Grid Magazine May 2013 [#049]

m ay 2 0 1 3 / i ssu e 49 g r i d p h i l ly.co m

S u S ta i n a b l e p h i l a d e l p h i a

t a k e o n e !

Co-Working it out

Local artisans find strength

in numbers

kidding Around

Spring is here and so

is great goat

cheeseSEEDsaviorsSeed savers safeguard our region’s rich horticultural heritage

Our annual profile of local farms in partnership with PASA

YOU KNOW YOUR THE GREENEST GAL ON THE BLOCK WHEN...your compost recipe is a

closely held family secret.

Yeah, you’re that kind of green. But what about your energy company? Clean Currents delivers only Green-e Energy® Certified wind power—because clean energy isn’t something we have to wait for, it’s here now. But we’re not just interested in powering light bulbs. We’re powering a movement of people like you who are committed to a sustainable future.

Start green-powering your home today.Visit www.windpowerpa.com or call 215.525.2955

PA #A-2012-23304407 Not just a change in power—the power to change.

May 10Trinity Memorial Church

22nd and Spruce Sts.

DRINKS PROVIDED BY CO-SPONSORED BYSUSTAINABLE

19103T H E C I T Y O F P H I L A D E L P H I A

MAYOR’S OFFICE OFSUSTAINABILITY

YOU’VE READ THE MAGAZINE, NOW SEE THE SHOW!

PRESENTS

Judy WicksFounder of White Dog Cafe, Sustainable Business Network and Fair Food

AUTHOR OF GOOD MORNING, BEAUTIFUL BUSINESS

Rob FlemingSustainable Design Director, Philadelphia University

AUTHOR OF DESIGN EDUCATION FOR A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE

William Woys WeaverThe Keystone Center for the Study of Regional Foods and Food Tourism

AUTHOR OF AS AMERICAN AS SHOOFLY PIE: THE FOODLORE AND FAKELORE OF PENNSYLVANIA DUTCH CUISINE

YOU’VE READ THE MAGAZINE, NOW SEE THE SHOW!

HOSTED BY

Nic Esposito Urban Farmer and Novelist

Alex MulcahyGrid Publisher

Friday

May 10Trinity Memorial Church

22nd and Spruce Sts.

DOORS OPEN AT

6:00 p.m.SHOW STARTS

AT 7:00 P.M.

TICKETS

$5.00TO ORDER VISIT

GRIDPHILLY.COM

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Featuring fresh organic, chemical-free, and conventional produce.

12 plain Sights: Has Hidden City found the birthplace of the Barnes Collection?

13 clean cut: A do-it-yourself solution to keeping your cutting boards toxin-free

14 Food Source: Meet Philadelphia beekeeper Adam Schreiber

16 rolling Wonder: The Farm Explorer hits the road, delivering farming and cooking education

20 the Whole Food: Bok Choy

22 Kids these days: Goat cheese season has finally arrived

38 urban naturalist Fish Town: The Fairmount fishway is helping shad make the arduous trip upstream

40 events Earth Day celebrations, gardening workshops and a run for clean air are just some of 20-plus events that will get you outside this spring.

46 dispatch Some Seeds Have Deep Roots: An heirloom seed saver tells the story of his collection

cov e r a n d co n t e n ts p h otos by r o b c a r d i l lo | w w w. r o b c a r d i l lo.co m

m ay 2 0 1 3 / i ssu e 49 g r i d p h i l ly.co m

FarmbooK — 16-page Special inSert inSide!

heirloom seed-savers are preserving our area’s rich horticultural heritage by brian rademaekers

26 Small businesses meet a great idea: Co-working artisans share resources, experience and a vision of community

Exploring thEof philadElphiapage

30

April 18 - 28, 2013

www.philasciencefestival.org

Presenting Sponsor: Created by Philadelphia’s science, cultural and educational

institutions and organized by The Franklin Institute.

Science Carnival on the ParkwayApril 20 | FREE ALL DAY!

11 days of science in places you least expect that will stimulate your senses, tantalize your taste buds, and rattle your brain.

FarmbooK — 16-page Special inSert inSide!

Speaking of these pages, what an issue! It has our fourth Farmbook, published in partnership with PASA (the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture), Brian Rademaeker’s excellent cover story on the importance (and fun) of Philadelphia’s heirloom seeds, and a back page essay from another local titan of sustainability (and author), seed saver William Woys Weaver.

I hope you enjoy reading this issue as much as we enjoyed putting it together. But please, don’t let Grid keep you from a good night’s sleep.

alex j. mulcahy, [email protected]

These days much of my at-home time is spent trying to induce smiles and sleep from our little guy. Between sing-

ing “Two Princes” and “I Feel Good,” and count-less hours on a rocking chair, finding time to read is a challenge. But despite feeling the end-of-day exhaustion, I just tore through Judy Wicks’ new memoir, Good Morning, Beautiful Business. Do I lose editorial credibility if I say she’s a hero of mine? Though I’ve read any number of articles about her life story and her impact on Philadel-phia’s local food and business communities, the book was still a revelation. She’ll be on the cover of the next issue, Grid’s 50th, and a guest at the next Grid Alive, Friday, May 10 at Trinity Me-morial Church (22nd and Spruce Streets). I’m thrilled to have this opportunity to interview her, and I hope you’ll join us.

Another book robbing me of sleep is Drift, a detective thriller about genetically modified food. You may know the author, Jon McGoran, any number of ways. He’s written several novels under the pen name D.H. Dublin; he’s been an ac-tivist on behalf of community gardens and food labeling; and for the past few decades, he’s been a fixture at the venerable food co-op, Weavers Way. For more than 20 years, he served as editor of the Shuttle, an excellent publication produced for members of the co-op. When I met Jon al-most five years ago, he guided me on a tour of the co-op and Weavers Way’s Mort Brooks Farm. It was astonishing how often our conversation was interrupted by Jon greeting passersby. It seemed that not only did everybody know Jon, they all seemed to like him, too.

So it’s with great pleasure that I introduce Jon as Grid’s editor-in-chief. He’s smart, funny, im-mensely likeable and a very talented writer. He’s also a shameless punster (if you have shame, you don’t make puns), so I look forward to blaming him for any groan-inducing attempts at humor in these pages, especially if I’ve written them.

Read Local

publisherAlex Mulcahy

215.625.9850 ext. 102 [email protected]

editor-in-chiefJon McGoran

[email protected]

managing editorLiz Pacheco

[email protected]

art directorJamie Leary

[email protected]

designerDanni Sinisi

[email protected]

distributionJesse Kerns


marketingMorgan Berman

[email protected]

writers Shaun Brady

Bernard Brown Tenaya Darlington

Grace Dickinson Marisa McClellan Julianne Mesaric

Kristen Mosbrucker Emily Teel

Leah Troiano Brian Rademaekers

April White Williams Woy Weaver

intern Alex Jacobs

volunteersSarah Adams

Whitney DiTaranto Corey Jameson Keysha Taylor

Meredith Thomas Rick Way

Jessica Zuzack

photographers Rob Cardillo

Christian Hunold Peter Woodall

Emily Wren Albert Yee

illustratorsKirsten Harper

Melissa McFeeters

ad salesAlex Mulcahy


published byRed Flag Media

1032 Arch Street, 3rd Floor Philadelphia, PA 19107

215.625.9850

g r i d p h i l ly . c o m

Grid welcomes an editor-in-chief

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liberal arts education.In middle school.

What if education were reimagined, reinvigorated and

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as her capacity to achieve? It is at the Waldorf School

of Philadelphia. We provide a collaborative environment

that mixes artistic thinking with scientific thinking, and

creates original thinkers prepared for life.

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I wanted to thank your team for writing a thorough article on our neighborhood and addressing historical designation. My hus-band and I live in Overbrook Farms and love the community. We are currently a one-income family and found the histori-cal designation intimidating — specifi-cally, the additional money this designa-tion could involve. Your article cleared up much confusion. I especially liked the rules and regulations box. We will soon be a two-income family again and have begun to think (dream...) about fixing up our home. —cheryl o’donnell

are you ready to take the next step in making your home more energy efficient? Grid has partnered with energyworks to give away a free energy audit every month this year (a $400 value!). to enter, visit gridphilly.com/grid-energy-audit-contest. a winner is chosen at the end of each month.

learn more about energyworks at energyworksnow.com

Dear GriD,

Designation Explanation

This spring, Grid is excited to an-nounce a new partnership with Philadelphia’s Fabric Horse. Based in South Philadelphia, Fabric Horse makes thoughtfully designed back-packs, utility belts, accessories and bike-related gear, hand-crafted from recycled materials.

Based on Fabric Horse’s popular waxed canvas tote, our limited edi-tion bag will feature a special Grid color combination. Equipped with four pockets, vinyl interior, a snap closure and sturdy seatbelt handles, the bag is designed to fit in your bike basket and is perfect for a weekend farmers market haul.

The bags will debut on April 14 at the Philly Farm & Food Fest. After-wards, they will be available online at store.gridphilly.com

To learn more about Fabric Horse, visit fabrichorse.com

Win a free energy audit!

Boy, am I glad I entered that contest in Grid magazine! We now have a really detailed roadmap to help us on our way to saving more energy and money.”

— past winner

Bag It!get your limited edition Grid canvas tote bag

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community

Plain SightS 40th andfilbert

The BirThplace of The Barnes collecTion? This building at 40th and filbert streets in West phila-delphia is where Dr. albert Barnes manufactured the wildly successful (read: lucrative) antiseptic argyrol. it is also where he hung his paintings, which would become part of the regular seminars Barnes held for his employ-ees on his theories of art and learning. for more on this story, visit hidden city Daily, hiddencityphila.org.

12 g r i d p h i l ly.co m m ay 2 0 1 3 m o D e r n p h oTo By p eT e r Wo o Da l l • a r c h i va l i m ag e co u rt esy o f t h e at h e n a e u m o f P h i l a d e l P h i a

in PartnershiP with hidden city, Plain sights highlights historic buildings with comPelling stories hiding in our midst.

http://hiddencityphila.org/

HOW TO

Green livinG

Cutting out chemicals without cutting down on clean by leah r. troiano

Clean CutMy cutting boards are my most trea-

sured — and most used — kitchen items. I rely on these workhorses

many times a day, and since they have contact with just about all my food, I’m very careful about how they’re maintained.

My gorgeous butcher block board is near and dear to my heart, but is off limits when prepar-ing animal products. Since wood is porous, se-cretions from meat and fish can become trapped in the wood when the knife breaches the board’s surface. Caring for this type of board requires specific attention and care. The product you use

to clean a wooden cutting board could poten-tially end up in your food. So I make my own cleaning product using only food-grade clean-ing products.

leah r. troiano, a certified cancer support educator, works with people who have cancer or would like to prevent cancer. Videos on how to make the products featured in this column can be found at cancerhealthandwellness.com. Contact Leah at [email protected].

White vinegar

Water Clean spray

bottle

Baking soda (or salt)

Lemon Mineral oil (food grade)

make YOUR OWN cUttiNg bOaRd cleaNeR

→ Fill a clean spray bottle with equal parts water and white vinegar. Shake to mix and then spray the board. Wipe and remove any leftover debris using a cloth towel. (don’t have white vinegar? A few drops of dishwashing liquid on a wet cloth will work, too.)

→ Sprinkle the board with baking soda and salt. cut a lemon in half and rub (cut side down) over the board’s surface. once

the surface is coated, let sit for about 5 minutes.

→ rinse the board with water or spray it with the vinegar and water solution. Wipe clean. Allow board to completely dry.

→ once dry, drizzle food grade mineral oil over the board and rub into the wood. let sit for about 15 minutes and then wipe to absorb the extra oil. (This step conditions the wood and extends its life.)

SEPTAMAKES FRUITFUL CONNECTIONS

Support our local farmers at one of the many farmers

markets near SEPTA stations. You’ll find fresh local produce,

meats, and dairy on SEPTA’s special Farmers Market

Map at www.septa.org/maps

Farm-to-SEPTA

ALthough I’M A “Less Is More” type of person, having more than one cutting board is essential in my kitchen. To maintain cleanliness, i designate certain types of boards for specific foods. For example, i use only dishwasher safe boards for meat, fish and cheese. Those boards can go in the dishwasher and be sterilized in the high-heat cycle. Some boards even come marked with different images (such as a fish, cow or vegetables) as a helpful reminder.

m ay 2 0 1 3 g r i d p h i l ly.co m 1 3

http://septa.org/maps

Beekeeping is a meditative practice,” says Adam Schreiber. “When you are working the bees, they require your full, undivided at-tention. If you don’t give that to them, they will let you know. They have

a very demonstrative way of letting you know.” ¶ A hobby apiarist and former president of the Philadelphia Beekeepers Guild, Schreiber, 41, works bees in colonies throughout the Fairmount neighborhood. He keeps hives in a commu-nity garden, in nearby Fairmount Park and even on the roof of his rowhome.

