Farm to Future: Investing in Food for Better Health
Get ready to dig into the exciting world of local food systems with "Farm to Future: Investing in Food for Better Health"! This initiative, part of our CAFE Coalition, aims to educate and engage our community on the benefits of local food.
Nourishing Our Community
Local food systems are more than just a trend—they are a vital part of a sustainable and healthy future. By focusing on local food, we can create a stronger, healthier community. Our CAFE Coalition's goal is to teach and explore how these systems can nourish both our bodies and our economy.
Fun Fact
Did you know that eating local food supports twice as many families and businesses compared to non-local food? This makes choosing local a win-win for both our health and our economy! Read how we can invest in food for better health and build a stronger, more resilient community. Stay tuned for more updates and insights from "Farm to Future"!
Notes
Casey Phillips: Chris, how long have we known each other?
Christopher Cooper: Oh, it's been a little bit. It's been, I think what was it? Is it 2024 right now? It's been a little over a decade, I think.
Casey: It has been a little bit over a decade. I thought that was accurate in that what a joy, man. It's been to like watch you just as a human, as a friend, but to watch you just continue to climb in Baton Rouge Green and your leadership. Skills. It's awesome seeing you hold a clipboard, but it's also cool to see that you're still the happiest when you're digging holes for trees and absolutely.
Christopher: Yeah, apparently my style of professional advancement is just like stick around longer than anyone else. I think.
Casey: Brother, that is unless you're trying to become the CEO of Amazon, I think that's for the rest of us. I always say down here with the rest of us. I think that's the way that it works, man. And right, it's like outwork people, be willing to be and love what you do, be willing to outwork everyone and just outlast folks. And after a certain amount of time, you look to the left and the right and then you eventually have gray in your beard and you just outlasted them somehow, you advance. So it works, but welcome everyone. As I said, that's a very casual intro to the Friday. Obviously Christopher Cooper for Baton Rouge Green. And we have somewhat of a casual report, but we're going to make some new friends today. And it's a beautiful Friday. Tia, one of the many reasons it's a beautiful Friday. You called it. We have not only had our, cause this is just building on the following Fridays. Not only do we now have a superintendent for the East Baton Rouge Parish school system, but we have the suit. As I said I have goosebumps. I'm so excited. I can't think of any human being that is a better person to lead our school system than LaMont Cole. I first met him not as a politician. The first time I met him, he was a principal at CSAL. And I was sitting in his office asking permission to work in his district to do MLK Fest to that with Luke St. John, as a matter of fact, now that I think about it, it was with Luke St. John, and we sat in his office, and that dude had some kind of It's like dolphin sonar where he knew that there was someone across the courtyard in the other building doing something that they weren't supposed to do. And he went and handled business immediately as we were having a meeting and a true educator, a true administrator. And I am happy for our city that this mess is behind us and that we landed with someone so incredible. And quite frankly, Adam at the right. And everybody else is going to rally behind it. It was a horrible process, but the result I couldn't be happier with. And Tia, you were the first person to say that this is how you thought it was going to shake. And so I want to give your clairvoyance credit.
Tia Fields: Thank you. I'm actually excited as well, just to have that style of leadership and discipline and structure that's needed to carry the district further as it relates to our children and our education because that's who matters the most. So yeah, I'm with you on that, Casey.
Casey: That's right. So anyway, it's a happy Friday in Banroo, Joel. Tia's got a great call for us and I hope everyone is really excited for the weekend and thank y'all for sharing the space today.
Tia: Oh, Manny said he didn't hear congrats to councilperson call. So this morning we are talking food and health. We have some wonderful friends from Baton Rouge Green and LSU Ag. You guys know the cadence. We will let our guest speakers introduce themselves, tell us who they are and what they do. And then we'll just hop into some general questions. So Jamila, I'm going to start kick it off with you. Just introduce yourself to the group and let everybody know who you are.
Jamila Freightman: Good morning, everyone. So happy to be sharing this space with you today on this beautiful Friday. My name is Jamila Freedman, as she stated, and I am the program manager for our CDC high obesity program. And so I'll reference that as HOP. So CDC Hop. But this program, it's a cooperative agreement between the LSU Act Center and the CDC, so the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will hopefully reduce our obesity numbers across the state. But the focus of this grant is in 10 parishes that are mostly rural and Louisiana, that have an adult obesity rate over 40%. And so the way we do that is through a community participatory approach. So our agents. Are working in the communities to develop coalitions. And they work with those coalitions to address the issues that they want to address, but also address and enhance the food system and physical activity environment. And so I'll turn it over to Makenzie to introduce herself.
Makenzie Miller: Thank you, Jamila. Good morning, everyone. My name is Makenzie Miller. I work with Jamila with our CDC High Obesity Program at the LSU AgCenter, and I also work with the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Education, also called SNAP Ed, as well as the Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program. Also called FNEP across the state but focusing on our CDC high obesity program, my role with that program is to assist communities and also the local agents with any of their work related to food access. So we often have partnerships with like food pantries, food banks, as well as farmer's markets, food retailers and others, in the food access realm in communities.
Tia: Thanks, Makenzie. Next I'm gonna kick it over to Winston. Go ahead and tell the people who you are and what it is that you do.
Winston Horton: Good morning, everyone. I'm Winston Horton. I'm from Baton Rouge Green. I'm the Agroforestry Equity coordinator. And I recently graduated from Southern in December, 2023. And so I'm from Nashville, Tennessee, and I'm fairly new to this. So I've been here for about four and a half months. I'm over to shed a fruit program and with the shed a fruit program, I've been engaging in communities where we have citrus orchards sites across the parish, which are located in food deserts. Having this program helps bring access to fresh fruits to the communities that we have the sites in. And also the benefits of trees in urban forestry. Yeah, so the benefit of urban forestry is to help stormwater mitigation pollution control. Urban heat reduction, and also we want to educate the people within these communities how to maintain trees, whether it's okay. I'm sorry. Sorry about that. I went to long, but that's basically why I'm Winston.
Tia: No worries. It's all well, Winston. Thank you for sharing. S. K. You want to go ahead and hop on and tell everyone who you are and what it is that you do so wonderfully.
SK Groll: Yes, indeed. Hi, folks. I'm S. K. Groll. I work with Baton Roots Community Farm which is one of the programs under the Walls Project. Many of you know my colleague Mitchell who is really farm based and programming based these days, so I'm here with y'all. We work to grow food in public places in Baton Rouge, so right now we're growing at our main site at BREC Howell Community Park. At three school sites in East Baton Rouge school system. And then also at 11 sites with the East Baton Rouge Parish Housing Authority. And so our goal is to grow food where folks need it, teach people to grow their own food and use sustainable practices along the way.
