Sep 5, 2018
By Stephanie Oelsligle Jordan, Local Food Project Manager
I once came across a birthday or anniversary card that said something like this: “I love it when you whisper those 3 little words in my ear…..Let’s Eat Out!” It’s true. Making dinner has become something we all love and hate at the same time, and the complexity surrounding it is likely multiplied by how many jobs/children/after-school activities/deadlines you have. Even as a trained chef, I find myself at times guiltily turning to easy, processed food from a box (i.e. mac & cheese!) for my two boys on any given weeknight.
More truths: the demand for prepared food has become stronger, and the quality of some prepared foods has become very questionable. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone were around to cook you healthy dinners, made from ingredients that came from local, organic farmers in Solano County? Well, that is exactly what has been happening for the past 4 weeks. In mid-August, I began working on a pilot program with Cultivate Community Food Co-op – funded by Solano Department of Public Health – which I’ve been calling “Community Supported Dinners.” These dinners are much like what we envisioned within our original Community Food Center model – homemade meals made by local chefs from local ingredients.
The main purpose of this 6-week pilot is to test costs, logistics and other factors involved, which will provide us with information to fine tune the vision. Greg Morrison (Board Treasurer of the Co-op, and on our USDA Local Food Advisory Board) has organized a distribution plan to get raw food products from the farms to me in the commercial kitchen at Vallejo’s Dan Foley Cultural Center. Deliveries come Monday and Tuesday mornings, and by Tuesday afternoon, my assistant Veronica Bearce and I have meat or vegetarian dinners cooked, cooled, boxed, labeled and ready to get delivered to folks in Benicia and Vallejo. Speaking of Veronica, she is also the chef-owner of Veronica’s Veggies, which specializes in vegan food.
The participants for this project are largely Co-op members (sorry – it’s not open to the public yet!), who also have the option to purchase raw ingredients directly from the farms through an online ordering system. Feedback from the farmers has been positive, because they can get direct-to-consumer sales without having to stand at a farmers market or utilize other resources to get their products to people. Fresh produce for the project comes from Eatwell Farm (Dixon) and Lockewood Acres (Vacaville). Meat products are sourced from Tara Firma Farms (Petaluma), and fish is sourced from Real Good Fish, which supports sustainable fishermen/women up and down the California coast. While I have been ordering products based on consumer counts, I am more interested in knowing whether people would sign up in advance for dinners (similar to how a CSA operates). Would you pre-pay for, say, two months of dinners every Tuesday? I promise I won’t make mac & cheese.
Menus thus far:
Aug. 14: Caribbean Chicken / Black Beans with Sofrito + Coconut Quinoa with Cilantro + Roasted Seasonal Veggies
Aug. 21: Indian Spiced Lamb Meatballs / Indian Spiced Eggplant + Tzatziki Sauce + Chickpea-Tomato Salad with Feta Cheese + Whole Wheat Pita
Aug. 28: Spanish Paella with Chicken & Pork Linguica / Paella with Roasted Peppers & Onions + Lemon-Garlic Aioli + Fig Salad with Mixed Greens, Walnuts, Goat Cheese
Sept. 5: Mustard-Glazed Salmon atop Cannellini Bean & Tomato Ragu + House-made Focaccia + Classic Greek Salad
Special Thanks to Eatwell Farm, Lockewood Acres, Tara Firma Farm, and Real Good Fish for assisting with this project!
Sep 3, 2018
By: Marcella Licea
[Photo: Alexis, Owner of Soul Food Farm, Source: thepollenmill.com]
Through years of hard work and developing a deeper connection with the land, Alexis and Eric began to further immerse themselves in issues around community land use, the true cost of feeding people, workers’ rights and the humane treatment of animals. Today, Soul Food Farm is working on a number of new expansion projects that will add layers of diversity and variety for community members, such as heirloom peaches, apricots and pears. In addition to more fruit trees, they also plan on extending the olive orchard and are in the planning stages of a farm store, tentatively scheduled to open in the spring of 2019. This farm store will not only sell Soul Food Farm goods, but produce and other products from local farms in the region.