AGriculture

Beekeeper’s Bonus Bees produce honey, pollinate plants, and occasionally provide a reminder to be mindful story by april white • photos by emily wren

Last season, he maintained 10 colonies, rais-ing approximately 700,000 bees. Bees produce honey to feed themselves during the cold, barren winters; surplus honey is the beekeeper’s bonus. Last year, Schreiber harvested 200 pounds of honey. He eats his fill — on toast with bananas

and peanut butter — and sells the rest to family and friends.

Philadelphia is a surprisingly rich environ-ment for both bees and beekeepers. For the bees, the city’s abundant ornamental plantings provide a diet more varied than many rural set-tings. For the city’s 63-registered beekeepers, there’s the four-year-old Philadelphia Beekeep-

ers Guild, which is dedicated to sustainable ur-ban beekeeping and has more than 125 members. The group is a much-needed resource for expe-rienced and would-be keepers, hosting regular meetings, workshops and an annual weekend seminar.

“The first question people who are new to bee-keeping will ask is: Am I going to get stung?” Schreiber says. “There’s a lot of things you can do to minimize the chance. You wear protective gear, establish a good routine. But as much as we try to domesticate honeybees, at the core they are wild animals. Yeah, you are going to get stung some times.”

Learn more about the Philadelphia Beekeeper’s Guild at phillybeekeepers.org.

AdAm Schreiber Beekeeper

14 g r i d p h i l ly.co m m ay 2 0 1 3

Adam Schreiber maintains hives throughout the

philadelphia, including on the rooftop of his

rowhome. To reach those bees, Schreiber must climb

through a window (left). When checking his hives,

Schreiber will use a smoker (above) — a beekeeper trick for subduing bees. Typically

beekeepers will wear additional protective gear as

well. last season, he raised approximately 700,000 bees

and harvested some 200 pounds of honey (right).

happening now: May in Philadelphia is a busy time for bees and their keepers. The bee colonies are focused on raising their young in preparation for the nectar flow that comes with the mid-May and June blooms. The beekeeper must make sure the hives have enough space to accommodate this rapid growth. Too little space can prompt a “swarm,” the departure of half the colony for a new home, a natural occurrence that can alarm the neighbors and greatly reduce the season’s honey haul.


“The raised beds on Farm Explorer will mimic the (sea-sonally changing) raised beds in the fields of Hillside Farm, creating the most authentic farm experience we can,” says Helen Nadel, education specialist for Greener Partners. “Allowing children to have the experience of pulling food from the dirt and tasting how delicious it is can be a real ‘Aha!’ moment.”

Farm Explorer was inspired by research that found a curriculum combining gardening and nutrition education improves student attitudes and preferences for fruits and vegetables. Greener Partners hopes to connect children and families to their food through physical, sensorial and practical experiences. The end goal is to increase general health, reduce obesity rates and reconnect people with the pleasures of real food.

The mobile farm, created through a partnership with the Independence Blue Cross Foundation’s Healthy Futures campaign and The Junior League of Philadelphia, will

also enable Greener Partners to expand their seed to plate education efforts in the Greater Philadelphia region. Farm Explorer will be visiting 15 schools in the School District of Philadelphia this spring (in addition to the 25 schools Greener Partners reaches through their Seed to Snack pro-gram), as well as senior centers, health centers, community events, summer camps and birthday parties.

For some, this will be their first time pulling a carrot out of the ground and seeing that small harvest transformed into a simple, healthy dish. “We want to bring the farm experience to folks who might not otherwise have access to seeing how fresh food grows,” says Meg McCurtain, educa-tion director for Greener Partners. “The youth have a great voice in this healthy food movement, and will really be the ones to move it forward.”

For more information and to request the Farm Explorer at your school or community event, visit greenerpartners.org

Agriculture

Rolling WonderA farm on wheels takes farm education on the road by julianne mesaric

The FArm explorer is hitting the road this spring! Catch this mobile garden at these Earth Day celebrations.

April 20The longview CenTer For AgriCUlTUreCelebrate Earth Day with The Lost Creek Alpacas. Enjoy dry felting and spinning demos, angora rabbits and shop alpaca products.

Sat., Apr. 20, 10 a.m.- 2 p.m., The Longview Center for Agriculture, 3215 Stump Hall Rd., Collegeville. For more information, visit green-erpartners.org

April 22villAnovA UniversiTyJoin the Villanova University community for a sustainability fair, farmers market, panel discussion on fracking and a keynote address from Philadelphia’s sustainability director.

Mon., Apr. 22, 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m., Villanova University, 800 Lancaster Ave., Vil-lanova. For more informa-tion, visit campusevents.villanova.edu

Philadelphia’s food truck scene boasts everything from grilled cheese sand-wiches to Korean tacos. This spring, a new kind of food truck is rolling into town. In-stead of just serving meals, the Farm Explorer allows diners to harvest and cook their

food, too. Launched in April by Greener Partners, a five-county, Greater Philadelphia-based nonprofit that connects communities through food, farms and education, this 24-foot trailer holds living vegetable beds and a community kitchen all hauled by a biodiesel pickup truck.

1 6 g r i d p h i l ly.co m M Ay 2 0 1 3

In late March, Greener Partners started growing

lettuce in bins that will be installed in the Farm

Explorer in April.

m ay 2 0 1 3 g r i d p h i l ly.co m 17

http://lancasterfarmfresh.com

1 8 g r i d p h i l ly.co m m ay 2 0 1 3

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8 SITES > 8 PROJECTS 8 WAYS TO SEE THE CITY ANEW

MAY 23rd through JUNE 30th

To volunteer and learn more about the sites & projects:FESTIVAL.HIDDENCITY.ORGfestival.hiddencityphila.org

http://festival.hiddencityphila.org

foodfood

for The gardener Beth Bowman finds bok choy to be one of the

easiest crops to grow. “It’s fast growing and isn’t very picky in terms of fertilizer or soil type,” explains the Northeast Philadelphia gar-dener, who grows the crop every spring at Benjamin Rush Com-munity Garden. “Even in poor soil it can grow, and within a few weeks, you can typically harvest.” The quick turnaround is what gets Bowman most excited. “When you’re able to start growing in the spring, you want something you can harvest quickly. You don’t want to wait three months down the line.”

Seeds should go into the ground in April, and within 50 to 60 days will be ready to harvest. However, the leaves can be picked even be-fore fully grown, and used raw in dishes like salads. When planting, Bowman prefers to mix bok choy seeds with different types of let-tuce. “The seeds are round and very, very small, like sesame seeds,” Bowman says. “They’re easier to handle when you mix them with other types of seeds.” Given the seeds’ size, bok choy will generally need to be sowed in excess, and then thinned once the leaves start popping up. This is when Bowman harvests for salads, thinning as she goes along, and leaving the rooted bok choy to mature into full bulbs. Later-season bok choy is great for stir-fry, she says.

from The Farm “In our neighborhood, the slight-ly more adventurous people are

generally the bok choy buyers,” says Andrew Olson, founder of Southwest Philadelphia’s Farm 51. May through October, Olson sells the farm’s produce at his weekly farmstand. He says the challenge in growing the crop is the heat, especially in the city. “If you get a few sustained days of hot weather, it will bolt and there goes your bok choy crop … If you’re plagued with a stretch of 80 or 90 degree days in May, you’ll need to pick it.” In its prime, bok choy maintains a compact shape. However, when about to bolt, its center will elon-gate and a flower sprouts. “If you get it when it just starts to bolt, it’s not the end of the world,” Olson says. “But as the flower starts to grow, the bok choy gets more bitter.”

Though slowly gaining a name for itself, bok choy is far from common here in the states. Travel to China however, where the ingredient has been cultivated for more than 5,000 years, and

you will find that bok choy is a staple. This month’s featured gardener Beth Bowman grew up in the Philip-

pines, where the vegetable has been popular since the Spanish conquest of the Asian islands in the 1500s, when many Chinese immigrated to the Philippines and brought their beloved bok choy with them. In 1974, Bow-man moved to the U.S., but it wasn’t until the past 10 years or so that she could easily find bok choy in seed catalogs.

Used in everything from salads to stir-fry, the leafy green has crisp stalks similar to celery, and a mild, but slightly bitey flavor. Bok choy — also called pak choi — is a member of the cabbage family and is often referred to as “white cabbage.” While markets in Asia can feature up to 20

different kinds, you’ll primarily find two types here in the U.S. Regular bok choy has sturdy leaves and bright white stalks. Shanghai bok choy, or baby bok choy, has delicate leaves that lend themselves well to being used raw. Either variety will work for the following recipe (p. 21), a brightly flavored kimchi featuring bok choy bulbs.

grace dickinson is a food blogger, photo enthusiast and recipe creator. These passions are brought together on FoodFitnessFreshAir.com, where she chronicles her experiments in the kitchen.

the choys is yoursstory and photos by

grace dickinson

The Whole food

Bok Choy

nutrition 101 Bok choy is an excellent source of vitamins a and c, and has 15 percent of the recommended daily allowance of calcium per serving. one cup has a mere 10 to 20 calories.

What to look for as you would with romaine lettuce, look for heads with crisp, bright green leaves and firm white stalks free of any brown spots. if planning to use raw, opt for smaller-leaved heads.


Another key to a successful crop is steady watering. “Ideally, [bok choy] gets an inch or an inch-and-a-half of rain or water a week. So if you’re not getting that naturally, you’ll want to make sure they get supplemen-tal irrigation.” Pests like cabbage loopers can also be a problem. Olson suggests using a row cover — fabric that covers the entire row to form a physical barrier against the bugs — or a spray with Bacillus thuringi-ensis (Bt), a naturally occurring bacterium commonly used in organic farming. Olson uses Bt at Farm 51, but says both methods work equally well. “If you’re going with the row cover, just make sure to use a more open mesh rather than a real fine mesh, because that can create a warmer environment later in the season and that won’t be good.”

for The kitchen Bok choy kimchi has

become a staple for Chef Kevin Sbraga. Currently, he serves a slightly more complex version of this recipe at his modern American restaurant, Sbraga, located on the Avenue of the Arts. Kimchi is a traditional Korean dish typically made from seasoned and fer-mented vegetables. “There are some ingredients out there that are big and bold in flavor … and then there are other ingredients like bok choy that are more delicate, and they absorb, and they’re receptive to other flavors,” explains Sbraga. “That’s what I like about bok choy, and that’s what I like about it in this particular use of it. You make this awesome kimchi dressing and the bok choy just absorbs all its flavors. It’s pure deliciousness.” At his restaurant, Sbraga serves the kimchi over a miso-marinated bluefish, but a pan-fried fish can easily be substituted to sim-plify the dish.

Sbraga, 440 S Broad St. sbraga.com

2 1

for The pantry Bok choy is a member of the Chinese cab-

bage family and is beloved for its fresh flavor and crunchy texture. It doesn’t can well, but can be used in a number of quick and fermented pickles.

To preserve its crunch, wrap bok choy in perforated plastic bags and store in the coldest part of your fridge.

For a speedy, crisp slaw, trim away the leafy bits and chop the white ends into matchsticks. Dress with toasted sesame oil, soy sauce and rice wine vinegar.

If you like a funky pickle, substitute bok choy for the more traditional Napa cabbage in your favorite kimchi recipe. — Marisa McClellan

Learn more about food preservation at McClellan’s blog foodinjars.com

�� For the dressing: Simmer the vinegar, bay leaves and peppercorns until reduced by half. Strain, cool and reserve. In a bowl whisk the vinegar reduction and all the remanding ingredients, except the oils. With an emersion blender or regular blender, slowly add oils and blend to emulsify.�� For the vegetables: Heavily salt all

the cut vegetables (don’t be scared, most of the salt will be discarded) and allow to sit for 20 minutes. Drain all the excess liquid and press through a fine strainer or pasta strainer. Mix the vegetables with the sesame seeds, 2 cups of kimchi dressing and sesame oil. Check seasonings and adjust to taste, if needed.

Dressing¼ cup ginger, zested

or minced2 cloves garlic,

minced 2 tsp salt1 tsp cayenne1 Tbsp smoked

paprika2 Tbsp ketchup2 Tbsp tomato paste6 Tbsp sriracha3 Tbsp sesame oil1 cup blended oil

(80% canola, 20% olive oil)

1 quart white distilled vinegar

1 bay leaf5 black peppercorns

VegeTABLes3 cups (approx.

