[00:00:09] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find. Now temperate zones and tropic climbs are not. Through currents and thriving seas and winds blowing through breathing trees and strong ozone, safe sunshine, good planets are hard to find.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: Hello, Ksquid listeners. It's every other Sunday again, and you're listening to sustainability now, a bi weekly Ksquid radio show focused on environment, sustainability, and social justice in the Monterey Bay region, California, and the world. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. Students eat, but what do they eat, and where does that food come from? Both the US Department of Agriculture and the California Department of Food and Agriculture are trying to help small farms sell more of their organic produce to public schools, shortening the supply chain between farms and consumers, and encouraging students to eat more salads and other healthy foods. Today I have a full house at the studio. My guests are Mirea Gomez Contreras and Alma Leonor Sanchez from Esperanza community farms in Watsonville and Pajaro Valley. High school students mark Mendoza Luengas and Julio Gonzalez. We're going to talk about Esperanza's farm to cafeteria program and their efforts to help latina operators of small farms on the central coast earn more revenue for their crops by selling directly to customers.
I want to welcome all of you to sustainability now.
[00:01:42] Speaker C: Thank you so much for having us.
[00:01:44] Speaker B: Ronnie, say something. Ok.
[00:01:46] Speaker D: Thank you.
[00:01:47] Speaker E: Thank you for having me.
[00:01:48] Speaker B: Ok. All right, let's start by telling our audience something about Esperanza community Farm, how it got started, how it operates, who does it serve, and who does the work on the farm.
[00:02:03] Speaker C: Sure, I can start. I'm Mireya, and I'm co leader at Esperanza Community Farms, along with our farmer, Guillermo Lazzaro, who co leads as well as the farmer. And he's actually the one that does the bulk of the work on the farm.
Esperanza was started in 2017 by Roberto Candy and Ana. Actually, Ana's. I know she's listening to us right now, cheering us on, especially these wonderful youth that have taken a step into the salads at their high school.
Esperanza has three programs, starting with the CSA, the community supported agriculture program. That program basically delivers farm to door baskets of fresh, organic, local produce from our farm to the doorstep of 175 families in the Paharo Valley. The second program is the farm to Cafeteria program, which we'll be focusing on today. And the third one is the small farmers of Colorado cooperative that we helped form, which is in their final stages of transition to becoming their own independent ag co op on the central coast. So all of those programs work interdependently, and we'll talk a little bit about how that happens. And we're really. I mean, I started as a CSA member myself in 2017, and it's really been a blessing and a transformative experience for me to be on the farm for so many reasons. Keep it at that for now.
[00:03:29] Speaker B: And, Alma, what's your role at the farm?
[00:03:32] Speaker F: Yeah, so I've been working with Esperanza community Farms for about two years.
My role is farm to cafeteria project manager. And I basically work to help students connect to our organic farm, get to learn more about other organic farms in the area, and also support their goals to get organic produce onto their campuses.
And so we have two internships that involve students in those types of leadership roles that help them, that allow them to experience the farm and also get, you know, get interested and get motivated to bring that healthy and organic produce onto their schools.
Every time there's students who want to learn more on campus or are just interested about where these salads come from, I'm typically the one engaging on campuses and communicating with staff, which is a really big, important piece to kind of the overall project.
[00:04:43] Speaker B: Okay, and Mark and Julia, why don't you tell us something about yourselves?
[00:04:52] Speaker E: I really like film. I've been working with a program called Youth Cinema Project that goes to my school. So I've been doing that since elementary. I do a lot of acting and drama and now this internship with Esperanza Farms.
[00:05:05] Speaker B: Are you filming as part of the internship?
[00:05:08] Speaker E: No, but we're gonna make a student documentary kind of, for the end of the internship, showing what we did. And I think I might make a short film out of that.
[00:05:17] Speaker D: And Mark, I like to be an activist for youth a lot. So when I heard about this internship, I really wanted to be in it because I like to activate for students. I also do, like, different projects. Theatre, I do art, I taekwondo. And that's like, I'm more of a creative side and I try. I want to bring creativeness to pharmacy, cafeteria, and esperance of community farms.
[00:05:47] Speaker B: Well, why don't we start by talking about the.
The background of the farm to school program? Okay. So both USDA and the state of California have gotten very interested in supporting the operators of small farms. And this is one of the main motivations. Right. For farm to school and to provide channels for more direct sales. So what can you tell us about, broadly about the. The programs?
[00:06:19] Speaker F: Yeah, so farm to cafeteria specifically started off simply with just high school students trying to figure out a way for more of the food that they eat on campus to be organic and to be locally sourced.
They had a big interest on getting students to recognize where their food is coming from and who's growing it. And so that's when Esperanza community farms be began to partner with students and support their ideas. And that's where farms cafeteria came from.
