It's really cool to me that now I get to work with young people who are the age that I was when I first was getting into this.
There's a lot of interest in trying to build a food system that's more resilient, that can weather the coming challenges of this century.
I'm only 27, so I'm still rosy eyed and I think we can win. I think we can build a better world here.
Welcome to the 334th installment of Ear to the Ground, the Land Stewardship Project's podcast on family farming, regenerative agriculture, community food systems, and local democracy.
I'm Brian DeVore, editor of the Land Stewardship Letter.
Marcos Gioci's first experience with raising food was as a high school student when he worked on an urban farm in South Minneapolis.
The vegetable plot was part of a soccer field, so he has not so fond memories of digging up mesh that was left over from when the sod had originally been laid down.
Nevertheless, Marcos caught the farming bug. He studied biology and botany in college, and spent a year in Bolivia working in agriculture and habitat restoration.
That turned out to be good preparation for his current job.
For the past five years, he's worked at Urban Roots, a nonprofit enrichment and empowerment program that works with high school students in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Along with a market gardening program where youth can get experience raising food in an urban area, Urban Roots also has a cooking program and a habitat restoration initiative.
Marcos now works as the farm manager for the market garden program.
It has vegetable plots and an orchard in the flyover area of the St. Paul Airport, as well as garden locations in East St. Paul.
The program works with around 80 high school students a week during the summer and around half that number the rest of the year.
The produce the youth raise is sold through the Mill City Farmers Market as well as at neighborhood markets.
The goal of Urban Roots is not just to teach young people how to raise tomatoes, cook a nutritious meal, or plant trees.
It's also to give them a sense of how bigger issues impact things like access to food or environmental sustainability.
The youth that work with Urban Roots come from a variety of backgrounds, and some face issues of food insecurity.
As Marcos puts it, it's not just about teaching people where their food comes from.
It's also about helping them learn about the injustices that can make healthy food inaccessible for certain populations,
and what proactive steps can be taken in the community and beyond to address those problems.
Despite his background in farming, Marcos felt he needed to learn skills related to agricultural financial management and goal setting.
So, in 2022, he enrolled in LSB's Farm Beginnings course.
For the past quarter century, Farm Beginnings has been offering training that focuses on the goal setting, marketing, and financial skills needed to establish a successful farm business.
Through the class, LSB organizers introduce students to holistic business planning,
a system that provides a big-picture view of farm management by putting the land, finances, community, and the farmer's quality of life all on the same level of importance.
In addition, established farmers, as well as experts on farm financing and other topics, give in-depth presentations during Farm Beginnings classes.
Marcos, who's 27, says he particularly appreciated the goal setting and planning skills he learned through Farm Beginnings.
In fact, those tools came in handy after he finished the course, when Urban Roots was facing a decision as to whether to continue its community-supported agriculture program,
or to focus more on selling at the farmer's market and via farm stands in the community.
It's also helped him think about how to help the youth he works with develop the kind of skills that make them an integral part of the community, even if they don't pursue a career in farming.
Before the spring planting season began, I traveled to the headquarters of Urban Roots in East St. Paul and sat down to talk with Marcos about his Farm Beginnings experience,
the need to connect food and farming to the bigger picture, and how working with young people in an urban farming setting gives him hope for the future.
Urban Roots is a youth enrichment and empowerment program, and we work with St. Paul Public High School students ages 14 through 18 and beyond.
And the lens through which we do our programming is around environmental education and food.
So we do cooking, market gardening, and habitat restoration.
And you have some land over near the airport in the flyover area, and you have some community gardens,
and it sounds like you're marketing through the Mill City Farmers Market, and then you have kind of here on the east side of St. Paul, you have some local markets that you do, too.
So when you were taking the Farm Beginnings class, one of the things you said that was pretty valuable was trying to figure out how to do goal setting,
and holistic goal setting in particular, and take a look at the whole big picture of how some of the things that we're doing,
even at a place that's a nonprofit urban farm educational place like this, how sometimes you end up doing things that, because you've always been doing them that way,
and it helped you kind of step back and actually make some pretty major decisions here at Urban Roots.
I really loved the focus of the Farm Beginnings class on centering the decisions you make and the structures that you build on a farm around what your values and your core goals are,
and expanding that to the whole human behind those goals and values.
Yeah, and so you guys had done a CSA, like you said, forever, for several years, because this has been around for several decades, Urban Roots,
but you kind of came back to the farm and kind of took a different look at maybe what the role the CSA would play in the farm.
Can you talk a little bit about that kind of process and what you guys ended up deciding to do, and why you ended up making some different decisions there?
