Cumberland County Soil and Water Conservation District - Community Agriculture
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From the NACD 2020 Annual Meeting. Learn about Cumberland SWCD's community agriculture programs and grants.
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Cumberland County Soil and Water Conservation District - Community Agriculture
- 1. Community Agriculture in Cumberland County, ME Jenna Martyn-Fisher
- 3. Agriculture Water Resources Forests -475 farms with crop land -260 farms with hay & pasture land -29 certified organic operations -54% forested -93% is privately owned -55% is pine, maple and birch -89 Lakes and ponds 23 on the State Priority List -13 rivers and streams on State Priority List
- 5. Building Healthy Soil • Saves money • Saves Time • Better for kids, pets, and the environment Soil Test! Aerating, Topdressing, Overseeding Mow higher, leave clippings Compost Tea Use fescues & ryegrass Recommended Practices Yardscaping
- 7. NACD 2016 Program Goals • Develop curriculum for: • New American urban gardeners, provide workshops • At-risk youth, hold workshops at the Long Creek Youth Development Center • Provide technical assistance • Promote Food Forests • Assess urban agriculture needs
- 8. Curriculum Development New American Workshops At-Risk Youth
- 9. Workshops
- 11. Promotion of Food Forests
- 12. Promotion of Food Forests
- 13. Needs Assessment
- 14. Lessons At-risk youth facilities lack internal communication and require a lot of time to coordinate New American communities were highly receptive to workshops Portland (our urban center) has an abundance of garden programs but surrounding communities do not. Communities are very interested in the concept of food forests People are not testing their soil and have little understanding that lead could be a potential contaminant
- 15. Lessons Communities are very interested in the concept of food forests People are not testing their soil and have little understanding that lead could be a potential contaminant
- 17. Education
- 18. Food Forests
- 19. Edible Main St
- 20. Fall Event
- 21. Quimby Round 2
- 23. Focus Area & Need
- 24. Sampling and Action Plans
- 25. Outreach • What is Soil Lead? • Why is Soil Lead Dangerous? • What Can I Do?
- 26. Overall Lessons Community enthusiasm is key for success Be adaptive Write flexibility into the proposals Continued interest in how to incorporate urban ag into their communities
- 27. What’s Next?
Editor's Notes
- My name is Jenna, I’m here from the Cumberland County Soil & Water Conservation District in Maine
- Let’s start with a quick run down of our District and the demographic of our county. Maine has 16 Districts that roughly follow the county boundaries. CCSWCD was formed in 1947 and our mission is To Assist and educate the public to promote stewardship of soil & water resources. Our annual budget is ~$750K. We get a small amount of base funding (~$25,000) from the Maine Dept. of Ag, Conservation & Forestry and (~$20,000) from Cumberland County Government. The remainder of our budget comes from grants, fee-for-service contracts, and fundraising. Cumberland county is located in the southern part of the state *CLICK*
- We have a unique and mixed landscape which is divided between agriculture, forests, water, and urban/suburban areas Quick County Facts: Acres: 835 square miles 381 square miles of water Towns: 3 cities and 25 towns, 14 of which are MS4 regulated Population: 289,977 Cumberland county is a tourism hotspot! Generates $1.2 billion out of the $5 Billion generated in Maine The biggest threat to our soil and water resources in our county has shifted away from agriculture and is now development. Because of this, stormwater management has become one of our highest priorities given how much area is water. Many of the long-term family farms are being sold and transitioned into housing developments.
- So, while our District’s roots are in agriculture, our focus has shifted based on the needs in our area. As farms are being absorbed into housing developments water quality has become our main focus. However, this also means people are becoming increasingly separated from their local food systems. In our county, NRCS manages most of the technical support for agriculture so for a number of years, our main soil health program was related to yardcare and building healthy soil as an alternative and keeping nutrients out of our waterways.
- This program gained lots of interest over the years and conversations with people showed they were also interested in incorporating these methods into their regular gardening. So these methods where a great starting point to helping people become more successful at growing gardens.
- In 2016, we received our first grant to begin a community agriculture program. (We lean towards calling it “community” vs “urban” as we only have a few communities that would truly consider themselves “urban” but many of the rapidly growing suburban towns have walkable centers.)
- We had quite a few different projects under this grant as we tried to determine which communities and projects would most benefit from our service. We focused on these four areas but the key part for us was the needs assessment This was new territory for us, so it was particularly important to meet and work with partners who were already focused in these areas, to see where we could best serve to support efforts that were already happening, and then determine what areas our community members most wanted support or further work in. After this first year we took our lessons and were able to apply for funding on more specific projects in communities that would benefit the most.
