Singer’s respect for soil inspired her to found Carbon Sponge, an interdisciplinary platform that honors this threatened resource by cultivating healthy soil to foster carbon sequestration. “Carbon sponge” is a term usually used to describe healthy soil that absorbs and retains water; Singer found it aptly described the subject and actions she wants to cultivate. 

Fighting climate change

Greenhouse gas emissions, which result from high levels of atmospheric carbon, are a critical cause of climate change. That systemic shift is responsible for weather patterns, such as periods of intense drought or rain, imperiling all aspects of life, particularly our food supply. Yet agriculture in the United States is responsible for about 10 percent of the country’s emissions and food production accounts for more than a quarter of global emissions, when factoring in the larger food system, including packaging and transportation. 

Carbon storage is an important tool in combating climate issues because sequestered carbon produces fewer emissions. It also improves soil’s fertility, its structure for conveying nutrients and capacity to retain water. Healthy soil is more productive and leads to better growing and farming outcomes.

Singer hopes to fight climate challenges and generate a societal shift in which decisions about land use practices, such as fracking, are thoughtfully made to support humans and other species that rely upon the ecosystem. Carbon Sponge, she says, is “part of our nature-based solution[s] to our man-made problems.”

An event with USDA scientists, organized by Carbon Sponge, at White Feather Farm in 2023. (Photo credit: Jess Giacobbe)

Anybody who is interested—urban, suburban or rural gardeners and farmers or any land stewards—can participate in Carbon Sponge. Singer has written a manual, “Carbon Sponge Guide: A Guide to Grow Carbon in Urban Soils (and Beyond),” available on the Carbon Sponge website. It explains how to assemble a toolkit of inexpensive, easy-to-purchase-and-use instruments to test metrics such as the fungal to bacterial ratio, which indicates soil’s ability to provide hospitable conditions for carbon storage. Chapters discuss how to monitor and teach children about soil and to design a carbon sponge. An educator at heart, Singer wants to offer tools to teach people to develop new ways of thinking.

Putting soil first

Centering soil in conversations is at the heart of Carbon Sponge. “First of all, asking, what does soil need? Which I think is an interesting question unto itself,” says Singer. “Then also, ‘what can we learn from soil?’” 

Farming methods over the past 50 years, such as growing monocultures and fertilizing depleted soil to prop up the system, are shortsighted, says Singer. She wants to invest in rather than impose on or extract from soil. “If you’re just looking at a yield and how much you get on the land, then you’re not understanding the complex systems that support the growth of that plant and future growth,” she says. 

Singer is notably not a scientist. She’s an award-winning professor of New Media at SUNY Purchase where she teaches Dark Ecology, a class closely aligned with her work in the ecological art space. It explores what it means to be human in the age of the Anthropocene, reading theorists, she says, who straddle art and science and think about how those disciplines can help people interrogate and rethink humans in relation to soil, microbes and the food we’re growing. Singer’s work, at the intersection of technology, art and social change, has been exhibited at MoMA/PS1 and is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art. 

Fabio and Christine Ritmo of Nimble Roots Farm in Catskill, NY, a participating farm of Carbon Sponge Hub 2022-2024. (Photo credit: Brooke Singer)

After participating in collaborative art projects involving food waste, Singer wanted to learn more about soil. She also wanted to transform that waste into a rich resource. Those interests led her to co-found La Casita Verde, a community garden in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn. 

Singer had worked a lot with data collection, visualizing data in her art practice and generating data in various projects. Learning that the soil had to be tested for lead, a common contaminant in urban soil, prompted her to wonder what it was not being tested for and what would be useful to the soil. “What other kinds of data could we collect in the garden,” says Singer, “that kind of filled out the story about soil?” 

Group effort

Carbon Sponge, formed to explore regenerative agriculture in urban gardening, incorporates art, scientific research, data collection and agriculture. For its initial project in 2018, Singer, as designer in residence at the New York Hall of Science, assembled soil scientists, artists, agroecologists, urban gardeners, landscape designers, government agencies and corporate funders. The goal: to find out how carbon cycles in urban soils and if it was possible to grow soil organic carbon in urban soils in the same way that happens in native rural soils. “I was very interested in making an aesthetic and pleasing experiment so that people would be pulled in by it and want to be in this space and start to learn and ask questions with us,” says Singer. 

Urban soil is very different from rural soil, which is much less disturbed by humans. So, the experiment combined “technosol,” also known as human-engineered soil, a mix of sediment and compost, in different ratios. It demonstrated that soil organic carbon could be developed in urban soil.

The findings are important because the sediment, previously considered waste, can now be considered a resource, opening up new potential for use in ecosystem services and regenerative agriculture. A paper detailing results is currently under peer review. 

Singer’s integrative, collaborative approach and activist streak are influenced by her time at Carnegie Mellon University, where she earned her MFA. There she co-founded Preemptive Media, a collective of artists, computer scientists and roboticists who explored the then-new field of human and computer interaction. She enjoyed being part of a group that “included people who knew how to build projects both in the physical and technological sense and create projects that were bigger than one person,” she says, “and often with an eye towards inclusion, participation, transparency and building a better world with more of a democratic input.”

