July 5, 2025 • 20 mins
There's nothing quite like a tasty, nutritious meal full of fresh ingredients, especially if they're locally sourced. For almost two decades, the people behind the Island Grown Initiative have been working to build a local food system, helping the island's year-round residents ensure they always have healthy food on the table while teaching young people how to continue the work. Noli Taylor, Co-Executive Director of Island Grown Initiative, joins Nichole on the the show this week to tell their story.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
From WBZ News Radio in Boston. This is New England Weekend.
Each week we come together right here and talk about
all the topics important to you and the place where
you live. It is great to have you back with
us this holiday weekend. I'm Nicole Davis. There's nothing quite
like a tasty, nutritious meal full of fresh ingredients, especially
if they're locally sourced. Meals like that can be hard
(00:28):
to enjoy if your food insecure, and that's certainly a
problem many people here in Massachusetts are struggling with. On
Martha's Vineyard, farmers have been working for years with volunteers, teachers,
local businesses, and many others to expand access to freshly grown,
healthy food at an affordable cost. You're starting that education
about food very early as well. Noley Taylor is the
(00:50):
co executive director of the Island Grown Initiative. She's here
to talk about all their work. Nolly, welcome to the show.
Tell us a bit more about the Island Grown Initiative.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Our own initiative started in two thousand and six when a
group of volunteers, home cooks and moms, and farmers and
grocers and a feed store owner all came together with
this shared goal of wanting to find ways to support
local food and farming on the island, and the first
thing they did was to create a farm map to
(01:22):
help island residents and visitors know where to go to
be able to buy food from our local farmers. We
have about twenty six family farms on the island and
that's an agricultural heritage that this community is so proud of.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
So we made the farm map, and after that we thought,
are we done? Is there more to do?
Speaker 2 (01:43):
And we got together a group of local farmers over
a dinner and asked what they saw as being needed
to build a strong local food system, And out of
that came a list of goals that became our roadmap
for the first years of our organization. And the more
that we work to the more that we saw how
much there is to do to build a truly strong
(02:06):
local food system for everyone on our island. And in
these almost twenty years since then, we've built a whole
family of programs that now impact the majority of our
year round community in a.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
Variety of ways.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
And food is such an incredible space to work in
because it's where so many things come together, from human
health to environmental health to the values that a community holds.
And so here we are after nineteen years. I've been
with the organization for eighteen of those years, so.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
You know what's going on. You've been there almost since
the beginning, and you've really helped to shape this program.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
Yeah. It's been a real labor of love by so
many people on our island, and there's so many people
who are now a part of this organization and touched
by the work.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
That we do.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
And I could tell you about those programs if it
would be helpful.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
Yeah, yeah, definitely. We'll get into that in a moment.
But I wanted you to tell me a little bit
about essentially the ecosystem I suppose of the island in
that you have a lot of tourism. Obviously on the Vineyard,
you're well known for being a beautiful place for people
to come and relax, but I think that people forget
that there is a thriving community year round on the
Vineyard and that it's a working class community of people
(03:27):
who come together and lift each other up all year long.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
That's absolutely right. Thank you for raising that. Yeah, I
think the Vineyard is thought of as a summer resort
community which it is. You know, our population swells enormously
in the summer, but we have a year round population
of about twenty five thousand people. That is a very
rich community in terms of cultural history and community connections.
(03:53):
The Wampanog people have lived on this island for twelve
thousand years continuously.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
And are still here.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
My husband's family has been here for hundreds of years.
Our children are seventeenth generation born on the vineyard. And
when there's deep roots like this, the relationships between people
are so strong and there's something very special about that.
Another factor that our year round community faces, though, is
(04:20):
the incredibly high cost of living here, and since COVID,
the challenges of being able to live on the island
have only grown. The lack of affordable housing here is
an incredible challenge for year on community members. The cost
of food here is actually the highest of any county
(04:41):
in the United States, and these factors high cost of
living lack of affordable housing mean that it's become more
and more difficult for island people to be able to
afford their basic needs. And one of the programs that
we run at Island Grown is the Island Food Pantry,
and last year we served six thousand people, which is
(05:03):
a large percentage of our small year round population, and
that's working people and seniors and families with children. It's
just become so hard for so many people to be
able to live here, to be able to afford the
cost of living here, and they need support and that's
something that we're so glad to be able to provide
(05:24):
through the pantry, where we offer people nourishing food with dignity.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
We grow.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
We grow about one hundred thousand pounds of produce at
our regenerative farm that island grown, runs in the middle
of the island, and we donate the majority of that
through the pantry to our clients, so they have access
to staples and proteins and locally grown food. And we
have a group of about three hundred volunteers who make
(05:52):
all these programs possible. So it's a community that really
cares about caring for one another. Moment, when federal support
for food access programs like SNAP and WICIC and school
meals are all on the chopping block, it's just more
important than ever for communities to care for one another.