Students had been walking to Esperanza community farms with teachers as, like, field trips for a while. And we realized that there's a point where students are basically saying very clearly what they would like on campus and the type of food that they deserve. And so we decided to kind of move forward with that and see the possibilities of this. And so we began with a pilot in summer of 2022.
And that pilot, we made 50 salads for students two times a week during summer school to see kind of what types of vegetables they would like, how often, and how many salads were students actually likely to eat. And so we had two youth leaders really design that project so that other high schoolers can engage with it in the ways that they knew their peers would be interested in engaging in that project. So, yeah, those two youth leaders were Jesus and Carla, who are now in college.
But, yeah, they really took the lead on that and kind of created a baseball, a baseline for farm to cafeteria in the way that it's so student led.
And now each year, we're in our third year of that program, and each year we welcome new interns to kind of shape the internship and the farm to cafe project so that more students can be engaged and it can keep growing each year.
[00:08:34] Speaker B: How many schools are you working with by now?
[00:08:37] Speaker F: Yeah, at the moment, we are serving salads at four different schools. We serve 150 salads at Pajaro Valley every week, and then we serve 70 salads at alternative schools in Watsonville. So that's diamond Tech, renaissance, and new school.
We've recently started a partnership with Everett Alvarez High School that has kind of just started off as getting students to go on field trips to organic farms in that area that, you know, Salinas is also a community where a lot of schools are surrounded by organic farms, yet a lot of the students don't realize that, and they don't kind of, they're not completely aware of, like, the stuff that's around them. So being able to expose them to organic farmers and get to know those farmers is kind of what we're moving towards.
[00:09:39] Speaker B: And are there groups? Is there a student group at the high school at Pajaro Valley? I mean, how do you interact with the students?
Maybe I mean, can the students tell us? Can Marco Julio say something about that?
[00:09:55] Speaker E: So, in the beginning of the year, my teacher had asked me if I wanted to participate in the farmstead cafeteria. And I was like, yeah, sure, because I'm willing to do anything for school, like, any extracurricular activities, but. So I was sent to the cafeteria, where we made some salads, and I went with some other students that I was unfamiliar with. But every other day, we would go to make the salads, and we'd conversate, and it kind of built community within more of the students.
[00:10:26] Speaker B: Did you know at the time where the produce was coming from?
[00:10:29] Speaker E: Yes, I knew it was coming from the farm right next to my school, Esperanza farms.
[00:10:33] Speaker B: Ah, but it's coming from the co op. Well, we're going to talk about the co op as well. And, mark, how about you speak up.
[00:10:41] Speaker D: A little bit for, like, pharmacy cafeteria? I heard about it from my ethnic studies teacher who runs a cooking class after school, and she always encourages to, like, make food, like, on a budget, so, like, everyone could have, like, food. And she talked to us, and she brought Alma to do a presentation while we were in class.
So that's how I learned. And, like, I was very interested in it. I was like, oh, this is really cool. Like, we have a farm here. I didn't know that because I'm a freshman, and that's, like, how it started, how I learned that our school has a farm and that there's, like, a group where we can learn more about, like, sustainable food.
[00:11:23] Speaker B: So how does the food get from the farms to the school?
[00:11:29] Speaker C: Before we answer that question directly, I just wanted to give a little bit of context to what Alma and Mark and Julio have said, because, yeah, it's, you know, I am lucky to spend my time seeing kind of the bigger picture with regard to farm to school in the region.
And I'm lucky, too, that I'm connected with through Guillermo, who's our farmer at Esperanza community farms, connected to a whole pretty large network of dozens of small farmers of color, specifically who many of them are graduating out of Alba, which is an incubator of small farmers who were taught to farm organically.
Because, you know, the first year that farm to cafeteria operated, the produce was coming directly from the farm.
The second year, as we grew in the number of salads and the number of students interested, we realized, well, we either we're going to grow our farm, or we're going to figure. We're going to need to figure out how else to get produce. And at the same time, our CSA program was growing. So we knew we just needed to move more quickly to get produce in and in line with our values of interdependence and dignity and joy, we realized, and Guillermo was actually the one that raised his hand and said, hey, you know, I have my own farm in Salinas also. And I know lots of farmers that are incredible farmers. They're, you know, 3rd, 4th generation farmers.
And the thing with the problem they have is they can't, they don't know how to get their produce to market. And if they do, it's mostly to wholesale companies that don't necessarily pay what, they don't pay the market rate, basically. And so we immediately thought, Guillermo and I, well, how do we bring together small farmers of color so that we help them, we connect them directly to the school. Now that has taken several years to do, but we're really lucky this year in particular that the work of the initial students that Alma mentioned and Alma's work has been a really incredible effort. And so currently the produce that is brought into the school at Para Valley Unified School District to make the salads is pulled from the seven plus organics co op, which is now the official name of this cooperative that we helped form a couple of years ago.
