When Food Deserts, Junk Food Swamps, single sector economies, and automation collide....here is how we create system shift.
The EDGE Team has developed a systemic approach to combating the food desert by making food the foundation of the community and tying the health of local food to community and place health. EDGE and its team recognize the overlap of systemic issues in its local single sector economy, the local food desert and junk food swamp, and local substance addiction. The following graphs tell this story. We know, of course, that there are more contributing factors than these.
Everyone in our community (and yours) deserves access to healthy food as a foundation for their own and community health.
We have developed a training for rethinking these intertwined issues--to combat these systemic issues through a producers approach. We train professionals and community members to recognize and to act.
In an advanced industrial society, if significant amounts of the population is poor, overweight, and addicted, then the systems that society has created directly or inadvertently continue to support those outcomes. The EDGE team takes a systemic view of these intertwined issues, and applies on-the-ground tactics by focusing on producing producers to nourish the soil and nourish the community.
Everyone in our community (and yours) deserves access to healthy food as a foundation for their own and community health.
We have developed a training for rethinking these intertwined issues--to combat these systemic issues through a producers approach. We train professionals and community members to recognize and to act.
In an advanced industrial society, if significant amounts of the population is poor, overweight, and addicted, then the systems that society has created directly or inadvertently continue to support those outcomes. The EDGE team takes a systemic view of these intertwined issues, and applies on-the-ground tactics by focusing on producing producers to nourish the soil and nourish the community.
Mountain Farming Renewal
EDGE collaborates with nonprofits, schools, community centers, and other groups to train young people and adults in local food production, markets, production education, and healthy food access issues as parts of the same puzzle.
We partner with schools and other organizations such as Concord University’s Rural Social Work program who have public health and other health specialists in place to address the addiction, mental health, and physical health issues that affect every family in our region.
Very simply, our rampant issues of addiction and health are not only tied to our single sector economic issues, but tied to the food we have available in our communities and the lack of local food production diversity. Thus, we focus our energy on increasing scalable and profitable nutrient dense food production for producer profit and consumer and end-user health.
EDGE's Mountain Farming Curriculum
Mountain Farming: Farming is Much More than Flat Acreage and Massive Tractors
Often in the United States, due to marketing campaigns and the dominance of industrial scale Midwestern agriculture both in practice and in policy, farming is construed as marked by needing tremendous amount of physical infrastructure (tractors, balers, etc.), massive uniform land (corn, soybean, wheat production models), and engaged in by certain profiles of people. Likewise, we have come to have fixed ideas about where and who can produce food.
In Central Appalachia, the rural industrial that has come to dominate--energy production--absconds the longer history of mountain farming in the region. The dominance of industrial scale agriculture also contributes to erasing the many other profitable ways that food can be grown and sold. Thus, policymakers, politicians, lay people, educators, often have little to no accurate information about the range of the kinds of profitable production possible, because the larger culture now promotes only one production model accomplished only by certain kinds of people.
In McDowell County, WV the USDA NRCS program has already partnered with the agricultural cooperative McDowell County Farms to increase the capacity for local food production in high tunnels. This is the first wave of scalable production in McDowell County, WV since the drop off of agricultural production there adjacent to the energy industry in the early 1980s. Mountain Farming can be renewed through new trends in marketing, sales, safety, production models, product diversification, and client relations.
http://smallfarms.cornell.edu/2018/06/28/operation-mountain-grown-veterans-growing-food-jobs-and-futures-in-coal-country/
The rural is often mistakenly construed as a place of leisure, when, in fact, in many place these spaces are sites of massive scale industrial production, with the communities serving these industries having more in common, than not.
How the Death of Mountain Farming Contributed to Poverty in Appalachia
In the Central and Southern regions of Appalachia, the advent of massive industrial agriculture in the Midwest and in the West post-WW II largely killed off a model of 30 - 50 acre smallholding mountain farming, which, during much of the history of the Republic, either provided significant livelihood or supplemental income. This killing off of mountain agriculture heavily contributed to an uptick in poverty in Appalachia during a time of otherwise unprecedented US economic expansion.
