transition is inevitable, but the timeline is up to us. Both the consulting expertise and corporate willingness are evident. As consumers, we can make that transition faster by continually asking questions and demanding answers. After all, carbon footprint data shouldn’t be as hard to uncover as those government secrets!
In the mean time (as you’re reminding corporations and store managers how important carbon footprint data is to you), don’t forget to show your appreciation to the companies who are on the forefront of this movement. That’s right, you have my permission – go find some Fat Tire!!
By Julie Munro
Climate Fellow,
Clean Air-Cool Planet
Julie Munro is working with Claire Roby in Oklahoma on Charting Emissions from Food Services (CHEFS) and Greening Tulsa. A new graduate of American University in Washington, D.C., she was “very active in campaigning for campus sustainability and I helped to establish a community garden, farmers’ market, and Clean Energy Revolving Fund on campus.
As a part of our work on CHEFS, we are also 1) creating momentum within corporate foodservice providers to green their own operations, and 2) contributing to the body of life cycle data for food production in North America. We have partially completed a first phase of piloting the new tool, but will also be undertaking further pilot testing with a revised version of the tool throughout 2010. Julie is coordinating the communications with each pilot site, recruiting new pilot partners, and synthesizing the outcomes into best practices and outstanding questions.
Julie is also at work in the office of the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce, where she is bringing the large-scale carbon accounting work with CHEFS to action and programming at the local level. Approximately one day per week will be spent supporting the Chamber’s “Tulsa Young Professionals” group with several environmental projects.
Here’s a question to chew on over your lunch break: Where does your food come from?
Several years ago, as I was assisting with a summer camp program at Southside Community Land Trust’s urban farm in Providence, Rhode Island, I posed this same question to the young, inner-city campers. Cursory answers like “the supermarket,” “the refrigerator,” and “the drive-thru” (yikes!) started flying in all directions. My mission for the summer was to instill in them that food actually originates in the ground, and that even as seemingly powerless children growing up in a sea of impervious surfaces, growing food in their urban environment was still possible.
This summer, I have a new target audience – institutional food service providers – and I’m quickly learning that even environmentally minded answers like “our food comes from the ground” won’t cut it. Clean Air-Cool Planet’s “CHarting Emissions from Food Services” (CHEFS) tool is an initiative that will assist campus-based institutional dining services to quantify the carbon impact of food production, processing, preparation, and disposal. As I investigate “life cycle assessment” (LCA) of different foods in order to build a database for the CHEFS tool, I am realizing that beauty “life cycle” is very much in the eye of the beholder.
Much like another national (and perhaps a tad more controversial) debate demonstrates, there is always a question of when life begins. Consider a milk carton: If you asked one of the kids at the Providence summer camp, they might say the milk originated from lunch lady in the school cafeteria. If you asked an average person on the street, they might say the milk originated from the cow. If you asked me, I might say it originated in the cornfield that grew the primary ingredient for the feed that would eventually be fed to the cow that produced the milk. Or I might tell you that the milk originated at the gas station where the CEO of the Dairy Company stopped to fill his tank on the way into the office that day. None of these answers would be wrong, but would any of them truly be right?
While these differences in life cycle perspective will make it infinitely more difficult to pinpoint values to use in the CHEFS tool, the major problem thus far has not been too much information, but rather, not enough information. The overwhelming majority of scholarly life cycle assessment reports about food come from Europe or Japan with data based on systems completely different from that of the infamous monstrosity bolstered by the United States Department of Agriculture.
Thus, the desperately necessary shift to a more environmentally responsible and less carbon-intensive food system in the United States will need to be a bottom-up approach. While we can’t all take the time to research and assess the life cycle of the food we eat, we can use the all-mighty power of consumerism to ignite a national conversation. We at Clean Air-Cool Planet hope that the CHEFS tool will be a key part of that national conversation, starting with college campuses and instigating reforms up through the corporate food sector. Understanding our impact is the first step to changing it, and it all begins with asking, WHERE did THIS food come from?
By Harry Alper
Climate Fellow,
Clean Air-Cool Planet
Harry Alper is earning an undergraduate degree in anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, where he is involved in environmental justice efforts and “grateful for every chance to ride bikes with friends and to serve dinner on my front porch.” He will be working this summer on The Seacoast Science Center’s Carbon Challenge – helping the Center to make the Challenge part of their climate education offerings. He will evaluate and assist in the successful cultivation of Northeast Science Center Collaborative.