Tia: Awesome. Awesome. And last, but certainly not least, we have Mr. Chris Cooper.
Christopher: Hey, good morning, everybody. My name is Christopher Cooper. I am the director of operations here at Baton Rouge Green. Baton Rouge Green is a 501c3 nonprofit. That's been here in Baton Rouge for over, I think, about over 34 years, and we maintain a lot of the trees along the public right of way. We have citrus programs, other fruit programs. We celebrate local Louisiana Arbor Day. And then also last, but certainly not least, we have the Louisiana community forest program, which is a statewide grant program that we try to engage and build capacity for Urban and community forestry management and outreach across the state. And with that, we partner with the Baton Rouge community farm and walls project with their more recent IRA dollars, which we'll be talking about in a little bit.
Tia: All right. Okay. So thank you guys for the introduction. I do want to start off with Makenzie to tell us a little bit about the obesity program and just piggyback with Jamila and we can just move from there.
Makenzie: One thing I didn't mention in our introduction is specific to the nutrition work that we do with our HOP grant, the major focus is promoting food service and nutrition guidelines anywhere where food is sold, served, or distributed. So this could be, like, healthcare facilities, higher education, private or government work sites, and also the charitable food system, like food pantries. And then we also do a lot of work related to fruit and vegetable voucher incentives. So this is like snap or Farmers market nutrition match programs like they have at the red stick farmers market and also produce prescription programs. So right now, we're in still in like the first year of this current grant cycle. So we're doing a lot of assessments and also what we call asset mapping where we're working with our local agents to identify any of the, potential partners that we could work with on implementing these projects. And just getting the lay of the land and also identifying through interactions and meetings with community members what their priorities are related to this type of work in their communities. And I also want to add although our like high obesity program is only implemented in particular parishes across the state, a lot of the work that we do is replicable, in other communities and many of our agents, maybe that work in different parishes or under different programs can also often pursue like similar types of projects. And oftentimes, in working with different communities on different projects, we'll create resources. That we can share across the state. And we also do more statewide work with some of, some of the things that we pursue with hops. So I help to facilitate a statewide Louisiana Charitable Food System Network that meets quarterly. And then we also have a Louisiana Charitable Food Summit event that we hosted in 2023 and are planning on hosting in 2025. And then we also have some programs that kind of span the state as well. We have a Grow Row to Share program, which is like a produce sharing program that connects local producers with like food pantries who can distribute any excess produce that they receive. And then we also created a healthy retail program called Go Shop Healthy that's also being implemented in different parts of the state.
Tia: Thanks for that, Makenzie. So I do have a follow up question. I'm just curious to know what is the research and innovation? Like, how does it play in advancing sustainable agriculture and improving food security? What type of research are you guys doing at LSU Ag to meet the demands of healthy nutrition so that they can lower the obesity rates?
Makenzie: My colleagues do a lot of research. Oh, yeah. And Jamila just put a nice link in the chat. My colleagues do a lot of research around barriers and facilitators to healthy food access. And Often in rural parts of the state. So looking at, like what factors influence people's ability to access healthy food. And then we also do smaller assessments as well. Whenever we're, first starting to engage with partners to identify, like what their needs are, how we may be able to address them through our work. And I'll also pass it over to Jamila if you want to add anything.
Jamila: Yeah, so I can add to that as a university we do research, but with how we call it evaluation. So we're constantly evaluating what we're doing through the coalitions. And at least once a year, our agents are tasked with doing some type of community forum, or getting community feedback to really hear from the community what the issues are regarding feedback. Food insecurity or any other type of community issues, whether it's community violence, or, we don't feel safe walking from this place to this place. So we do that, but we do a lot of it's a lot of qualitative research. And so that's a lot of the reports that you'll see on our link is a lot of the research that's been mostly qualitative, but there's some quantitative research isn't in there as well. So that we're also doing the asset mapping as Makenzie stated as well. But we also. Even though we're getting research for ourselves, we also ensure that whatever we find, we report back to the community. So we'll do things like a data walk to really present to the community. What we found, we can tell them that this many people have cars. This many people are actually being physically active every day. Every day, every week or every month. So we actually have those types of events as well to make sure that we're getting data, but also presenting it back to the community. And that helps them determine what initiatives programs things that they want to do to address the issues that were.
Tia: That's awesome. Awesome. Awesome. As speaking of community it makes me want to go straight to SK to talk a little bit about the work that Baton Roots is doing with the community garden and some of the implementations with Baton Rouge Green. SK you want to share a little bit about the program?
SK: Yeah, absolutely. And if it's all right, I'll share about Baton Roots, and then I'll kick it over to Chris and Winston to talk a little bit about the Baton Rouge Green component of it. Baton Roots, as many folks in the call know, was started around MLK Fest 2019, when we broke ground at Brec's Howell Community Park. At that park they had previously had a golf course that, is being managed differently now with Brec, and so it was a really great opportunity for us to jump in on the park system, trying to have more sustainable land management practices, and also more community input and footprint at that space. So since then, we've expanded to having about 2. 5 acres of in ground plantings. 18 raised garden beds, a 30 tree citrus orchard that's operated along with Baton Rouge Green that new screen and a utility yard where we're able to wash and pack produce that can go off. For community distribution. We also have a number of satellite sites, like I mentioned before, at housing authority communities and then at school spaces that we do education work in. I think for us it's really important to be growing food, where people are at, as well as teaching them how to grow food. We know that one community farm is not going to solve a food access problem within Baton Rouge, or within any location and so for us it's important to be teaching as we're growing. We're In East Baton Rouge Parish, one in seven adults and one in five children are food insecure, and that's not geographically equitable, right? That's distributed in pockets, and that mirrors other types of inequity in our city and so for us, it's really important that food be a multipurpose issue so we want to be able to talk to folks about, like, how do they want their communities to function? How do they want public space to function? How do they want, you going to the grocery store or preparing a meal for their family to function and how can growing food be a component of that? And then alongside of that, how can growing food improve. The environmental sustainability of our area, how can the ways that we manage our farm plots, or even someone's front yard or backyard garden help to improve storm water drainage or reduce the urban heat island effect things that Winston was referring to when talking about trees earlier. So we do a lot of education work. We do a lot of current food work and we try to keep our programs as low barrier as possible. So I think in the 3 years that I've worked for Baton Roots in the walls. I can't remember us charging for a Baton Roots program, but we'll do donation based or sliding scale events. Occasionally. We just want to make sure that's as accessible as possible. This past year or a little bit more than that, we've been able to expand on. A previous program, so working with Baton Rouge Green to install orchards at many spaces and I'll let Chris and Winston talk about that in order to seek funding for an agroforestry apprenticeship program. Going forward over the next few years, we'll be training. To cohorts of up to 15 apprentices for up to 18 months for the apprenticeship and they'll get certifications along the way in horticulture arborist licensing. And green infrastructure and so our goal is to have more folks that are in the region and in the greater Baton Rouge area. Who are ready to grow food and grow trees. As well as to contribute to the overall resiliency of our region, both in terms of our food access and our environmental access.
