Press

November 23rd, 2009

Urban farm teaches kids how to run a business

Posted by: Nick Carey

Reuters Blog

BUFFALO, New York – A tropical fish farm was not quite what we expected when we arranged to meet some of the people running the Massachusetts Avenue Project, an urban farming group in this rusty Rust Belt city.

Walking in from a torrential rain into a greenhouse on a city street, we found ourselves in a warm enclosure full of running water and a tank full of fish in the floor. Jesse Meeder, who runs the fish farm, told us how it works.

A heated water tank sunk into the floor contains hundreds of tilapia – a tropical fish that needs warm water to survive. Water containing fish waste is pumped up to a large wooden case above, where watercress and spinach is growing. The fish waste fertilizes the soil before it passes back to the fish tank below.

Meeder told us that once the fish reach between a pound and a pound and a half in weight - this takes about nine months – they are then sold to local restaurants. The fish farm sells about 2,000 to 3,000 fish a year. It is the main revenue source for MAP, a nonprofit set up to educate local schoolchildren about farming and running a business.

The organization hires about 50 schoolchildren a year to work through the summer months, and keeps the top performers on for the winter months when there is less work, growing vegetables in outdoor plots where abandoned homes once stood, or tending to the fish farm. Altogether, the farm covers about half an acre.

“It is important to pay them, as it teaches them responsibility and about earning a wage,” said MAP executive director Diane Picard.

As well as farming, the schoolchildren have developed and marketed their own products that the farm sells to local retailers. So far the children have come up with a chilli sauce, a salsa and are working on a salad dressing.

“They learn how to write a marketing plan, how to write a business plan and how to come up with a strategy,” said Erin Sharkey. “These are important skills that they can apply out in the real world.”

Picard said that the project’s success is clearly demonstrated by what the children go on to do after working for MAP.

“One hundred percent of the high school seniors who have worked here have gone onto college,” she said. “In almost every case they were the first in their family to go beyond high school.”

The farm is located in the West Side of Buffalo, where around 47 percent of children graduate from high school.

Photos by Brian Snyder

Click here for more Route to Recovery

Picard said that the farm hopes to expand its fish farm business as it is also reliant on government funding and private donations to keep going.

“We can probably only ever be 50 percent self-reliant,” she said. “But the organizations that sponsor us are clearly aware of the major benefits that this brings to children in this area.”

November 02, 2009

Jess Meeder, farm education coordinator for the Massachusetts Avenue Project, shows off the fish tank full of tilapia and its connected water-filtering system — an herb garden.

Robert Kirkham/Buffalo News

West Side program has self-contained fish farm

Urban project plans creative way to wean itself off grants, gifts

By George Pyle

You can't spend much time loafing when you've got 2,000 fish to take care of.

Jesse Meeder's project at the Massachusetts Avenue Project's urban youth farm promises to supply a neighborhood that now has little access to fresh food with locally raised tilapia — a warm-water fish that has long been a staple of the Middle Eastern diet — as it brings the community agriculture organization some income that can make it more self-sufficient.

Housed in the garden's adobe and straw bale greenhouse on Buffalo's West Side, the small fish farm is designed to work in a way that requires little expense or outside input and produces no waste.

In fact, calling it a "fish farm" misses the point, which is to create a miniature ecosystem where the fish, plants such as basil, parsley and watercress, and compost energized by 5,000 red worms feed one another in a manner similar to the way nature operates. The technical term is "aquaponics."

"The system is perfectly balanced," Meeder said. "We're trying to replicate the natural environment. That's what farmers should be doing."

Meeder, MAP's farm education coordinator, said he had been researching the aquaponics plan for about two years, reading and tinkering with tubs, tubes and pumps before launching the pilot program in July.

The pond in the middle of the greenhouse contains about a gallon of water for each fish — standard ratio for raising the breed, Meeder said — with a series of pipes that move the water through the pond, through a pump and into a collection of old bathtubs and sinks that have been repurposed into a self-contained multi-crop farm.

