Presentation at 2016 Massachusetts Sustainable Campuses and Communities Conference

1. Strength Grown
From A Single Seed:
The Story of
the Greenfield
Tuesday
Market
Partnership

2. Starting From
Seed
When I think about the origins of the
Tuesday Market Project, it’s nearly
impossible for me to not think about it in
terms of agriculture. The seed that has
become the grant-funded, cooperative
farmers’ market was planted over a year
ago in the alley that now plays host to it.
I had partnered with Just Roots, whose
CSA pick up site is in that selfsame alley
during the summer months, to put on a
weekly cooking demonstration during their
pick up hours that featured an item from
that week’s farm share. Week after week,
while we were helping people discover the
hidden delights of kohlrabi, or the softer
side of spinach, curious passers-by would
come down that walkway and ask, hey--is
this a farmers’ market?

3. What if…..
We’d have to tell them no, and
explain that it was a CSA pick
up, but, it was easy to see why
they made the mistake--tables
groaning with gorgeous,
organically-grown produce are
hard to resist, and the number of
times someone tried to bargain
with us to purchase just a single
bunch of beets or perfect
bouquet of kale led to a wild
little idea: well--what if it
WERE a farmers’ market,
during the week?

4. How’d that go?
When I began thinking about what
that market would look like, I
knew from the beginning that I
wanted it to be different. I had
been working with new farmers, I
know a lot of young, new
agrarians looking for land of their
own, and I had spent time on a
micro-dairy in Orange learning to
milk goats---I knew how much
effort went into simply being
present, day after day, for the
demands of this vital, energy-
intense way of life. What could
we do, I wondered, to make the
process of joining a market easier,
better, and more affordable?

5. Maybe something like…
And that’s where GCC came in. A fellow
Co-op employee, Jon Shina, had recently
graduated from the food and farm systems
program at GCC, and we had been
pondering ways in which the Co-op might
become involved in, and supportive of, this
important educational resource in Franklin
County. What if, I thought, we created a
market that was staffed by students?

6. Student Power!
A market staffed by students would
enable new, small-scale farmers to
participate in a farmers’ market without
having to spend additional time away
from their farm. A market staffed by
students would give practical, hands-on,
real-world experience to students in the
food and farm program that would
make the theoretical tangible, and
connect them in a powerful way to the
agricultural landscape of Franklin
County. A market staffed by students
would provide new economic energy
that traveled beyond on-farm jobs, that
would have the potential to create
further new positions for high school
students as well as it grew. A market
staffed by students could be a powerful
illustration of the benefits of partnership
between growers and sellers, and a way
to further the goal of keeping our shared
economic future viable in a sustainable
way.

7. Empowering
Community
And, speaking of a shared
economic future– we also wanted
to ensure that what we were doing
reached beyond the immediate
bounds of the market—so we
decided to partner with
community organizations whose
social services included meal
programs. They would buy our
unsold produce at a reduced rate at
the end of the day, and we would
be able to both reduce food waste,
and, to keep more of that carefully
grown food on the tables of those
who need it most, while reducing
financial losses for our farmers!

8. That’s when…
With all of these ideas in mind, I
packed up my little seed of a
plan and set up a meeting with
Amy-Louise Pfeffer and
Christine Copeland at GCC!

9. A growing field:
The Farm and Food Systems
Certificate at Greenfield
Community College: A little
background from Amy-Louise
Pfeffer about who, what, where,
and why this program, in this
partnership!

10. Just Add Fertilizer
And then we got a grant! And a
partnership was born between
GCC, The Franklin Community
Co-op, and CISA, to further our
growing ambitions!

11. The Greater
Picture
Our agricultural community and
CISA—working together for our
shared strength!

12. The Student
Picture
Meet Liz Suozzo—our Student
Market Manager! She’s here to
tell you about her connection to
this project, how she came to
find the farm program at GCC,
and what this has meant to her
sense of place and food here in
Franklin County and the
Pioneer Valley.

13. Our market
workers:
Braeden
Leinhart

14. And also
Dustin Cutler

15. And of course
David Strong

16. What We’re All
Working Towards:
From the seed of one small idea, and the
beginning of one single farmers’ market, we
hope that this model of cooperative
collaboration between a campus, a coop, and an
agricultural collective can serve as a blueprint
for a way forward in other similar rural
communities faced with food insecurity, loss of
jobs, and a youth population who feels that
they have to look elsewhere for economic
opportunity and possibility. The sense of place
that gives meaning to our particular landscapes
is something felt by all people about that
particular piece of earth that they call ‘home’--
and, is something that is capable of creating
similar connections across the globe. We all
have to eat. In order to eat, we all rely on
farmers producing the raw materials that
sustain us. Food has the power to be a powerful
unifying force, because we all need it in order to
survive---and, in turn, for our communities to
survive and thrive, we all need to participate in
the process of creating sustainable avenues for
continued growth that is deeply rooted in that
shared sense of hunger, of place, of the
celebration of our home soil.

17. Last but not least…
From the issue of land succession to the preservation of agricultural landscapes to the emptying of storefronts
on main streets in innumerable small towns, the future of food and farming is intimately connected to the larger
picture of our global economic future as a whole. We are hungry for the tangible in an increasingly esoteric
economic landscape--and, I believe, hungry for one another, as our daily interactions take place increasingly
removed from the physical sphere, and are isolated in textual interchanges behind our glowing screens.
Connecting small farms to students, and in turn to communities, and continuing that shared sense of purpose
through the stewardship of land and food, is a way to create self-sustaining community systems whose job
creation and growth enriches the people that it serves, rather than distant shareholders. Our common needs can
become our shared strength. From humble seeds, acre after acre of future nourishment can grow.