Tia: Okay. So real quick, before we kick it over to Winston or Chris, I was again, out of curiosity what type of sustainable farming practices are being promoted with Baton Roots to ensure that the food security, like long term food security.
SK: Yeah, so we don't use any pesticides. We don't use any chemical fertilizers that you could buy at the store. But what we've really been piloting is using a variety of like natural fertilizer methods and low cost fertilizer methods, stuff that folks can easily replicate at their home and also that uses supplies that are either readily available, like the grocery store or the local nursery or just things that they have already. Yeah, Part of that is Jadam which I can drop a link in the chat to after I pick it over to Chris, but that's an adaptation of Korean natural farming that takes and really just makes a lot of soil amendments from things that you wouldn't even think about that are. Really readily available. So Mitchell has been really championing that and Mitchell and Jacquel, who Jacquel is our mobile farmer mobile farm manager who manages all of our housing authority, community gardens have been championing those methods. And then we also use a lot of composting. If you volunteered at the farm this past spring, you probably helped to build a Johnson bio reactor, which are these. Big tall towers that we're breaking down leaves and dirt and some other plant matter in to make some really high impact fertilizers. And when we make something like that's really large volume, we will distribute it to community members that are coming to our events that they can take it to their home gardens as well, because for something like that, a little bit goes a long way. And then we also use Bokashi composting and this past year, along with the. Along with Healthy BR and Go Get Healthy had done a small composting pilot to get folks to be composting at home with their food waste to support their gardens.
Christopher: Okay. Yeah, so I'll take it over from here with the Share the Fruit. So Share the Fruit was originally a brainchild between the programs of Baton Roots and then our city citrus program here at Baton Rouge Green. Some of you may be familiar with that. Historically we've partnered with schools, churches, Brec Parks, community facilities, other things like that. And it was 1 that was passively run, we're. Community members are reaching out to us. We're going into their spaces, their private spaces, and then planting these, some of these public spaces as well. We're planting these and then we're having the kind of the the mantra of the program was always share the fruit. And so a lot of times you're planting them along sidewalks. You're planting them outside a maybe some basketball courts or. Your local park or your local school, and so people can just walk out their door on the way to work on the way to school and just, pluck that fruit from there, right from the tree and just, keep on walking with that. We've always had this, the annual pick event, our citrus pick event, because we recognize very early on that there was even though we were planting hundreds of trees. There were thousands of trees out there and tens of thousands of pounds out there of fruit. That was not being activated. And so we partnered with the greater Baton Rouge food bank back in, I think, in 2013, 2014 to activate, dozens or even over 100, 150 volunteers each year to go and pick fruit from residential properties. And so each year we're typically harvesting anywhere from 2,500 to 6,500 pounds of fruit. We're. Bringing that back to the greater Baton Rouge food bank and they're distributing it through the, their networks, which goes to, I think the surrounding kind of 11 parishes, which is pretty awesome. We took that program and we saw all the awesome things that Baton Roots was doing directly with the community. We saw their management styles. We saw them activating their larger kind of professional unit around their program. And then we saw their food distribution networks that they already had in place. And so we took some of this federal grant money, and then we started the share the fruit program, which installed an Agroforestry equity coordinator. And so we're combining the agro side, the agricultural side of Baton Roots, the forestry and urban forestry side of that and combining those things to something that we think is really quite cool. And it's we're meeting people, I think, on a way that we haven't before we're going to, we now have a hundred or Close to 100 citrus trees and 8 different housing authority sites. And so we can work directly with these members of the community who are often overlooked, unfortunately. And we can have this Agroforestry Equity Coordinator who's now Winston, previously it was Preston. Who presented here, I think last year, and we we're just talking about, having conversations with people, not only getting them the much needed access to clean, fresh food, but then also talking to them about pulling them in, that's a nice little gateway drug to talking about the benefits of trees and specifically urban trees. Now we walk out that door and you see this tree and you can you. That tree is doing X, Y, Z for, that tree is pulling in, tons of carbon dioxide. It's pulling in particulate toxic chemicals out of the air, pulling that into the tree that's giving you fresh oxygen. It's also helping combat. Stormwater and flooding all these things. And so when we do that, we turn it to this whole educational campaign so that they're getting the physical and the mental benefits of these products. And I think Yeah. And we'll be expanding that exploding it even with the money that Walls Project has gotten. And we'll be planting not just a hundred trees, but we'll be going into a thousand trees over the next five years, which is really cool. And we'll be we'll be definitely be testing the. The waters for what we can do with our management styles, what we can't do, Mitchell and I are already in a little creative lab of what that looks like as far as taking elements of permaculture or agroforestry or other sorts of things to how can we get the max out of our products to benefit the community. But also it's very much agriculturally sustainable and ecologically sustainable. If I could just turn it over to Winston really fast. I didn't want to throw Winston into the deep end. He's only 4 months in right now. But I would like him to introduce himself a little bit, his background and talk about a little bit of the management styles that he experiences.
Winston: Yeah, I'd like to pick up where I left off. So yeah I'm that new agroforestry equity coordinator been here 4 and a half months. And so basically what Chris was talking about how the community aspect of it, connecting with them since I've been here, I've noticed that a lot of people come out and talk to me, ask me what I'm doing. Kids will come up, we have a 5. It's a 525 gallon water trailer. And I'd say about three weeks ago, a kid came up to me, asking me what was in the trailer. I'll explain to him why I was watering the trees and educating them on what it is and stuff. And I'll have them help me. Sometimes I had a guy come out to me. He's like a lookout of the trees, since he lives in that community and we're not there all the time, you'll look at the trees and be like, Oh, people, this is what's going on. Kids will play in the area. And, just having that connection with them really helps. And then the way we maintain the trees, weed suppression, watering, mulching and the benefits of it. So that's pretty much anything else, Chris?
Christopher: No I just dropped, or I am currently dropping the kind of PDF version of the share the fruit first edition of the case study exemplify a little bit what we did. As far as the planting, you can see some pretty incredible pictures there of how we're engaging with the community. Social media gets us so far, a lot of social media, just, it's like circles and circles of your own kind of groups that are getting exposed to that. But we are. Down there, digging in the dirt, a lot of these kids that we're planting with this is the first time that they planted a tree before, obviously, a lot of them have had a really good experiences planting with Baton Roots before and yeah, this is something that we definitely want to explore more and as Winston develops this this program we definitely want to take it statewide. Cause this person to person in contact is frankly the best way to communicate and communicate the benefits of of these trees and the benefits of fresh, healthy fruit and a myriad of other things. So this is where we wanna be and we want to take this program statewide. So if you know of other. Members like Baton Roots or someone who's poised other nontraditional partners poised to engage on this level. We would love to reach out to them.