(06:13):
And we feel very fortunate that we've spent twenty years
growing a family of programs that are aimed to help.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
Build food security for our population.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
Talk to me though about the need that you're seeing
right now on the vineyard, because I know statewide, one
out of three people living in Massachusetts is our food insecure.
How is that translating on the vineyard?
Speaker 2 (06:37):
That's right, yes, and food insecurity has only grown since
the pandemic. The Island Grown Initiative adopted the Island Food
Pantry in January of twenty twenty because we knew that
food needs were already growing on the island. What we
didn't know was that we were on the precipice of
a global pandemic, and within the first year of us
(07:00):
adopting the pantry, food needs had doubled on the island,
and we imagined that that would be a short term blip,
that we'd gone from one in ten Islanders coming to
the pantry every year to one in five Islanders coming
to the pantry every year. But we haven't seen the
need go down, just like we're seeing across the state
(07:23):
that the demand for food and the need for food
support has only grown and that continues.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
To be the case.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
We served six thousand people at the pantry last year.
Which is a significant percentage of our year round population.
And while public support for food access is dwindling, the
need is higher than ever and the cost of food
is higher than ever. So we really rely on our
partners at the Greater Boston Food Bank, who provide us
(07:54):
with so much free food every year, as they do
to six hundred pantries across the state. So we're keeping
a close eye on policy that supports pantries and doing
all that we can to help support the funding that
pantries need to meet the growing need in our communities.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
And you've been growing a community really from a very
young age who knows how to be self sustaining. I
love this program that you have. You are in the
schools teaching kids everything about growing and raising their own
food and what the food is and the nutrition aspects
of this food. Tell us a little bit about your
school programs because I love this, Oh.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
Thank you, it's the best. So our farm to school
program is called Island Grown Schools, and we started it
in two thousand and seven. So we just completed our
eighteenth year of providing food education to every Island student
in every Island school. We have five full time educators
who teach about twenty five hundred children from preschool all
(08:56):
the way through high school about how to grow food,
save seeds, and cook with seasonal ingredients and why their
food choices matter. And we really see this kind of
food education as the foundation for a strong local food system.
It's something that we want every child to have access
to food education in school. And so not only do
(09:18):
we create this program here on the island, we've also
developed a curriculum, a preschool through high school curriculum that's
all tied to teaching standards that's available free for anyone
to utilize on our website.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
And so we hope.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
More communities will dig into offering food education for the
children in their place, because it does so much for
kids to connect to their food, to be able to
grow food in a school garden, to be able to
visit other farms and see how farming works. Our students,
the majority of them, come to our farm every year
(09:55):
and they get to learn about regenerative agriculture, and they
also participate in our gleaning program where they harvest food
to donate to islanders and need. That's so meaningful to
kids to be able to visit a farm, harvest crops
from the field and either bring it themselves to the
food pantry, or they also can always bring them back
(10:15):
to their school cafeteria and enjoy local food through school meals.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Imagine being able to plant the seed, raise your own plant,
pick the produce, take it back to school, and know
that you and your friends are eating something you've grown.
What a sense of accomplishment for these kids, and some
of them we're talking about elementary school age kids being
able to do this.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
How cool, and even preschool you know, from the time
kids are two or three years old in school, they're
getting to grow food themselves in their school gardens and
being raised with that from a young age has so
much power in terms of helping kids feel a connection
to nature, a connection to their place, and also that
kind of self sufficiency of knowing how to feed themsee
(11:00):
elves and help support their families and their neighbors.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
So you mentioned gleaning, and I was doing a little
research before you and I chatted, and I was looking
at your website. I am not familiar with gleaning, and
I am so curious about this. What is gleaning exactly
and how often do you do it? And why?
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Yes?
