Talking 'Bout The Talking Farm
Excerpts from an interview with Jesse Schaffer, the nonprofit's production manager
Stoking Local Food in Skokie
A week from today, The Talking Farm — the 16-year-old educational nonprofit urban farm just north of Chicago in Skokie — is holding a fundraising farm dinner. After publishing details about the dinner in the July 8 issue of Local Food Forum, I visited The Talking Farm on Wednesday (July 13) for the first time in five years to get better acquainted with Production Manager Jesse Schaffer.
Jesse, who is rounding out his first year at The Talking Farm, comes from a background in social justice and community organizing. He is passionate about the farm’s work to provide hands-on growing experiences for very young children to adults, and its efforts to bring its educational mission to customers at its booths at the Downtown Evanston and Skokie farmers markets.
Scroll down for excerpts from my interview with Jesse and lots more photos, after this quick glimpse at my Saturday market haul from Green City Market in Lincoln Park.
Just Peachy in July
The availability of some other peak-season crops, such as corn and bell peppers, is a bit spotty (not unusual given the differences in rainfall and temperatures across the broad Chicago region). But we can officially declare that peach season is on. This delicious, sweet, juicy fruit is available now from virtually all our local fruit orchards.
My Saturday Green City haul included almost-perfect peach seconds sold at a discount by Ellis Family Farms (Benton Harbor, Michigan), from whom I also bought the blueberries and sweet cherries; apricots from Hillside Orchards (Berrien Springs, Michigan); sweet corn from Nichols Farm and Orchard (Marengo, Illinois); cherry tomatoes and zucchini from Wholesome Harvest (Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin); heirloom tomatoes from Iron Creek Farm (La Porte, Indiana); shishito peppers from Froggy Meadow Farm (Beloit, Wisconsin); cremini mushrooms from River Valley Ranch (Burlington, Wisconsin); and Australian bacon* from Finn’s Ranch (Buchanan, Michigan).
(* Australian bacon, aka cottage bacon, is cut from center pork loin rather than pork belly. It typically comes in slices rather than strips and is less fatty, salty and smoky than most bacon products.)
Talking Farm’s Jesse Schaffer: Spreading the Word
For Jesse Schaffer, the production manager at The Talking Farm in Skokie, the three-acre nonprofit teaching farm is an extension of his longterm commitments to social justice, community organizing, and a better food system.
While an undergrad at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., the Skokie native served as director of agriculture for a Jewish summer camp in Three Rivers, Michigan; was his college’s community garden manager; and was campus coordinator for Real Food Challenge, a nonprofit that seeks to increase the amount of healthy and locally produced food served to students.
After he apprenticed in 2015 at the University of California Santa Cruz’ Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, Jesse managed the Jones Valley Teaching Farm in Birmingham, Alabama; was director of land stewardship for a Jewish-oriented farm in North Carolina; then came back home, serving for a year as farm manager for The Roof Crop’s urban farming operation in Chicago before landing at The Talking Farm last July.
Jesse’s passion for farming and sharing his knowledge on the subject were obvious during our July 13 interview and walk about the farm. Here are some excerpts from our chat.
Why is this called The Talking Farm?
I think it's that the vegetables speak for themselves… By having people experience and come out here in this educational space, a really hands-on, accessible place, it's an opportunity for people to expand their understanding of what it looks like to grow food, where food comes from, what it looks like to grow food in community.
It is also linked up with the Tot Learning Center next door, which is an early childhood learning center. And we have those students constantly over here to take tours, harvest vegetables — we had them picking carrots last week — where you're really incorporating community.
Education as basis for the farm’s nonprofit status
If we weren't a nonprofit, we would just sort of be competing with any other grower. But we're trying to do something larger than that. We want to expose people at the level of production, so we had a group out today who helped us harvest [green] beans, and they got to experience that directly. Then also, when customers come to us at the farmers market, it's an opportunity to do larger education. A lot of times, you go to the farmers market, and we don't have a crop that week and we hope to have a conversation with them about, “Hey, no arugula this week. That's because we had two back-to-back heatwaves, and we'd had no precipitation. And so that's a really cool opportunity to connect with the consumer.”