In An Appalachian Reawakening: West Virginia and the Perils of the New Machine Age, 1945 - 1972, Jerry Bruce Thomas succinctly summarizes the state of the state and the contradictions at work in much of West Virginia beginning in the 1950s. As the rest of the country enjoyed never-before-experienced levels of prosperity, shifts in United States’ energy use, along with changes in coal mining technology, created more poverty than prosperity for coalfield workers. Jerry Bruce Thomas addresses a second machine age derailment of work, this one in Appalachia’s agricultural sector during the 1950s. Just as coal mining employment entered a free fall post World War II due to lower demand for coal, higher demand for natural gas, and the advent of the continuous miner, mountain agriculture could not compete with the large machines and surplus inputs or agricultural political advocacy of the American Midwest and West.
Machines designed for flat land and opened spaces did not suit mountain agriculture. As commercial agriculture shifted even harder to large tracts of lands, smaller holdings of fifty-five acres or less in Appalachia could not compete, and neither American tastes nor agricultural policy focused on supporting agricultural product diversification or small farm advantages. This compounded the shift prior to World War II of farm offspring leaving the farm, prior full-time farmers finding employment off the farm, and farmers aging. Additionally, erosion mostly from timbering had wrought severe soil deficiencies in some twenty-five percent of available farmland in the West Virginia mountains.
Thomas points to some throughlines of poverty in the region not only being caused by coal industry mechanization and shifts away from coal energy, but also to the view at the time that small farms could not “be enlarged to commercial size.” He also relates other natural resource extractive or environmentally destructive industries as equally devastating for some West Virginia farm communities. For example, in Hardy County, tanneries and timbering had left that area susceptible to severe flooding. As these industries closed or reduced workers, off-farm work dwindled, and landowners could no longer afford to farm even part-time. As in coal country, as mechanization happened (in timber, or as industry demands fell as in tanning and textiles), those who did not move for work elsewhere, or could not work elsewhere due to age, disability, family demands, etc., found their standard of living drop to below benchmarks for poverty. Moreover, improved approaches to forest management addressing issues of erosion and forest planning failed to replenish former timber jobs or lumber demand.
Lastly, Thomas points out the obvious, that the cities and towns tied to these industries (coal, agriculture, timber, tanning) and the many businesses formerly serving the employees or businesses themselves also declined with the drop in demand for workers. Population decline set in, and this population decline rippled and rolled through many once prosperous towns and counties, contributing on multi-levels to economic decline, education decline, and tax base drain.
Renewal of Mountain Farming
The sciencitization of American food production since the 1880s, with the spread of Agricultural Extension, has continued to favor flattening environments to where they can be managed by large scale machines, controlled through chemical and technical means, thereby eliminating a lot of the complex knowledge of land to make the uncontrollable aspects of farming (weather, pests) less destructive. Along the way, understanding and producing in a mountain environment, along with scaling to reasonable size in a mountain environment, has been knowledge lost. With the turn in the last thirty years toward more diversified and local production, mountain farming is poised to make its re-entry. However, approaches crafted for Midwest and Western environments rarely obtain in this mountain model.
Producing Food Again Where We Are: Food Resilience, Community Resilience, Connection to Heritage, Reskilling, Serving Local and Export Markets, Ending Our Addictions
In 2014, the contamination of tap water sources in Central West Virginia sent already stressed food banks such as the Union Mission over the edge: the majority of the food they provide as relief in West Virginia comes from restaurants and other establishments in the Kanawha Valley. Likewise, in 2016, the closing of the Walmart in McDowell County, WV severely limited food choices options for local residents, forcing them now to purchase in bulk once a month, if they could get a ride to Tazewell County, VA or Princeton, WV to the Walmarts there. These two incidents are only drops in the bucket in the myriad of issues arising from vast sections of Central and Southern Appalachia being food deserts.
Typically, food deserts are discussed as low access to healthy food options by purchase. However, just as food production is a system, food consumption is also part of a system--and these two are linked. Addressing the issues of local food production diversity can be organized to also address issues associated with low healthy food access and consumption.
We partner with schools and other organizations such as Concord University’s Rural Social Work program who have public health and other health specialists in place to address the addiction, mental health, and physical health issues that affect every family in our region.
