What Is Slow Food > Slow Food USA Blog > Got a truck? You can help the “coolest urban ag project around.”
The Slow Food USA Blog
Got a truck? You can help the “coolest urban ag project around.”
Posted on Mon, April 18, 2011 by Jerusha Klemperer
6 Comments | Categories: Biodiversity, Farms and Farming, Film/TV/Radio, Food Justice, Take Action, Youth Food Movement,
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by Hnin Hnin
Some farmers have thousands of acres of land. Some farmers have a few. Truck Farmers have a pile of dirt in the back of a pickup truck. Truck Farm is a simple concept with a big impact. It’s a mini-mobile farm, an edible exhibit, and the focus of a documentary coming out this winter. What exactly can you do with a 4x8 bed of soil and seeds on wheels? Add an ambitious farmer with the passion to teach kids about growing and eating healthy food, and you’ve got one of the coolest urban agriculture projects around. That’s why Slow Food USA has partnered up with Truck Farm to recruit some of the freshest new urban farmers in town.
After months of planning and planting, a fleet of 25 Truck Farmers across the country are about to take to the road, popping up at schools, camps, street fairs, outdoor concerts, and anywhere else large groups of youth congregate. They’re revved up and ready to go…
BUT there’s one snag—7 of the 25 farmers don’t have a truck! Meet Cate Brennan, a student and leader of Slow Food University of Rhode Island. With your help, she and her group can become some of the youngest Truck Farmers on the fleet.
Here’s what Cate has to say to you:
“We decided to become Truck Farmers because we wanted to build community. Rhode Island may be a small state, but it is very diverse. In the southern part of Rhode Island we see many rural farming communities, but in the more northern and urban parts, such as Providence of Pawtucket, we have elementary-schoolers who have never seen a real cow or eaten a vegetable straight out of a garden. We want to bridge this gap! By having a traveling truck farm, we could link people to agriculture and give real, fresh food to the people who need it most.
It would mean the world to us if we were to get a truck donated for our project. As a student-run volunteer organization, we don’t have much in terms of funds, but would so much love to be able to complete this project. We can’t do it without a truck. We ask any kindhearted individual with an old clunker to please consider us before scrapping or selling. We can change the way people eat one truck at a time!”
If you want to donate a truck to Cate or to the 6 other hopeful urban farmers—including Dave Ring from SF East Central Indiana and Patty Emmert from SF Phoenix—please email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Member Comments
From Shelley Wooldridge on Mon, April 18, 2011
This is ridiculous! I so want to help and be involved in “Slow Food” or any other healthy food movement but no one ever contacts me back or is willing to work with me. I’m a former organic chef and I am aching to the core to get involved with my community to teach a better way of eating and helping out our local farmers. I so very much want to be one of those people on the trucks preparing delicious, healthy wonderful food grown from our local farmers passing it out to hungry and willing people with a big o’l smile on my face! Whole Foods won’t hire me, local businesses and schools won’t give me the opportunity to teach and introduce healthy foods. I am getting very depressed over this because I am the perfect person, THE PERFECT PERSON to be doing this! So, help me out or reject me like the others. It’s your choice. And yes, I have access to a truck or two as well.
Here’s to healthy eating!
From Dani Smart on Mon, April 18, 2011
Unfortunately we don’t have a truck to offer but we have a wonderful online farmers’ market with close to 300 active weekly customers. We provide the site, farmers set up their virtual table, we collect the orders and pass them along to our farmers who bring pre-sold items to our pick up point on Friday mornings. Our customers pick up their orders or have them delivered to their homes Friday evenings. We’d love to help any of our local small farmers connect with customers! This is a great, collective way for the little guys to sell directly to customers all year long. If you’re a farmer in the southeastern part of Washington state or northeastern Oregon we’d love to talk with you!
From Stephanie on Mon, April 18, 2011
I work with developmentally delayed adults and we are always looking for people from the community to come into our program and teach. We are a non profit agency so we don’t have funds to pay people therefore turnout is low. If anyone is interested in teaching us about eating healthy we have a healthy lifestyle group that meets each week and would love guest speakers too. Feel free to email me at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) And Plymouth has a great farmers market even in the winter months.
From david on Fri, April 29, 2011
assuming this truck is carrying roughly 300lbs of additional load in dirt/water the amount of additional energy burned by the truck will greatly out weigh any sort of harvest hoped to gain by growing in the truck. im all for slow food but this is far from practical
From Kris at Spence Farm, IL on Sat, April 30, 2011
This is a great project! The bigger picture isn’t the driving around with the food, but to teach how food can be grown anywhere, by anyone, city or rural countryside, and with the smallest available space. Put a pot in the front seat and grow some herbs there also! Even a broken down truck would provide quite a bit of food for a family.
We especially need to teach our children that they can grow their own food, no matter where they live. Even kids in our own rural community don’t always understand where their food comes from. Farms don’t always have gardens anymore. We see this first hand from working with the kids in our small farming community.
Will Slow Food post the project in length? Help us learn how to create our own truck gardens for our communities, how to drain it, how to keep the rotation of crops going throughout the whole year. Will the amount of food grown be documented, along with the amount of money earned if it was sold or if the food had been purchased? How can we get one of the truck gardens to come to our community and our schools?
Kudos to Slow Food for taking this out to the people! Good luck with your project, can’t wait to hear more about it!
From hnin on Mon, May 02, 2011
Re: Kris at Spence Farm, IL: Thanks for lifting up the bigger picture as one about teaching people that food can be grown anywhere—as long as we get creative and resourceful.
Another great thing about Truck Farm is that it’s about young people leading the way. In addition to the few Truck Farmers who are in their early 20’s, there are thousands of other young people in elementary, middle and high school growing food in cool and quirky places. Check out the Truck Farm Garden Contest: http://truck-farm.com/#/Contest
Stay tuned! We’ll be posting more stories soon!