12-15) bok choy bulbs, bottom base trimmed, thinly sliced (leaves can be used for garnish)

½ cup carrot, julienned

1 bunch of scallions, thinly sliced

1 Tbsp ginger julienned

2 tsp white or black sesame seeds, toasted

1 tsp sesame oil½ cup salt

Bok choy Kimchi

from the kitchen of chef Sbraga

Chef Sbraga suggests serving the kimchi with pan-seared blue fish or black cod, atop adzuki beans. The full recipe can be found at gridphilly.com


While an east coast winter can put any local foods operation into hibernation, the region’s goat-cheese makers have been quite busy. Valley Shepherd Creamery opened a cheesemaking opera-

tion and grilled sandwich stand in Reading Terminal Market, and Cranberry Creek hired Paul Lawler (formerly of Fair Food Farmstand) as their full-time cheesemaker to develop a new line of goat cheeses at their state-of-the-art facility in the Poconos. Add to that the recent World Jersey Cheese Awards for nearby artisan dairies Keswick Creamery and Hidden Hills, and it seems that eastern Pennsylvania is starting to get its dairy due.

Here’s a sampling of what local goat cheese-makers have in store for this spring.

Valley Shepherd creameryLong Valley, NJ • valleyshepherd.com

Reading Terminal Market’s newest stand fea-tures a range of goat cheese styles. Look for sup-ple chèvres, spreadable “goat cream,” French-style crottins, and husky aged raw goat daddies like Gotogetagoat that deliver rompin’ stompin’ flavor. Be sure to peer through the windows into the on-site “make room,” where you can watch cheesemaker Jamie Png stir fresh curds. Png isn’t making goat cheese just yet, but you can al-ways snag a braid of fresh mozzarella still warm from the vat!

foodfood

Kids These Days

As winter fades and spring unfolds, there’s plenty to still be excited about. Kidding, when goats give birth to their young, takes place in March and April, and marks the start of goat cheese season, ushering in snow-white cheeses that appear in tubs and tuffets at local markets. May is the time of year to sink your teeth into soft

chèvre, fluffy goat ricotta and other cloud-like offerings. The secret to great spring goat cheese lies in the tenderness of the grass. As herds move onto young pastures, they shift from a grain-based diet to consume new shoots and leaves — ingredients that generate fresh, light-tasting milk imbued with sunshine.

new local goat cheeses are springing up all over story and photos by tenaya darlington

A wedge of gotogetagoat from

Valley creamery in long Valley, NJ.


WhO’s gOt YOUR gOat? Look for the above selections at area farmers markets, Greensgrow Farm, Fair Food

Farmstand, Di Bruno Bros. and on the cheese boards of Philadelphia restaurants, including Tria, Talula’s Garden and Kennett Restaurant.

Shellbark hollow FarmWest Chester, PA • shellbarkhollow.com

Pete Demchur, the area’s godfather of goat cheese, is known for his Extra Sharp II — a kicked up chèvre that pairs beautifully with picnic fare, like buck-wheat honey, fresh fruit, cured meats and crusty bread. This spring, Demchur debuts two new selections: Cornwallis, a deeply creamy sharp chèvre that has rip-ened at least six months (expect “a hint of blue and a slightly peppery finish”), and Tumbleweed, a raw milk sharpie washed with Frecon Farms’ hard ciders.

Kirchenberg Farm Fleetwood, PA • farmfromage.com

New to the local stage, Kirchenberg Farm will be offering Thumbalina, a small goat crottin (or cake) made by John Zimmerman, a Mennonite goat farmer in Berks County. Thumbalina will be distributed by Farm Fromage, a local company that works closely with new

Lancaster County cheesemakers to de-velop and distribute their products. “As a young cheese it’s delicious, and when it gets hard as a hockey puck it’s great grated on vegetables,” says Howard Field, founder of Farm Fromage. “Each one is a perfect three mouthfuls.”

cranberry creek FarmCresco, PA • cranberrycreekfarm.com

When Headhouse Farmers Market opens in May, stop by the Cranberry Creek stand for downy chèvre rolled in fresh herbs, and keep your eye out for new creations by Paul Lawler who joins the operation this spring. His expertise in making beefy Taleggio-style cheese and rustic tommes will no doubt lift this young dairy to new heights. “I’m going to bring some serious washed rinds to the table,” says Lawler. “We also want to try a leaf-wrapped bloomy, perhaps doused in liqueur. I’ll also be honing their tomme, called Eugene — named after the farm’s founder.”

YELLow SPRInGS FARM GoAT ChEESE CSA PICKuP LoCATIonS

» yellow springs farm, 1165 Yellow Springs Rd., Chester Springs

» henry got Crops CsA, 7100 henry Ave., Philadelphia

» forest & Main Brewing Company, 61 n. Main St., Ambler

» taste of olive, 22 w. Lancaster Ave., Ardmore

» taste of olive, 26 S. high St., west Chester

» rushton farm CsA, Delchester Rd., newtown Square

» victory Brewing, 420 Acorn Ln., Downingtown

» fair food farmstand, Reading Terminal Market, 12th and Arch Streets, Philadelphia

» pennypack CsA at highlands, 7700 Sheaff Ln., Ft. washington

» Weavers Way, 8424 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia

» Longview Center for Agriculture, 3215 Stump hill Rd., Collegeville

yellow Springs FarmChester Springs, PA • yellowspringsfarm.com

This pristine farmstead dairy in Chester County services the area’s dairy fiends with a goat cheese CSA that starts in May and runs through the fall. The CSA pick-up locations include the Fair Food Farmstand in the Reading Terminal Mar-ket, which also carries a seasonal line of Yellow Springs’ hard-to-find award-winning cheeses, as well as many more outside the city (see sidebar for the full list). In late spring, look for two new goat cheeses in the line-up. “We’re develop-ing a new cheese that uses native saspa-rilla, and another with sumac that we’re calling Staghorn Sumac,” says Al Renzie, cheesemaker at Yellow Springs. Al and his wife Catherine also run a native plant nursery, and their growing line of cheeses incorporates some unusual flavors grown on the farm, including saffron and black walnuts.

misty creek goat dairyGap, PA • farmfromage.com

Amish wunderkind Amos Miller has established himself as the go-to goat ricotta producer with his velvety Misty Lovely. He also produces a wonderful aged Spanish-style goat cheese, called Kidchego. Both make excellent picnic cheeses, especially alongside honey and spring berries.

linden dale Farm Ronks, PA • centralmarketlancaster.com/

directory/view/linden-dale-farms

The Mellinger family makes one of the area’s most authentic French staples. A take-off on central France’s Valençay, Dalencay is shaped like a pyramid and rolled in ash, just like the original. The farm also produces Laughing Lindy, a Brie-like cheese that is herbaceous and rich; it’s rare to find great “bloomy” cheeses made from goat’s milk, but chee-semaker Andrew Mellinger has a light touch. This spring, he’s experimenting with goat’s milk yogurt, but is deter-mined not to expand his line of cheeses just yet. “We’re making the same cheeses we made last year, but we’re trying to make them better,” said Mellinger over breakfast during kidding season. “Right now, we’ve got our hands full.”

For more on local cheese, visit madamefromageblog.com

Extra Sharp ii, a kicked up chèvre from

Shellbark hollow Farm in West chester, pa.


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2013p r e s e n t s

Meet members of the pennsylvania association for sustainable

agriculture, working to bring fresh, delicious food to local eaters

raw power

Raw milk has many

virtues — so what’s the

controversy?

why we farm

PASA members

share their passion for

farming farm futuresvillage acres farm found a future for their farm in the next generation, but other farmers are having to get more creative

2 | PASA | 2013 FARMBOOK

at Longwood Gardens

Full service restaurant featuring locally sourced and seasonal ingredients.

Open daily.Reservations made via opentable.com or call 610.388.1000.

Certified Green Restaurant® Since 2010

FRESH Organic Vegetables from our Farm

to your Neighborhood

Join our CSA or visit us at the Bryn Mawr Farmers Market [email protected] www.wimersorganics.com

CSA Locations Glenside

Philadelphia Main Line

Ply. Meeting Royersford Warminster

Downingtown

Wimer’s Organics

http://southwarkrestaurant.com

http://wimersorganics.com

http://pennswoodswinery.com

PASA | 2013 FARMBOOK | 3

No food may seem more basic to any mammalian species than milk, and yet nothing sparks a com-bination of curiosity and controversy so much among humans as the question of whether or not to consume milk in its raw form. In fact, given all the strong rhetoric on the subject, it’s perfectly normal to feel totally confused about what to do.

Not so many decades ago raw milk could be bought directly at farms and pasteurized milk was a value-added option for the general public to buy at the corner store. Admittedly, pasteurization was necessary to reduce health risks in many areas of the country, since mass produced cow’s milk carried the risk of shoddy production and contamination with tuberculosis and other foodborne diseases. From that perspective, pasteurization was in-deed the miracle process we all learned about in school.

However, throughout this “pasteurization era” for milk, there were farmers — mostly working on a smaller scale — who continued to cultivate a high-quality, raw product by reducing risk in other, less technological ways. In so doing, they avoided two major pitfalls of pasteurization: incidental damage to the nutritional content of the milk, and not-so-incidental profit-taking by corporate middlemen who handle processing and distribution of most dairy products.

The result has been a split of the dairy industry. There are farmers shipping milk to the mass market infrastructure — the end product

being “anonymous” milk” — and those serving con-sumers as directly as possible, through locally and regionally based food systems. Some farmers will say that the milk passing through the contrasting channels represents two entirely different prod-ucts and, in many cases, they’re right. But for con-sumers, the important difference is often whether or not they’re able to speak directly with farmers about the methods used in producing the milk or other dairy products.

There is no such thing as risk-free food for anyone, so I suggest reframing the debate from “raw vs. pasteurized” to “anonymous vs. identity-

preserved” milk. These aren’t synonymous categories, since some identity-preserved milk is raw and some pasteurized. But qualities instilled by farmers, like organic, pasture-raised and grass-fed, can make a bigger difference for the consumer than the raw/pasteurized question. The challenge to the consumer is choosing milk — or really any food — that has maintained its identity. We always recommend knowing where your food comes from and how it was produced, in order to make the best possible decisions on behalf of your own and your family’s well being.

brian snyder, Executive DirectorPASA (Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture)pasafarming.org

A Tale of Two Types of Milk

from PASA’sexecutive director

Your neighbor’s our farmer.


But the 100-acres weren’t always dedicated to grass-fed, sustainable dairy production. Be-fore Lopez, a bovine veterinarian by trade, took over the family farm and opened Wholesome Dairy in 2008, his uncle was running a “heavy metal” dairy operation. “That’s where you have sick cows, and dead cows,” Lopez says. “Cows in

a commercial dairy must be milked as hard as possible because the profit margin is so low.” Farmers will sell their milk to one manufactur-er, where it’s mixed together before being sepa-rated into various components and processed into dairy products like milk, cheese and yogurt. In these operations, cows are also commonly

fed grain, not grass, so they produce more milk. A grass-fed cow — like those at Wholesome Dairy — will produce half as much milk com-pared with a corn- or soy-fed cow, says Lopez, but the product will taste much better.

Having grown up drinking raw, unpasteur-ized milk from his grandfather’s grass-fed cows, the return to this practice seemed natural for Lopez, who says he made the change because he wanted the best for his animals. While de-veloping a raw milk dairy hasn’t been easy (five years later the business is finally stabilizing), Lopez recognizes the value in his product — one produced on a small scale that has traceability and the unique identity of coming from his farm. Today, as federal agencies continue to dis-courage raw milk consumption, even in states like Pennsylvania where the practice is legal, that identity is increasingly relevant. Whether consumers are looking for raw or pasteurized products, local food advocates argue that it is understanding where one’s milk comes from that is most important to ensuring the prod-uct’s safety.