Very simply, our rampant issues of addiction and health are not only tied to our single sector economic issues, but tied to the food we have available in our communities and the lack of local food production diversity. Thus, we focus our energy on increasing scalable and profitable nutrient dense food production for producer profit and consumer and end-user health.
EDGE's Mountain Farming Curriculum
- This curriculum focuses heavily on practice and praxis with outcomes in practical and actionable business. The end goals of the curriculum link to actual markets on the ground seeking product currently and provide access to those buyers through aggregation and/or retail sales. Production is tied to waiting markets of scale, capable of providing a family income of $80K, the gross needed to support a farm family in our region (drawn from the work of Virginia Tech Agricultural Economic professor emeritus David Kohl--head of Homestead Creamery and Founder of the Ag Biz Planner training program).
- Ideally, youth and adults learn content in conjunction so that families and the community reinforce learning, and production can be a family activity. This builds the family and community, offering agripreneurship as both a livelihood and focus of income and identity.
- Train youth and adults in profitable mountain farming with a focus on how mountain farming can be accomplished using modern tools such as high tunnels, small equipment, and pooled resources. This process simultaneously rebuilds local food production capacity and sets communities on the path to avoid catastrophe when food relief by other means falls short or fails.
- Train youth and adults to produce for locally redeveloped markets such as schools, institutions, grocery chains, local stores. Again, this simultaneously rebuilds local food production capacity and sets communities on the path to avoid catastrophe when food relief by other means falls short or fails.
- Mentor youth and adults in modern mountain farming as a livelihood, thus, with a focus on commercially viable production as well as sustainable mountain harvesting. This mentorship provides continuity of product development, production, market access, and acquiring capacity to scale.
- Reskill community for food production and sustainable harvest, thereby reconnecting with values lost, but, introducing updated techniques and market access.
- Pooling resources and aggregating product both reduces start up and production overhead and bundles product to meet the quantity demand of client institutions and retail. This curriculum focuses on the benefits of cooperation among producers for production and sales.
- Train youth and adults in the diverse product harvest and potential for Appalachian mountain climates. Every season offers opportunity for income diversification and additional income streams.
Mountain Farming: Farming is Much More than Flat Acreage and Massive Tractors
Often in the United States, due to marketing campaigns and the dominance of industrial scale Midwestern agriculture both in practice and in policy, farming is construed as marked by needing tremendous amount of physical infrastructure (tractors, balers, etc.), massive uniform land (corn, soybean, wheat production models), and engaged in by certain profiles of people. Likewise, we have come to have fixed ideas about where and who can produce food.
In Central Appalachia, the rural industrial that has come to dominate--energy production--absconds the longer history of mountain farming in the region. The dominance of industrial scale agriculture also contributes to erasing the many other profitable ways that food can be grown and sold. Thus, policymakers, politicians, lay people, educators, often have little to no accurate information about the range of the kinds of profitable production possible, because the larger culture now promotes only one production model accomplished only by certain kinds of people.
In McDowell County, WV the USDA NRCS program has already partnered with the agricultural cooperative McDowell County Farms to increase the capacity for local food production in high tunnels. This is the first wave of scalable production in McDowell County, WV since the drop off of agricultural production there adjacent to the energy industry in the early 1980s. Mountain Farming can be renewed through new trends in marketing, sales, safety, production models, product diversification, and client relations.
http://smallfarms.cornell.edu/2018/06/28/operation-mountain-grown-veterans-growing-food-jobs-and-futures-in-coal-country/
The rural is often mistakenly construed as a place of leisure, when, in fact, in many place these spaces are sites of massive scale industrial production, with the communities serving these industries having more in common, than not.
How the Death of Mountain Farming Contributed to Poverty in Appalachia
In the Central and Southern regions of Appalachia, the advent of massive industrial agriculture in the Midwest and in the West post-WW II largely killed off a model of 30 - 50 acre smallholding mountain farming, which, during much of the history of the Republic, either provided significant livelihood or supplemental income. This killing off of mountain agriculture heavily contributed to an uptick in poverty in Appalachia during a time of otherwise unprecedented US economic expansion.