Carbon Sponge now also encompasses scientific research, Singer’s art practice, a farmer-to-farmer network called Carbon Sponge Hub (located since 2022 at White Feather Farm in Saugerties, New York, where Singer is the director of Farm Innovation), and a yearly soil fest there. 

Anne-Laure White, Carbon Sponge field tech, surveying the sorghum crop at Stoneberry Farm in Athens, NY, in 2023. (Photo credit: Brooke Singer)

Last year, 10 small area farms participated in the Hub, which includes professional lab testing to substantiate kit results. Planning for 2024 is underway, with intentions to scale up production from a hand-harvested-and-winnowed operation to a machine-driven one, to formally verify the kit, thanks to a USDA grant, and to explore culinary uses.

The Hub is also growing sorghum alone and in cover crop mixes for a scientific study to determine if sorghum can be called a “New York climate-smart plant.” The nutritious grain from Africa possesses numerous agronomic and sustainable properties that can help soil store carbon. It is drought resistant and produces a significant amount of plant biomass, which can be used by farmers to nurture the land. Notably, it efficiently photosynthesizes more “exudates” (“basically, liquid carbon,” explains Singer) into the soil through its vast root system, which helps microbes multiply, building soil health. Hub farm Zena Farmstead reported a 50-percent increase in microbial biomass in its experimental plot from its first to second year of participation. 

Looking ahead

Current generations may not see the benefits of this work; carbon sequestration can take many decades. But Singer is undeterred. “This provides one model,” she says. “We have to be on soil time, which is very different than human time. Both should be part of the solution.” 

Carbon Sponge is modeling new ways of thinking that are necessary for human survival. “We can’t get ourselves out of this problem in the same way we got into it, with extractive capitalists and profit-driven systems,” says Singer. “I’d like to think of this as a different way forward.”

***

You can find Singer’s manual, “Carbon Sponge Guide: A Guide to Grow Carbon in Urban Soils (and Beyond),” on the Carbon Sponge website. It explains how to assemble a toolkit of inexpensive, easy-to-purchase-and-use instruments to test metrics such as the fungal to bacterial ratio, which indicates soil’s ability to store carbon. 

The post Sequestering Carbon Is Not Just A Science But An Art, Too appeared first on Modern Farmer.

It’s one of the reasons he signed on to be a mentor farm in the Glynwood Center for Regional Food and Farming’s newly expanded farm apprentice program.

Across the country, this vital and demanding profession is approaching a watershed moment. According to the USDA, the average age of farmers has risen to 57.5 years. Climate change poses threats to conventional methods of farming. Land access is limited by availability and cost.

Glynwood, in Cold Spring, NY, part of the Hudson Valley, is working to confront these considerable challenges through a farm apprentice program geared at training young farmers for a more sustainable and inclusive farming future. Since 1997, the organization has built a reputation of ensuring that the Hudson Valley is a region defined by food, where farming thrives. Its apprentice program, begun in 2008, has a successful track record: Two-thirds of alumni are still farming and more than 80 percent are working in the broader food system, including food justice, sovereignty, education or policy.

Glynwood has recently expanded its program to gear it towards marginalized groups that want to enter the farming and ag space, which has traditionally been dominated by cis white men. It’s one of the few programs nationwide that offer a robust, formal curriculum for new entry farmers. 

Glynwood president Kathleen Finlay says that ag schools, multi-generational farms and other programs aren’t meeting the needs of farmer training at this moment. “One of the biggest barriers or the most challenging obstacles is that there’s a dearth of opportunities for farmers to learn to farm in a way that stewards the land, is resilient to the climate crisis [and] is deeply rooted in food justice and food sovereignty,” she says, attributing some of the hurdles affecting first-generation farmers to systemic oppression.

Barriers to entry

Glynwood’s farm apprentice program evolved from informal sessions spearheaded by Dave Llewellyn, director of farmer training since 2008 and a former farm apprentice himself. As the program matured, Llewellyn noticed fewer entry-level opportunities, a result, he says, of the 2019 minimum wage requirement in New York, which prompted many farms to abandon internships or apprenticeships as a means to an end, hiring work crews instead. “We saw nonprofits as an important player in this to make sure that the opportunities continue to exist,” he says. “That’s when we started talking to some partners about this idea of bringing the education component to the table, providing funds to support that work.”  

As a member of several agricultural networks in the Hudson Valley and around the country that share knowledge and best practices, Llewellyn often acts as a connector. He recognized the need for a co-ordinated, cross-farm, regional apprenticeship program and that the area’s many small farms are uniquely positioned to accommodate one. To help shape the program and its expansion, he commissioned a report examining training programs around the country, such as Rogue Farm Corps in Oregon and Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (MOFGA).

The resulting 64-page report confirmed a gap between what was expected and the actual apprentice experience and highlighted the barriers to entry for members of marginalized groups. It’s peppered with candid comments from former apprentices, program managers and mentors. 

