Grants seeding growing agriculture industry

A SEED GROWS: Northeast Organic Farming Association of Rhode Island President Michael Roberts also co-owns Roots Farm in Tiverton with his wife, Kelli. He is pictured above with his son, Ronan. / PBN PHOTO/TRACY JENKINS
A SEED GROWS: Northeast Organic Farming Association of Rhode Island President Michael Roberts also co-owns Roots Farm in Tiverton with his wife, Kelli. He is pictured above with his son, Ronan. / PBN PHOTO/TRACY JENKINS

The U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded $205,000 in grants to Rhode Island projects that promote “specialty crops” last October. This month the department concluded another round of 16 applications for an additional $150,000 in grants that will be awarded in the fall.
The USDA specialty-crop grants and the new Local Agriculture and Seafood Act grants approved by the General Assembly in 2012 are nourishing the state’s growing agricultural industry.
The LASA program started with $100,000 in the 2013 state budget and was matched with an additional $100,000 from local philanthropies, expanding funding to seafood and aquaculture projects, in addition to farming.
“We had 89 applications for the LASA grants, requesting a total of $1.4 million, so there’s clearly more demand than available capital,” said Leo Pollock, network coordinator for the Rhode Island Food Policy Council, an independent organization with the mission of “promoting a more accessible, more equitable and more sustainable food system” in the state. The council is assisting DEM with administration of the LASA grants.
“I think there’s been a gap in access to capital and the eligibility for these LASA grants is specifically aimed at those who have been growing less than 10 years,” said Pollock. “If you’re starting out on leased land and you have high overhead, but you want to scale up, generally the banks have not been interested in or willing to lend to smaller growers, especially if they’ve been in business less than three years.
“Farms and the food sector overall are showing positive trends in the state,” said Pollock. “This is one area where we’re seeing exciting growth in the Rhode Island economy and I think people are encouraged by that.
“People will see this as a state where you have an opportunity to start on a small scale, build a customer base and then build sales,” said Pollock.
Rhode Island is defying the national decline in the number of farms.
From 2007 to 2012, the number of farms in the U.S. decreased 4 percent, to 2.1 million, while the number of farms in Rhode Island increased 2 percent, to 1,243, according to the USDA’s 2012 Census of Agriculture Preliminary Report released in February. “One of the big drivers of the fact that we’re up 2 percent in Rhode Island is the vibrant local food culture, with increasingly savvy consumers who care where their fruits and vegetables come from and are concerned about issues like sustainability,” said Ken Ayars, chief of the division of agriculture for the R.I. Department of Environmental Management, which administers the USDA specialty-crop grants. “Almost all of what we grow in Rhode Island that’s edible is sold in the state.”
The edible part is a trend in the state’s agricultural landscape, he said.
“What’s happening is that there’s a general shift from being dominated by nursery stock and sod, which was hit hard by the recession, to fruits and vegetables,” said Ayars.
In addition to bucking the national trend in the number of farms, Rhode Islanders who tend the land to put food on family and restaurant tables are overcoming major obstacles.
At an average of $13,600 an acre, the cost of Rhode Island farmland is one of the highest in the nation, according to a study on land access by the Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic, done in collaboration with the Rhode Island Food Policy Council and released in March.
“It’s really a pretty strong picture for agriculture in Rhode Island, despite the high price and scarcity of land,” said Ayars.
The scarcity of land hasn’t stood in the way of the determination of the African Alliance of Rhode Island to grow and market truly unique crops, with the support of the USDA’s broadly defined specialty-crop grants.
Specialty crops can include everything from tomatoes to green beans and potatoes.
“The USDA definition of specialty crops is anything that’s not a commodity crop, which are typically grown in bulk and sold on the commodities market, like wheat or corn,” said Ayars. Some of the specialty crops are, however, uncommon locally.
“Our growers are refugee women from Rwanda, Burundi, the Congo and Liberia,” said Julius Kolawole, president of the African Alliance.
The alliance got its first USDA two-year grant of approximately $15,000 for 2011 and 2012, which was used to lease land from local agencies for $1 a year, purchase equipment and soil, build planting beds, install irrigation, put up fences, buy gutters and barrels to collect rainwater and prepare for market. That grant gave the effort a strong start.
“We have two locations in Providence for our community gardens and plots – one on Saratoga Street and one Diamond Street,” said Kolawole.
“Our vegetables include ewedu, efo tete, garden eggs, cassava leaf, amaranth, sweet potato greens and varieties of hot peppers and spinach,” he said.
The initial efforts helped fill out family meals with fresh vegetables and enough extra produce to allow a few of the African growers to test the demand for their products at the Armory farmers market in Providence.
“We could not meet the demand at the farmers market – it was beyond our imagination,” said Kolawole. The interest in the African vegetables at the 2012 and 2013 farmers markets spurred the project on.
The alliance was awarded a $20,000 USDA grant in the October round to provide African vegetables grown in urban parcels, with funding filtering down through DEM as of April 1.
African vegetables are more than just a fresh food, said Kolawole. They’re potentially a larger business, a means to engage and educate young people and an opportunity for intercultural communication.
“We had a lot of traffic at the farmers market because many Latinos eat the same vegetables, as well as people from Haiti and other places in the Caribbean,” said Kolawole.
This spring, the African Alliance is using part of the grant to hold customer-service training for the growers, including ways to offer cooking and preparation tips to buyers. The alliance is also planning a community event with three chefs, including one who is Latino and one who is African.
To bring youth into the network, they’ll be encouraged to help plant and tend, where they’ll have to use math and keep journals to figure out the details of cultivating vegetables, and then have a bicycle-delivery service to neighborhoods lacking in shops with fresh produce, said Kolawole.
An important link in the state’s fresh-produce network is the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Rhode Island. The organization got a USDA specialty-crops grant for $17,000 for two years, beginning in 2014 and applied in the new round for an overlapping grant beginning in 2015.
“Each time we apply for the USDA grant, we expand our activities,” said President Michael Roberts, who works as a mechanical engineer, in addition to owning Roots Farm in Tiverton with his wife, Kelli.
The organic-farming organization uses the grant money for a variety of training and outreach, including free on-farm workshops geared to commercial growers, but open to the public.
A farm-adviser program offers expertise on topics ranging from tractor driving to interpreting soil tests and improving soil fertility, to organic certification. The organization also holds workshops for advanced growers, sometimes bringing in experts from out-of-state.
“Now, for the first time, we’re planning an organic-farming conference for spring 2016,” said Roberts.
“For the USDA grants, our success is judged by the impact we have on commercial growers,” he said. “The grants are meant to enhance the economic viability of farms in Rhode Island.”
That economic viability will soon get a new infusion of funding from the state’s LASA grants. The winning projects, scheduled to be selected in mid-April, have a quicker turnaround than the USDA grants, said Ayars. The winners of the LASA grants, totaling $200,000, will be announced at Agricultural Day at the Statehouse on May 1.

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