T equila, coco and jellybean may not seem like children’s names, but to Mark Lopez, they might as well be. “These cows are like family to me,” he says, standing in the pasture of his 100-acre Wholesome

Dairy Farms in Douglasville, Pa. One of 163 raw milk dairies in Pennsyl-vania, the farm has seen many changes since Lopez’s grandfather began raising cows there in the 1930s. ¶ “Back in the ’40s and ’30s and such, rotational grazing was most of the way it was done.” In rotational grazing, the cows are regularly moved from pasture-to-pasture, giving the grass time to re-grow. Lopez has returned to that same system, dividing his land into a circuit of paddocks, or enclosed sections of pasture, that takes the cows two weeks to complete. With grants from the Natural Resources Conservation Services, he has also added a solar-powered watering system and a walkway and stream crossing for the cows to reduce erosion and habitat loss.

got raw?for raw milk fans, it’s pasture versus pasteurby liz pacheco & kristen mosbrucker • photos by albert yee

r a w m i l k ,c h e e s e ,y o g u r t , k e i f e r

w H o L E S o M E D a I r Y

d o u g l a s v i l l e , p a


What’s in your glass? Most milk available for sale in Pennsylvania is pasteurized — heated to 161° F for at least 15 seconds to destroy potentially disease-causing bacteria. Many raw milk-drinkers say the un-pasteurized product is fresher and full of en-zymes and nutrients that are destroyed when heated. The Center for Disease Control coun-ters that the nutritional impact of pasteuriza-tion is limited to slight decreases in levels of thiamine, vitamin B12 and vitamin C. But as the pasteurization process continues to evolve, higher temperatures are being used to increase shelf life and the greater impact on nutrient content is unknown.

While more than half of all states permit some kind of raw milk sale, Pennsylvania is one of only eight states where the sale is legal everywhere. Regulations in other states can include place of sale and quantity limitations, as well as a variety of other restrictions. Some even require that customers have a doctor’s note. In Pennsylvania, the state Department of Agriculture requires regular testing of raw milk, just as it does of the pasteurized product. Raw milk farmers self-test through state-approved labs for a variety of pathogens. Coliform — bacteria found in animal feces — is tested for twice a month, and the state requires testing for salmonella, E. coli and other diseases every six months. Results are sent to the Food Safety Di-vision. “We have a lot of dedicated staff who go out every single day,” says Lydia Johnson, direc-tor of the Bureau of Food Safety and Laboratory Services in Pennsylvania. “We are tasked with a very important job to keep Pennsylvania safe.”

Johnson stresses that the department fully supports local farmers, although she is hesitant to call raw milk products safe. “Pasteurization is the kill step, so raw milk is definitely a product that we try our best to regulate,” she says. “How-ever, it’s a snapshot, so one day the milk can be fine and the next there could be contamination.”

Lopez can attest to the state’s attentiveness

and says that surprise visits are common. But in addition to the tests required by the state, Lopez does his own each week to monitor his product. Even with these extra precau-tions, he knows there is always risk for contamination. “[The customer has] to have a lot of trust when they’re drinking raw milk. Because they don’t really know what’s happening on the farm. They hope that things are being held up to the stan-dard that they’re supposed to, but [contamina-tion] could happen anywhere.”

The ongoing relationship between farm and consumer is critical in building and maintain-ing that trust. For Lopez, this means keeping an open door policy and inviting anyone to visit his farm and see the dairy operations. Despite this openness, Lopez is surprised at the ques-tions customers ask. “I get ‘Are you organic?’ ‘Do you feed [genetically modified organisms]?’ ‘Do you use pesticides?’ ‘Are there antibiotics in the milk?’ ‘What do you do when the cows get old, do you kill them?’ It’s always sort of like hot-button issues.” Instead, Lopez advises customers to ask questions about the milk’s cleanliness. “Never once have I gotten, ‘What are your bacteria counts?’ ‘What’s your somatic cell count [how much inflammation a cow’s ud-der has]?’ And I think I would ask that. ‘Have you ever had any kind of issues with contamina-tion?’” To date, Lopez has had no contamination problems.

a Dairy DilemmaIn addition to raw milk, Pennsylvania has also legalized the sale of raw milk cheese aged at least 60 days. Kristian Holbrok, a former chef who now manages Doe Run Dairy in Chester County, explains that the difference between the cheeses is in the bacteria. The raw milk already has the bacteria necessary to make

Food safety is an issue whenever people eat anything. It’s not just a milk issue.”

Opposite: Mark Lopez (left), farmer at Wholesome Dairy Farms, with kitchen and farm manager Rebecca Seidel, who is responsible for everything from milking to making the cheese and yogurt.


cheese whereas the pasteur-ized milk needs bacteria added. But the 60-day aging require-ment means any raw milk soft cheeses are illegal.

“If we could make raw milk soft cheeses there is much more of a flavor difference,” he says. “It’s just not the same.” Holbrok still makes raw milk soft cheeses for his own enjoyment, specifically va-rieties that were once imported to the U.S. from around the world, before the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned interstate trade two decades ago. His favorite is Reblochon, a French cheese which literally translated means “to pinch a cow’s udder again.”

Further regulation of products like raw

milk cheese, may be on the horizon, a develop-ment that Holbrok says will be difficult for small farmers to accommo-date. “We just don’t have the money left over like that,” he says, explain-ing his concern about the FDA’s new Food Safety Modernization Act. Passed by President Obama in January 2011, the act is expected to af-fect all farms selling food

directly to the public, not just raw milk farms, and could include additional fees and regula-tions for food production. Currently under pub-lic review, the act’s final implications are still to be determined.

Holbrok isn’t the only cheese farmer feeling pressure from the FDA. Emily Bryant Mont-gomery, cheesemaker at Calkins Creamery in Honesdale, Pa., originally made her Brie-style Noble Road cheese with raw milk. Despite the cheese’s popularity, Montgomery couldn’t shake the fear of FDA regulations. Recently, she started using pasteurized milk instead.

a relationship of trustLopez is very open about the risk of producing and selling raw milk. “To address the raw milk

cleanliness issue — that’s real … People can get sick if the milk gets contaminated. People can get sick if the spinach gets contaminated, or the peanuts, or the hamburger, or any food. It’s a real issue. Food safety is an issue whenever people eat anything. It’s not just a milk issue.” Despite this, raw milk dairy farmers tend to face a higher level of scrutiny at the federal level than other food producers.

When Lopez started Wholesome Dairy in April 2008, he knew his cows were healthy, pro-ducing a clean, delicious product. The challenge was not to convince consumers of his milk’s safety, but simply to tell them his products were available. After two years — and almost shutting down the farm — Lopez was finally able to tap into the raw milk demand. “I almost feel like a celebrity sometimes. It’s really gratifying to show up with my trailer and some milk and the response is like, ‘Yeah, Mark’s here!’” Today, Wholesome Dairy products can be found at 15 stores and markets throughout the region.

“I can’t tell you how many times people have said, ‘I’ve had different kinds of raw milk and your milk is the best I’ve ever had,’” Lopez says. “That makes me really proud to hear that, but that’s not an accident, you know?” Choosing to grass-feed his Ayrshire cows makes the differ-ence, he says. “That to me is what really sepa-rates us, not from the commercial milk that’s in the grocery store, but from any other raw milk in any other store.”

I can’t tell you how many times

people have said, ‘I’ve had

different kinds of raw milk and your

milk is the best I’ve ever had,’”

Lopez says. “That makes me really

proud to hear that, but that’s

not an accident, you know.”

Above: Wholesome

Dairy sells raw milk in addition to

yogurt, kefir, and ricotta

cheese.


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emily bryant montgomery PASA MeMber Since 2005Cheesemaker • Calkins Creamery • Honesdale, Pa.

farm favorite: “Our brie-style cheese. It’s just fun and buttery and light and it’s just so neat to see the milk go to curds in that way.”

farming isn’t easy. the hours are long, the work exhausting, and you never know what curve ball Mother

nature will throw next. so, why would anyone want to farm? We asked that question of some farmers here in

pennsylvania, and here’s what they had to say.

wHY wE FarM

“I grew up in a farming lifestyle ... And then once I went to college I realized the best thing for me to do was to go back to the farm and help sustain it. And it’s just

a beautiful place, it’s preserved and it’s where I get to raise my kids. Fresh air, fresh food — can’t beat it.”

I think working on an organic farm is a way of the future, to change

from monocultures and things like that. That’s probably why I farm, I believe in it, I think it’s good overall for the future.”

“Because I love producing nutritious food for people and healing the earth.”

tyler zajac PASA MeMber Since 1992Farmer • Tait Farm Foods • Boalsburg, Pa.

farm favorite: “I’d say kale; I like the greens.” tom culton

PASA MeMber Since 2005Owner • Culton Organics • Lancaster, Pa.

“My turkeys. Because they taste much different from other turkeys ... and they greet me every morning at the door. Yeah I’d say the turkeys are my fraises du bois.”

“That’s a tough one. Because I’m 10th generation and I didn’t have many options. That’s all I ever knew.”

josiah taylor PASA MeMber Since 2012Manager • Mill Hollow Farm • Edgemont, Pa.

“It’s probably tea herbs because I’ve been growing them the longest and I feel such a visceral effect when I make teas or when I use herbs.”

To provide my family and community with local, organic, healthy vegetables — with nutrient- dense vegetables.”

don hess PASA MeMber Since 2002Vegetable Grower • Dancing Hen Farm & CSA

• Stillwater, PA

farm favorite: “Kale. Because it’s so good for you … packed with nutrients.”

“I’ve always wanted to do it and my mission in life is to feed people. I don’t

care if I’m putting the food on the plates or I’m growing it or I’m promoting it or I’m writing about it — I just want people to have access to healthy food.”

sandra miller PASA MeMber Since 2002

Owner • Painted Hand Farm • Newburg, Pa.

farm favorite: “I’m a goat farmer, I love baby goats.”

“It’s an experience for my twin six year-old boys and for quality food for my family.”

al benner PASA MeMber Since 2006Owner • Old School Farm • Honesdale, Pa.

farm favorite: “I don’t have one. I like to do a little bit of everything … [But] my one son really likes the Icelandic sheep and my other boy really likes to collect the eggs.”


I farm because I have a passion for good food and I particularly enjoy the

connection between producing and the people that are eating. And it’s a good

healthy lifestyle.”

“Mostly just because it’s fun and I just really enjoy living on a farm. We

recently moved to this farm and [my brother and I] both have taken up lots more responsibilities. Over the summer we do lots of work with our CSA.”

bill elkins PASA MeMber Since 1999Co-owner • Buck Run Farm • Coatesville, Pa.

“My cattle. My grasses and my cattle both – can’t separate one from the other.”

“I don’t know what else to do. I wouldn’t know what else to do.”

l i f e t i m e m e m b e r

chandler scott-smith PASA MeMber Since 2008Farmer • Village Acres Farm • Mifflintown, Pa.

“I really like the berries; we have blueberries and raspberries and blackberries. They’re really fun to pick and pack and it’s really fun to sell in the CSA.”

karen vollmecke PASA MeMber Since 1996Farmer/Owner • Vollmecke Orchards • Coatesville, Pa.

farm favorite: “The cantaloupes and watermelons in the summer time … nothing better than eating a good cantaloupe or watermelon, right?”


“The allure of self-employment, self-reliance. The opportunity to work along side my wife and daughter are really the things [that make me farm]. And I think they feel the same way.” —Tom

“It’s a lifestyle choice. It’s about doing our gift, doing what we’re passionate about. Giving back, build-ing community ... oh my gosh, all those things!”—Tricia

“I am a breast cancer survivor and part of my healing process was a farm that we had bought four months prior to my diagnosis. It

was part of my heal-ing ... And now we’ve discovered the good-ness and richness of doing that, we’re doing it for our local community as well.”

sloane six PASA MeMber Since 2010Farmer • Quarry Hill Farm • Harleysville, Pa.

farm favorite: “Our lamb is just so mild and sweet and delicious. I’d say probably our lamb shanks. On the vegetable side, that’s hard. Dragon-tongued beans come to mind. I’d never had them before. They’re just really crunchy and delicious.”


I farm because I like being connected to something so human and something that’s connected so deeply with nature, it brings everything together. And it’s fun and it’s hard work, and I like hard work”

nina berryman PASA MeMber Since 2008Farm Manager • Weavers Way Farms • Philadelphia, PA

farm favorite: “Hakurei turnips. They’re damn good. And they’re easy to grow.”

“Because this is the thing that makes me feel most like myself.”

margaret schlass PASA MeMber Since 2009Farmer • One Woman Farm • Pittsburgh, Pa.

farm favorite: “I like to grow root vegetables. Because they’re just so satisfying. You pull them out of the ground and it’s just like ‘rarrrrrr.’”

tricia Borneman, tom Murtha, Dakota

PASA MeMberS Since 2006Farm Manager • Blooming Glen Farm Perkasie, PA

farm favorite: “Kale!”