"The system I built crazy cheap," Meeder said.

With the major expense being the water pump and heater, the whole project came in at no more than $500 for materials. Once the initial population of organically raised tilapia was ordered from the fisheries operation at the State University of New York at Cobleskill, about the only other input is for the electricity to power the water pump/heater. And, Meeder said, he has hopes of replacing that with solar power.

The water literally falls from the sky, caught in the MAP's 1,000-gallon rain barrel. Heating that water to 80 degrees — necessary for the equatorial fish to grow and multiply — keeps the rest of the greenhouse warm enough for the watercress, basil, beans, tomatoes and other vegetables that are grown in deep gravel beds.

The plant beds filter the water before it is returned to the fish pond. Not that the water has to be all that clear.

"Tilapia like murky water," Meeder said.

They also grow quickly, don't eat one another, and are happy to eat vegetable leavings as well as the duckweed (40 percent protein) and algae that Meeder grows specifically as fish food. That avoids the need to buy commercial feed, which both reduces the cost of the operation and ensures that the fish and plants won't somehow be contaminated.

"We're never going to have any disease in here at all," Meeder said.

The first crop of tilapia should be large enough to sell in the spring, he said. They'll be eight to 10 inches long, weigh a pound to a pound and a half, and sell for $5 or $6 each.

They'll be sold live — processing would involve a lot more expense, plus licensing and inspections — to individuals and restaurants. Anyone who has ever cleaned a fish caught in a river or lake can do the same with MAP's tilapia.

The hope, Meeder said, is to create a larger fish operation, with 10 times as many tilapia and maybe some 200 catfish — in a separate tank — so that the aquaponics project will generate enough profit that MAP can ween itself from the grants and gifts that help keep it going.

Diane Picard is executive director of MAP. She said the aquaponics project, modeled after one developed by the Growing Power organization in Milwaukee, supports her organization's major goals.

It provides fresh food for a population that often has trouble finding it, not only by selling it but by demonstrating how individuals can do similar things in their own homes. "It can be done in a 50-gallon barrel in your basement," Picard said.

Brent Lehman manages the fish hatchery at SUNY Cobleskill. He sells about 5,000 tilapia fingerlings a year to customers around the northeastern United States. He said most of his customers are high schools that buy 1,000 or so for student projects, while some individuals buy 50 or so for their own ponds. The one- to two-inch fingerlings sell for as little as 6 cents an inch, while those closer to full-grown go for $2.50 a fish.

Picard said the project also provides work training experience for the local youth and will help make MAP self-supporting.

Meeder said that while his project needs to get larger to become a viable commercial enterprise, individuals could create their own smaller versions to raise some of their own food. If more people did that, he said, they would have more nutritious food, save money and put more of the city's area to productive use.

July 21, 2009

Nutritious meals on jumbo wheels

RV-turned-market provides food, tips to low-income area

A giant purple and green RV pulls up in front of Jericho Road Ministries on Barton Road on the city’s West Side, drawing curious stares from neighbors and the refugees and immigrants.

Two teenagers file out of the rickety vehicle, toting a foldable table and containers of freshly harvested lettuce, broccoli and cherries. Inside the RV is more produce — collard greens, cabbage, green onions and snap peas — and nutritious bulk items including brown rice.

It is a farmers’ market on wheels; a way to bring healthful food at affordable prices into neighborhoods where such food is hard to find or too expensive.

The mobile market is a new program by the Massachusetts Avenue Project, a West Side group devoted to youth development, community revitalization and increasing access to healthful foods through urban farming.

Since 2003, the Massachusetts Avenue Project has been running a farm on seven previously vacant lots on Massachusetts Avenue, where neighborhood teenagers learn to grow produce. They’re also taught about nutrition and how to run a business. They learn to cook with the food they grow and also develop products, such as a bottle chili starter, with their produce that they sell.

Buffalo's farmers' market on wheels

The mobile market, organizers hope, is the next step in bringing healthful food into low-income neighborhoods.

