Author: Ninette Irabaruta

On the coast of Maine in the United States, the Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture and the Environment is a hub of local food, global scientific research, training of future regenerative business leaders, and hands-on learning for the public. With a 60-year history on 626 acres, Wolfe’s Neck weaves together all these nourishment-cycle connections in both science and economics.

Executive Director Dave Herring emphasizes that “Wolfe’s Neck is a single beautiful place – and we use the power of that place to bring diverse but related ideas and people together in strategic ways.”

In doing so, Wolfe’s Neck is succeeding as an engine for spreading biological and economic nourishment cycles. Even amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Herring says that while long-term planning has become more challenging, core operations in farming, science, and local food production continue to flourish. 

Wolfe’s Neck’s agricultural research, for example, generates food for local communities while studying use of seaweed as cattle feed for producing nutritious milk and reducing greenhouse gas emissions at the same time. Wolfe’s Neck also collects and shares data for the OpenTeam technology collaborative (alongside global universities, corporations, and others) on soil health related to different farming practices, sharing this data and learning with farmers globally.

These programs also provide a 2-year apprenticeship for next-generation dairy managers, and sell around 116,000 gallons of milk per year to Stonyfield Organic for yogurt production in the region. For example, former Wolfe’s Neck apprentices now work on scaling up operations at the Milkhouse organic dairy products company, and at Casella Organics focusing on naturally produced nutrient inputs for farm fields. Interestingly, during COVID-19 Wolfe’s Necks’ milk business has seen an increase in demand because it is not subject to supply chain complications that have plagued some others in the commercial milk industry.

In parallel, Wolfe’s Neck grows and sells approximately $100,000 per year of nutritious foods in local communities; students, summer camps for children, and the general public come to learn about regenerative farming and nutritional impact; and visitors come to camp, shop, and enjoy the views and farming life. In this case, COVID-19 did reduce on-site visitation in the summer of 2020, although food sales in the wider community were unaffected. 

In our work at Nourishⁿ, we’ve heard interest in Wolfe’s Neck’s research and farming activities in the East African country of Malawi, in California technology initiatives looking at nutritional relationships between soils and foods and people, and at small farmer conferences in Massachusetts. Wolfe’s Neck illustrates both the power of nutrient-nutrition-nourishment cycles for integrating science and economics, and the power of a single place for bringing these insights into focus for people across diverse sectors.

Photo Credits: Wolfe’s Neck Center

Community responses to food concerns during COVID-19 shine the light on opportunities for all of society. Small farming and gardening at home boost food security, economic activity, and cultural connections.

This pattern highlights promising paths to more resilient, sovereign, nutritious, and prosperous food networks. While not always as efficient as externally-controlled food systems, these regional networks enable producers and consumers to respond more quickly and creatively to new challenges like disease outbreaks or natural disasters. They stimulate community innovation and resilience amid shifting circumstances.

Furthermore, small farmers and home gardeners networking together, for both commercial and social purposes, tend to create nimble infrastructure which can then be used to deliver other economic and social services as well. This is because networked food systems enable frequent and adjustable movement of products and information in a region (since food is needed daily, and these people sometimes have an economic interest in aggregating product to sell outside the region even in the midst of crisis).

For example, during COVID-19, we see that Tolani Lake Enterprises, located on the indigenous Navajo Nation in North America, started a “home gardening kit” intiative that is now also distributing healthcare supplies, clean water, and COVID-19 educational materials, and is building community connections around other issues. They started in April to address food security by distributing Native seeds, gardening tutorials, recipes using foods grown in your own garden, and a social support network. They observed some gardeners and small farmers also experimenting more than before with rainwater harvesting, greenhouses, hoop houses, and lasagna bed garden techniques. Their new systems for reaching remote households quickly attracted attention for provision of COVID-19 relief supplies. This underscores how regional food systems align local resources and relationships in ways that are also inherently adaptable and quick-responding to other local priorities. (In this case it may seem a mixed blessing: it supports the critical COVID-19 healthcare response, but this extra attention might also be slowing down the local food sovereignty impact). PHOTO: Tolani Lake Enterprises (pre-COVID).

Another example of regional food producers and consumers creating nimble infrastructure is the cooperative food company COMACO in rural Zambia, with over 100,000 small farming families working together to bolster food security and sell products made from surplus to urban markets. This year COMACO responded quickly to springtime floods that wiped out its community members’ gardens, raising money and procuring and distributing quick-growing maize seed so over 1,500 families could replant food for their households while there was still time in the growing season. Such quick response in a remote region was only possible because of the adaptive, locally controlled infrastructure they had already developed. Of note, this flood relief effort also stopped a likely increase in illegal elephant hunting because of food shortages. PHOTOS: COMACO Zambia (pre-COVID).

In Ireland, the Grow It Yourself (GIY) movement creates community support networks encouraging thousands of people to grow a piece of their own food for the first time. Because of COVID-19, GIY is now being consulted and supported by government agencies looking at the resilience and local control of Ireland’s future food systems. PHOTO: Grow It Yourself Ireland (pre-COVID).

Another interesting aspect of this trend/opportunity, highlighted by Tolani Lake Enterprises, is that home gardening can also provide culinary, cultural, nutritional and ecological “entertainment” for young people during times of home isolation. Gardening in traditional and tasty ways, and networking with friends about it, channels periodic boredom into action around the package of local food sovereignty and culture and ecological vitality and improved nutrition.