It's a pretty, I mean, that's what we call systems change. You know, Esperanza community Farms is a nonprofit, but we're not just about giving produce to families. That's important on kind of an immediate level. People need to eat. They need to eat good food. We believe that everyone needs access and has a right to food on a long term basis. We know that farmers have to be able to, you know, kind of stand on. Stand on their own 2ft and be able to sustain these relationships with institutions. And so over the course of the last years, we've supported small farmers to build relationships directly with school districts. So that Esperanza kind of is not a middle, it's not a broker or a middle kind of person or organization coordinating that, which we did for the first two years. Alma can talk about the logistical pieces of getting that produce to the farm. Do you want to do that? Because we've learned a lot.
[00:15:03] Speaker B: You're listening to sustainability now. I'm Ronnie Lipschitz, and in the studio with me today are four people. So it's pretty crowded and it's getting a bit warm too, isn't it?
Maria Contreras Gonzalez Gomez. Sorry, Alma Leonor Sanchez. Julio Gonzalez, right.
[00:15:24] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:15:24] Speaker B: Good luck. And Mark Mendoza Luengas and we're talking about the farm to cafeteria program that Esperanza farms in Watsonville has managed to sort of launch over the last three years.
We were just talking about the suppliers, the farmers who are providing the produce for the program. And I do want to come back to ask some more questions about that. But I also had asked about the logistics of getting the food from the farmers to the schools, and Alma is about to tell us about that.
[00:16:01] Speaker F: Yeah, it's actually a really interesting process that when I started working, I was, like, really excited to be able to do this work, because the produce that we're taking to the schools is organic and fresh, and a lot of the times harvested that morning.
And so we coordinate with five to six farmers who have their farms located in Watsonville and Salinas and the Pajaro Valley area.
And so typically, around 07:00 a.m. We drive to Salinas to pick up produce, five different items of produce from the farmers.
And a lot of the times, it's lettuce, cherry tomatoes, strawberries.
And then once all the produce is picked up, I bring it back to the high school.
And then because it's harvested the day of, there's really not a whole lot of need for, like, refrigeration or packaging, because a few hours later, the students come in, they get their gloves on their hair nets, and they're ready to start making salads, which is really cool that this is, like, something that was just harvested from the earth, like, a few hours ago. And now the high schoolers get to enjoy it.
And so, yeah, that delivery happens twice a week, and we coordinate with the farmers to see what types of vegetables are in season and also communicate with the students so that if there's, like, a particular vegetable that they would like to see in their salads, we can add that in. Or if there's something that they don't really like in their salads, we can keep that out, too.
[00:17:53] Speaker B: Do you actually drive to each of the farms, or are they bringing their produce to, say, Guillermo's farm?
[00:17:59] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:18:00] Speaker F: So before, in the previous years, we were picking up at one central spot at Alba, where all the farmers would drop off their produce, and then we'd pick it up.
This time around, each of the farmers is taking turns being the pickup spot. So, yeah, every morning, I'll drive to. Or not every morning, twice a week, I'll drive to one of the farmers farms and then pick up the produce.
[00:18:27] Speaker B: And just how does the produce get to the other schools? Do you also have to bring it there?
[00:18:33] Speaker F: No. So PV High has a pretty big kitchen that multiple schools will come to the kitchen to pick up their lunches or make their lunches in that kitchen. So when we make the salads, we set aside a few. So that way when those places. Yeah, when those cafeteria staff come by PV high, they just take the salads that they need.
[00:18:57] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:18:58] Speaker B: And Mark and Julio. So you've been engaged in making salads?
[00:19:03] Speaker E: Yes.
[00:19:04] Speaker B: Yeah. Have you ever done it before?
[00:19:07] Speaker E: Made a salad?
[00:19:08] Speaker B: Made a salad, yeah.
[00:19:08] Speaker E: Yeah. Well, before that, no, but I've done it a few times.
[00:19:12] Speaker B: This is your first time in. In the kitchen?
[00:19:15] Speaker E: Not in the kitchen, but making salads.
[00:19:16] Speaker B: Making salads. Where do the salads made then?
[00:19:18] Speaker E: In the cafeteria.
[00:19:19] Speaker B: On the cafeteria.
[00:19:20] Speaker E: Now we move. They moved into the kitchen.
[00:19:22] Speaker B: Now you're in the kitchen and mark?
[00:19:24] Speaker D: Oh, well, I haven't made salads. I stopped to try that out. But currently the last meeting we had at Esperanto community farms, we were like brainstorming ideas for new salads, which is really cool. We're getting feedback from our friends like, oh, they don't like this. Well, you should do this. So we brainstorm a whole bunch of salads. And we kept saying different salads. And I've tried the salads and they're pretty good. I really like them.