“I farm because I feel like it’s doing something good for the world. My parents owned the farm and it was

probably going to get out of the family after four generations and I wanted to be the fifth generation.”

kelly smith PASA MeMber Since 2011Farm Operator • Deep Roots Valley Farm • Morhsville, Pa.

farm favorite: “We do meat and eggs, but I say we definitely partake in the eggs the most. They are plentiful and healthy and perfect.”


The romantic ideal of the family farm is a vision of several generations working the fields side by side, children growing and assuming the mantle from their parents. Such isn’t always the case in the contemporary world, where financial viability is a serious issue for any farm, and the prospects of a college education and more lucrative careers lure younger generations away. While there is no single way to go about it, succession planning has become vital for modern farmers hoping to see their work carried on.

easements Can make it easier“It’s been a struggle,” says Al Granger. “There aren’t that many young people that have an interest in that type of work.”

Granger, 80, owns Glasbern Inn, a Lehigh Val-ley bed and breakfast with an adjacent 130-acre farm. He’s been hunting for successors to the inn and the farm for five years, to little avail. A young farmer recently responded to the call and is in the midst of his first season at Glasbern, an arrangment Granger hopes will become more permanent.

preparing the ground for the next crop of farmers by shaun Brady • photos by albert yee

farm team

S everal minutes after his family had gathered at a round table in their large, timber frame FoodShed, the patriarch of Village Acres Farm finally arrives. He offers his hand along with what turns out to be a characteristi-

cally droll introduction. “Hi, I’m the late Roy Brubaker.” ¶ At 71, Roy Brubaker is, in fact, alive and well (if not always perfectly punctual). But he is a few years past what people in most professions consider retirement age. Brubaker and his wife Hope have recognized this and begun to think about passing Village Acres on to the next generation.

V I L L a g E a C r E S

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Chip Planck and his wife Susan had better luck with their Wheatland Veg-etable Farms in Northern Virginia. In 2002, the couple took advantage of a “Ru-ral Hamlet” provision in their county’s zoning ordinance. Ten of their 60 acres were subdivided to become a small rural community for those desiring to live adja-cent to farmland. The remaining 50 acres were put under easement (meaning legally protected from future development) and divided into two parcels: one 40-acre plot which has all the farm infrastructure, in-cluding greenhouses, a worker kitchen and irrigation system, and a second 10-acre piece with a small house and farm-land but no infrastructure.

“It was more an effort to do what we thought of as appropriate rural planning than it was a succession plan,” Planck says. “We wanted to save the land, and if you’re saving the land you’re presumably assuming that somebody is going to be on it, but that wasn’t an overt goal.”

Knowing their two children had no interest in farming the land, the Plancks began to look for buyers within their lo-cal community. A young farmer whose parents and grandparents had been the Plancks’ neighbors bought the 40-acre farm in 2011; and a writer involved in DC-area farmers markets bought the 10-acre piece a year later.

“One of the problems with retirement is that one day you count and the next day you’re home and you don’t count,” Planck says. “We were fortunate to be able to gradually disengage ourselves but not disengage ourselves completely. We have no interest in going anyplace else in the world and yet we had no interest in picking squash and peppers all day long anymore either.” Now 72 and essentially retired since 2010, the Plancks still live on land neighboring their former farm and occasionally still do work for their successors.

raise your hanDsA key component of the Plancks’ succes-sion plan was investment; for 15 to 20 years they made the maximum contribu-tion to a self-employment account. “We can be retired on those investments with-out having sold a bit of this land,” Planck explains. “So we weren’t forced into deci-sions that were unattractive but necessary from a financial point of view. We didn’t have to sell the farmland to someone to put 50 ugly houses on in order to retire.”

Jim Crawford and his wife Moie of New Morning Farm in South Central Penn-sylvania were in the process of renovat-ing their home when a financial advisor warned them that investing too much money could increase the property’s

roy brubaker, patriarch at Village Acres Farm, and his daughter Debra have recently become

50/50 partners in a Limited Liability company to begin a more formalized succession process.

The Village Acres family (from left to right): Debra Brubaker, Hannah Smith-Brubaker, Hope Brubaker, Roy Brubaker and Julie Hurst, wife of Debra's brother and manager of the FoodShed and community events.

roy and Hannah Smith-brubaker,

Debra’s partner who helps with

chickens, eggs and marketing

for the farm.


resale value to the point where it was too expensive to re-main a farmhouse.

“You go through your thirties and forties and you never consider the fact that you’re ever going to get old,” says Craw-ford, now 68. “I’d never considered the fact that I was going to have to think about these assets being saleable to someone else who we hope would farm. As I got older I realized more and more that I didn’t want to be the last generation to farm this land. That was a huge revelation to me.”

Knowing that their children wouldn’t take over the farm, the Crawfords focused on making New Morning economical-ly viable in a way that would be attractive to a potential buyer. “Your kids are a lot more likely to put up with whatever id-iosyncrasies you’ve got built into your operation,” Crawford says. “Whereas somebody who’s not in your family is going to look at it from more of a cold, hard business perspective: Is this going to be a way for me to make a living and support a family in the long term? So that attitude is the beginning part of having a good succession plan.”

Hire PowerHiring good employees and giving them enough responsi-bility to breed loyalty and dedication was also important to Crawford’s plan. He assumed that his successor might come from his pool of workers; what he didn’t expect was that it might be more than one of them.

For eight years, Crawford attempted a “farm-to-own” pro-cess; several farmers lasted one season before both sides re-alized the arrangement wasn’t a good fit. “The whole process demonstrated how difficult it is to find someone who can really step into your life,” he says. “Every farm is unique and structured on the personality and values of the farmer. It’s so much the opposite of generic that I couldn’t conceive of these people stepping in and living my life.”

A few years ago, however, two members of Crawford’s crew formed a partnership and stepped forward with a plan to take on the farm. At first skeptical, Crawford came around and last season stepped completely away from production, giving the partnership, since grown to include five employ-ees, a “dress rehearsal” that has so far proved successful.

HelPing Your CHildren SuCCeedAt Village Acres, a more traditional family succession has been underway, albeit in a particularly modern guise. The current plan for the Brubakers’ 30-acre farm in Juniata County, 40 miles outside of State College, involves their 31-year-old daughter Debra, the youngest of their four children. After leaving home for college and living in New Mexico for several years, Debra returned to the area in 2009.

“I don’t know how my parents did it, but all of us kids ended up somehow enjoying the work of the farm,” Debra says. “We come from a Mennonite heritage, so it was always very much in my upbringing that being a farmer is a calling. We have a responsibility to be stewards, to care for the land, to care for the ecosystem.”

However, it wasn’t always clear that the Brubakers would pass the farm on to one of their children. In 1997, their oldest daughter Angela began several seasons working alongside her father, but ultimately left to become a nurse practitio-ner in Austin, TX. “After a few rough years with a lot of bad weather and minimal profits, she decided to go on and get further education, which I was encouraging her to do,” Roy recalls. “She’s still interested in the farm and may cycle back to be a part of it someday. But when she left, I began to think that maybe some of our apprentices could become partners with us.”

Village Acres’ apprenticeship program began in 1992, when the Brubakers’ son came home from college for the summer with a friend in tow. The program became more formalized over the years, with three or four interns now working at the farm most years, many of whom have gone on to work their own land. As an early adopter of organic practices, Roy also serves as a mentor to many of the region’s farmers. Village Acres officially became certified organic in 1991, though many of those practices had been in place since the farm’s inception in 1982, inspired by Roy’s father’s own interest in organic growing methods.

Debra’s homecoming was at first tentative. She and her partner, Hannah Smith-Brubaker, are working to devise a work-life balance, while facing the sometimes daunting prospect of being a same-sex couple in a rural community — or even simply being female in a traditionally male-dom-inated field.


“For me,” Debra says, “being a woman or being gay, it’s about being confident that you have an equal right to speak up. I have a long legacy of Roy Brubakers in my family to be in the shadow of. It’s just about finding your voice, which is a common female problem in rural America and beyond.”

In 2012, Debra and her father became 50/50 partners in a Limited Liability Company (LLC) in order to begin a more formalized transition process. Both father and daughter say the LLC leaves open the prospect of further involvement from the other siblings, whose perspectives are still taken into account. Physical evidence of their cooperative efforts can be seen in their newly-built FoodShed, a space where they host monthly breakfasts and occasional live music events, and which they envision as a multi-purpose com-munity gathering place. Roy scoffs slightly at the building’s pristine aesthetics, a requirement from his more image-minded children.

Roy has long incorporated his family’s vision for the farm into his own, even when they conflict. “In 1998, Angela want-ed to start a CSA, which she was very keen about and I was not,” he says. “She won the battle and it was a good decision. That wasn’t part of my dream, but I guess my dream was to follow the stream and see where it would take us.”

This willingness to adapt new practices and strategies has made Roy — and farmers like Granger, Planck and Crawford — able to see a future for their farms, even after they have stopped farming. While this future may not be what Roy initially imagined when he started farming, it’s proof that farm succession is a fluid process, one that requires flexibil-ity, innovation and perhaps most importantly, planning. Or as Chip Plank sums it up, “You have to think way ahead.”

Every farm is unique and structured on the personality and values of the farmer. It’s so much the opposite of generic that I couldn’t conceive of these people stepping in and living my life.”

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S he salvaged my sorbets,” says Marianne Cozzolino, owner of Jenny and Frank’s Artisan Gelato. “I was having texture problems and she said, ‘Why don’t you get a refractometer?’” Cozzolino’s savior,

Brûlée Bakery owner Lila Colello, wasn’t lending her expertise as a consultant; she was just being a good neighbor. Independently, Colello and Cozzolino roll croissants and freeze sorbetto, but instead of taking turns in a rented commer-cial kitchen, they simultaneously work on their own equipment as members of a new entrepreneurial food community called the Artisan Exchange.

co-working artisans share resources, experience and a vision of community by emily teel • photos by albert yee

The West Chester-based Artisan Exchange follows the co-working model first brought to Philadelphia in 2007 by Indy Hall, a member-oriented office space for designers, develop-ers, writers, artists, educators and everyone in between. Since then, co-working spaces have

popped up around the city. There is Seed Philly for techies and CultureWorks for creatives; the Artisan Exchange is for food makers. While members can take advantage of business sup-port common to co-working spaces, like printing services and meeting rooms, the Exchange has

the added benefits of commercial-grade kitchen space and a weekly Artisan Market for selling goods. Members have also discovered that the co-working community lends itself easily to lo-gistical collaborations, allowing entrepreneurs to sidestep some of the production and distribution hurdles that can keep nascent food businesses from getting off the ground.

It Started wIth a Great Cup of CoffeeThough rapidly diversifying, the warehouse that houses the Artisan Exchange and the weekly market was recently home to a single business: Golden Valley Coffee Roasters. Started in 1986 by John Sacharok, a former Wawa marketing direc-tor who developed their coffee program, Golden Valley largely deals with corporate clients. The company’s coffee is served in hotels, restaurants, convenience stores and gas stations throughout the U.S.

As global demand for coffee has grown, how-ever, Sacharok noticed a disturbing trend. “Used to be you’d get a ‘Wow!’” but slowly, he says, “there wasn’t any wow left.” Coffee, a shade-loving understory plant, is now often sun-grown in a monoculture to produce more volume. Sa-charok is adamant that this is “what is funda-mentally wrong with the coffee business. The

“

small businessesbig idea

meet a

Oley Valley Mushrooms is located just minutes from the Artisan

Exchange and on Saturdays sets up shop at the indoor Artisan Market.

M ay 2 0 1 3 gridphilly.com 27

desire to drive down cost of production means that the product — flavor, antioxidants, aromat-ics — suffers.” Unwilling to compromise, Golden Valley changed course.

Sacharok and his business partner (and sis-ter), Maryann Baldassarre, purchased roasting equipment. Frank Baldassarre, Jr., Maryann’s eldest son, became their master roaster. Today, the company still largely deals in the corporate world, but they roast their beans themselves and, whether it’s a priority for their clients or not, the coffee now boasts a sweeping set of credentials: Fair Trade, bird-friendly, and not one, but two organic certifications. They’ve even developed a single-serve coffee machine that brews single-serve cups without using wasteful pods, in order to continue marketing their product to offices and other companies rapidly switching to one-cup coffeemakers, like those made by Keurig.

The shift left the business owners with a dilemma: a warehouse and central drive aisle larger than their current needs, but out of synch with warehousing trends. They were reluctant

to sell the building in an unfavorable real estate climate. The team, which now included Frank Baldassarre, Sr. (Maryann’s husband and a for-mer banking executive) and Joe Stratton (Golden Valley’s director of equipment services and a farmer), began to look for alternate ways of us-ing the warehouse.

a NIChe IN the KItCheNIn 2011, the group came across a survey by the National Grocers Association reporting that a whopping 86 percent of consumers interested in local foods found themselves asking, “What are the small-scale food manufacturers doing for space?”