Keeping a close eye on the project is Samina Raja, an assistant professor at the University at Buffalo’s School of Architecture and Planning. She has been working with the project since it began various efforts ranging from locating “food deserts” in the city to tracking the eating habits of the youth participating in the farming program.

The Massachusetts Avenue Project’s work is critical in addressing serious food-related health problems in urban neighborhoods, said Raja, who specializes in urban planning and design for healthy communities.

“In Western New York, in Erie County, and in Buffalo in particular, there are lots of neighborhoods that don’t have food access,” Raja said. “Food might be available, but it might not be affordable. It might be available, but it might not be nutritious.”

In many poor communities in Buffalo and in cities across the United States, she said, there’s a lack of supermarkets and an abundance of corner stores where fresh produce and other nutritious foods are rarely sold.

Such corner stores often sell plenty of inexpensive, low-nutrition food: cookies, chips and soda, for instance.

“If you’re using your dollar to buy calories,” she explained, “it’s six to seven times more expensive to obtain the same amount of calories from a carrot than from cookies.”

This explains the paradox seen in low-income neighborhoods of obesity and malnutrition at the same time.

“We end up as a society blaming the individual for not making the right [eating] choices without really understanding that their choices are absolutely constrained by their environment,” Raja said.

Even the teenagers who participate in the Massachusetts Avenue Project’s Growing Green program aren’t eating much better after they finish the program, Raja said. They’re much better informed about what is healthful, but their parents can’t afford the more expensive, nutritious food.

The point was driven home to her, Raja said, while she was interviewing one of the teen participants. As they talked, the boy’s mother dropped off his lunch: a bag from McDonald’s.

“He knew it was ironic,” Raja said.

The teen went on to tell Raja that his mother won’t let him go grocery shopping with her anymore because she feels he’s criticizing her food choices. The truth was that the nutritious foods he wanted were beyond her budget.

Raja suggested he walk to the Elmwood-Bidwell Farmers’ Market to buy fresh produce at reasonable prices.

“Do I look like I belong there?” the boy said. He said he felt out of place at the market.

Such attitudes about farmers’ markets, which tend to be held in more-affluent neighborhoods, keep many low-income people away, Raja said.

“That’s where the mobile market fits in,” Raja said.

At the steering wheel of the mobile market — literally and figuratively — is Cyndie Huynh (pronounced Win), a petite young woman who navigates the unwieldy RV through the streets of the West Side on market days.

Huynh, who was hired through the AmeriCorps program in the fall to run the mobile market, said she experienced firsthand as a Buffalo resident without a car how hard it is to get to a grocery store to buy food.

“It made me more passionate,” she said.

The roving RV is modeled after a mobile market started by an Oakland, Calif., organization called People’s Grocery. Other cities have been trying similar approaches. In 2007, Capital District Community Gardens in Troy started a “veggie-mobile.”

In Buffalo, the mobile market did a couple of test runs in the fall. Now, with the summer harvest just starting, the RV is making stops from noon to 2 p. m. Tuesday at Jericho and from 1:30 to 3 p. m. Wednesday at the Santa Maria Towers, a senior facility. As the season progresses, plans are being made to add sites on the East Side as well.

Most of the produce is harvested from the Massachusetts Avenue Project’s own farms. The rest comes from local farms, including Ole’s in Alden, and through wholesale natural food stores.

The market keeps its prices as low as possible. A head of broccoli goes for 50 cents. A bunch of green onions is a quarter.

Huynh recently arranged for the mobile market to accept food stamps.

“We’re also working on accepting [Women, Infants and Children] checks as well,” she said.

Accepting food stamps has increased sales at the market by 50 percent, Huynh noted.

The teenagers from the youth program help harvest the produce, wash and package food, and then sell the goods to the community.

The West Side market locations target two particularly vulnerable populations: immigrants and refugees, and seniors. While there are both the Tops supermarket on Niagara Street and Guercio’s grocery store on Grant Street, both populations aren’t always able to get to the stores because they don’t have cars, Huynh explained.