[00:19:52] Speaker C: Well, I'm eager to talk about PVUSD and their incredible work, but did you have another question?
[00:19:57] Speaker B: I can ask it later.
[00:19:58] Speaker C: Well, I can't help it. You know, if any of our listeners today are on Facebook or Instagram and you're following PVUSD food nutrition services, you'll see the incredible work that they've been doing, the effort that they've taken to bring more locally sourced produce to the school district, district wide, you know, to all of the schools there. I know that they are. In November of last year, they became Eat real certified, which means that there's not only are they sourcing more and more locally and sustainably, but they're increasing their scratch cooking and they're doing it in a way that's really kind of culturally fitting. They have green pozole. I knew they had green. I didn't know that. Green pozole at PB High last.
[00:20:43] Speaker E: It's pretty good.
[00:20:44] Speaker C: Yeah, I saw their post and I thought, I want to try that. They have, they had some sort of like, carne, some sort of bowl recently. What was that? It was like a Chile Verde Chile Rojo bowl. Al pastor bowl, actually.
[00:21:00] Speaker E: Yeah, it was pastor.
[00:21:01] Speaker C: What was that like?
[00:21:02] Speaker E: I was pretty good. They gave you some pastor with a bit of, I think it was Pico de Gallo. And they give you a few tortillas as well.
[00:21:09] Speaker C: And that's a new thing.
[00:21:10] Speaker E: Yeah.
It's way better than what we've had before.
[00:21:14] Speaker C: Yeah. They're also bringing trays. You know, students serve themselves in trays.
[00:21:18] Speaker E: Oh, I haven't seen that.
[00:21:19] Speaker C: Yeah. And then, you know, Jeannie, the. The director of food nutrition there has been an important person.
She's really been leading the effort to transform this work. Yeah. And I just want to give her a shout out, because in terms of leadership and social justice is about leadership, strong leadership, committed leadership that stands their ground. And while I have heard lots of school district food nutrition directors talk about the incredible amount of rules they have to follow. Right. And it really is, I'm sure, really complex and a tangled mess. That's me talking about it without actually being in it, but I can see it.
She has Jeannie in particular. I just want to give her a shout out. She's done an incredible job to be student friendly. She has opened up doors at PVUSD to allow farm to cafeteria to grow. And in particular, the season, farm to cafeteria season is bringing in produce that's completely paid for by the farm, the food nutrition budget. So Esperanza is no longer subsidizing the actual produce, which is an important way to begin to institutionalize programs like this that are student led, that are in cooperation with farmers, and that are kind of making visible the invisible things that are so important behind any vegetable. How many people touch the vegetables? We always ask students, how many people touch the carrot that's in your salad? Right? Where did it come from?
Who picked it, and what are they paying for that? And what are they getting back in return? Because they deserve to live a good life, too. Right?
[00:23:01] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:23:01] Speaker B: So, yeah, I imagine the produce that the school district and the schools were buying before probably came for a long way away, even though all this stuff has grown right across the street.
[00:23:14] Speaker C: Basically, I was tracking a few years ago when my daughter was at Calabasas elementary school, just during COVID the meals that were coming home. And I'm sure COVID, uncovered lots of other problems and possibilities for transforming the food system in the schools. But apples were coming from Nevada at one point, and I thought, oh, my goodness, we have lots of yummy apples here. And of course, it isn't easy to say there's apples here. Let's bring apples into the school system. But there's got the possibility, you know, we see that there's possibility to make it happen. And Alma has led the way to make that happen through the farm to cafeteria program.
[00:23:50] Speaker E: Yeah, actually, pretty recently, a staff from. I'm not gonna say who, but a staff from my school had told me that the packaged carrots that we get are coming from Vegas, which is Nevada. Like, what you were just saying?
[00:24:03] Speaker B: I had no idea that carrots were being grown in Nevada. I thought they all came in the winter. They came from Arizona and the imperial Valley.
[00:24:11] Speaker E: They're those little baby carrots, and they come in a little package.
[00:24:14] Speaker B: Pretty neat. My joke is they take the big ones and they grind them down into the little baby ones.
Are you learning about what I think of as the political economy of food production, the sort of relationship of these small farmers to the distributors and the marketers and general, is that one of the things that you've been learning about?
[00:24:40] Speaker E: Yeah, we've been. I know that Esperanza Farms is a nonprofit organization, and they help provide food for those who cannot afford it. And we've also been learning about how, like, other farms, the ones that use non organic farms, that they use pesticides and they don't crop rotate, which is rotating through crops, like I just said.
[00:25:06] Speaker B: In order to retain soil fertility so.