Tia: Really good information. I want to kick it over to my ladies at LSU Ag. I know you guys are mainly focused on populations, but is there any initiatives that can take place in Baton Rouge or that is in the works of trying to target? The Baton Rouge population.
Jamila: I can talk about 1 pilot that we're currently working on, which is related to procurement. And so we have a work group that's formed. It's a statewide work group, and we bring early child care partners from across the state together during that work group. But this particular procurement is mostly related to our farm to easy initiative, but it's really about trying to get local food into early child care and education centers. And so we're working with a distributor who purchases. Local, locally grown food in bulk. And so we're truly trying to figure out, how can we set up this delivery system from local producers to ECEs. And so that's what we're trying to do, this whole farm to institution, farm to school, really trying to get what's grown in the ground to, to to early childcare education. And that pilot is. We're working with their healthy Baton Rouge program here. I think I saw one of our partners on the call. And so I think Kelli Rogers is on the call. I think. And so she is also part of that procurement project. So that's 1 of our partners who are working with on that project here in Baton Rouge and then I'll turn it over to Makenzie. I think she mentioned that all of the programs and resources that we have on our website are statewide and can be done. In any area outside of hop. We do work in 39 parish and East Baton Rouge is one of them, but I'll turn it over to Makenzie so she can explain more.
Makenzie: Thanks, Jamila. Yeah, I do also want to highlight again, like the Louisiana charitable food system network is a statewide network that we help to facilitate. So anyone across the state who's working in the charitable food system, whether it be, a food pantry, a little free pantry, maybe working with a Food bank is welcome to join that network. We have like quarterly networking calls. We usually have a presentation topic that we have speakers to talk about. And then we have, open discussion and time for people to share updates or work that they're doing. Working on and then, of course, the, Louisiana charitable food summit is open to everyone across the state. And that's just an opportunity for people working in the charitable food system to come together to learn and network and share best practices. So we're starting to plan that event for 2025 some more info to come later. And then. Yeah, again, some of our statewide projects that we have like the Grow Road to Share program is just something that anyone across the state can access through our website, they can register, there's like a short little training and then they can sign up to be a partner either to accept local produce or donate local produce to get involved with that program. And of course, like a lot of our Work that's happening across the state related to like food access can vary depending on what the local agent maybe has the ability to do or what the communities they work with are interested in doing. So I just say getting in touch with your local LSU AgCenter nutrition and community health agent is a great place to start to see the type of work that they're doing. And I know that like our FNEP agent in East Baton Rouge has. current or recently done some work. She helped to start a food pantry at Tara High School. And then also is working with a community garden in Zion City. It's things can, just depending on what people have interest in doing and the capacity of our agents, there's a lot of, Things that people can explore and we do have a lot of resources available online if people are interested we have a lot of things available for like food pantries around safe food handling and storage I'm also like client choice pantries so if someone has you know, a right now maybe they have a drive thru model and they want to set up a model that's more like a grocery store for people to be able to choose what they'd like to have we have a lot of resources related to that you as well as many others.
Tia: No, I don't know if you guys can tell what I'm doing here. But for those who are new to the space we are really focused on recentering our calls around the nine drugs of poverty of the reason why One Rouge was birthed and put into action. And one of the main focuses is our Cafe coalition out of the three that's operating now, and that's ensuring that individuals in our community has access to three healthy meals a day. In the spirit of August coming up, it's intersectionality month, and I just want you guys to just take into account on how many of our systems intersect. So when Jamila mentioned the farm to school program for E.C.E. My brain literally went off on the connection for our education to career coalition and our cafe coalition. There's so much work to be done, and I'm just really grateful that you guys are giving this knowledge to the community so that we can see how we can push the needle forward and work together. Casey, do you have anything you would like to add or ask?
Casey: Oh, so much. Thank you. Tia appreciate it. And I like that you connected those dots. By the way, everyone, happy 215th week. We're 50 strong today and it's been 215 weeks that this call has been going since covid. And I just want to, just make sure and give kudos to the team. The new folks that are joining us today, I believe Patricia and Christina, but also some of the OGs like Jen and Dean and Goddess and Lily and Tekoah and Carl. Thank y'all so much for consistently coming back. And then I also have to lift up probably one that we've talked about. There's a lot of funny t-shirts that come out of these calls. And I think Chris Cooper just gave us another one that citrus trees are gateway drugs. I think that's the first time I've actually ever heard that said before. Let's throw that one on a t-shirt and explore that later. I heard Makenzie reference Kelli Rogers who's always quiet and silent, but a huge force in this space and I also want to make sure and lift up Darlene from BREADA. Rural access, and either one of y'all can comment on this Kelli or Darlene or any of our panelists, as a city, as the city cousin and the slicker, right? It always it seems weird to me that rural parishes have issues accessing fresh food because you think of the rural parishes as more agricultural based and the nature of the communities in rural parts of the state where a lot of my family are from, they have a tendency to be a little bit more close knit. They take care of one another on the block and it's surprising to me that rural communities are having trouble with accessing healthy food as the data shows that LSU Ag just presented today. Darlene and Kelli, could you maybe speak to that about why that is and what some of the solutions are? And of course, any of our panelists.
Kelli Rogers: Darlene, you're the expert. You go.
Darlene Rowland: I don't know if I'm an expert in the real part, but I will share my thoughts on it for sure. Good morning. Thank you. for having me here. I'm with BREADA, Big River Economic and Agricultural Development Alliance, and we run the Red Stick Farmers Markets and work to support small scale farming and food access across the state. I think just speaking from what some of our farmers even say in these rural communities, you just don't for example, Mr. Buddy, who's our peach farmer, coming to the farmer's market here was so important because of access to people, so people that need to, that are farmers that are growing food need a large audience to connect with to make enough money to sell the food. So a lot of times these farmers in rural areas are coming, leaving those rural areas to come to a metropolitan area to make a living. So that creates sometimes the disconnect. It's really important for them. He always said, there's just no people in Tinsel Parish. If I had to rely on, on, on my community, I wouldn't be in business. So I think that to me is one big factor is just The rub between farmers, being able to find sustainable living and those people in those communities being able to access the food it's just a matter of commerce.
Casey: Kelli, anything to add? Thank you, Darlene.