“We were struggling to find a kitchen,” says Carrie Balthaser, “at $20 per hour it’s hard to get your product out at cost.” Balthaser, whose company Basic Batters makes gluten-free cook-ies, is one of the newest members. “I work in the corporate world, but this is my passion.” Golden Valley discovered that there was no shortage of passion among these potential entrepreneurs,

but logistical concerns, such as space and licens-ing, were serious obstacles to making these busi-nesses viable.

The traits of their warehouse that were con-sidered liabilities in the real estate market be-gan to look like benefits. The central aisle meant that entrepreneurs could drive their vehicles in to unload supplies or load product for farmers markets. When the weather grew colder it also made the perfect enclosed place to host a Satur-day market.

In June 2012, Golden Valley welcomed its first members to the Artisan Exchange. They envi-sion it as an affordable home and a community for those seeking to transform their local food dreams into reality. Within the last few months, word has spread and interest has exploded. As of mid-March, members included 20 food busi-nesses, among them two food trucks, Ka’Chi and LuLu’s Café, who use Artisan Exchange as a home base for their mobile businesses.

Though plans for the space include the build-out of a commercial kitchen where aspiring

Top right: Spiked cinnamon pecan buns from Brûlée Bakery, shiitake mushrooms from Oley Valley Mushrooms, and pasta from Vera Pasta are just some of the delicacies available at the artisan Market. Above: Ka’Chi, a Korean food truck, and Dia Doce, a cupcake truck, also set up on Saturdays at the artisan Market. left: MomPops/Take Me Bake Me Pizza was among the first tenants to join the artisan Exchange.

John Sacharok, his sister Maryann Baldassare, her husband Frank Baldassare, and Joe Stratton, a Golden Valley Coffee Roasters employee and local farmer, opened the Artisan Exchange in June 2012 as a solution for Golden Valley’s empty warehouse space.


entrepreneurs will work by the hour, the cur-rent model requires members to rent space in 120-square-foot blocks in three bays — called neighborhoods — of the warehouse. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture have certified the entire space, and each neighborhood includes a sanitation station: the commercial kitchen’s trifecta of handwashing, prep and triple-basin sinks. Beyond that, members can equip their spaces however they like. Cozzolino had 220-volt wiring run to power her imported gelato maker, and Gary Crane of Gary’s Specialty Food Products installed a sink to wash peppers for his line of hot sauces. Some blocks are loaded with refrigerators of both commercial and Craigslist varieties; others stand mostly empty while entre-preneurs with day jobs, like Waffatopia’s Brian and Andrea Polizzi, amass equipment to build their businesses.

oNe-Stop artISaN ShoppING Issa Ostrander, owner of MomPops and Take Me Bake Me Pizza, was among the first tenants. Ostrander is perhaps the ideal candidate for the new venture; as welcoming and gregarious as an RA in a dorm, he enthusiastically embodies the collaborative potential that the space hopes to foster. Having previously launched a retail food business — Mom’s Bake at Home in Manyaunk — Ostrander knows well the intimidation of starting from scratch. “[Here] you’re not com-ing into a brand new business alone … it’s more like ‘Welcome! Here’s a cake!’” And cake there is, alongside Sweet Salvation Truffles, and the many delicious gluten-free treats from Sally B Gluten Free, Rawsome Fudge and Basic Batters.

Outside vendors add diversity to the Sat-urday indoor Artisan Market. Urban Essence brings handmade bath and body products. Across the aisle, Livengood Family Farm sells pasture-raised meats, and just two stalls down is the prizewinning Oley Valley Mushrooms. Thornbury Farm, located just minutes away, is

even offering the Artisan Market as a weekend pick-up option for their 60-plus CSA members in the upcoming growing season. Farm manager Zachary Heacock laughs at the suggestion that he’s there to bring vegetable righteousness to the many sweets and baked goods, “kale always goes the fastest … people will buy three bags at a time.”

Market patrons are enthused as well. West Chester residents Kate and her son John are exuberant. “We just bought our entire dinner!” they say, opening bags to show off purchases. “We had two boxes of macarons, but we ate one … mushrooms, chips and [guacamole], chicken sausage, pasta, gelato, and we’re about to go get coffee.” Even on a chilly March morning the mar-ket is pleasantly busy. The industrial space offers plenty of parking, shelter from the elements, and the real game-changer, Jackie, the Baldassarre’s 16-year-old daughter, who, along with friends, coordinates craft activities for children so their parents can shop unencumbered.

More artISaNS, More wayS to CollaborateSo far, the vision set by Sacharok, Stratton and the Baldassarres seems to be playing out well. Entrepreneurs are interested, and creative rela-tionships are forming. Before, Cozzolino threw away egg whites leftover from gelato produc-tion. Now, Colello uses them to make colorful, dainty French macarons. Lisa Ferraro Klinge of Taste Artisanal makes spreads with European cheeses that can end up on Ostrander’s pizzas or in Joe D’Andrea’s creative Vera Pasta. Antipasti platters are also in the works that will feature Klinge’s spreads alongside Cucina Verde’s lo-cal vegetable ferments and Maiale Salumeria’s cured meats.

Logistical collaborations are developing as well. A group of members who sell their prod-ucts at many of the same farmers markets plan to share transportation in the season ahead. They’re also discussing cooperative buying. Food distributors often require minimum orders of $2,000 or more. The plan, Ferraro Klinge says, is for members to “divide it up amongst cheese, chocolate, baking supplies or packing materials,” ultimately conserving their resources and avoid-ing excessive individual expense.

Beyond saving costs, members have a tangible goodwill towards one another. The overwhelm-ing opinion, which could easily skew competi-tive, is one of admiration, respect and convivi-ality. “The sense of community in here is just amazing,” Balthaser says. “We all do different things … but we try to complement each other.” Artisan Exchange continues to grow, accepting new members and building resources to include the commercial kitchen, an allergen room and shared cold storage. The hope is that the mem-bers’ respect for one another will keep pace with that growth and, like Golden Valley’s triple bot-tom line approach to coffee, the increasing de-mand will support an expanding community of passionate entrepreneurs.

the artisan market is open every Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. (208 Carter Dr., West Chester). For more information on the market and the Artisan Exchange, visit artisanexchangewcpa.com

Below: Joe D’andrea, chef and founder behind Vera Pasta, works to make a sale during Saturday’s

market. right: Chandler Brunnabenb and Carrie Balthaser’s Basic Batters, a gluten-free cookie

maker, is a newer member to the artisan Exchange.Below right: Cured meat from Maiale Salumeria.


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The Fish Pepper was an African-

American heirloom plant popular in

Philadelphia and Baltimore, dating to

before the 1870s.

M ay 2 0 1 3 gridphilly.com 3 1P h OTOS By r O B C a r D i l lO

With distinct white-striped leaves and young green fruit, the pepper bush was interesting in on a purely visual level. But what really got my attention was the pepper’s history as an African-American heirloom plant popular in Philadel-phia and Baltimore, dating to before the 1870s. Heirlooms are plants whose seeds have been saved over generations, replanted year after year, consistently reproducing similar traits. Many vegetables offered at nurseries and big-box stores are hybrids that can produce sterile seeds or offspring with erratic traits.

The idea of a plant with deep roots in our his-tory intrigued me. How many others plants like this were out there? What is our region’s history in growing heirloom food plants? Could I make a whole garden featuring heirloom plants with Philadelphia ties? Thus began my seed-search-ing quest to create the ultimate Philadelphia heirloom garden.

CeNter SeedyAs I quickly found, such a garden needn’t lack di-versity. The Philadelphia region has long been a powerhouse of heirloom seed production, start-ing with Native Americans and Quakers and growing with seed companies like D. Landreth Seed Company (founded in 1784) and Burpee (founded in 1876), right through the 19th and 20th centuries.“We had Quakers in the city who were always interested in botany and food production improvement,” says William Woys Weaver, a Chester County author who has been collecting and growing local heirlooms since the 1970s. He inherited his grandfather’s seed collec-tion of hundreds of local heirlooms and has since expanded it to include thousands of local plants. (Learn more about Weaver’s work on p. 46.)

“Philadelphia has always, since at least the 1700s, had a special interest in growing things, so we’re ahead of the game,” Weaver says. “You had all these people growing things here, and the list of heirlooms to come out of this region is incredibly huge, more so than any other part of the country, I think.”

Generally, heirlooms are considered “any variety that’s older than 50 years,” says Tim Mountz, founder of Happy Cat Seeds in Kennett Square. But not all heirloom-type plants go back 50 years. “We call anything newer than 50 years ‘open pollinated’ varieties,” Mountz explains. If you’ve ever grown or eaten a Green Zebra To-mato, you know a “new heirloom.”

Open pollinated or “OP” varieties are created

A s anyone with the gardening bug knows, the bleakness of midwinter in Philadelphia has a way of making you dream of warmer times, often hatching ambitious plans for your raised

beds. I had one of those moments this winter while looking through the glossy pages of a seed catalog. Among the hundreds of pages of colorful fruits, flow-ers and vegetables, a particular plant caught my attention: the Fish Pepper.

heirloom seed-savers are preserving our area’s rich horticultural heritage by brian rademaekers

exploring theof philadelphia

❝Since the 1950s, hybridization has

bled out nutrition for the sake of shelf life, or for whatever reason. It’s just not there.❞← William Woys Weaver


just a good looking plant. “The flowers are more beautiful, the plant itself is more beautiful, and the bean itself is a dark purple.”

Weavers Way Co-op in Mt. Airy, Primex Garden Center in Glenside, and Burpee Seeds in Warminster all carry local heirloom seed va-rieties, but the Fish Pepper that first caught my eye came from the Baker Creek catalog, based out of Missouri. Baker Creek owner Jere Gettle cites the Jersey Devil tomato as one of his favorite heirlooms from our region. “It looks sort of like

through a process in which two plants with dif-ferent traits — say, a green tomato and a yellow tomato — are interbred to create a hybrid, ex-plains Mountz. This is done across six genera-tions of plants, with the grower tracking a desir-able trait over successive generations. After six generations, the plant can be considered stable. After 50 years, it can be called an heirloom. The Green Zebra Tomato, bred in 1984, is now stable and can be called its own variety, but it is not yet an heirloom.

Happy Cat is one of many places where gar-deners can find heirlooms with local roots. One

of Mountz’s favorites is the Stoltzfus String Bean, which he found in his grandfather’s collection after he passed away. “It had been extinct for 70 years before we brought it back,” Mountz says. “It’s a string bean, so we’ll eat it green before its beans develop in the pod, and we’ll also dry them and then soak them overnight for use in the winter as a cooking bean for things like re-fried beans.” Beyond the good eating, he says it’s

The first question any seed saver should ask is are these seeds are worth saving. Heirloom or “open pollinated” seeds have been bred to produce for generations with-out losing vigor or desirable traits, unlike seeds from hybrid or “F1” plants, which may not stay true to the parent plant’s traits. To avoid cross pollination with different variet-ies, some gardeners cage or bag their plants. Planting single varieties should be precau-tion enough, but you should also make sure your neighbors aren’t growing another variety of the same vegetable. Seeds should be wrapped in light-proof paper and stored in sealed glass containers in the refrigerator.

Beginning seed savers should start with seeds that are easy to save. Some, like peas, are a snap. Tomatoes are more of a challenge. You might decide it’s worth a couple bucks to just buy seeds, but there’s something special about saving seeds one year and growing them the next, part of a cycle that is thousands of years old.

Here is a guide to some of the easiest seeds to save, and some you might want to hold off on until you’re a more seasoned seed saver.

d.i.y. seed saving

❝[The Stoltzfus String Bean]

had been extinct for 70 years before we brought it back.❞→ tim mountz

Tim Mountz found the Stoltzfus String Bean in his grandfather’s seed collection after he passed away.


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a horn, which is where I guess the ‘devil’ part comes from. It’s my favorite paste-type tomato … they’re just incredibly good eating.”

GrowinG LocaLWeaver notes that there currently isn’t an ex-

tensive guide to regional heirlooms, let alone a one-stop shop for buying them. Finding them takes some research and “hunting and peck-ing through catalogs,” he says. But, one great resource can be seed exchange groups like the Philly Seed Exchange.

Aimee Hill, a co-coordinator with the Philly Seed Exchange, says the group doesn’t only focus on seeds with historic ties to the area, but since they come from plants grown in the region, they are by default local heirlooms.