[00:25:10] Speaker E: That the nutrients from the soil isn't removed. But they care more about quantity over quality. It's all just about making money. It's not about the nutritions. It's not about making it accessible for those who need it.
[00:25:22] Speaker B: Well, to be entirely fair, if you're farming ten acres, it's a very, very marginal business, and quantity then becomes important. Have you talked about the role of distributors in the food chain?
[00:25:41] Speaker F: So just recently with the interns, we had a conversation about the food supply chain. And y'all are welcome to jump in if you'd like. Yeah, go ahead.
[00:25:50] Speaker D: Just like we were talking about the food chain, right? And we were saying we did a food chain in the survey, and we went through, like, every step. It was like, you grow it, you package it, you send it to a warehouse, then they package it again and send it to big stores, and that gets to the people who buy it. But then we started looking at, like, how can we, like, like, make it easier, like, not use so much packaging, not, like, use, like, so much transportation. And, like, we were talking about how it's very better to just, like, support, like, farmers market, like, organic farms, because, like, how we were talking about how, like, carrots come from Nevada. Like, that's not really necessary because it's so much transportation and so much packaging. It's like, it's, like, not like it's cheaper, but it's also not good for you. Like, you don't think about how. How much those carrots went through and like what you're putting in your body. And if you go to a farmer's market, they're usually all grown locally and they always support local farmers, which is something that we talked about.
[00:27:00] Speaker B: I was looking into some of the statistics a few weeks ago, and this is from the USDA website. And it applies to large farmers, but farmers get about 15 or twenty cents of the retail dollar, if that much.
So these farmers are selling to distributors and they're getting.
And the produce at the retail level is pretty expensive.
So what does this do then? What does farm to cafeteria do?
[00:27:32] Speaker C: Well, farmed to cafeteria for small farmers, it creates channels for direct connection where there aren't the kind of wholesale companies or middle people, sellers that take a piece of that profit. Ultimately, I think what Julio said, and it is important to be fair, farming is so expensive. I had no idea. Oh, my gosh. I know that in our area, or at least where we farm, we're really lucky to lease three acres of land, of organic land, farmland out of the land trust of Santa Cruz county. They are an important player in our creation story. I mean, really, we. We would not be able to have built this. We wouldn't have been able to build Esperanza and farm to capturia, to what it is if we had. Didn't have that as a foundational piece. And we only get to pay a dollar a year per acre because we're a non profit.
Our neighbors who also farm there, tomatero and Sarasara organic farms, they pay between 1700 to 2500 per acre. And imagine 20 acres, 50 acres, 100 acres. So, yes, it's pricey to farm when.
[00:28:47] Speaker D: We.
[00:28:48] Speaker C: So what Esperanza does is we provide technical assistance to farmers so that they get this gonna kind of. It's a wild thought that I. Or it's a wild.
I'm gonna explain something that might sound very wild to many of us listeners today.
That is it.
Small farmers of color are. They know how to farm. That's what they do. They know the soil, they know the water. They walk outside and they can tell you whether rain is really coming or not. They can, you know, you can feel soil in their hand. They can close their eyes, they can smell. They know when a fruit is ripe. Gosh, that's like nutrition and sustenance. It's life itself. And they're not many of them, many of the farmers that I've met are not business people. You need to have the kind of business skills and savviness to navigate in a kind of a market that's based on competitiveness.
We work with small farmers of color, specifically the seven plus organics co op, to support them in preparing to call a director of a food nutrition program at a high school or school district, and to know how to invite them to a meeting. Right. To know what to put on the agenda on that meeting, to negotiate negotiation skills.
We are also connecting them with people that can do that work. Graphic designers, web designers, photographers that can take photos so that they can actually exist online.
Writing an email can be incredibly difficult. And many small farmers that we work with don't necessarily navigate the world in English. Spanish kind of is their first language, and that's how they move around. And so it's all of these kind of basic navigation and business skills and tools that we're able to not only model, right, but we build their skills so that when Esperanza no longer exists, they can still remain connected to the buyer. This institution, in this case, it's the Parham Valley Unified School District. But lSl High School is on its way. The county office of Ed in Santa Cruz county is on its way. We just actually finished writing a collaborative grant with California department. What is it? CDFA of Food and agriculture.
And you're right, what you said earlier, Ronnie, about the incredible amount of investment that's coming into farm to farm to cafeteria, farm to school. It's pretty gigantic. And the really cool thing about it is that there's four tracks that are made available so that farmers can apply through one track, farmers directly, nonprofits and schools can apply on another. So it really is like four open doors. Which door do you want to walk through to get funding to be able to fund such important work like this, that is transformative, that is sustainable, we can sustain a program like this. It's very possible, right, to minimize the packaging, to know who your farmer is, to be able to make a salad for the first time. Oh, my goodness. All the way until high school, it took me four years to eat my entire CSA basket. The first two years, I wasted almost half of it, to be quite honest. That's embarrassing to say, but I didn't know how to cook kale. I didn't know what it was. I just didn't eat as much.