Kelli: Thank you, Darlene. Darlene can probably speak to this a little bit one of the things that I've just heard in a lot of meetings that I've had. Is the limited number of local growers. Darlene, if that's, you can speak to that. If that's true. I know there seems to be greater demand then there are growers to fill that demand. Would you say that's true?
Darlene: Absolutely. I just had a, another thing is just climate change. I just got off the phone with a farmer early this morning. They are not putting as much seed in the ground because of the high risk of climate change, the way the patterns are changing, things are not growing in the same seasons they used to. The extreme heat burns seeds up in the ground, then you have extreme rainfall, which causes things to rot. So it has just become a very tenuous situation for farmers to be able, it's not that same confidence when you put a seed on the ground as it used to come up and grow and you're going to have stuff to market. So the risk, especially in this time of year of hurricanes putting things in the ground and if you get a big hurricane you're wiped out for the entire season. We do have the Louisiana Small Scale Survival Fund which works to give grants to farmers after disasters. It's saved a lot of agricultural businesses. However, it's not a ton of money. It's enough money to, to let someone just make it through, get by, pay the food bill. There's still a lot of work to be done there. BREADA is a founding member of Louisiana Small Scale Agriculture Coalition, LSAC, and we're specifically working to try to address some of these climate change concerns. Last year, we held the first Farmers Climate Convening in Chico State Park last January, trying to bring together farmers to really not only, A, just commiserate and share stories around how they're coping with and Adapting the climate change, but also bringing in experts to try to provide some kind of help. And so you can see that it is really becoming a huge problem on trying to adapt to the changing climate and growth.
Casey: Yeah, and and not from personal experience, more of observation inside our organization. Growing food is hard, folks. Growing food is hard, and I am so proud almost teared up listening to everything S.K. and Chris and Winston are talking about that they're, that we're doing together with Baton Roots and and with Baton Rouge Green. I'm just immensely proud of the work that SK and Mitchell and Jacquel and everybody's doing in Baton Roots. It's hard work. It taught us how and the climate is becoming more difficult to navigate. When we move, if we shift over Marlee, I think it's Marlee Pittman. There can only be 1 Marlee, right? But maybe there's multiple Marlee's but I also, I saw the release yesterday and Manny also dropped it in the chat. So Manny’s here. Thank you so much for dropping it in there. I said, Marlee, would you like to talk about one of the solutions that we're trying that are being worked on the urban core around food access?
Marlee Pittman: Yeah, can everyone can y'all hear me?
Casey: We can.
Marlee: First I'll say the effort to bring a grocery store that has fresh food to food deserts to low income areas to North Baton Rouge has been a long journey for this community and has had so many champions that have been critical and keeping this effort alive. When we had some additional funding come to our community after the 2020 and 2021 disasters, something that Mary really shared was very important to her, was trying to find a way to make the grocery store work. So we're at the early stages of that. We've had a lot of, I've participated in a lot of community conversations. I've been working with our council and different kind of community advocates on this. We've traveled to Houston to see what they're doing. So we're really excited about it. We've also engaged some national groups who've been really successful in this on the. On the funding side, right? So we have some federal dollars, some Department of Housing and Urban Development funding to help subsidize the development of a grocery store. And when we've met with other cities that have used HUD funding to do this, and we've gotten a lot of information from them, and so we've to help our partners. Put together successful projects that are going to meet the federal requirements. And also we hope some of our community goals that we've just heard in our, in different community meetings we've attended we put out some guidance for what we're going to be looking for when we open up that application process to developers. We're going to also host a community meeting on August 8th, just a virtual one for potential applicants to come ask questions of us. And make sure that they're putting together the best project for our community possible, and we give them any information that we can that can help them do that. That's a short overview, but I'm happy to answer any questions anyone has.
Casey: Awesome. Thank you so much, Marlee. And we do want to shift over into I want to make sure and give the microphone back over to you. If anyone does have questions for our speakers, please put them into the chat. I see a little bit of back and forth with Aimee, and I want to give Aimee a chance to come off mute if she would like to speak on that. And also because of the research and the evaluation superpower that you have. If I would also like to ask our speakers to all put your name in your email and if you want to put your phone number into the chat, please put that in there because I already see Christina. I'm trying, I was trying to figure out if you were sitting on one of those bouncing balls or if you were just getting excited, Christina. And I said, yeah, and welcome to the space, but I know the Knock Museum wants to partner up. And that's it. And everybody put their information in there. Aimee, anything from you?
Aimee Moles: First of all, hello, Jamila. We've worked together before on a project. Hi, good to see you again. And I think y'all answered my questions, just the awareness that the coastal areas have a lot of saltwater intrusion on top of the changes in the climate. So they just cannot grow things the way they used to. And some of our research has been discussions with the folks who live there in the coastal areas, and it's a real issue, but it sounds like everybody's aware that's a problem.
Casey: Salt water intrusion is also becoming a problem inside the city of Baton Rouge as well, as we continue to pump and deplete our underwater ground water reservoir for heavy industry. Which again, we will be hopefully having a call on that again in Friday, but just making everyone aware that, life can't really move forward if we don't have access to water. So SK, Christopher and Winston anything that y'all would like to lift up at all that comes up for you all from this conversation that you would like to put out to the group? And then back to you Tia.
SK: Yeah, I'll just say, I think that something that came up for us, really, we came into this space from a Baton Roots perspective, thinking about, how can we grow food where people are at? And that invites a whole lot of other conversations really around what we want communities to look and feel like, and how we want them to function. Where do we want our food to come from? How do we want to use our resources? And what do we want our neighborhoods to feel like? And that's part of them. The gift of working with our friends at Baton Rouge Green is really having that having our imaginations as Baton Rouge staff pushed into thinking about trees and tree equity, because there is that overlap of food, producing trees, fruit, producing trees, but that also is stretched us into thinking about okay what does it mean? To plan for public spaces where our collaborators at community farm and garden sites are also feeling really good in their space where they have shade coverage where we're doing things that have multiple ecological and social benefits for. Our neighbors, and that are also providing food, providing these. That are edible or medicinal along the way, and so I think that what I'm reminded about is this work is inherently social work, but it's also inherently optimistic work and it's inherently. Geared towards imagining a future where our city functions differently, more equitably with more people and resources, reaching towards each other. And so thinking about the spaces that y'all are working in the, the communities that you're working in, how do those function differently? If there's more food available, if there's more tree coverage and shade available. What are the things that would make an impact for the neighbors that you're in close relationship with and how can that relate to things like food access or how people move through their days? Because that's a question I think that now we're, we are more constantly asking as Baton Roots staff and in the Baton Rouge spaces that we're in. But it's a question that opens up a lot of conversation when we go out to different nonprofits, when we go out to different schools and partner with them on workshops. It's like how can we reimagine this space so that our natural resources are used a little bit differently there.