The refugees on the West Side, mostly from Myanmar and Somalia, have the added challenge of not being familiar with American goods. Many are not sure how to cook the produce available at the market.

“They get the one or two things that are similar to what they eat at home and only eat that,” Huynh said.

To try to entice refugees into trying produce, the market offers samples and shares recipes.

On Tuesday at the Jericho market, DeVonte Mull, 17, and Prince Saysay, 14, gave out samples of coleslaw made with apples, mint and kohlrabi, a small cabbagelike vegetable the market will be selling in the next few weeks.

The boys laughed as they stumbled over the pronunciation of the unusual vegetable. But they eagerly beckoned passers- by to try the slaw.

Inside the RV, Verdall Cole and Anthony Orta, both 15, showed off the produce selection, including lettuce they had handpicked that morning. They were especially proud of their snap peas — a vegetable they had never eaten before.

“It’s like candy,” said Anthony, who now likes to snack on them raw.

Faustina Sein, who is from Myanmar and who works part time at the Journey’s End office at Jericho Road, was delighted by the vegetable selection in the RV.

“I like vegetables,” she said after stepping off the RV with a bag full of broccoli, asparagus, cucumbers and peas.

Sein, who now lives in Cheektowaga but used to live on the West Side, agreed that it’s hard for many immigrants who don’t have cars to buy produce. She said her community will come to embrace the market.

“If they know it’s here, a lot of them will come and shop,” she said.

Mary Schmaul, who lives in Kaisertown and who had come by bus to a diabetes class at Jericho, was thrilled with her cache: a head of cabbage, one bag each of red and green leaf lettuce and two cups of brown rice, all for $4.75.

On disability and living on what she calls a “very fixed” income, Schmaul said she struggles to find affordable produce in her neighborhood—food she knows she needs to eat to help control her diabetes.

“This is great,” Schmaul said. “I wish we could get this in South Buffalo.”

5/11/06

Healthy Eating by Design-view online at http://hebdbuffalo.bfn.org/

The vision for the Healthy Eating by Design - Buffalo (HEbD-Buffalo) program is to raise awareness for the benefits of healthy living and to promote the integration of active lifestyles and healthy eating for children and their families.

The Healthy Eating by Design - Buffalo (HEbD-Buffalo) project is designed to promote, reinforce, and facilitate healthy eating and enhance active living efforts for youth at a school on Buffalo’s East Side.

The Massachusetts Avenue Project (MAP), the University at Buffalo (UB), the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus (BNMC), Urbgardens, Montessori Outdoor Learning Experience (MOLE), Bennett Park Montessori Center, Native Offerings, a local Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm, and the Lexington Co-operative Market are the primary partners forming the working group of the Healthy Eating by Design - Buffalo project.

In conjunction with funding provided by an 18-month Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant, the Healthy Eating by Design - Buffalo project is promoting healthy eating and active living among school children through the following programs...

4/20/07

Straw Greenhouse Rises on Buffalo's West Side

Purva Ghate, a graduate architecture student, squares off a bale of hay being used to construct a greenhouse for the Massachusetts Avenue Project.

Release Date

04/20/07

Contact Patricia Donovan

pdonovan@buffalo.edu

716-645-5000 ext 1414

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Contrary to the unhappy experience of the first little pig, straw bale is a strong, cost-effective, exceptionally insulating, fire-resistant, sustainable, natural building system.

University at Buffalo architecture students and community members -- cold, covered in mud and stuck with hay -- recently raised 130 50-pound "two-string" straw bales (14-inches-high by 18-inches-wide by 35-inches-long) that will constitute the load-bearing walls of a community greenhouse on Buffalo's West Side.

The greenhouse was designed and is being built for the Massachusetts Avenue Project (MAP) as part of "Natural Building Systems," a graduate seminar taught by architect and engineer Kevin Connors, adjunct instructor in the UB School of Architecture and Planning, who has a deep interest in sustainable construction.