[00:32:11] Speaker B: You might have been better off.
[00:32:14] Speaker C: Ask my daughter. She makes a pretty good kale salad.
[00:32:18] Speaker F: Yeah.
[00:32:18] Speaker B: You're listening to sustainability now. I'm Ronnie Lipschitz. And today I have in the studio four people who are involved with a farm to cafeteria program which basically buys produce from, in this case, small farmers of color around Salinas and Watsonville to be made into salads in high schools in Watsonville, my guests are, and I'm going to read this just so I get it. All right. Mark Mendoza, Luangas, and Julio Gonzalez from Pajaro Valley High School. Did I get it wrong?
[00:32:54] Speaker E: No, you said Julio Gonzalez.
[00:32:55] Speaker B: Okay. Okay.
[00:32:56] Speaker E: That's right.
[00:32:56] Speaker B: Yeah.
Alma Leonard Sanchez and Maria Gomez Contreras. Let me get it straight from Esperanza community farms.
And we were just talking about the fact that many of these farmers, these small farmers know how to farm. That's what they learn at Alba, but they don't really know how to run a farm.
And there's precious little assistance that's available. And one of the observations I've made is that a lot of college educated farmers to be, learn an awful lot of this stuff in college. They learn all of the science and the biology. They learn how to do it, which is big stuff right now. They may have access to capital to start up their farms, family access, and they know how to deal with bureaucracies. And that's one of the stiffest things that farmers have to do. Like if they want to be certified organic, right, they have to get organic certification. And there are all kinds of food safety regulations.
It's a regulatory nightmare. So it's a lot easier just to sell to the distributor and not have to deal with all of those other kinds of things. So can you tell us a little bit more about how you're helping the farmers?
[00:34:18] Speaker C: Yeah.
The seven plus organics co op has been meeting.
They started out meeting monthly, but for the last almost year, they've been meeting on a weekly basis. And now their meeting agendas are quite different. You know, their bylaws have been on their agenda now for some months. And so they're on the tail end of completing their bylaws for to kind of finalize the formation of their ag co op.
One of the things we've supposed to, what we've helped them do is find a lawyer that can help them with that process, which is a difficult one.
We've done some research to help them find funding opportunities and have helped them write some grants that have come in that are actually.
I know that one of the farmers in the co op received a state grant, and that state grant, he used to strengthen the farm to cafeteria program.
You know, there's so many things to navigate. I know that their ultimate kind of wish and goal is to farm altogether on 100 acres.
Now, our relationship with the land trust, you know, Esperanza's relationship with the Land Trust of Santa Cruz county makes it possible for us to have conversations about what it might take to, you know, in three to five years, find the capital and also the land.
I should say that one of the more. The more recent accomplishments that we're celebrating is that there's a foundation out of the southwest, Potlicker Foundation, Potlaker Capital, I think they're called. And they are visiting the seven plus organics co op in the next month. And they may potentially be recipients of one of 13 $250,000 grants in the country that's geared at helping small farmers of color access land, you know, buy land or take a big step toward really cementing their business and to generate profit.
So, you know, everything from navigating the bureaucracy to kind of the softer skills that you might imagine of just putting a crop plan into practice, you know, and finding. Finding the buyers. And once you have the buyers, how to sustain that, how to be reliable, how to be, you know, how to communicate with buyers so that they continue to buy your produce. So, yeah, it's been an incredibly eye opening partnership between Esperanza and the farmers, the small farmers, and I'm committed to getting them as close to this dream they have of the hundred acres.
[00:37:30] Speaker B: Yeah, well, maybe make it more.
[00:37:32] Speaker C: Maybe more. Yes, Ronnie.
[00:37:36] Speaker B: Well, it also sounds to me like you should be, the students should be learning how to write grants and help the farmers. Right. I mean, that's one of the main issues. Right. Is the translation from, you know, and the legalese.
What else are you doing with this program? I know that there's some other initiatives to it.
[00:37:58] Speaker F: Yeah. So I think the internships that we offer, we have had the chance to really dive deeper into what we want students to engage in and what kind of activities we want to offer with the internship.
And so this year we have seven interns versus in previous years, we've had two to three where we're now coordinating field trips so that they themselves can get to personally meet a lot of the organic farmers in the co op, that farm in the area.
We have them present at city council meetings and school board meetings so that they can kind of share with the wider community about the food supply chain and specifically how it's working at their school and how this program has been implemented.
And also, I feel like with the internship, a lot of what I personally find is really important. Is the fact that we're providing just a safe space outdoors where students can engage in, like, very important conversations about their schools and their, you know, the cultures in their community.