Every year, Soul Food Farm hosts a wide variety of workshops on the farm. Everything from artisan cooking classes, photography, herb gardening, basic chicken care, and so much more; our calendar of events has something for every pallet. This month on Saturday, September 22nd from 1:00pm-4:00pm, engage in a panel discussion between six of the most successful and driven women entrepreneurs of the Bay Area at Soul Food Farm’s first annual Women of Abundance Conference: Women Entrepreneurs in the Regenerative Culture, Economy, and Community. The conference stemmed from Alexis’ interest to explore the dynamics between food and agriculture and its intersection with social justice movements– both integral parts woven into the fabric of Northern California. This event will examine the ideas of competition, explore the realms of abundance and manifestation, and cultivate the possibilities of growing together in success through collaboration and support. Click here to register and ticket information.
Sep 3, 2018
By Elena Karoulina, Executive Director
We continue working on our big vision for the environmentally and economically sustainable and socially just local food system in our county. As a part of our Community Food Center project, funded by USDA, we are finalizing the feasibility study of the agriculture production available for the needs of the county. In June-July, our mighty working team of Sustainable Solano staff, UC Davis interns and a representative of the Solano Public Health, our key partner in this vision, embarked on reaching out to our farmers and meeting face to face with them to better understand the reality of farming and feeding the community in Solano County.
We reached out to 60 farms. Most of them are small to mid-size operations, producing a variety of food (mostly produce, but also honey, olive oil, eggs, meat and dairy). Not everyone was available or interested to talk with us about the emerging local food system, and we totally understand and respect this reservation. However, many opened their hearts and minds to this vision, and we are immensely grateful to the farmers who took time off their busiest season of the year to sit down with us and to tell us the true story of local food production and distribution.
We are still finalizing the results of our interviews and integrating them with relevant statistics from USDA and Solano Department of Agriculture to form an accurate picture of the state of agriculture production suitable for the local markets. What we see so far is a rather weak supply, a lack of infrastructure and most importantly, a week demand for Solano-grown food. If we are to change this picture, if we are to create a resilient local food economy, we’ll have to revisit our relationship with local food, our commitment to buying locally and our priorities as consumers.
Sustainable Solano is committed to continue working with various stakeholders and community partners to strengthen our local food economy. However, we cannot do it without a broad support of this vision from our communities! Please give your personal and family food supply a thought! To find out more, attend one of our many public educational events and consider buying truly local. For the list of Community Supported Agriculture, farm stands, restaurants and retailers, please click here.
From the bottom of our hearts, THANK YOU to the owners and operators of the following farms who communicated with us during this process and contributed to our understanding of the current state of our local food economy:
Acquistapace Farms, Fairfield
Be Love Farm, Vacaville
Brazelton Ranch, Vacaville
Cherry Glen Beefmasters, Vacaville
Eatwell Farm and CSA, Dixon
Everything Under The Sun, Dixon
Grabishfarm, Dixon
Il Fiorello Olive Oil Company, Fairfield
Lockewood Acres Organic Farm, Vacaville
McCormack Ranch
Menagerie Hill Ranch, Vacaville
Pleasants Valley Honey Company, Vacaville
Robledo Produce, Fairfield
Rock Hill Ranch Chickens, Fairfield
Saechao Family Farm, Fairfield
Sepay Groves Olive Oil, Fairfield
Sierra Orchards, Dixon
Solano Mushroom Farm, Vacaville
Soul Food Farm, Vacaville
Tenbrink Farm, Fairfield
The Cloverleaf at Bridgeway Farms, Dixon
The Collins Farm, Dixon
Aug 15, 2018
As part of a large, multi-stake Solano Local Food system project, Cultivate Community Food Co-op, in cooperation with other county organizations, will be working on a pilot project through September 21st with local farmers and chefs to offer participating co-op owners weekly home delivery of local, sustainably-grown produce and locally prepared meals. There will be no charge for home delivery for this pilot, though participants will need to pay for any food purchased.