"We hadn't seen much straw-bale construction since it was used for houses in early 20th-century Nebraska, where trees were few and grass was plenty," Connors says. "Its obvious advantages, however, have helped provoke its comeback over the last 15 years or so."

In the next stage of construction, the community-student group will coat the straw-bale walls with an earth-clay plaster that will become part of the building's skin, along with a resistance coat of lime plaster.

Dave Lanfear of Bale on Bale Construction of Hamburg again will present a building demonstration for the workers on April 21. His company provides straw-bale construction services, including planning, bale raising and plastering, throughout Western New York and the northeastern United States.

The greenhouse, adjacent to MAP's community garden at 387 Massachusetts Ave., will be used by the organization for "Growing Green," an entrepreneurial program that partners garden-based businesses with neighborhood youths and trains them in sustainable urban agriculture and food systems issues.

Connors says straw bale, so useful in this instance, can be used much more frequently if architects, designers, engineers and the public become familiar with how and why it works so well. That is the educational mission of the project.

"We built the foundation and frame of the greenhouse over the past few weeks," he says, "minimizing the use of concrete with a technique called 'shallow frost-protected foundation.'"

Concrete foundations must be four feet deep in this region to accommodate ground freezing. In this case, rigid insulation was spread on the foundation, limiting the required depth of concrete to 12 inches.

"The roof and at least one wall of the greenhouse will be made of polycarbonate," Connors says, "a strong, lightweight plastic that allows the wall and ceiling to serve as a light source and permit passive solar energy to heat the building in sunny months."

The team used standard techniques to frame the roof, including fabricated steel-plate connections to allow for very rigid posts and beams.

The posts and beams were made of both standard lumber and lumber salvaged from a beautification project on Bailey Avenue. For that project, another group of Connors' students worked with the not-for-profit group Street Synergy to build a neighborhood park at the corner of Bailey Avenue and Dartmouth Street.

Although most people are completely unfamiliar with straw-bale construction, Connors, points out that such buildings are going up all over the country, particularly in the southwest.

"A bale house is being built in South Wales, N.Y.," he says, "another near Syracuse and a third, in Rochester, is being put up to give the public an opportunity to see it and to assess its cost in comparison to standard construction methods."

Connors emphasizes the fact that straw bale is as insulating as fiberglass, but is much thicker than most rolls of insulation, so it provides a stronger shield against heat and cold.

Straw-bale construction also is fire retardant. The Wall Street Journal reported recently that potential investors are encouraged to learn that plastered straw-bale walls have been proven to be a fire-safe envelope for both residential and commercial buildings. The paper noted that in recent tests, a straw-bale wall satisfactorily withstood more than two hours of 1,700-degree heat and the subsequent hose-down.

Connors says he first was exposed to straw bale at a natural building colloquium in Bath, N.Y., in 2004. Participants of the colloquium began five buildings on the site of the PeaceWeavers, an extended community of people from different cultures and spiritual practices dedicated to peace, healing and living and building in a way that has a positive impact on the earth.

"There, I learned about straw bale and found it to be a great way of building. Although most projects like this are in rural areas, I saw the greatest need for ecological building in the city."

Straw bale is not the only natural building method studied by Connors' students. During the spring 2006 semester, they collaborated with a civil engineer to test paper-crate construction, in which blocks made of compressed recycled paper are used as walls.

This semester, they experimented with cob, a particularly long-lasting mud-daub building method in which earth, sand and straw -- in this case from the Bailey Avenue site -- are mixed together and massaged onto a foundation, creating thick, long-lasting, load-bearing walls.

Connors says he is interested in helping to develop a factory cottage industry for the production of sustainable building materials this summer for the Costa Rica Sustainable Futures Program, a collaborative sustainable building project of UB, the University of Maryland, the University of Illinois-Champagne-Urbana, and the Syracuse University School of Forestry and School of Architecture

UB architecture graduate students who participated in Connors' straw-bale seminar are Garrett Wyokoff, Lindsay Clark, Andrew Petrinec, Felix Lomonaco, James Teese, Jr., Susan Voelxen and David Ruperti.