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Great question.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
So gleaning is an ancient practice.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
Traditionally, it was done by.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Farmers who would go through their field and harvest all
they could, and then they would open the fields to
the poor to come and harvest whatever was left. Today,
gleaning helps people capture excess from farm fields. There's so
much food that's grown on farms that's never even harvested
(11:45):
for a variety of reasons, either a lack of labor,
or say you've planted a whole row of zucchini and
then you've planted a second row of zucchini. The first
row is still producing, but you've transitioned to picking from
the second row, so the first row might all go
to waste. Instead of letting that excess go to waste,
(12:06):
we organize volunteers to go to farms and harvest that
excess to donate to community members in need.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
Of food support.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Last year, we harvested more than sixty pounds of excess
produce to donate for free to islanders in need. And
it's such an incredibly.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
Fun thing to do.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
To go gleaning, you go out with a group of
community members and together, in the span of a couple
of hours, you can harvest so much beautiful produce to
bring to people who really need that food, and so
we do gleaning throughout the growing season all the way
up into December, and our circle of gleaning volunteers are incredible.
(12:46):
They're so dedicated and it's something that people can do
of all ages. So that's something that we do with
island students when they come to our farm for field trips,
and it's really changed the food access picture on our
island to be able to have gleaned food available.
Speaker 3 (13:04):
That's how we were able to.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
First get local food into school meals and also to
senior centers, to low income housing developments. You know, gleaning
really opened the door for local food access to part
of our population who hadn't had access to that food before.
And it was through gleaning that we realized that some
(13:25):
people really benefit from having that kind of hole fresh
from the field produce, and other people really need food
that's been prepared, so that could be people with mobility issues,
seniors who aren't able to do something like chop a
butternut squash.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
Un housed people.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
We have a growing unhoused population on the island, people
without kitchen facilities. There's also a lot of seasonal moving
between houses that don't always have great kitchens, so we
started a prepared meals program. We now have a commercial
kitchen where we prepare about seventy five thousand nutritious meals
(14:04):
every year that we distribute for free. We also use
our kitchen to prepare lunches when school's out of session
and when families lose access to the nutrition that's available
through school breakfasts and school lunches. So, you know, you
start with one piece of the food system and you
realize that it's all connected and how much work there.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
Really is to be able to create food.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Security for a community, both in the short term and
in the long term. And we do this work here
on our island, but it's work that we want to
help support all across the food system. So any way
that we can support other communities who are doing kindred
work to build a strong food system for all, we
(14:49):
want to be here. So we share our resources widely
through our website, through conferences, through farming organizations that where
we can help teach other farms about the kind of
regenerative agriculture work that we do that has done incredible
things for our forty two acre farm that we run
in the middle of the island, and we're always happy
(15:11):
to talk to other communities that can reach out anytime
if there's anything that we can do to help support
their efforts.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
And you're also supporting farmers who right now, I feel
are getting kind of a one two punch, not from
the government, but just from overall climate change. They're dealing
with the impacts of that. They're dealing with the lack
of federal funding, tariffs and all sorts of different issues
out there, the cost of getting food into the markets.
So having even your people out there gleaning and taking
(15:38):
care of a one less thing for them to worry about,
making sure that their local produce gets out there. I mean,
I love the fact that it all comes back to
the ecosystem side of it, right you're all working within
your own ecosystem to uplift each other. And I really
think that what you're doing for farmers right now, along
with everybody else on the island, it's really incredible work
(15:59):
and much needed in a time like this.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
That's absolutely right.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
It's true farmers face so many challenges and they really
need our support. However, we can offer that so seeking
out local farms in your community, supporting them is a
really important thing for our farming community now because all
of us need to eat. That's a fundamental shared value
that we all have. We all need access to food
(16:25):
and we need our farmers to be there for us.
And also there's so many opportunities for people to grow
our own food, and this is why food education from
a young age feels so important. We also offer a
community garden at our farm to offer plots for people
who can't necessarily grow food at home but want to
be able to grow food, and community gardens are sweeping
(16:47):
the country.