Yeah, it was a big decision. It was something that we had been running for many years, like you said, and so it was pretty ingrained into our operations.
Like the CSA was part of how we made our crop plan. It was part of how we rolled out the week every week.
So it was really intertwined in the way that we structured everything else.
But when we sort of stepped back and thought about, OK, what are our main goals as this urban farm who's trying to get food back into the community,
trying to take good care of the land and take good care of ourselves and empower youth in the process,
it ended up making more sense for us to actually focus more on markets for multiple reasons.
It was easier for us as farmers. We got to more hone in on the crops that were doing really well at market and become really good farmers at those crops.
And so it simplified things for us. It took away a deadline in our week.
And so we had a deadline for the CSA in the middle of the week and then the market deadline at the end of the week.
And this way things got more streamlined for us. We could put more energy into our youth program and more energy into the educational stuff that we were trying to do.
And then it also was a more enjoyable experience for the high school students in our programs.
They get really excited about showing up to the market and setting up the stand and being able to show off the things that they grew and share those with the world,
the ways that they've learned to grow and prepare and eat those foods.
They get to interact directly with the customers in a way that's really exciting for them. And so it was a win there for us also.
And then also the thing that really surprised me was that our customer base, the CSA base, they were also incredibly supportive of that shift.
I mean, a lot of them were looking for a way to support the work that we're doing and they were doing that through being a CSA member.
But we told them where they could still find us at the different markets.
And so they were really supportive when we explained why we were making that big change to what we were doing and connecting it to the goals that we had as a program.
And you were saying it's neat to see the youth interact at the market because they not only get to meet the customers face to face and say,
hey, I grew this, but also they can say, you know, I ate this and this is how I prepared it.
And all that stuff is just I mean, that's invaluable of learning the food system from beginning to end.
Yeah, definitely. I mean, a big part of what we do every summer here is we have a big communal meal with with all 80 of the youth that we work with every week.
And so and then a lot of our food goes into those meals that we grow here.
So it's this it's this great experience like there's nothing like connecting with other people over over a lunch or over over food.
And so it's like a great way for them to build camaraderie and build deeper relationships with each other and with the food and with the land and all of those things.
And one of the things that I think is really striking is this idea.
A lot of times people say, well, we work with youth on urban ag projects, that kind of thing, or work with folks to try to connect them with the food system.
And one of the reasons that we do that is to show them where their food comes from.
But you said it's really it's bigger than that, isn't it?
The food system is really big and complicated and oftentimes a really unjust thing.
And so, yeah, like trying to build some of these projects like what we're doing here, where it's like people not only get to like be empowered when it comes to growing food and like and have like have a say in that process.
And then also like getting that food back to people in a way that's like accessible, affordable, culturally relevant to the people that live in this neighborhood.
Those are things that we're working really hard at.
I'm just going back a little bit to your background.
You kind of saw from the beginning in high school, you started working with a kind of an urban garden situation in Minneapolis.
And you, I guess from the beginning, and you've always been interested in botany, you studied botany in college and you worked in with agriculture and habitat restoration in Bolivia, I believe.
So you've been able to make that connection be kind of how it's all connected, I guess that it's like, you know, ecosystems are all connected.
That's the first lesson of ecology. It's all connected.
But you kind of sounds like from the beginning, you didn't have to unlearn this idea. You know, often people think agriculture in the natural environment or the community even are not connected.
It sounds like that was ingrained with you. You didn't see it any other way that it's all kind of connected in the in the big picture.
It's kind of part of the one big ecosystem a little bit.
Or one of the big lenses, I guess, that when we're when we're working with young people is drawing those connections, right? Seeing our human activities as part of the natural environment and like those two things influencing each other all the time.
Like losing that thread is like one of the reasons why there's a lot of crisis right now, like in our ecosystems and our climate.
And so really centering what we do on those connections feels really important.
When we were working with youth, do you get a sense that they maybe they're not going to go on to be farmers, but they're using some of these skills in other ways in their life?
Definitely. I mean, we've got youth that come from a lot of different backgrounds and are excited about a lot of different paths for themselves after they leave here.
But we're really trying to empower them in that process and plant the seeds of being good stewards of their communities and of their environment.
Because no matter what you do, you're going to be on this earth and you're going to be part of a community.
So decision making is part of everything. It doesn't just happen. And you kind of saw that firsthand with they were able to make some connections to their school.
I think that's a really good example because people say, well, these youth didn't go on to farm.
So it was a failure. But that's not the case at all. They they through some an experience like this, they may go on the farming, but they may go on to other parts of their life.
And like you said, learn the skills that they learned here can be applied.