Crop diversity tops efficiency
If I were working on three acres and it was strictly production, I would not have winter squash in my fields. They're abundant, large yields, large pumpkins, but in reality, that's huge amounts of space that could have been filled with greens or beets or lots of other crops that would really maximize the square footage. And so we were doing a little bit different than the normal farm does. We want to have that broad diversity of crops so that people get to experience all of those different things, even if it isn't always the most efficient per square foot.
No industrial use land, no remediation necessary
[Note: One of the biggest challenges for urban farming is that much of the vacant land, especially in larger cities, was previously in industrial or residential use and needs extensive soil remediation before crops can be grown.]
This farm exists because of a land use agreement between the Skokie Park District and the Talking Farm as a nonprofit… The other special thing about this is that the Skokie Park District had sections of land as preserves that were never, never developed. This was one of them. And so what that meant was not only is this an urban farm, but it's an urban farm on land that was never developed. I've done a lot of urban farming in the past where we were still digging up foundations of houses and buildings. This is all soil, which is very special.
Staffing
We have myself as the production manager, and about two to four part-time staff… My background is also in mentorship and training, and so even if people are coming in with like a small amount of experience, maybe they've interned somewhere else, we're trying to also grow them into farmers. And then we have a volunteer group, our standing volunteer hours are Wednesdays from 1 to 4 p.m. And during that period of time, we have open hours when anybody can show up.
Then we have what we call super-volunteers, people who have just consistently come to the point that their schedules are flexible, and they want to put in more time than just the Wednesdays 1 to 4… So those people keep coming.
Interns
Then we have a cycle of five interns per season. That means over the course of the year, it will be about 15 people… We have a partnership with the village of Skokie, where they help support us in giving out a stipend for the internship. They work I think it's roughly 150 hours maximum. And over that period of time, we try to also cover through our curriculum a variety of subjects in agriculture, get them trained. Those people go on to be our staff some of the time because they've gotten all this training.
Social justice goals
I've been farming for about 12 years now… I farm because I have social justice goals, and I find that farming is a tool to accomplish those goals…. I've run teaching farms in a number of different places. Mainly, my last large operation was overseeing seven Urban Teaching farms in Birmingham, Alabama. And this included a three-acre production farm, seven small satellite farms, and then another two-acre, high school urban farm run all by students; the manager there was a graduate of that school. But really the consistent thread amongst all of these is really mentoring young farmers who are learning the trade, and really, there's just no other alternative to being in the field with people…
Advocates for Urban Agriculture [a nonprofit organization] has a farmer to farmer mentorship program in Chicago. I got to participate in and mentor farmers out in Woodstock [an exurb about 60 miles northwest of Chicago]. It was amazing. I like mentoring people, like watching them grow. But I learned so much from seeing the farm with a new pair of eyes, you know, young farmers, right?
Season extension
[Note: The Talking Farm’s “skyline” is made up of three high tunnels, covered growing facilities that are the bigger cousins to hoop houses. An increasing number of small farmers are adding structures such as these to practice season extension in order to meet the rising consumer demand for local food year-round.]
Season extension is huge. I think it's transformational. It meant like the first few weeks of the farmers market, all of our greens came out of our [high] tunnel. It was so cold and harsh during the spring, right? So rainy, so cold, there wouldn’t have any sort of germination in the field. So when everybody else is sort of like bringing barely anything in market, we’re loaded up with greens… It is a really important tool in the toolbox for small farmers to really compete in a world where people are used to getting produce year-round now.
On connecting people with local food first through taste
A lot of the work that I do is with youth and I love watching their eyes light up tasting something they’ve never tasted before. It's like candy, right? Like they bite into a cherry tomato, it's so sweet and it's unlike anything else they've had before. It hits the sort of receptors that give you the satisfaction that candy gives you but it's this thing from the earth. And it's a life-changing experience, and it does that for adults as well. There's something experiential about smells and tastes that you can't replicate. You can tell somebody all you want about freshness and quality and the importance of the nutrients. But it's a whole other thing to experience it directly. It's a really special thing to be a part of.
The Talking Farm at farmers markets
So generally speaking, we're at Evanston every week. We're at the Skokie farmers market every other week. And then this spring we did a test run briefly at the Andersonville Farmers Market [on Chicago’s North Side]. Yeah, we're gonna try and bring it back again for next year.