Speaker 3 (16:49):
That's something that anybody could seek out.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
And we also help run a community seed library at
one of our local libraries because having access to seeds
is a fundamental part of food security. As we saw
in the early COVID days, so many people got interested
in growing their own food and suddenly seed companies were
selling out of seeds. And being able to develop locally
(17:12):
adapted crop varieties through seed saving is something that will
really help with long term food security and it's also
really fun. So the Community Seed Library has a website
that you could check out, and there's many community seed
libraries that people could connect to in their own communities.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
Is it like a little free library where you walk
outside and you just open the I love those things
for what it's worth. When you open up the little
door and you just go, oh, I'm going to put
some azalias in the ground today, or do you have
to go somewhere.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
It's a card catalog, like the old kind of library,
card catalogs with drawers.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
That you could pull out.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
So the ideas that you can go and kind of
check out seeds for free, bring them back to your
home garden, grow out those plants, save the seeds, and
then enter them back into the library at the end
of the growing season, and throughout the season we offer
workshops to help people know how to do those things.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
That is so cool. And I see you have a
CSA as well. So if people like maybe myself who
don't have a cream thumb and want to support you regardless,
you know, you have a CSA that people can subscribe to.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
Correct that's right, that's right.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture and that's a program
where people can sign up as members of a local
farm and each week of the growing season you get
a bag of food to bring home of whatever is
fresh from the.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
Field that week.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
Our CSA helps bring people to our farms so they
can see our regenerative growing methods and connect to the
land where their food is grown. And also it builds
community with each other. As people come to pick up
their CSA, they're sharing recipe ideas like how do you
use this cool Robbie and getting to know one another.
This summer is the first time that we've had prescribed
(18:58):
CSA shares where our partners in the local healthcare system
are actually offering free shares to patients who either face
diet related disease or food insecurity or both, so they're
able to come to the farm and get free produce
every week and also connect with others who are eating
(19:18):
that produce.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
We have a upick.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
Section at the farm where people can go out and
pick their own flowers and herbs and peas at this
time of year, and so all of these things help
build health and wellness in the community, help build community
connections and relationships all through the.
Speaker 3 (19:36):
Power of food.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
Noally, this is incredible. If people are curious about learning more,
if they want to get involved either with the CSA,
they want to go out gleaning with you, they want
to dedicate themselves to helping out at the farm. How
can they do that and where can they get in touch?
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Yes, we would love their support and participation. You can
find us at our website IGIMV. We'd love to hear
from you. We're always looking for volunteers to come.
Speaker 3 (20:04):
Glean with us.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Donations mean the world to us, and we hope people
will do this kind of work in their own communities
as well. Come see what we're doing on the vineyard
and then do it yourself at home.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Nolie, thank you so much for the time, and thank
you for all you're doing to make sure people stay
fed and healthy on the vineyard.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
Thank you so much, Nicole, have a safe.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
And healthy holiday weekend. Please join me again next week
for another edition of the show. I'm Nicole Davis from
WBZ News Radio on iHeartRadio.
From WBZ News Radio in Boston. This is New England Weekend.
Each week we come together right here and talk about
all the topics important to you and the place where
you live. It is great to have you back with
us this holiday weekend. I'm Nicole Davis. There's nothing quite
like a tasty, nutritious meal full of fresh ingredients, especially
if they're locally sourced. Meals like that can be hard
(00:28):
to enjoy if your food insecure, and that's certainly a
problem many people here in Massachusetts are struggling with. On
Martha's Vineyard, farmers have been working for years with volunteers, teachers,
local businesses, and many others to expand access to freshly grown,
healthy food at an affordable cost. You're starting that education
about food very early as well. Noley Taylor is the
(00:50):
co executive director of the Island Grown Initiative. She's here
to talk about all their work. Nolly, welcome to the show.
Tell us a bit more about the Island Grown Initiative.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Our own initiative started in two thousand and six when a
group of volunteers, home cooks and moms, and farmers and
grocers and a feed store owner all came together with
this shared goal of wanting to find ways to support
local food and farming on the island, and the first
thing they did was to create a farm map to
(01:22):
help island residents and visitors know where to go to
be able to buy food from our local farmers. We
have about twenty six family farms on the island and
that's an agricultural heritage that this community is so proud of.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
So we made the farm map, and after that we thought,
are we done? Is there more to do?
Speaker 2 (01:43):
And we got together a group of local farmers over
a dinner and asked what they saw as being needed
to build a strong local food system, And out of
that came a list of goals that became our roadmap
for the first years of our organization. And the more
that we work to the more that we saw how
much there is to do to build a truly strong
(02:06):
local food system for everyone on our island. And in
these almost twenty years since then, we've built a whole
family of programs that now impact the majority of our
year round community in a.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
Variety of ways.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
And food is such an incredible space to work in
because it's where so many things come together, from human
health to environmental health to the values that a community holds.
