By Annie Sholar
Note: all photo credits: Seeds of Solidarity/Deb Habib
Seeds of Solidarity began over 25 years ago with a mission to awaken the power among people of all ages – from toddlers to teens to people who are incarcerated – to Grow Food Everywhere to transform hunger into health and create resilient lives and communities. The non-profit runs alongside Deb Habib & Ricky Baruch’s agroecological farm in Orange, MA on unceded land of the Nipmuc Native Americans.
NOFA/Mass spoke with Deb about her work and her presentation at the NOFA Symposium in March 2024.
NOFA/Mass: You’ve talked about how staying rooted in community is one of the core values for Seeds of Solidarity. Can you share how that value shows up in your work?
Deb: I would say that all of our work - which includes the Seeds of Solidarity non-profit, a family farm, and the North Quabbin Garlic and Arts Festival - comes from a core value of starting small, being creative, and taking important risks for the things you believe in. Then, you find others with whom you work well and effectively to expand your vision and grow outward from there.
Sometimes, people feel like they have to take on a massive thing to make a farm work – they’ll go into debt because if they don’t have a ton of machinery, they don’t feel like they’re real farmers. Or, in non-profit organizations, people jump to every grant they see. They can sometimes lose sight of their mission, or worse, swallow the work of other grassroots organizations without acknowledging those smaller nonprofits.
I like the phrase “moving at the speed of trust.” I’ve not found confirmation of the original source* but I’ve heard it used more and more in thoughtful community organizing work. To me, that means focusing on building relationships and partnerships in the community.
I think it’s key to really take the time to be present in your relationships and partnerships and to be thoughtful about your actions, programs, or farm products, whatever it is, especially in smaller communities, whether rural or urban, building relationships is essential. If you take the time to build thoughtful reciprocal relationships, word of that gets around. On the other hand, if you make promises you can’t keep, step on people’s toes, or approach things with a lot of arrogance, that travels fast, too.
Moving too fast, doing too much, and thinking too big is easy. The ego gets involved, and it’s hard to repair when those things happen. It’s important first to make sure your values are intact. I think it’s especially important for people who have more privilege in this society, be it skin color privilege, language privilege, or class privilege, not to take up too much space.
NOFA/Mass: Can you tell us about the Grow Food Everywhere program and mission?
Deb: Seeds of Solidarity started on land where people said, “Oh, they will never be able to grow food here because it doesn’t look anything like a farm.” We ended up here because it’s all we could afford. Before starting Seeds of Solidarity, my husband was a co-owner of a 20-acre organic farm in upstate New York, where it was much more typical-looking farmland: deep, rich topsoil, flatness, all of that. But where we are now, we had to figure out how to build soil.
That’s why I think what we do is also really applicable to urban settings – where you have to think, how will I grow intensively, starting with the soil?
Grow Food Everywhere is our tagline, and we use it frequently in our work, both in our teaching about farming methods and in our programs. In these programs, we work within communities to support people in growing food in all kinds of settings for themselves, their families, their organizations, etc.
The “grow food everywhere” concept says we must decentralize food production in all our communities to make fresh food more accessible. We also need to figure out how to use no-till, climate-resilient practices to keep food affordable and sequester carbon rather than continue releasing it into the environment.
We have to make the places we live better than when we found them. The colonizer mentality and consumptive, capitalist ways of being have caused a lot of destruction. One way we can participate in remedying that - one of many needed ways - is by building beautiful, healthy soil that is good for people, the land, and the atmosphere.
MOFA/Mass: Can you give us a summary of what you spoke about at the NOFA Virtual Symposium on March 29th, 2024, in your session titled “Passion, Purpose, and Fresh Paradigms?”
Deb: I wanted to focus on the importance of everyone thinking about their values. What’s your niche in this larger ecosystem? What does the world need now? It doesn’t have to look like everyone else’s. I tried to help people think about “what your contribution is to your community and the planet now.”
The presentation included images of what we have done at Seeds of Solidarity, with values at the center. It was followed by a conversation in which people could think about and share their own process and values in a creative and forward-thinkingly and consider how those values contribute to fresh paradigms.
Fresh, not new. I intentionally did not use “new” in my title because nothing happening or needed now is particularly new. At this time, we’re in a particular state of humanity-induced climate-related crisis, where we need to take bold but meaningful steps to do things differently.
It’s easy for the small farm dream to turn into a chaotic, massive, consumerist project, becoming all about branding and QuickBooks and all that stuff. It’s easy to lose sight of why we’re really doing things in the first place.
We wrote our book, Making Love While Farming, after thinking about these things and wanting to create a guidebook, a workbook, for thinking through these topics, relationships, and values. It is easy, especially for new farmers, to fixate on informational workshops and the how-tos. Meanwhile, relationships fall apart, and physical and mental health suffers. It is vitally important to balance work with wellbeing and seek support when needed.
I hope this topic appeals to people, especially those who always attend the “how-to” workshops. We can do the “how-to,” but the “how-to” will not sustain us for the long haul as farmers and community workers. It’s the “who with” and the “why,” the fresh ways of working together, the partnerships and the love that will sustain us for the long haul.
*adrienne marie brown helped publicize this idea in her book Emergent Strategies.
Grow Food Everywhere
As part of their Grow Food Everywhere mission, Seeds of Solidarity wrote a Recipes for Wellness booklet highlighting simple, accessible tips for growing and eating good, local food.
Included is this great idea: grow your own salad greens in a colander!
A colander is deep enough so small plants can grow, and the holes provide good drainage.
Here’s How:
Use a spare metal or plastic colander – look for one in thrift stores or yard sales!
Fill the colander with organic potting mix or garden soil and moisten it well.
Sprinkle your favorite salad green seeds (like lettuce, arugula, or mustard greens) over the top of the soil. Mix and match – choose the greens you like to eat most!
Cover the seeds lightly with more soil, and water gently.
Place the colander in a sunny spot, indoors or on a porch.
Gently water the colander every day until you see seeds starting to sprout. Then, water every other day or just enough to keep the soil moist but not soaking.
When the greens are about 2 inches high, trim them and enjoy!
Don’t pull the plants out just yet – continue to water the colander and they’ll regrow, perhaps a few times!
You can also use this method for growing herbs like basil and parsley, seeding only 1-2 plants per colander.
Annie Sholar works for NOFA Mass.
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