Connors is a principal in Kevin Connors and Associates, a Buffalo architecture, engineering and planning firm dedicated to ecological architecture.

The University at Buffalo is a premier research-intensive public university, the largest and most comprehensive campus in the State University of New York.

The Broadway Market Hosts Inaugural Christmas Fair

Crowds gathered at Santa's Market; Santa Clause arrived at the Broadway Market by horse drawn carriage at 10 am on Friday morning.

The day after Thanksgiving signals the official start of the holiday season. With anxious crowds mobbing retailers, and hundreds of thousands of families gathering to rejoice in the festivities, this merry time is also the busiest time of the year. While many local businesses are gearing up for the hectic season with familiar family events, the historic Broadway Market launched a new tradition this year with the introduction of its first annual Christmas Food Fair. Carol Bronnenkant, co-chairman of the event, said "the tradition of Christmas markets hosting food fairs in the month of December dates back for centuries in Europe." Bronnenkant originally got the idea of hosting one of her own from her sister who lives in Germany and told her about the fairs and how popular they are overseas. Bronnenkant thought it would be a lovely tradition to start in Buffalo and remarked "what better place to begin than the Broadway Market which has been serving the community since eighteen eighty eight."

Without a doubt, the Broadway Market has served as an integral part of the Buffalo area for well over one hundred years. With events steeped in tradition and plenty of involvement from the community, it has acted as a union for areas and neighborhoods that otherwise would not come together. Attendees of the inaugural Christmas fair reflected on the market's vital role in societal and holiday events. Tom Taylor, who runs and operates a jewelry stand within the market, commented "it is a wonderful thing what they are doing here for the Christmas season; hopefully within the next couple of years this will turn out to be as big as it is around Easter." In fact, the Broadway Market has played a significant part during that particular holiday for generations. As Carol Bronnenkant mentioned, "350,000 people come to the Broadway Market every year for Easter. It instills a real sense of tradition and gives people a true sense of community and camaraderie; invariably you will run into someone that you haven't seen in years, and it gives you such a warm, close knit feeling."

The Christmas festivities kicked off on Friday morning with the arrival of Santa Clause. The celebration continued inside with a Santa's workshop, a choir, a band, and over two dozen vendors offering a rich variety of delicacies. All volunteers at the fair welcomed guests with open arms, and their causes were as noble as they were diverse. Among the crowd, representatives from the Buffalo City Mission and Cornerstone Manor sold Christmas ornaments decorated by manor residents, Chateau Buffalo hosted a wine tasting, and members from Corpus Christi Church offered a history on their celebrated landmark. Carisma Robinson of the Massachusetts Avenue Project said that it was her first time ever vending at the Broadway Market, and she was joined at the event by two other members of her group as well as her teacher, Zoe Holloman. Holloman is the Youth Enterprise Coordinator of the Massachusetts Avenue Project; the group's goal is to teach young children the value of eating organically, as well as establish skills in entrepreneurship, and urban farming. She said that "every year the children attend the Northeast Organic Farmer's Association conference and talk to other farmers and youth groups that are active in urban agriculture and discuss trying to promote locally grown foods and how it is better for the environment and for our bodies." The active project sells its organically made products to local merchants, and in turn, the children are taught valuable life skills along the way. Especially benefitting are lower income urban areas that would otherwise be deprived of the essential nutrients and knowledge that come with the Massachusetts Avenue Project's mission.

Likewise, that is just what the Broadway Market has done for close to one hundred and twenty years; joining a plethora of groups and a rich, culturally diverse heritage, it has acted as to means to instill values and tradition to better the community. Patrons of the first ever Christmas Food Fair were jubilant, and excited to be involved in what will hopefully be a very celebrated and eagerly anticipated event for years to come. The two day celebration continues Saturday until 5 pm.

For more on the Broadway Market and the Christmas Food Fair, check out their website at http://www.christmas.broadwaymarket.com/

And for information on The Massachusetts Avenue Project, go to www.mass-ave.org.