“The idea is to get as many local seeds as possible and have people save seeds no matter where they came from in the first place,” Hill says. “As they’re grown and saved and grown over generations, they become more adapted to the Philly area.” They’ve gotten many seeds from the pre-1800s collection at Bartram’s Gar-

den and the Pendle Hill Quaker community in Wallingford, Pa.

While proponents of heirlooms have long lauded the superior taste compared to hybrid versions grown for commercial markets, there are many other reasons to grow not just heir-looms, but local heirlooms.

“If you have organically raised heirloom food plants in your garden, you’re going to be living a lot healthier than if you’re just growing hybrids. The heirlooms have not declined in their nutri-tional value the way these hybridized plants have,” Weaver says, citing studies from the U.S. Depart-ment of Agriculture. “Since the 1950s, hybridiza-tion has bled out nutrition for the sake of shelf life, or for whatever reason. It’s just not there.”

Mountz and Weaver also extol the vigor of plants that have been bred to cope with our cli-mate, soil and pests. “They’ll either germinate earlier, or be more resistant to humidity or in-sects,” Mountz says. “It’s really great to see the local traits you’ll get; it’s not just the local flavor and the local history, but the ability to grow in a climate that’s really cold in the wintertime, but

then subtropical for two-and-a-half months in the summer.”

Hill agrees. “If you grow things over genera-tions and save the seeds from specific areas, they become more resilient. It’s like terroir with wine and grapes grown in specific areas,” he says. “They’re better at getting all the good stuff, the fancy stuff, out of that soil so they taste better.” It also enhances economic independence, be-cause seed savers don’t have to buy new seeds each year.

SavinG for a Seedier futureThere are also benefits of diversity. “The more local seeds that are saved, the more diverse the seed base is in the first place,” Hill says. “From a neighborhood level, if you get more and more people saving seeds, the more diversity you have. Instead of just having a few fancy types of toma-toes, you have hundreds of types that can do well in Philadelphia. It’s food independence.”

I look forward to contributing to that diversity with my “ultimate Philadelphia heirloom gar-den.” This spring and summer, in addition to

Plant

Harvest Plants

Harvest Seeds

is a great way to preserve local heirlooms, grow plants well-suited for your local climate, and save a few bucks on seed purchases. But vegetables that are ready to eat a few weeks after planting might need to stay in the ground another month or more before their seeds are ready to harvest. If you are planning on saving seeds this summer or fall, be sure to plan your garden accordingly this spring. Here is a garden timeline to help you begin.

Saving SeedS

the Fish Pepper and the Stoltzfus String Bean, I will be growing Early Jersey Wakefield Cabbage, Amish Deer Tongue Lettuce, Philadelphia White Box Radishes and Jenny Lind Melons. My local tomatoes will include Jersey Devil, one called London Grove (from Happy Cat), and of course some Brandywines — the superstar of our re-gional heirlooms.

Saving local seeds does more than put deli-cious food on your plate, it keeps alive a history that is rich but fragile. As Weaver explains, those superstar Brandywine tomatoes, first grown on the banks of the Brandywine Creek in Chester County, are the perfect illustration of that fra-gility. Just a month after delivering the seeds to a seed company, the grower who gave Brandy-wines their name was thrown from a horse and killed. Had he died a month earlier, the Bran-dywine tomato as we know it might have died along with him.

Weaver compares preserving local heirlooms to linguists preserving endangered languages. “With languages, if you lose the speakers, you lose the language,” Weaver says. “It’s the same with these plants — if you lose them, they’re gone. I’ve come very close to losing some things, and it scares me because I shouldn’t be the only one on planet earth with some of this stuff.”

Seed saving has been essential to farming since the first time hunter gatherers decided it was time to settle down. But in the era of genetically engineered (GE) crops and monoculture on a massive scale, saving seeds is almost an act of defiance. With thousands of acres covered not just with the same crop, but the same brand and genetic modification, from the same manufacturer, non-GE crops like corn and soy are becoming scarce. Meanwhile, GE manufacturers like Monsanto have aggressively pursued lawsuits against seed-saving farmers who, intentionally or not, saved patent-protected seeds from one year to the next.

While no GE produce or seeds for home gardeners have hit the market so far, the processed foods on most grocer’s shelves are full of GE ingredients. More than 30 states, including Pennsylvania (gmofreepa.org), are pursuing laws to label GE foods. Supporters want to know if their food is genetically engineered for health and environmental reasons, but also because they want to know if their purchases are undermining the kind of genetic diversity that heirloom seed-savers are trying to preserve.

Protests, petitions and letters aren’t the only way to show your opposition to an agricultural system that has lost its way. Think about growing local heirlooms instead of the latest sterile hybrid. And if you’re feeling a little subversive when it comes time to harvest your spinach, peppers or eggplant, think about leaving a few in the ground and saving the seeds for next time. For more information about GE labeling initiatives, visit justlabelit.org


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When we think of migrating fish swimming upstream to spawn, we picture salmon heroically leaping up waterfalls — the stuff of inspirational posters. But the American shad is different. “Shad

don’t jump,” Joe Perillo, a Philadelphia Water Department (PWD) biologist, plainly states. American shad stay in the water, and for millennia they swam gracefully up the Schuylkill River as far as Pottsville.

by bernard brownurban naturalist

Fish TownShad don’t jump, but with a little help, their numbers can by bernard brown

Those mighty salmon might have been able to make it over the Fairmount Dam (salmon never actually swam this far south), but not our shad. Blocked from reaching their spawning beds, they’ve pretty much disappeared. Dams up and

down the Eastern Seaboard have turned Ameri-can shad from a commercially and culturally im-portant fish into a historical curiosity; we remem-ber them in Philadelphia at “Fishtown,” even if their April Shadfest has to import the actual fish.

The shallow steps of the Fairmount Dam fishway help shad move upstream so they can find somewhere to spawn.

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What’s a FishWay?…about

3 poundsVisitors can learn more about the fishway at the Fairmount Water Works interpretive cen-ter. there you can watch videos of shad, otters, water snakes and other critters making their way upstream. in the spring, you can view the live Fish cam online at fairmount waterworks.org/fishcam.php

But American shad are making their come-back in the Schuylkill thanks to a bit of clever engineering called a fishway. It is a type of “fish ladder,” a series of switchbacks that zigzag back and forth, like shallow steps, transforming the steep climb and surging waters of a dam or wa-terfall into a gradual rise and a gentler, more shad-friendly current. Located at the Fairmount Dam and elsewhere on the river, these fishways are helping the shad get up and over various ob-stacles so they can get upriver to spawn. Their babies will make the trip back downstream, grow up in the Atlantic Ocean and, we hope, come back when it’s their time to spawn.

This spring I tagged along with PWD workers on a weekly fishway cleaning trip. They shut a gate at the top of the ladder and water drained from the top compartment into the next one, and then on down through a switchback to the

bottom, leveling with the water below the dam. These compartments are arranged as shallow steps. When full, they let fish swim from one to the next, resting a bit at each level.

The shad won’t simply come if you build it, though. Perillo explains that a $1.5-million over-haul of the fishway in 2008 made it especially shad-friendly. It now features a pipe that shoots water diagonally across the river channel to get the fish’s attention, and there’s a calm spot right next to the fishway to make it stand out even more. Metal plates at the gaps between compart-ments calibrate the flow from level to level, and careful design eliminates shadows and bubbles, both of which spook the skittish shad.

PWD biologists have also been releasing hatchery-raised baby shad into the Schuylkill for a few years now. The idea is that these shad will remember their childhood home and come back to spawn later, jumpstarting a self-sustaining population. These days about 3,000 are making their way back up to spawn each year. They’ve been spotted as far up river as Phoenixville. Most of these fish are from the hatchery, but a few have been new, unmarked fish, a sign that shad are reestablishing themselves in the Schuylkill.

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Joe Perillo, a biologist with the Philadelphia Water Department, talks about the fishway and points to the fish crowder — a metal apparatus that forces the shad closer to the window so the Water Department can take a better photo.

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apr13

Bartram’s Garden Volunteer DayWork alongside Bartram gardeners to maintain and beautify the garden’s

unique urban landscape. Held the second Sat-urday of each month.

→ Sat., April 13, 9 a.m.-12 p.m., free, Bartram’s Gar-den, 54th Street and Lindbergh Boulevard. For more information and to register, visit bartrams-garden.org

apr13 Fermentation Basics Workshop

Join Amanda Feifer of phickle.com to learn the basic principles of fermen-

tation and how to make probiotic foods from scratch. Participants will take home kraut or pickles.

→ Sat., April 13, 12-2 p.m., $35, St. Michael’s Lutheran Church, 2139 E. Cumberland Rd. For more informa-tion and to register, visit greensgrow.org

apr14 Philly Farm & Food Fest

Sample our region’s bounty at the second annual PF3, a gathering of

local farmers, food producers, and sustain-able food businesses and organizations.

→ Sun., Apr. 14, 11 a.m.-4 p.m., $15-30, Pennsylvania Convention Center Annex, Broad and Race Streets. For more information and tickets, visit phillyfarm-fest.org

apr16 The Making of a Viaduct Green

Explore how two former railway lines can become a future garden and civic

project that can enhance the quality of life, cul-tural landscape and economic vitality of Phila-delphia.

→ Tues., April 16, 6-7:30 p.m., free, Corzo Center, University of the Arts, 320 S. Broad St. For more information and to register, visit corzocenter.tick-etleap.com

apr16 GMO Free PA Monthly Meeting

Do you know what genetically modi-fied organisms are? Learn more at this

monthly meeting held by the local chapter of GMO Free PA.

→ Tues., April 16, 7-9 p.m., free, Ludington Library, 5 S. Bryn Mawr Ave, Bryn Mawr. For more informa-tion and to register, visit facebook.com/GMO-FreePA

apr18 Genetic Roulette Screening

Enjoy a complimentary bag of organic popcorn and watch Genetic Roulette, the

film that’s helping America wake up to the reali-ties of genetically engineered organisms in our food supply. Hosted by GMO Free NJ.

→ Thurs., April 18, 6:15-8:15 p.m., free, 771 Haddon Ave., Collingswood, NJ. To RSVP, email [email protected] with your name(s) and phone number.

apr18 A Bicentennial Town Square

featuring Dr. David OrrDavid Orr, an environmental studies

professor at Oberlin College, will lead a discus-sion on green building. For 25 years, Orr has studied energy, water and materials use on col-lege campuses, helping launch the green campus movement.

→ Thurs., April 18, 6-8:30 p.m., $10 members/$15 nonmembers, Academy of Natural Sciences, 1900 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy. For more information and to register, visit davidorr.eventbrite.com

apr19 Swarthmore Co-op Presents Food

Truck-a-ThonJoin Swarthmore Co-op for their second

Food Truck-a-Thon, featuring live music and local food trucks, including Nomad Pizza, Foo Truck, Say Cheese and many more.

→ Fri., April 19, 5-7:30 p.m., free, 341 Dartmouth Ave., Swarthmore. For more information, visit swarth-more.coop

apr20 21st Annual Children’s Earth Day

ForestWalk through a handmade rendition of

a Pennsylvania forest overflowing with life-size plants and animals, all created entirely by local classrooms and schools.

→ Sat., April 20, 10 a.m.-1 p.m., free, Rolling Hill Park, 1301 Rose Glen Rd., Gladwyne. For more informa-tion, visit lmconservancy.org

apr20

Hunting Park Orchard FestJoin this family festival at the site of the new Hunting Park Community Or-

chard. Activities include orchard planting, cider pressing, games, a health fair and more!

→ Sat., April 20, 10 a.m.-2 p.m., free, Hunting Park, Old York Road and W. Bristol Street. For more information and to RSVP, visit phillyorchards.org

apr20 Science Carnival on the Benjamin

Franklin ParkwayJoin scientists from the Academy of Nat-

ural Sciences and 100 other exhibitors as part of the Philadelphia Science Festival. The carnival includes family-friendly experiments, activities and live entertainment.

→ Sat., April 20, 11 a.m.-4 p.m., free, Academy of Natural Sciences, 1900 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy. For more information, visit ansp.org

Second Saturday Gardening Series: High Tunnels in PhiladelphiaTommy McCann, a Penn State Extension horticultural educator, will talk about high tunnels and their benefits for urban agriculture and gardening, specifically in Philadelphia.

→ Sat., April 13, 10 a.m.-12 p.m., $10, Fairmount Park Horticultural Center, N. Horticultural and Montgomery Drives. For more information and to register, visit extension.psu.edu/philadelphia/events

apr13

Farmer Rick Rigutto tends to rainbow chard in the high tunnel at the Weavers Way’s Mort Brooks Farm.