And so here we are after nineteen years. I've been
with the organization for eighteen of those years, so.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
You know what's going on. You've been there almost since
the beginning, and you've really helped to shape this program.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
Yeah. It's been a real labor of love by so
many people on our island, and there's so many people
who are now a part of this organization and touched
by the work.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
That we do.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
And I could tell you about those programs if it
would be helpful.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
Yeah, yeah, definitely. We'll get into that in a moment.
But I wanted you to tell me a little bit
about essentially the ecosystem I suppose of the island in
that you have a lot of tourism. Obviously on the Vineyard,
you're well known for being a beautiful place for people
to come and relax, but I think that people forget
that there is a thriving community year round on the
Vineyard and that it's a working class community of people
(03:27):
who come together and lift each other up all year long.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
That's absolutely right. Thank you for raising that. Yeah, I
think the Vineyard is thought of as a summer resort
community which it is. You know, our population swells enormously
in the summer, but we have a year round population
of about twenty five thousand people. That is a very
rich community in terms of cultural history and community connections.
(03:53):
The Wampanog people have lived on this island for twelve
thousand years continuously.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
And are still here.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
My husband's family has been here for hundreds of years.
Our children are seventeenth generation born on the vineyard. And
when there's deep roots like this, the relationships between people
are so strong and there's something very special about that.
Another factor that our year round community faces, though, is
(04:20):
the incredibly high cost of living here, and since COVID,
the challenges of being able to live on the island
have only grown. The lack of affordable housing here is
an incredible challenge for year on community members. The cost
of food here is actually the highest of any county
(04:41):
in the United States, and these factors high cost of
living lack of affordable housing mean that it's become more
and more difficult for island people to be able to
afford their basic needs. And one of the programs that
we run at Island Grown is the Island Food Pantry,
and last year we served six thousand people, which is
(05:03):
a large percentage of our small year round population, and
that's working people and seniors and families with children. It's
just become so hard for so many people to be
able to live here, to be able to afford the
cost of living here, and they need support and that's
something that we're so glad to be able to provide
(05:24):
through the pantry, where we offer people nourishing food with dignity.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
We grow.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
We grow about one hundred thousand pounds of produce at
our regenerative farm that island grown, runs in the middle
of the island, and we donate the majority of that
through the pantry to our clients, so they have access
to staples and proteins and locally grown food. And we
have a group of about three hundred volunteers who make
(05:52):
all these programs possible. So it's a community that really
cares about caring for one another. Moment, when federal support
for food access programs like SNAP and WICIC and school
meals are all on the chopping block, it's just more
important than ever for communities to care for one another.
(06:13):
And we feel very fortunate that we've spent twenty years
growing a family of programs that are aimed to help.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
Build food security for our population.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
Talk to me though about the need that you're seeing
right now on the vineyard, because I know statewide, one
out of three people living in Massachusetts is our food insecure.
How is that translating on the vineyard?
Speaker 2 (06:37):
That's right, yes, and food insecurity has only grown since
the pandemic. The Island Grown Initiative adopted the Island Food
Pantry in January of twenty twenty because we knew that
food needs were already growing on the island. What we
didn't know was that we were on the precipice of
a global pandemic, and within the first year of us
(07:00):
adopting the pantry, food needs had doubled on the island,
and we imagined that that would be a short term blip,
that we'd gone from one in ten Islanders coming to
the pantry every year to one in five Islanders coming
to the pantry every year. But we haven't seen the
need go down, just like we're seeing across the state
(07:23):
that the demand for food and the need for food
support has only grown and that continues.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
To be the case.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
We served six thousand people at the pantry last year.
Which is a significant percentage of our year round population.
And while public support for food access is dwindling, the
need is higher than ever and the cost of food
is higher than ever. So we really rely on our
partners at the Greater Boston Food Bank, who provide us
(07:54):
with so much free food every year, as they do
to six hundred pantries across the state. So we're keeping
a close eye on policy that supports pantries and doing
all that we can to help support the funding that
pantries need to meet the growing need in our communities.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
And you've been growing a community really from a very
young age who knows how to be self sustaining. I
love this program that you have. You are in the
schools teaching kids everything about growing and raising their own
food and what the food is and the nutrition aspects
of this food. Tell us a little bit about your
school programs because I love this, Oh.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
Thank you, it's the best. So our farm to school
program is called Island Grown Schools, and we started it
in two thousand and seven. So we just completed our
eighteenth year of providing food education to every Island student
in every Island school. We have five full time educators
who teach about twenty five hundred children from preschool all
(08:56):
the way through high school about how to grow food,
save seeds, and cook with seasonal ingredients and why their
food choices matter. And we really see this kind of
food education as the foundation for a strong local food system.