Christopher: Yeah, and the only thing I'll say is I love conversations like this, Sk is known for building partnerships. Casey is known for building partnerships and you know through just you know, simple conversations like this over the years is how we got to this kind of agroforestry fusion of Baton Roots and city citrus Share the Fruit. And they have helped us put us into spaces in our trees and there are many benefits into spaces. That we haven't been in before and frankly it's really excelled our program and made us better as an organization. So I'm always really happy to have these conversations and figure out where each different organization and landowner or whatever else can how we can fit in together. So I appreciate this and I appreciate y'all having what's in here today.
Casey: Yeah, vice versa, Christopher, I appreciate the kind words and I meant to say it before. Baton Rouge Green has been teaching the Walls Project for a decade or more, with MLK Fest, Robert Seaman, Christopher were the first people to raise their hands to come out to Scotlandville and plant trees. They also taught us that there's a lot of rules around a lot of city laws and regulations around planting trees. It's not quite as easy as you would think with easements and whatnot. And folks, I would really like to encourage everyone on this call to really take a deep, soul searching look at their own organization and realize how much more powerful we are together. The work of the Walls Project, let's just say up until, let's, 2017 18, was grown. We were a fast moving troublemaking kind of organization. And I'm proud of that, by the way, I'm not apologizing for it. But as we learned that we knew so little and that the needs were so deep and complicated. In with systems, we started merging for all practical purposes with organizations like Metromorphosis, having shared staff, having shared resources, shared methodologies, processes. I'm forever grateful to Sherreta and Raymond in helping shape the direction of our organization. Same with Baton Rouge Green. This has been going for years of this shared staff and team members, and ThoughtShare, and it's positioned the city to reason to receive millions of dollars. 6 million were received for the city, not for Walls or for Baton Roots or EBRPHA or Brec. It's for the city right to reduce the heat map. We did that because we truly are working together, not to just get a grant. We were actually working together. And that's why we got the grant. And I think that there's many groups on this on this powerful groups on this call every Friday. That would be able to really move the needle in some of the systematic barriers to poverty in the city. If you all would just if you all would identify 1 or 2 organizations that there's a subset right in the way that you make moves in the city and come together and really invest that time. Because it will be good for the people that we all serve. It's not, I'm not challenging anybody. I'm actually just encouraging everybody to look around and see if those opportunities are there. It takes a lot of work. It's exhausting and you have to put your ego to the side. And we all know mine is relatively healthy. And I said, and it takes if I can do it, then everybody can do it as a founder of an organization. So I just want to lift up just how incredibly powerful the partnership with Baton Rouge Green has been in learning that collective impact model, not just for Metromorphosis, but also Kelli at Geaux Get Healthy, right? Kelli and Jared Heimowitz really led the charge on the collective impact. In the food space would go get healthy and forced everybody to play well together, right and trained us to look at that collective impact. It's powerful. My friends. It's powerful. Tia?
Tia: Before we jump into our community announcements, I did just have a few follow up questions from Makenzie and Jamila. When we're thinking about the lack of access to healthy food, can you just share a little bit about the correlation with that in obesity?
Makenzie: Sure. I guess I'll just lift up, like the social determinants of health and just recognizing that there are so many, factors in our lives that can influence our health and things like access to healthy food, access to physical activity, healthcare access, education access can all, impact our health and our risk for chronic diseases like obesity.
Tia: Thank you for that, Makenzie. And it's it's important to me that we keep those things at the center of our mind, as we continue to do this work not forgetting our why as to why we're in this space and the things that we're doing to improve the quality of health for everyone not only in our city, but in our state I know it's been a pleasure for me to be a part of the One Rouge team to learn about the way that we can change the systemic issues that are going on amongst the nine drives of poverty collectively, not just as one organization or one individual. So I just really want to take the time to thank each of one of our panelists for sharing space to talk food and health with us. And with that being said, I'm going to open up the space for community announcements. So if anyone has anything they want to share about what's going on this week or that towards the end of the month. Now is your time to let us know what's going on.
Casey: Hey Manny you put in the you put in the chat an announcement that the Eco Park is happening. Do you maybe want to speak on that and then your question that you had?
Manny: Sure. Every time I say it, then something happens. But actually this past Wednesday, we had an onsite pre bid meeting for contractors to actually start breaking ground on the park, which has been a. A long time coming on the corner of Erie Street and Plank Road, and the idea behind the Erie Street Eco Park was to be this combined effort to the point you made before intersecting between different projects and groups and things with the community. So yeah, so we have a pre bid meeting on the 24th, which happened on Wednesday and then we'll be we're starting to accept bids for contracts to, to build out the park and just to give some brief background, the park was something that was first community driven in which we convened a group of local citizens in the area to actually give us their input about the amenities and then go from there, we have folks like the, like Rob Seaman from Baton Rouge Green. We had the late professor Cameron Abdullahi from Southern University's urban forestry program. We had some other folks from LSU landscape architecture and things like that to help with four different semesters of students participating. So it's the final culmination of all that community work coming together. And yeah, that, to that end my question, which was long winded there was, Baton Rouge Green did have a list of like local indigenous flora that were really, Helpful and creating the landscape for the park, but wanted to know more about. How folks who are local residents can shift from just having green lawns that don't really do much for. For the environment to have grasses or things like that. That can help with environmental issues, like localized flooding, but also help with. Pollinators and things like that, that can ultimately help the larger scale community. With its resiliency around some of these things, as well as providing some edible fruits and veggies for folks to have as well.
Casey: Thanks, Manny. All right. Community announcements, good people, or you might want to jump in.
Pat LeDuff: Okay. This is Pat LeDuff on the phone. Good morning.
Casey: There she is. What's up, Pat?
Pat: Doing pretty good. Wanted to thank Marlee for that update on the grocery store, and we're really excited about that, and also at some point I want to know about any type of safety for food in the grocery store, in the gas stations, if we could come back to that one day. And then I also have Harper Juliet with me this morning. So she has a message.
Harper Juliet: Good morning, One Rouge. I just want to thank you guys for supporting, especially Manny. And we did reach our goal yesterday at 4 o'clock. So we are really excited, and thank you very much.
Casey: All right, Posh Pops. All right, Posh Pop, congratulations! All right!
Pat: Yes, thank you guys so much for your support, and looking forward to seeing them continue at LSU, and also newly at Southern University Football, and yeah, just continue to buy Posh Pop. Thank you.