- We worked with our Cooperative Extension and an education specialist to develope curriculums for both New Americans and At-Risk Youth The plans were geared towards non-English speaking or low literate populations. Topics for New American workshops included techniques that would be important to making them successful in transferring existing skills to be effective in Maine’s unique climate. Lesson plans for at-risk youth were geared towards developing skills that would help them pursue careers in agriculture. One of the issues for operational farms in Maine, is a lack of skilled workers in this field. So we figured that providing youth with marketable skills would also support Maine’s local farms by improving the workforce.
- We held 3 workshops with New American gardeners using the curriculums we had developed. They focused on the importance of mulching, testing soil, and determining whether to use fertilizer, and if needed, the correct application. For youth lessons, we partnered with the Long Creek Youth Development Center which works with incarcerated youth to deliver the lessons. The staff were very enthusiastic about bringing this program to the facility. They had installed garden beds previously, but they had never been used. We ran into a lot of challenges working with this facility but in the end delivered 8 lessons, which was double the amount we originally planned for.
- We also provided technical assistance for community gardens with drainage issues. At this site, nutrient runoff is a concern as the ocean is just down hill from here. It was recommended that this drainage pool be converted into a rain garden to absorb the excess water given that an exploration into the soils showed extremely poor drainage and the use of fill which may be contaminated with lead.
- We assisted with the creation of a new community garden and food forest in Portland as well as supported expansion of 3 existing food forests. The community garden beds used a “lasagna layer” technique. The layers were from many partially composted ingredients like horse manure, leaves, and seaweed and then topped with finished compost, newspaper, and hay. This makes them incredibly nutrient dense and when topped with the newspaper and hay means they are low maintenance in terms of weeding and watering. On the outside area of this community garden we installed a food forest. They include species like peach, apple, cherry, elderberry, rhubarb, and many others and are open for everyone to harvest from.
- This food forest is heading into its 4th season this spring and it has been such a transformation to this area. I actually moved to this neighborhood during the project and still participate in this space as a community leader organizing clean-up and maintenance days with neighbors. So I’ve been able to see firsthand how the addition of the garden space has really brought people together. Where this was once a vacant lot slated to become a parking lot, it is now a place that provides nourishment through both the food and the community interactions.
- The last part of this project was conducting a county wide survey to determine where access to healthy food and growing opportunities was lacking. Additionally, we learned that less than a third of home gardeners had done a soil test in the area where they garden. Even more alarming, 70% were unaware of what types of plants could or could not be grown in areas with marginal lead contamination.
- As we wrapped up the project we looked at the key lessons that we learned from our inaugural community ag program. At-risk youth facilities took a lot of time to coordinate and just didn’t seem like they were ready structurally to integrate this program long-term with us. While New Americans were receptive, there were several other organizations already providing support for this demographic Portland, where much of this work was focused, is doing great garden programs, but many of the surrounding communities have very little happening in terms of community ag. Based on the needs assessment, people really love the idea of food forests. And, people are not testing their soil and don’t have an understanding of why it could be dangerous if they aren’t So we looked at these lessons and said, it’s not going to be a good use of time to continue pursuing the at-risk youth facility and there’s already organizations who are supporting New American farmers so our time isn’t going to be valuable there in the future either. *CLICK*
- But there aren’t many organizations setting up community gardens, food forests, and other community agriculture programs in our other urban and suburban communities and we know that there is a lot of interest around these ideas growing. And there are also a lot of people who are growing food in areas where the potential for lead contamination is high who have no idea that this is something they should even be aware of So we determined these were the directions to pursue for future funding and then we looked around at possible funding sources that might align with these objectives.
- The first one we found was the Quimby Family Foundation which is a Maine based foundation that was started by the founders of Burt’s Bees. Their mission is Growing Human Wholeness- To foster stronger relationships between people and nature to improve our physical, emotional, social, spiritual, and environmental health through grant making in Maine. We felt this fit really with the food forest and education directions we were heading so we applied in 2017. And we weren’t funded. But they gave us great feedback and suggested that it needed to be even more geared toward community involvement. So we revised our ideas and included more ways for the community to be involved. And we were funded for $20,000 for a one year project in 2018-2019, so we just wrapped this phase up. This project took place in the Town of Gorham which we selected for 2 reasons: historically it has held a lot of farm land but is now one of our most rapidly developing communities. And municipal employees and other community organizations were highly interested when we reached out about the initial proposal.