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apr20 DIY Sprays, Fertilizers and

Treatments for a Healthy Organic Garden

Learn how to use natural ingredients from your kitchen to make organic pesticides that will stop insects, squirrels and diseases from killing your favorite plants.

→ Sat., April 20, 12-2 p.m., $25, 2501 E. Cumberland St. For more information and to register, visit greensgrow.org

apr20 5K Run for Clean Air

The 32nd annual Run for Clean Air, held on the banks of the Schuylkill

River, is Philadelphia’s Largest Earth Day cel-ebration. Hosted by the Clean Air Council, par-ticipants can choose from a 5K run, 3K walk or kids fun run.

→ Sat., Apr. 20, 9 a.m., $10-$35, Martin Luther King Drive (West River Drive). For more information and to register, visit 5krunforcleanair.org

apr20

Teens 4 Good Farm Spring KickoffHelp prepare the Teens 4 Good gardens for planting, enjoy healthy refresh-

ments, and participate in family-friendly activi-ties led by teens.

→ Sat., April 20, 10 a.m.-2 p.m., free, Teens 4 Good Farm, 8th and Poplar Streets. For more informa-tion, visit teens4good.orbius.com

apr20 Stormwater Soak It In!

Learn sustainable landscape practices that reduce stormwater runoff and pro-

mote water quality while creating natural habi-tats for birds, beneficial insects, pollinators and wildlife.

→ Sat., April 20, 11 a.m.-3 p.m., free, Ingersoll/Clay-tor property (located behind the Lower Gwynedd Township building, 1130 N. Bethlehem Pike, Spring House). For more information, visit lowergwynedd.org/township-government/gwyneddgreen.aspx

apr21 Doylestown Earth Day Fair

The Doylestown Earth Day Fair is fun for the whole family, featuring lo-

cal food vendors, green merchants and earth-friendly crafts for kids.

→ Sun., April 21, 11 a.m.-4 p.m., free, Bucks Country Gardens, 1057 N. Main St., Doylestown. For more information, visit greencollaboration.org

apr22 Villanova University Earth Day

CelebrationCelebrate Earth Day with a discussion

on fracking, a farmers market, and an address by Katherine Gajewski, director of the Office of Sustainability for the City of Philadelphia.

→ Mon., April 22, 9 a.m.-6 p.m., free, Villanova Uni-versity, 800 Lancaster Ave., Villanova. For more information, visit campusevents.villanova.edu

apr25 Museum Without Walls Fun Ride

Join the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia and the Association for

Public Art for an evening ride to visit select sculptures highlighted in the Museum Without Walls audio tour. Helmet required.

→ Thurs., April 25, 5:30-7:30 p.m., free, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy. For more information and to register, visit museum-woutwalls2-eorg.eventbrite.com

apr27 Backyard Tree Fruit Planting

Spring is a lovely time to start planting fruit trees. Learn about choosing the

right rootstock, planting space, soil and time to plant.

→ Sat., April 27, 11 a.m.-1 p.m., $10 members/$12 nonmembers, Longview Center for Agriculture, 3215 Stump Hall Rd, Collegeville. For more information and to register, visit greenerpartners.org

apr27 Rain Gardens: Sustainable Solutions

Learn how to add rain gardens to the landscape where they will be most ef-

fective absorbinh rainwater runoff from roofs, driveways, sidewalks and lawns.

→ Sat., April 27, 10-11 a.m., $20 members/$25 nonmembers, Morris Arboretum, 100 E. Northwestern Ave. For more information and to register, visit morrisarboretum.org

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apr27 Darby Creek Cleanup

Join the Friends of Heinz Wildlife Refuge for the 27th annual clean up

of Darby Creek to help keep the Refuge a clean and safe place for wildlife and visitors.

→ Sat., April 27, 9 a.m.-12:30 p.m., free, John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge, 8601 Lindbergh Blvd. For more information, visit friendsofheinzrefuge.org

apr27 Penn State in the City: A Special

Urban Agriculture FestivalPenn State’s Extension program will

be showcasing its community work and teach-ing skills to gardeners and chefs. Activities will include high tunnel tours, cooking demos and beekeeping workshops.

→ Sat., April 27, 1-5 p.m., free (space is limited), SHARE, 2901 W. Hunting Park Ave. For more information and to RSVP, visit extension.psu.edu/philadelphia/events

apr28 Philadelphia Science Festival

Discovery Day: Urban FarmingWant to grow your own vegetables in

the city? Learn how to test soil, grow food and even how to raise farm animals during this day of gardening demonstrations, beekeeping basics and more.

→ Sun., April 28, 11 a.m.-3 p.m., $10, Bartram’s Garden, 54th Street and Lindbergh Boulevard. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit philasciencefestival.ticketleap.com

apr29 From Tracks to Parks: The Next

Generation of Urban GreenHear from the visionaries transforming

industrial relics into urban parks of the future. The panel will include representatives from Chicago’s Bloomingdale Trail, New York’s High Line, Philadelphia’s Reading Viaduct, and St. Louis’ Trestle.

→ Mon., April 29, 6-8 p.m., free, The Academy of Natural Sciences, 1900 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy. For more information and to register, visit trackparks-eorg.eventbrite.com

may10 Grid Alive

Join Grid for their monthly live event. Featuring: Judy Wicks, founder of the

White Dog Café, Sustainable Business Network and Fair Food; Rob Fleming, sustainable design director at Philadelphia University; and William Woys Weaver from The Keystone Center for the Study of Regional Foods and Food Tourism.

→ Fri., May 10, 6-8 p.m., $5, Trinity Memorial Church, 22nd and Spruce Streets. For more information and to buy tickets, visit gridphilly.com

may11 Walk and Talk on Weeds and

InvasivesCan you identify the weed or invasive

growing in your garden? Lori Hayes, a Philadel-phia Extension master gardener, leads a walk to identify the top 10 local weeds/invasives.

→ Sat., May 11, 10 a.m.-12 p.m., $10, Fairmount Park Horticultural Center, N. Horticultural and Montgomery Drives. For more information, visit extension.psu.edu/philadelphia/programs/master-gardener

may04 Cuisine, Culture, and Community: A

Global Celebration of Women and Food

Join an internationally renowned group of phil-anthropic chefs, restaurateurs, authors, TV personalities, wine and spirits specialists, and educators as they host a fundraiser benefiting the Green Tables and scholarship programs.

→ Sat., May 4, 8 a.m.-4 p.m., $85 (includes all meals), The Restaurant School at Walnut Hill College, 4207 Walnut St. For more information and to register, visit lesdamesphiladelphia.com

may04 Spring Craft Bazaar

Celebrate spring with Greensgrow and shop for a Mother’s Day gift among a

talented array of local artists and vendors, sell-ing upcycled crafts, handmade soaps, jewelry, ceramics, photographs and more.

→ Sat., May 4, 9 a.m.-4 p.m., free, 2501 E. Cumberland Rd. To see more, visit greensgrow.org

may09 The Herb Society of America’s 74th

Annual Herb SaleThousands of herbs, scented geraniums

and salvias will be offered. Chutneys, jams, vin-egars and homemade baked goods will also be available, as well as a gourmet herbal brunch.

→ Thurs., May 9, 10 a.m.-1 p.m., free/$15 for brunch (reservations required), 1685 Art School Rd., Chester Springs. For more information, visit hsaphiladelphia.org

Eating AlabamaIn the documentary Eating Alabama, a couple returns home to Alabama where they try to eat the way their

grandparents did — locally and sea-sonally. Yet nearly everything about the food system has changed. Hosted by Slow Food Philadelphia and Farm to City.

→ Mon., May 6, 7-9:30 p.m., free, the Rotunda at 40th and Walnut Streets. To learn more, visit therotunda.org/events/eating-alabama-film-screening

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Seeds With Deep Roots

Heirloom seeds keep alive memories of people and place

by william woys weaver

As far back as I can remember, i have always been surrounded by seeds. During my preschool years, I farmed

with my grandparents, and it was my Grandfa-ther Weaver, with his acre or so kitchen garden in West Chester, who raised me at his knee.

My grandfather ran an accounting business, but his heart was in plants. He started collecting seeds in the early 1930s from relatives in Lancaster County where he was born. Before long, his entire property had become a botanical showplace, with fruit trees, bee hives, a pi-geon house for racing pigeons (which provided manure for the gardens) and all sorts of wonderful things no one sees today, like Pineapple Rhubarb with yellow stems.

Armed with my own little wheel barrow, hoe and shovel, I helped in the garden, and I suppose by osmosis I absorbed a lot of what my grandfather was doing. One of his garden buddies was renowned folk painter Horace Pippin, who also lived in West Chester. Pippin would visit the garden and my grandfather’s bees in order to get stung, a remedy that seemed to give him re-lief for an old war injury. My grandfather was not too happy about sacrificing his rare bees in this way, so to make up for it Pippin brought him seeds. As it turned out, these friendly bribes represented some of the rarest African-American heirlooms available then, including the Fish Pep-per, now found in many seed catalogs.

My grandfather died in 1956 and his seed col-lection was forgotten. Twelve years later, my grandmother and I were cleaning out the old freezer in the cellar, and there they were, safely stored in air-tight baby food jars. Those tiny jars reminded me of so many wonderful things from

his magical garden, I took up the challenge to see what could be salvaged.

The freeze had helped preserve the seeds. I lost some, but I managed to bring many of the best back to life. My fits and starts at seed saving

became more serious in the 1970s, as I realized not everyone had grandparents with gardens full of heirlooms. I began retracing my grandfather’s steps, contacting elderly cousins who still had gardens, seeds, and most importantly, the stories to go with them. By the end of the 1970s, when I moved the entire garden to Devon, I had ac-quired several thousand heirlooms, many more than my grandfather’s core collection.

I have always been interested in the vast riches of our tri-state region, and I suppose I have al-ways favored heirloom seeds from this area, es-pecially the Native American varieties. Having evolved here, these seeds do much better here than, say, desert heirlooms from the Southwest. They have provided me with the wonderful ge-netic material to continue breeding where my grandfather left off. “Bred and grown in Penn-

sylvania” has become one of my mottos.

The future of the seed col-lection I have assembled over the years, what I now call the “Roughwood Seed Collection,” is not clear. The Keystone Center for the Study of Regional Foods, which I am setting up this year to promote foods from our tri-state area, will fill a long-needed role in supplying seeds and offering workshops on regional foods and heirloom gardening. I am hoping it can also take on that part of the Roughwood Seed Col-lection devoted to our regional heirlooms.

The first step in this realiza-tion will be the groundbreaking this spring on a fully operational 1860s Pennsylvania Dutch kitch-en garden at Kutztown Univer-sity. Hopefully, it will become a launching pad for more serious work on our seed heritage, and a source of locally originated heirlooms for kitchen garden-ers across the region. Because we don’t grow heirlooms just for nostalgia; we grow them to eat.

If you’re interested in cooking with heirlooms, try the recipes in william woys weaver’s newest book, As American as Shoofly Pie: The Foodlore and Fakelore of Pennsylvania Dutch Cuisine (April 2013, University of Pennsylvania Press).

Each month, Dispatch features personal reflections on adventures in sustainability. Have a story you’d like to share? E-mail [email protected]


OttosMINI_Grid_May.indd 1 4/3/13 11:31 AM

wednesdaysWalk-In

EnvironmEntal StudiES

featured the SEcond

WEdnESday of each month

Open information session for all

LPS programs

Create Change.

Madison CarioMaster of Environmental Studies

Work was co-created with Myra Bazell and SCRAP Performance Group

Photo Credit: Courtesy of William Hebert

Be part of tomorrow’s solutions today.

www.facebook.com/UPennEES

@PENN_EES www.upenn.edu/mesor search penn mes

Madison Cario created a dance-theater work, TIDE, for her MES Capstone Project, in which she explored the social and psychological impacts of environmental destruction. Raising consciousness of environmental issues through the language of dance, TIDE draws on personal narrative and movement to inspire self-reflection, dialogue, and ultimately action to solve the ongoing environmental crisis.

Penn’s Master of environMental studies PrograM combines classroom work with field experience in a broadly based interdisciplinary approach to the study of the environment. As a culminating exercise in the program, students complete an individual project that puts what they’ve learned in the classroom to work in the field. Their choice of final projects often reflects the area of environmental work in which they intend to focus their careers.

Grid Magazine May 2013 [#049]

Documents

Transcript of Grid Magazine May 2013 [#049]