Casey: Yeah, Christopher and Winston and SK, I know it's not exactly going to help drive down the numbers that our friends at LSU Ag are shooting for, but if you could figure out how to grow a popcorn and candy tree Posh Pop could be everywhere. If y'all could maybe figure that out in the meantime, that would be amazing. Other community announcements?
SK: Corn does come from somewhere.
Casey: It does. I've heard it's a plant, right? It's a thank you, SK, for, thanks for the shade on that. I appreciate you. I deserve that. That's pretty funny. That's actually hilarious. There's no Reverend Anderson here today. So I feel like she was here earlier. She had to check out. So I feel like we need to recognize that the library system is the number one in the country and support it. And I feel like you need to always, everybody needs to pay attention to what Preach is doing for our families in the City Parish at the 19th JDC and beyond. I'll just say that out loud. Carl, I see you here with York. You have any updates on your summer program? I see Kendra, you're here with the Florida Street Corridor Plan. Anything that y'all would like to share with the group? Dean Andrews? Summer.
Tia: Real quickly before you guys get the talk speaking, Ms. LeDuff, can you share your contact information in the chat? We have some people who would like to connect with you to follow up on the food safety and gas stations.
Pat: Okay. Yes. Manny, will you add that to the chat? I'm actually on my phone so I'm not able to add it, but someone will add it.
Carl Dillion: No no updates. This is Carl from no updates on the youth program. So we do have an open house for some homes that we have in North Baton Rouge for sale three bedroom, two bath brand new homes listed at 191, but Louisiana Housing Corporation has that 20% Subsidy down payment assistance, so that and then we have some additional resources. So it could potentially be in a brand new. Approximately like 1700 total square foot home in that 130 to 140 range, which you're not going to find it anywhere in Baton Rouge. So if you know someone that's interested in home ownership, we have that open house. It's on Hollywood Street, 4750 Hollywood Street on tomorrow from nine to three, I believe there'll be there.
Casey: Thank you. Thank you, Carl and everyone. Yuric does amazing work. Carl's a quiet storm in the community. So if you're not familiar with Yuric and you're working with clients that are looking to transition into homeownership to build generational wealth, I can think of no better person than Lori P and Carl's team over at Yuric to stop in and have a conversation with. So yeah, it's a big props. Thank you, Carl for that. Shannon, I saw that you jumped on camera and I didn't know, did you have something to say? Or are you just like gracing us with your digital presence?
Shannon: I'm late to the party. Sorry about that. I just wanted to jump in and just maybe listen and take everything in and see if there's anywhere that we may have a place at the table or have a voice. Like I said, I just got here. So I just heard sort of the tail end of the last conversation. So I'll just keep listening. And if I feel like we can have a contribution to it, I will unmute.
Casey: Sounds great. Hey, Shannon, while you're unmuted. Yeah, let people know who your Royal We is.
Shannon: CACRC on Main Street, for those who know us, you know us but for those who do not, we are a non profit e waste recycler. We recycle computers and electronics from all over the state and we do a lot of work 30,000 square foot roof. We take in about, oh gosh 1. 5 million pounds of electronics a year. And of those electronics, we're able to refurbish about a third of them and get them back out to the people who need them most. So we offer very low cost devices to families, seniors, Veterans, other nonprofits really just, educational groups. We've got a big initiative that we started in the last quarter of last year called CACRC Believes. And in that program, we're able to make a generous donation every quarter to important groups that are doing like minded missions that are really trying to bridge the digital divide. Yeah, that's like a nomination process. There's a link on our website. If you know a group or are a group who could use a donation of technology, please use that nomination page to do we have been really doing a lot of work. We've been donating a lot of technology. It's just it's a testament to how much it's needed and how much work that so many small groups are doing. We couldn't accomplish our goals without collaboration. So I think that the more groups that sort of chime in and say, hey we want to get involved. There's a work that we would like to accomplish, but we really need some technology to do that. We need some iPads, maybe to go out into the community. We need laptops, for our field people. We need desktops for our. Learning hubs or for our after school groups. Those are things that we can help with and we're excited to do so anyway, that's us. That's what our nonprofit does. We can certainly help. If you have old technology to recycle, we can come pick it up. Yeah, so if anybody needs our services. I'm happy to help. I'm happy to get you guys started with that. But that's us.
Casey: Awesome, Shannon. Thank you. And we'll have separate conversations at another time. But the last two hours on zoom yesterday afternoon was around recycling and reuse not just electronics, but all the way across the board. I believe that this is this is something that needs to start becoming integrating itself into the center of all of our work. As we Don't contribute. As I know July is is the month that's global live without plastic month, right? And I'm sure everybody has tried that at some point in your life. And if you have not done it before, try to live a week. And not use plastic. It is hard. It is hard, but I said, nonetheless, just cause it's hard doesn't mean that we shouldn't do it. Shannon, thanks for the work that you do. Nancy Jo Craig holds a special place in my heart forever. And the work that the CACRC does is really important in our community. I look forward to catching up with you one on one. Thanks for joining the space. I appreciate it. All what else? We got good people. Any announcements?
Allie: Hey, this is Allie with BREADA. I'm just letting everyone know that we are hiring a marketing coordinator. So if you guys know anyone, I put the link in the chat a little further up. So please share that with whoever, that may be interested.
Casey: Thank you, Allie. Patricia I'm officially intrigued. What do you do?
Patricia Burns: I am the marketing and communications manager at Magellan of Louisiana, and we administer the coordinated system of care program for the state of Louisiana. It's a free program for children that have more severe behavioral health issues. We provide, or we administer rather the home and community based type of services for those children. When we use the wraparound model. Each child, or each member will have a facilitator assigned for them and that will see to what needs that child may have.
Casey: Awesome. Thank you for the work that you do and thanks for sharing the space today. Awesome. And we would love to have you all involved in our education to career coalition specifically because there's a lot of folks that get left out of the process, whether it's humans with a range of ability, right? Whether it's, young people with behavioral health issues. This is people always build systems. It feels like on the rule and not the exceptions. And it just makes these divides even larger for a lot of the humans in our state. Thank you for the work that you do. Thank you. Appreciate you. And Winston, we don't know each other, so I wasn't gonna put you on blast early, but now that we're coming to the end of the call, you did great, man.
Winston: Oh, thank you.
Casey: You did great.
Winston: Thank you. I'm glad to be a part of this helping the city of Baton Rouge, especially with food and fruits and fresh produce. So happy to be a part of this.
Casey: And I'm making an assumption that you are a product of the incredible SU Ag program.
Winston: Yeah. Yeah. Huh. I majored in plant and soil science.