It's something that we want every child to have access
to food education in school. And so not only do
(09:18):
we create this program here on the island, we've also
developed a curriculum, a preschool through high school curriculum that's
all tied to teaching standards that's available free for anyone
to utilize on our website.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
And so we hope.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
More communities will dig into offering food education for the
children in their place, because it does so much for
kids to connect to their food, to be able to
grow food in a school garden, to be able to
visit other farms and see how farming works. Our students,
the majority of them, come to our farm every year
(09:55):
and they get to learn about regenerative agriculture, and they
also participate in our gleaning program where they harvest food
to donate to islanders and need. That's so meaningful to
kids to be able to visit a farm, harvest crops
from the field and either bring it themselves to the
food pantry, or they also can always bring them back
(10:15):
to their school cafeteria and enjoy local food through school meals.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Imagine being able to plant the seed, raise your own plant,
pick the produce, take it back to school, and know
that you and your friends are eating something you've grown.
What a sense of accomplishment for these kids, and some
of them we're talking about elementary school age kids being
able to do this.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
How cool, and even preschool you know, from the time
kids are two or three years old in school, they're
getting to grow food themselves in their school gardens and
being raised with that from a young age has so
much power in terms of helping kids feel a connection
to nature, a connection to their place, and also that
kind of self sufficiency of knowing how to feed themsee
(11:00):
elves and help support their families and their neighbors.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
So you mentioned gleaning, and I was doing a little
research before you and I chatted, and I was looking
at your website. I am not familiar with gleaning, and
I am so curious about this. What is gleaning exactly
and how often do you do it? And why?
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Yes?
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Great question.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
So gleaning is an ancient practice.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
Traditionally, it was done by.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Farmers who would go through their field and harvest all
they could, and then they would open the fields to
the poor to come and harvest whatever was left. Today,
gleaning helps people capture excess from farm fields. There's so
much food that's grown on farms that's never even harvested
(11:45):
for a variety of reasons, either a lack of labor,
or say you've planted a whole row of zucchini and
then you've planted a second row of zucchini. The first
row is still producing, but you've transitioned to picking from
the second row, so the first row might all go
to waste. Instead of letting that excess go to waste,
(12:06):
we organize volunteers to go to farms and harvest that
excess to donate to community members in need.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
Of food support.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Last year, we harvested more than sixty pounds of excess
produce to donate for free to islanders in need. And
it's such an incredibly.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
Fun thing to do.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
To go gleaning, you go out with a group of
community members and together, in the span of a couple
of hours, you can harvest so much beautiful produce to
bring to people who really need that food, and so
we do gleaning throughout the growing season all the way
up into December, and our circle of gleaning volunteers are incredible.
(12:46):
They're so dedicated and it's something that people can do
of all ages. So that's something that we do with
island students when they come to our farm for field trips,
and it's really changed the food access picture on our
island to be able to have gleaned food available.
Speaker 3 (13:04):
That's how we were able to.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
First get local food into school meals and also to
senior centers, to low income housing developments. You know, gleaning
really opened the door for local food access to part
of our population who hadn't had access to that food before.
And it was through gleaning that we realized that some
(13:25):
people really benefit from having that kind of hole fresh
from the field produce, and other people really need food
that's been prepared, so that could be people with mobility issues,
seniors who aren't able to do something like chop a
butternut squash.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
Un housed people.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
We have a growing unhoused population on the island, people
without kitchen facilities. There's also a lot of seasonal moving
between houses that don't always have great kitchens, so we
started a prepared meals program. We now have a commercial
kitchen where we prepare about seventy five thousand nutritious meals
(14:04):
every year that we distribute for free. We also use
our kitchen to prepare lunches when school's out of session
and when families lose access to the nutrition that's available
through school breakfasts and school lunches. So, you know, you
start with one piece of the food system and you
realize that it's all connected and how much work there.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
Really is to be able to create food.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Security for a community, both in the short term and
in the long term. And we do this work here
on our island, but it's work that we want to
help support all across the food system. So any way
that we can support other communities who are doing kindred
work to build a strong food system for all, we
(14:49):
want to be here. So we share our resources widely
through our website, through conferences, through farming organizations that where
we can help teach other farms about the kind of
regenerative agriculture work that we do that has done incredible
things for our forty two acre farm that we run
in the middle of the island, and we're always happy
(15:11):
to talk to other communities that can reach out anytime
if there's anything that we can do to help support
their efforts.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
And you're also supporting farmers who right now, I feel
are getting kind of a one two punch, not from
the government, but just from overall climate change. They're dealing
with the impacts of that. They're dealing with the lack
of federal funding, tariffs and all sorts of different issues
out there, the cost of getting food into the markets.