I think that a lot of students, specifically in this age group of high school students, a lot of times they don't get opportunities to explore outdoor areas, specifically when it's around, like, stewardship or, you know, working with the land and reciprocal relationship with the land. And being able to welcome them to a community farm that has regenerative and sustainable growing practices is something really important, I feel like, for this community specifically, because, I mean, I grew up in Watsonville as well, and a lot of my family and the families that live in this area have worked in the agricultural industry.
But I'm noticing that less and less of our youth are aware of the food supply chain and how we as individuals are involved in it.
So the internship is kind of just an opportunity where we can also just share about our personal stories and family history with growing food and how we can reconnect to that and, you know, engage our parents also in growing food and in eating healthy. And it's been really nice to hear, you know, students personal stories about, like, no, I've never grown food before, but my mom has and kind of exploring that, like, where. Where can we grow as a community? Not just as individuals, but, you know.
[00:40:56] Speaker B: What are your stories? Do you have stories? Mark and Julio?
[00:40:59] Speaker D: Yeah, for, like. Like Amma said, we're trying to build community as well with all these programs.
My mom's a farmer. She. She's been farming for. Since she's gone. She's been, like, for 15 years. And, like, I never. I, like, always admire her work because she works, and then she goes home, and then she's, like, she makes time for us, which is, like, really amazing. And, like, it just.
I wanted to learn more, so I came into the internship, and, like, I heard other people's stories, and it's really amazing. Like, we're trying to build community. Like, we're making salad for the schools, and we're like, we're giving out this salad to make a community. We're like, oh, did you like the salad? And we're just building community because that's something important in the internship community. Like, we're all gonna be in the same town for, like, a long time. Maybe, like, a lot of people are gonna stay here, and, like, it's important to build community with other schools and other people and other farmers. So that's, like, very important to me. Building community.
[00:42:07] Speaker B: Did you want. Do you have something?
[00:42:09] Speaker E: Yeah. My. I know my grandpa works in the fields picking crops, and it makes me appreciate more the food that we get, like, the produce. And I know, like, a lot of my friends families also have parents that work out there, and it's hard work. It's work that people don't pay much mind to or aren't mindful enough when receiving their produce. And I just think that more youth should be aware of the work that goes into all of the crops that they eat, and they should just be more appreciative of it.
[00:42:49] Speaker B: Mark, have you ever worked on your mother's farm?
[00:42:52] Speaker D: I tried once. She took me over the summer to pick strawberries. That failed completely. And I just stood there with my sister, and we just stood there for, like, an hour, just like, we didn't touch anything because we didn't know. But, like how Julio said, people stereotypes farming as, like, a bad thing. Like, it's, like, for. For. It's not for. It's not a good job. People stereotype it. So not a lot of people pay attention to it, which is, like, what we're trying to do is trying to change the community's view of farming. Like, we're trying to tell them, oh, this is a good thing. Like, all those stereotypes. We're trying to get rid of the stereotypes.
[00:43:30] Speaker E: Mm hmm.
[00:43:32] Speaker B: What. What did the two of you wanted are thinking about doing in the long term? You know, after. After high school and college, I'm thinking.
[00:43:40] Speaker E: About becoming an actor or director, film writer.
[00:43:45] Speaker D: I'm, like, on and off between things, but I enjoy, like, psychology or maybe, like, creating a business to help people out. Like people like my mom, like farmers. I want to help out people and bring community.
[00:44:04] Speaker B: Well, I think you're working with Esperanza farm speaks volumes about that.
What else should we talk about? Tell us a little bit about what is it that you're doing at the farm right these days?
[00:44:19] Speaker C: Oh, you know what? Yeah, there's two things. Well, in response to your question now, but I'll say that at Espenanza community farms, since we started, since the farm was founded, we've tended to start planting in March, as early in March as possible. The last two years, we've not been able to guess why.
The floods. The floods and the rains. And that has put us back two months in terms of the beginning of our CSA program. Luckily, interdependence in action, we have been able to work with the co op to make sure that we don't delay the start of our CSA season so that's been an important kind of acknowledgement and recognition that building community, this is one way that it can look, is kind of breaking down the silos and the barriers that keep us disconnected, looking toward each other to see how we can help each other out.
The other thing I wanted anyway, actually, to finish that. So we're just going to start planting this week. We do need volunteers for the program, so if anyone out there is listening and you'd like to come out and help us harvest once a week or twice a week on a monthly basis, weekly basis, please reach out.
[00:45:30] Speaker B: You're just starting to plant, though. So when will you be harvesting?
[00:45:33] Speaker C: We will start harvesting probably in six weeks, is when we'll have our first.
We start with lettuce and onions and some of the green, the leafy greens. So six to eight weeks, we should begin to see our first crop.