Imagine we live in a truly and completely sustainable world. We don’t extract and burn fossil fuels. Everything we manufacture either decomposes, returning to the soil from which it came, or is reused and recycled indefinitely. We release no toxic compounds into the environment. Our countries do not wage war over scarce resources, our communities have ended structural poverty, and our varied cultures are fresh and participatory. This is the society I want to live in, and since you’re at this blog, it’s probably the society you want to live in too! And it looks different in many ways from life in the USA in the year 2010. How do we turn people on to this new world?
One of my tasks as CA-CP Climate Fellow at the Seacoast Science Center is to help the Center engage its visitors in solutions to global warming. Most of those visitors are elementary- and middle-school-aged children. I’d like to sit down with a bunch of six-year-olds and try to put environmentalism into context, to explain some of the connections between commercial media, consumerism, and climate change. But the issues are bigger than the attention span of a very young person asked to sit still and listen.
It might not work to just lay out the whole complex web, and hope the children will make sense of it all. Instead I’d like to send them off to have a taste of sustainable society. And as they grow, and hopefully continue to experiment in ecological living, they will come to their own understanding of sustainability and how to bring it about.
We can encourage fifth graders to sit down with an elderly neighbor and ask her, “What was this neighborhood like when you were my age? Was it sustainable? Why?” Parents can bring their elementary school kids to a nearbygarden and help with the harvest (expect to hear, “Oh! That’s how asparagus grows?” or “That’s where eggs come from?”). As they turn sixteen we can encourage them to think about the places to which they drive. Could they walk or ride a bicycle instead? Try it! It feels better, no?
Arundhati Roy, Indian author and alter-globalization activist, said “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” I want to reach the children who visit the Science Center, help them to slow down and tune out the toxic din of television advertisements, and to try something new. Or old, as it would be…: Gardening. Neighborliness. Peace. Walking. And if they receive enough support, and are left enough creative space, they may choose to usher in this other world, a world of global citizens with the knowledge and the care to solve global warming.
By Amanda Muise
Development Officer,
Clean Air-Cool Planet
It must be getting close to lunchtime, because food has been on our minds a lot lately here at Clean Air-Cool Planet.
Our ongoing work on the CHEFS (CHarting Emissions from Food Services) Calculator has sparked some thought-provoking break-room discussions: Are local foods or organic foods better for the environment? Is it better to ship tomatoes from across the country or to freeze local tomatoes all winter long? Will eating an occasional hamburgertorpedo my efforts to lead an environmentally sustainable life? (What if I’m anemic? I can get a doctor’s note…)
These discussions, as enthusiastic as they’ve been, have yet to yield any definitive answers – what they have done, however, is to highlight the bigger-than-expected role that food has to play in solving the problem of climate change.
That’s why we’re so excited to be participating in Whole Foods Market’s region-wide Five Percent Day fundraiser. If you’re a Whole Foods shopper, you might have noticed these campaigns taking place at individual locations – store leadership selects an organization and then donates 5% of its net profits from a particular day to that organization. But on April 22 – Earth Day! – twenty-three Whole Foods locations in the New England region will be joining forces to raise funds for Clean Air-Cool Planet. Five percent of that day’s total net profits at these stores (including locations in Massachusetts and three locations in Connecticut) will be donated to Clean Air-Cool Planet to support our residential carbon reductions programs and oureducational outreach on climate science to youth.
This is great news for us, but it’s more or less business as usual for Whole Foods, which since its founding has enjoyed a strong and consistent environmental track record. They were the first major retailer to offset 100% of their energy use with wind energy credits, and their head office in Austin, TX, was recognized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as a leader in recycling and construction waste reduction. And Whole Foods’ newest store in Dedham, MA, is the first retail outlet in its state to generate on-site power with fuel cell technology. The 400 kW fuel cell will generate 90% of the store’s power – an especially impressive feat when you consider that the Dedham store is 70% larger than the chain’s other stores in New England. Whole Foods Dedham also boasts a state of the art refrigeration system, which will increase efficiency and prevent leaks of harmful gas into the atmosphere. Integration of a range of sustainable features has earned the store certification from the Green Globes environmental building rating system.
So, please keep us and Whole Foods in mind as Earth Day draws near, and if you need a justification to eat an organic hamburger (or a gluten-free cookie, or a ripe peach, or a nice big chunk of ethically-traded chocolate)… well, let’s just say that April 22 would be a great day to stop by your local Whole Foods Market and treat yourself!
By Helen Brady, President, Friends of Hilltop Hanover Farm and Environmental Center
Cool Planet 