- We coordinated a workshop with a local horticulture expert who specializes in edible species and food forest design to hold a workshop for adults. We set the capacity to 20 and it ended up being highly popular and we ended up with about 30 participants. We also worked with the Town’s Summer Rec program to create educational activities related to gardening practices. So we would spend an hour once a week with their first graders to do an activity that demonstrated the importance of a practice, like mulching, and then we would spend the rest of the time with the raised garden beds actually doing that practice.
- We installed 2 food forests with educational signage, one in the Town’s center and the other featured here, at the community center where the Rec programs are held. They feature a wide variety of edible plants including a variety of hardy kiwis and Pawpaw. The designs for these food forests were provided by community member, Josh Haiss, who does landscape design. He was an absolute asset to the success of these food forests through out the season by volunteering his time for maintenance.
- The third component of this project involved working with local business in the Town’s village to install an edible main street. Businesses received up to three planter boxes which were constructed by an eagle scout. All they had to do was keep them alive through the season by watering and it was really neat to see each one add some features of their own like trellises as they really adopted these as their own. Like the food forest, they were open for anyone to harvest from and the businesses handed out a pamphlet which we created to help them find other edible planters or learn more about what was planted there. Generally they all had a theme to help create one dish at each box so some were salsa or salad.
- We rounded out the growing season with a fall event where we set up a table near the food forest in the Village area and engaged with passersby about the program. We handed out our pamphlet to encourage them to take tours of the edible main street and if they visited 5 boxes they could enter the raffle for a basket of produce grown by the youth in the Rec program we worked with. We also got the word out about our program through a Facebook page run collaboratively by us with the Town’s Parks and Rec
- Reapplied this past fall and were partially funded to help continue this project for another year. Received $14,000 to continue building the program into the Town of Gorham’s identity. Want people to miss it if it went away so they are inspired to take on this project on as their own
- Our next grant was the EPA Healthy Communities Grant. This was another one where we applied in 2018 and we weren’t funded. But again they gave us great feedback and once again they pointed us towards community involvement so we were really starting to sense a trend with what these funders want to see in programs. So we revised our ideas, reapplied in 2019, and we were funded for $25,000 for a two year project which runs from Oct 2019- Oct 2021. So this is a fairly new project that we are getting going right now
- Essentially, this program focuses on increasing soil testing in the Portland area, particularly in neighborhoods that are most likely to have contaminated soil and also tend to house low-income families who are likely to be growing their own food. Historically, Portland has burned down a few times. The most notable was in 1866 and wiped out about a third of the downtown area. This was a time period where many of the housing materials contained lead and after the fires were extinguished, the debris was used as fill in the bayside areas. Over time this bay has been filled in quite a bit more over the foundation of the fire debris. For a time, this area was fairly industrial but in recent years, some of the warehouses are converting to breweries and other businesses and others are being replaced with housing.
- We’ll be collecting up to 120 samples collected from home gardens in Portland Maine from the targeted neighborhoods. Results will be provided to the participating gardener, with action plan for mitigation if needed. It will all be dependent on their individual lead level and gardening practices. We will also be collecting samples of plant tissues from up to 30 locations that have over 400 ppm of lead present in the soil. We will do this twice, once from vegetables grown this season and again at the end of next year to assess the effectiveness of the action plans.
- We will be providing factsheets translated into 5 languages as we canvas the neighborhoods connecting with home gardeners. While our testing is primarily available for people gardening at home it is also important that overall more people are aware of these issues. Door to door outreach to find program participants will be done with community members from partner organizations as well as neighborhood associations
- Over the past four years we’ve come to the following conclusions about urban agriculture in our county: Having community volunteers who are just as passionate about these programs as we are is key. The first food forest we installed in Portland has been solely maintained by volunteers, myself being one of them. Our Gorham project could not have been as successful as it was without the involvement of our community volunteer who helped maintain through the season. It is easy to come up with what we think will be a great plan but once the work actually begins there will always be unforeseen obstacles. Or even in the event that you apply for a grant and don’t receive it, reflecting on what can be improved and how to better serve the community is essential Plan for needing some flexibility. We’ve found some tasks take more time than expected and have had to adjust the rest of a workplan accordingly which was only possible because we hadn’t tied ourselves to overly ambitious deliverables. Interest in community agriculture is growing in our county. At the end of last year we already had other Town’s reaching out asking us how we can get something going with them.
- Which brings us to what’s next? You may have heard Monday morning that we were awarded the latest round of NACD funding. We will be using this to really solidify all the different pieces of our projects that we have done and then work directly with municipalities to create plans specific to their communities. Once they have plans in place we’ll be able to help them start implementing them through this grant and they’ll have an idea of associated costs to they can incorporate them into their budget to make these programs more long term sustainable.