In An Appalachian Reawakening: West Virginia and the Perils of the New Machine Age, 1945 - 1972, Jerry Bruce Thomas succinctly summarizes the state of the state and the contradictions at work in much of West Virginia beginning in the 1950s. As the rest of the country enjoyed never-before-experienced levels of prosperity, shifts in United States’ energy use, along with changes in coal mining technology, created more poverty than prosperity for coalfield workers. Jerry Bruce Thomas addresses a second machine age derailment of work, this one in Appalachia’s agricultural sector during the 1950s. Just as coal mining employment entered a free fall post World War II due to lower demand for coal, higher demand for natural gas, and the advent of the continuous miner, mountain agriculture could not compete with the large machines and surplus inputs or agricultural political advocacy of the American Midwest and West.
Machines designed for flat land and opened spaces did not suit mountain agriculture. As commercial agriculture shifted even harder to large tracts of lands, smaller holdings of fifty-five acres or less in Appalachia could not compete, and neither American tastes nor agricultural policy focused on supporting agricultural product diversification or small farm advantages. This compounded the shift prior to World War II of farm offspring leaving the farm, prior full-time farmers finding employment off the farm, and farmers aging. Additionally, erosion mostly from timbering had wrought severe soil deficiencies in some twenty-five percent of available farmland in the West Virginia mountains.
Thomas points to some throughlines of poverty in the region not only being caused by coal industry mechanization and shifts away from coal energy, but also to the view at the time that small farms could not “be enlarged to commercial size.” He also relates other natural resource extractive or environmentally destructive industries as equally devastating for some West Virginia farm communities. For example, in Hardy County, tanneries and timbering had left that area susceptible to severe flooding. As these industries closed or reduced workers, off-farm work dwindled, and landowners could no longer afford to farm even part-time. As in coal country, as mechanization happened (in timber, or as industry demands fell as in tanning and textiles), those who did not move for work elsewhere, or could not work elsewhere due to age, disability, family demands, etc., found their standard of living drop to below benchmarks for poverty. Moreover, improved approaches to forest management addressing issues of erosion and forest planning failed to replenish former timber jobs or lumber demand.
Lastly, Thomas points out the obvious, that the cities and towns tied to these industries (coal, agriculture, timber, tanning) and the many businesses formerly serving the employees or businesses themselves also declined with the drop in demand for workers. Population decline set in, and this population decline rippled and rolled through many once prosperous towns and counties, contributing on multi-levels to economic decline, education decline, and tax base drain.
Renewal of Mountain Farming
The sciencitization of American food production since the 1880s, with the spread of Agricultural Extension, has continued to favor flattening environments to where they can be managed by large scale machines, controlled through chemical and technical means, thereby eliminating a lot of the complex knowledge of land to make the uncontrollable aspects of farming (weather, pests) less destructive. Along the way, understanding and producing in a mountain environment, along with scaling to reasonable size in a mountain environment, has been knowledge lost. With the turn in the last thirty years toward more diversified and local production, mountain farming is poised to make its re-entry. However, approaches crafted for Midwest and Western environments rarely obtain in this mountain model.
Producing Food Again Where We Are: Food Resilience, Community Resilience, Connection to Heritage, Reskilling, Serving Local and Export Markets, Ending Our Addictions
In 2014, the contamination of tap water sources in Central West Virginia sent already stressed food banks such as the Union Mission over the edge: the majority of the food they provide as relief in West Virginia comes from restaurants and other establishments in the Kanawha Valley. Likewise, in 2016, the closing of the Walmart in McDowell County, WV severely limited food choices options for local residents, forcing them now to purchase in bulk once a month, if they could get a ride to Tazewell County, VA or Princeton, WV to the Walmarts there. These two incidents are only drops in the bucket in the myriad of issues arising from vast sections of Central and Southern Appalachia being food deserts.
Typically, food deserts are discussed as low access to healthy food options by purchase. However, just as food production is a system, food consumption is also part of a system--and these two are linked. Addressing the issues of local food production diversity can be organized to also address issues associated with low healthy food access and consumption.