And one of the, I guess, skills they learned was all the decision making that goes into producing food here and marketing the food and all that.
There's decisions and other aspects of their life that are being made that they may not think about.
But can you share that example that you saw where it just really was like, oh, that's why we do this here?
Part of our program model here is that every year that a high school student comes back, they get more of a say and more of a responsibility and become mentors to the youth that are just starting.
But they help actively make decisions around how we run the farm, how we run this place, and we include them in that process.
And also we were working with them a lot on skills of like like decision making consensus, decision making and like like working on a project as a group.
And so in our youth council, which is focused on civic engagement, our youth that have been with us for a while and have been entrusted and like have have gotten these responsibilities in the space at Urban Roots,
started to think about how that feels different from school and realizing, like you said, that like the different institutions and different parts of their life where like things are structured a certain way, realizing that that doesn't come out of thin air.
So they started wondering like, hey, who's actually if we're not making these decisions around how our schools are run, like where is this coming from?
How is it how is it forming?
And so they got really interested in the school board, especially because St. Paul Public Schools had school board elections this year.
And so our youth actually organized a an information session with all the school board candidates and they invited their peers and they invited youth from other organizations because they were really like with skills that they learned here.
Like, OK, well, who's running for the school board? What kind of decisions are they wanting to make? And how do we make sure that our needs are being heard by these people who get to make these decisions?
Everything in life involves decisions. Somebody's making them either.
You're going to be part of that or as they say, you're going to be what's for dinner kind of thing.
That's what I think. That's a really, really good example.
You're you're twenty seven, which but you've been actually involved with urban agriculture for five years. I mean, for since really since high school.
So you've kind of seen it from the ground floor, particularly here in the Twin Cities.
Do you feel like maybe it seems like I'm hearing more and more about urban farming?
And I know with farm beginnings when it first started, the majority of the students that were going through that were the classic farming in a rural area on a family farm and entrepreneurial type farming.
But we're seeing more people go through farm beginning to are interested in urban ag, different models of agriculture, the nonprofit model, that kind of thing, different land ownership models.
It must be kind of exciting to because you you have seen some of this from the ground floor a little bit.
I mean, do you feel like that we're I guess, first of all, seeing agriculture in a different way and bringing in, frankly,
different people who maybe weren't associated with American agriculture, who aren't the classic white male over 55 year old person, but also just seen urban agriculture kind of having a having a moment right now?
Yeah. Yeah. So like you alluded to, I got my start actually when I was in high school working on an urban farm in Minneapolis, working on actually building it out of a soccer field.
And so that was my first time ever getting my hands in the soil or like any sort of agricultural experience writ large.
So it's really cool to me that now I get to work with young people who are the age that I was when I first was getting into this.
But yeah, I mean, I think it's a it's a time where I think a lot of people are recognizing.
Yeah, like urban and rural, you know, there are these spaces that sort of shape each other in really big ways.
And I think there's a lot of interest in trying to build a food system that's more resilient, that can weather the coming challenges of the century.
And so it's it's sort of putting a lot of those like those divides into question.
Right. And so it's I mean, there's really big questions, I think, that people are asking right now around land access and like like zoning and like what what is the value of things like an agricultural plot, like a market garden in an urban setting in spaces where typically a developer would see that as like unproductive land compared to like something else that they could build there.
So, yeah, I think it's an exciting time for building a new food system.
That's a really good point about the development and because traditionally, an open plot, even if they let you farm there temporarily, they're like, well, that's temporary until we can develop it.
But if you can show that this is so valuable for the community and provides some economic benefit to the community, but also food for an area that maybe is a food desert, but also developing the next generation of youth who are looking at being part of the community.
That makes it that makes that piece of land just much more valuable than if it was another parking lot or whatever.
Yeah, I mean, it's like building a food system that's sustainable, right, and that that's not just sustainable in terms of the ecology, which is definitely like foundationally important, but like sustainable for the farmers and for society and a food system that actually empowers people on the land, rather than exploits them.
So it's yeah it's a huge project and I think that that sort of education and working with young people in an urban setting is like an important part of that project.
Like you said that your entry into to farming and agriculture was kind of through this youth model and urban farming and that could have led you in a lot of different directions but you're kind of in the middle of your, you're doing it exactly what you had kind of started out doing a little bit.
Right, yeah, and like you said I'm only 27 so I'm still rosy eyed and I think we can win. I think we can build a better world here.
For more on farm beginnings and urban roots, see the podcast page for Ear to the Ground episode 334 at landstewardshipproject.org.
If you have comments or suggestions about this podcast contact Brian DeVore at bdevor at landstewardshipproject.org or you can call 612-816-9342.
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