The purpose of this effort is to collect data in regards to the costs of labor, equipment and time that is needed to develop and implement a local food network that supports Solano County consumers, farmers, and chefs. The results obtained will be used to better understand the opportunities and challenges that exist to achieve the goal of building the community and economy while improving access to healthy, sustainably grown food.
Cultivate Community Food Co-op (CCFC) will be Solano County’s first community-owned, natural grocery store providing high-quality, locally-sourced, culturally-relevant, ethically- produced and affordable products.
Click here for information about how to become a member.
Aug 15, 2018
When it comes to the changing the environment and global climate change, the cause of the problem — humans — can also be the key to the solution.
That was the hopeful message permaculture expert Lydia Neilsen brought to a crowd of listeners on a warm August Saturday morning at Morningsun Herb Farm in Vacaville. The event shared Neilsen’s insights on how permaculture can help restore the local water cycle and was also the official launch of Sustainable Solano’s expansion of its Sustainable Backyard program into Vacaville.
Neilsen began with an overview of the ethics and principles behind permaculture for a crowd where about one-third were new to the concept. Everything stems from the ethics of:
• Earth care (repair, conserve and regenerate)
• People care (seek peace and guard human rights everywhere)
• Fair share (giving back what you have extra of, whether time, money, produce, etc.)
“Our actions have become decoupled from their consequences,” she said. Permaculture involves getting back to that system of relationships.
She then turned to the intricacies of the water cycle and how that has been disrupted — and what can be done on an individual and community level to restore it locally.
“We have been treating rainwater as a nuisance,” she said, referring to how cities pave, pipe and drain water away.
That approach and the removal of plants create dry, dead soil and intensify heat. Rising heat can push water vapor away and create areas that are hotter and drier than if trees and vegetation were present to capture the sun’s rays and not only shade but also to photosynthesize and release oxygen and moisture back into the air. On the scale of a forest, trees work to harvest water vapor, creating low-pressure zones and pulling in more moisture, moving it inland. Take away the forests, and that cycle is disrupted.
“We’ve been impacting it for a long time negatively, and now we can impact it positively,” she said.
The permaculture approach of slowing, spreading and sinking water is a different approach from how rainwater has been treated, keeping water where it does the most good. The other factor in the equation is the need for vegetation.
So much that the world faces is on the global scale, but there is hope to be found in what can be addressed on the human scale.
“What can I do with my shovel to make an impact?” she said. An individual can do a lot through thoughtful observation to determine what needs to be done to help the land — and such efforts can spread. As one crowd member said, “It’s so easy. I mean, I know it’s not easy, but it’s so logical.”
A fruit tree guild — a central fruit tree surrounded by supporting plants that supply mulch, fix nitrogen, attract insects, suppress grass growth and help accumulate nutrients — is “a great place to start,” Neilsen said. Add a greywater system that reuses household water in the garden and it’s a step toward healing that local water cycle by nurturing water and plants on the property. “Imagine if whole neighborhoods were putting in food forests like this,” she said.
Sustainable Landscaping Program Manager Nicole Newell noted that approach is being used in Sustainable Solano’s backyard demonstration food forests. The program, which is taking applications through Sept. 21, will select two private yards and one public space in Vacaville for the demonstration gardens, which volunteers will create through a series of workshops to capture rainwater, install a greywater system and create water-wise, sustainable gardens.
Resources:
During her talk, Neilsen mentioned several books she turns to as resources on the topics she discussed. They include:
Water for the recovery of the climate — a new water paradigm (a research paper)
Hidden Nature: The startling insights of Viktor Schauberger (by Alick Bartholomew)
Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual by Bill Mollison
Rainwater Harvesting For Drylands And Beyond by Brad Lancaster