Casey: Cool. I said, it's y'all, we have a world class, LSU Ag and Southern Ag are world class programs. They're recognized all over the world and it's weird. It's like having a band that's got a huge hit and sells out 10,000 person arenas, but can only bring 500 people in their hometown. SU Ag and LSU Ag are world class and we don't talk about it enough. And I said, and they wield a lot of power in this city and in this state, right? Those two institutions yield a lot of power and they change, they can change a lot of policy and a lot of practice. It's great. It's great to have you in the space and welcome to the work. We appreciate you being here.
Winston: Thanks for having me.
Casey: Yes, indeed. Tia? Great call today. Thank you for organizing it. And thank you for centering, keeping the conversation centered and as I said, I hope that you and everybody else has a wonderful weekend. And we look forward to seeing everybody next week. What's the topic for next week, Tia, so everybody can prepare?
Tia: That's a good question. We're actually in process of working that out as we prepare for the first week of August. I mentioned earlier that August is intersectionality month. So just be prepared to talk about intersectionality and systems.
Casey: All right.
Tia: And if you're interested in joining the call, shoot me an email and let me know so we can schedule that.
Casey: Appreciate you. Awesome. Awesome. Hey, SK. Oh, everybody, by the way, y'all are welcome. This is called overtime now. So we just talking now. So if everybody's got to get off to their work day and I get I don't know, hopped in the car and take a road trip for the weekend. Do that dang thing. SK, outside of your work with Baton Roots, anything that you would like to lift up about the work that you are doing in the world outside of just in in ag?
SK: My outside of the Baton Roots work is relatively quiet right now beyond the writing that I need to do. But I think, something that I'm. I'm seeing a lot of folks, there's a lot of political discourse that is happening nationally, citywide. And I think my encouragement for folks is always to be like organizing with their neighbors and getting to know the people around them. So I think that a lot of our, a lot of our energy can get zapped up when we think about the larger political systems. And there's a lot of work to be done at the local level. There's a lot of work to be done with each other. And I think there's a lot of fruitful conversations to have with each other about the kind of world that we want to live in. So that's all I'll say for my two cents right now.
Casey: Fair enough. As I said in other words, translation, Baton Roots is getting everything that you got. So as I said, I appreciate the dedication. What you got, Christina?
Christina Melton: I was just going to say so we I'm, I've wanted to. Just jump in and ask for everybody's help. We're about to launch something that we're calling the Adventuresome eating club. We are interested in trying to get children from the youngest ages to try healthy fruits and vegetables in ways that sort of can steer them away from the salt, fat and sugar pathway as the youngest, eaters. And so we're working with The seeds to success and a harvest of the month group, and they're going to start coming every quarter. We're starting with every quarter, just because we're overwhelmed with lots of other stuff right now. But I'm teaching kids how, vegetables look. In the store or in the ground seedlings look and then taking that all the way through a very simple recipe that we're making with minimal ingredients, not necessarily cooked, trying to keep it as simple for parents as well. And also teach parents how to make these types of foods and at home with minimal ingredients and minimal prep and minimal time. Thank you. And then also have them eat it together so that it's a joint experience with other people. And any advice everybody might have or partnerships, we would love to have you all come to the launch of this, which is going to be, I think, September 13th. I have to check my calendar, but we would love to start partnering and we want to grow fruit trees here too. So some inside our gate and then some in our front yard. So I'd love to find out more about all of that.
Pat: I had a comment on that. So I wanted to find out, what are we doing in the school system? First lady, Michelle Obama, started this big way with trying to make sure that the children get that in school first, and it did work carrying it on to the home. Now that LaMont Cole is our superintendent, I don't know how much influence I don't even know exactly everything so chopped up. But where are we in trying to make sure that we provide that to our children, at least in elementary or the pre K head start children.
SK: I think that, speaking for, my knowledge of what's happening in EBR, the child nutrition program folks that are working in the school system right now, really been trying to focus on fresh and local foods in whatever ways they can. And obviously they're working with a larger system and a huge volume of food delivery, but I know that they've been implementing more fruits and vegetables and to, to lunches and to breakfasts over this past few years and really trying to work on how they can get school gardens growing. And then also, Manny, you mentioned it in the chat earlier, the good food procurement program. That they're really, hoping to expand that work within the school system. I think for our end, we end up having little ones out at the farm for food demos and just, what their parents will bring them out with when they're volunteering or when there's an event. It helps, I think, in some ways to get them involved in seeing. Seeing plants growing, seeing things be, like, maybe differently shaped than they would expect, and how things are different in the garden versus what they may be seeing in the grocery store when it gets to their plate at home or at school. Though, I struggle to get my six year old niece to eat. My six year old niece and my ten year old nephew don't want to eat vegetables all the time either. And so sometimes it is just like making it a fun, weird thing. But I think the cooking demonstrations that we do on the farm really help. Where people can, where especially the young ones can see something that's different in the garden, get their hands in the dirt, maybe get a little bit grossed out by it, but be like excited by something being so different. And then, also be a part of preparing that food. So like bringing them into the process has been something that we've done with our camps and our students in the past.
Christopher: And if I can just, and I had one other, I was just going to say that we definitely have always worked with schools and we absolutely love being in those spaces. Our difficulty has been a kind of a lack of continuity. And we would love to sit down with superintendent Cole here. And have these conversations because we'll work in one school, we'll establish an orchard or we'll have our Arbor Day planting or something like that. But then, eventually that teacher or that principal or that school group, is going to move on. And then we have a difficulty with kind of maintaining those partnerships. And it would be nice to have an M.O.U. Or to have kind of agreements on a larger scale with the school system. So we can plant and maintain orchards. So there can be more diverse, locally based food right there on campus. And that are hopefully better maintained. So that's something that we always want to entertain. That's something that we actively do every year. We're always planting fruit trees on campus, but we do need something on a higher level, a higher commitment, I think, from the school system rather than just individual schools piecemealed.
Pat: And I also wanted to give kudos though, to summer feeding this year, and I would have to give credit to what we started doing during the 2020 pandemic, because we were talking about the food that was being served they are, they served real chicken wings, they served Salisbury steak, hamburgers did tacos, same all ground meat, but it was real, ground meat. They did real ground meat with spaghetti, and it was good stuff for the kids. They really enjoyed it. And the presentation of the plate was phenomenal. And so I don't know in terms of how healthy, but it was not processed cookie food and food that got soggy that you had to make happen again. So I think we're making strides in that. In that direction and salads, lots of salads and carrots and broccoli with with the some type of little ranch or something on it, but the kids really enjoyed it. The kids that we served.
Casey: All right. Excellent. Good people. Do you thing. I'm gonna go do my thing. Y'all do your thing. I said have a beautiful Friday and thank y'all for joining us today and thanks again to all of our speakers. Y'all were rad. Super, super informative call. Appreciate y'all and everybody be safe this weekend and I'll see y'all next week.
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