The second thing is, you know, there is a lot of momentum being built around food farming policy and nutrition. And I just want to recognize the other organizations that have been doing this work or similar work. I know food what has been an incredible youth serving organization that teaches students how to farm, how to take care of our bodies, and a lot of end life skills. Obviously, the food bank has been around delivering produce to people. And I know that while their lines are growing, they're there, they're consistent, and they're all across the county, there's life lab in the school system.
There's another organization that Sandra leads. Do you remember that one?
[00:46:51] Speaker F: Cardenia Amorie Amistad, which is located in Watsonville. They kind of advocate and practice, really just like a lot of wellness and nutrition.
[00:47:03] Speaker C: My dream as co leader of Esperanza is that all of these food justice organizations, I'll call them Food justice, but food farming organizations come together and leverage each other, leverage the power and the resources that we have, because as a systems changing organization, you know, in partnership with Food bank, in partnership with Life Lab, in partnership with Land Trust of Santa Cruz county, food wet nethers. There's just so much more that we can do to make sure that people have access to that term. Food security is we ask our CSA members, are you food insecure? And they're like, what does that mean? And so while they don't know what that means, that term is used by, is used pretty widely in the health and medical community. And that's something that we address as well, that people have culturally appropriate food, that they have food close to home. They don't have to drive two towns down that they have. They afford it, and that they don't worry about not having food in the near future. And so I wish for that kind of convening to happen so that we can address both long and short term goals and also build a system that not only results in profit because we need it, especially for small farmers of color, but that it results in the kind of dignity that we know we all deserve. And that's possible. We're making it possible. This is when, at a small scale, we're doing it. Yeah. And I think over time, it'll grow.
[00:48:49] Speaker B: Well, believe it or not, we're almost out of time.
[00:48:52] Speaker D: I wasn't going to say something. I just like, go ahead, it's your.
[00:48:55] Speaker B: You have the floor.
[00:48:56] Speaker D: I mean, I'm just, like, happy that I'm in this internship because I've learned a lot about agriculture and it's like, really interesting, like, to see, like, I'm like, telling my other friends, like, you guys should try these salads. And they're like, really? And they're like, and once they try them, they're like, oh, this is really good. And I'm like, you guys should have tried them. They're like, well, we don't really hear about these things. I'm like, so I'm, like, trying to advocate more.
[00:49:22] Speaker B: Did you want to, did you have any final, final remarks?
[00:49:26] Speaker E: Yeah, I just think that more young people should think about where their food came from and care more about what you put in your body, not just hot Cheetos.
[00:49:36] Speaker B: Where can our listeners, let's see. Learn more and sign up. To volunteer, one of you have to answer.
[00:49:43] Speaker F: Yeah. At our website, Esperanza community Farms. We've got information about CSA baskets. We've got a link for the seven plus organics co op. And we also have information about our upcoming event, Dia de la Speranza, which will be in Watsonville. And this is really just a celebration on June 16, 2024. And this is a celebration of organic farmers, you know, a place where the community can come together and learn about kind of this food supply chain that's been going on. And then if you need a phone number to sign up for CSA or have any more questions, our number is 831-854-8667 okay, Maria, did you want to add any final.
[00:50:31] Speaker C: There are more and more CSA programs popping up. Look for one near you. I know that the co op has one. I definitely want to say sign up for a CSA program, whether it be through Esperanza, the homeless garden project, the co op.
We all have a role to play, right? And I hope. I know I'm inspired by the young people that have stepped up to participate in this program, and I look forward to your films. Thank you. And I look forward to your psychology, however that shows up in the world to transform the world.
[00:51:02] Speaker B: Okay, well, listen, thanks to all of you, Marc, Julio, Alma and Maria, for being my guests on sustainability now.
[00:51:09] Speaker E: Thank you for having me.
[00:51:10] Speaker F: Thank you for having us.
[00:51:11] Speaker B: It was my pleasure. And I hope we can keep informed about what you've been doing.
You've been listening to an interview about Pajaro Valley high schools and Esperanza Farm to Cafeteria project, which actually includes more than just Pajaro Valley High School at this point. My guests were Maria Gomez Contreras and Alma Leonor Sanchez from Esperanza community farms in Watsonville and Pajaro Valley high students mark Mendoza Luengas and Julio Gonzalez.
If you'd like to listen to previous shows, you can find
[email protected] sustainability now. And Spotify, Google podcasts and Pocketcasts, among other podcast sites. So thanks for listening, and thanks to all the staff and volunteers who make Ksquid your community radio station and keep it going. And so until next, every other Sunday, sustainability now.
[00:52:11] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find now. Temperate zones and tropic climbs, and not through currents and thriving seas and winds blowing through breathing trees.
Strong ozone, safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find. Yeah.