So having even your people out there gleaning and taking
(15:38):
care of a one less thing for them to worry about,
making sure that their local produce gets out there. I mean,
I love the fact that it all comes back to
the ecosystem side of it, right you're all working within
your own ecosystem to uplift each other. And I really
think that what you're doing for farmers right now, along
with everybody else on the island, it's really incredible work
(15:59):
and much needed in a time like this.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
That's absolutely right.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
It's true farmers face so many challenges and they really
need our support. However, we can offer that so seeking
out local farms in your community, supporting them is a
really important thing for our farming community now because all
of us need to eat. That's a fundamental shared value
that we all have. We all need access to food
(16:25):
and we need our farmers to be there for us.
And also there's so many opportunities for people to grow
our own food, and this is why food education from
a young age feels so important. We also offer a
community garden at our farm to offer plots for people
who can't necessarily grow food at home but want to
be able to grow food, and community gardens are sweeping
(16:47):
the country.
Speaker 3 (16:49):
That's something that anybody could seek out.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
And we also help run a community seed library at
one of our local libraries because having access to seeds
is a fundamental part of food security. As we saw
in the early COVID days, so many people got interested
in growing their own food and suddenly seed companies were
selling out of seeds. And being able to develop locally
(17:12):
adapted crop varieties through seed saving is something that will
really help with long term food security and it's also
really fun. So the Community Seed Library has a website
that you could check out, and there's many community seed
libraries that people could connect to in their own communities.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
Is it like a little free library where you walk
outside and you just open the I love those things
for what it's worth. When you open up the little
door and you just go, oh, I'm going to put
some azalias in the ground today, or do you have
to go somewhere.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
It's a card catalog, like the old kind of library,
card catalogs with drawers.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
That you could pull out.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
So the ideas that you can go and kind of
check out seeds for free, bring them back to your
home garden, grow out those plants, save the seeds, and
then enter them back into the library at the end
of the growing season, and throughout the season we offer
workshops to help people know how to do those things.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
That is so cool. And I see you have a
CSA as well. So if people like maybe myself who
don't have a cream thumb and want to support you regardless,
you know, you have a CSA that people can subscribe to.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
Correct that's right, that's right.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture and that's a program
where people can sign up as members of a local
farm and each week of the growing season you get
a bag of food to bring home of whatever is
fresh from the.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
Field that week.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
Our CSA helps bring people to our farms so they
can see our regenerative growing methods and connect to the
land where their food is grown. And also it builds
community with each other. As people come to pick up
their CSA, they're sharing recipe ideas like how do you
use this cool Robbie and getting to know one another.
This summer is the first time that we've had prescribed
(18:58):
CSA shares where our partners in the local healthcare system
are actually offering free shares to patients who either face
diet related disease or food insecurity or both, so they're
able to come to the farm and get free produce
every week and also connect with others who are eating
(19:18):
that produce.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
We have a upick.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
Section at the farm where people can go out and
pick their own flowers and herbs and peas at this
time of year, and so all of these things help
build health and wellness in the community, help build community
connections and relationships all through the.
Speaker 3 (19:36):
Power of food.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
Noally, this is incredible. If people are curious about learning more,
if they want to get involved either with the CSA,
they want to go out gleaning with you, they want
to dedicate themselves to helping out at the farm. How
can they do that and where can they get in touch?
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Yes, we would love their support and participation. You can
find us at our website IGIMV. We'd love to hear
from you. We're always looking for volunteers to come.
Speaker 3 (20:04):
Glean with us.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Donations mean the world to us, and we hope people
will do this kind of work in their own communities
as well. Come see what we're doing on the vineyard
and then do it yourself at home.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Nolie, thank you so much for the time, and thank
you for all you're doing to make sure people stay
fed and healthy on the vineyard.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
Thank you so much, Nicole, have a safe.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
And healthy holiday weekend. Please join me again next week
for another edition of the show. I'm Nicole Davis from
WBZ News Radio on iHeartRadio.
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