A queer and trans-identified apprentice addressing the lack of diversity in farming asked, “But are these programs actually a viable, safe space for these kinds of people to go?” Mentors expressed aspirations and concerns, wanting tools to best support apprentices who encountered racism and to pay a living wage. “I don’t know how a farm supports that,” said one bluntly. Another asked, “How do you actually teach while getting so much stuff done?”

In-class learning at Glynwood supplements hands-on field work at off-site apprenticeships. (Photo courtesy of Glynwood Center for Regional Food and Farming.)

Learning and outreach

The apprentice program includes in-field work, 60 hours of classroom time covering topics such as pest management, tractor safety, holistic visioning of goals, food sovereignty (the right of people to be able to produce and/or procure healthy and culturally appropriate food in a sustainable manner) and compassionate communications training. Apprentices receive a stipend of minimum wage or above, a healthcare reimbursement account, free and discounted vegetables and meat from Glynwood, and renumeration for transportation to the weekly classroom sessions, as well as accruing vacation and sick days. Some housing is available. Funding for the pilot year in 2022 came from individual donors; the program is currently supported by a three-year grant from the USDA’s Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program that Glynwood was awarded last summer.

This initiative fits naturally into Glynwood’s work and ethos of inclusivity.

The organization strives to support participants from a diverse range of backgrounds in its programs. As part of the expansion, it included past and present program participants in program refinement and design. To conduct intentional recruiting, Glynwood has been building relationships with local farms by participating in volunteer workdays and partnering with organizations such as GrowNYC, with which it created a farmer training initiative called Pathways to Farming.

Mentoring and support

So as not to dilute the experience for the five apprentices onsite at Glynwood, Llewellyn and his team created a decentralized model, partnering with five farms to host apprentices and act as mentors. Each of the farms—Four Corners Community Farm, Maple View Farm, Ecological Citizen’s Project, Phillies Bridge Farm Project, Choy Division Farm and Rise & Root Farm—have participated in Glynwood programs, so a trust and comfort level are already established.

The expansion was piloted with 15 apprentices, 10 off-site. Seventeen are participating this year, which runs approximately from March to November. “It’s a very diverse group that has been intentionally cultivated here at Glynwood,” says current apprentice Sebastian Jindra-Cotilla, “bringing in various different values and trying to integrate them into one productive harmonious agricultural experience.” That’s one of the aspects that drew the first-generation Latino-American to the program, along with its generous compensation package and educational component. He says he felt “exploited by my employers for my labor” at a previous experience where learning was not prioritized.

Classroom topics include best practices in planting and disease and pest management. (Photo courtesy of Glynwood Center for Regional Food and Farming.)

Each mentor farm receives a $3,000 stipend for its commitment and as compensation for the apprentice’s classroom time. Mentors are required to attend an orientation, undergo anti-racist and team-building training, participate in frequent, specific check-ins with the apprentice and Glynwood team during the season and provide program feedback. They have access to online repositories of lessons developed by Glynwood and can network with other mentors.

Rose welcomes the help, money and opportunity to share knowledge as a mentor. He says designing a curriculum that is not just “grunt work” can be a burden for the farmer, so he’s grateful Glynwood has the expertise and ability to do so. “Why should each farm mentor reinvent the wheel?” he asks, noting that apprentices receive a richer experience and a standardized and wider breadth of knowledge. 

Impact beyond the farm

Former Glynwood apprentice Ellie Brown, who served as a mentor last year, was grateful for the housing provided when she was an apprentice. “Paying people and housing them are two big things people don’t have to figure out on their own,” she says. Paying minimum wage, says Llewellyn, does not make the opportunity equitable or accessible to all, but they ensure people are “reasonably compensated” by tracking hours, which is not common practice in apprenticeships.

Including social justice, food justice and inclusivity aspects adds more meaning to the program, says Brown, who is starting a farm this season, particularly because farmers already have a lot on their plate. “I think that this farming community in the Hudson Valley, a lot because of Glynwood, is at the forefront of being open and allowing everybody to have their voice no matter who they are. That’s a huge thing.”

Sharing meals after class fosters connection between the apprentices and Glynwood staff. (Photo courtesy of Glynwood Center for Regional Food and Farming.)

Jindra-Cotilla appreciates the opportunity to experiment in an accepting space, very different from previous farm experiences. “It goes to prove that the cultural aspect of agriculture is really, really important. We’re doing more than just growing food. That sort of anchors our activities; but at the end of the day, what we’re trying to do is create culture, to foster positive ways of being in relationship to one another, to the land. That means obviously including marginalized voices.” 

Rose agrees. When apprentices are taken for granted, “that excludes a lot of people,” he says, and “misses a lot of potential for growth of these future leaders, for the institutions themselves, for making a more inclusive, equitable society.”

The post Prospective Farmers Face Big Barriers to Entry. This Apprentice Program Wants to Set a New Standard appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Since 2014, the nonprofit organization has found 23 lost or nearly extinct apple varieties. At least 17,000 named varieties were once grown here after early colonists brought apples to America; today, there are just 5,000. The group seeks to identify and preserve heritage apple trees planted before 1920 in the Pacific Northwest. 

“The history these old apple trees have is just incredible,” says Dave Benscoter, a former FBI agent and IRS investigator, who runs the Lost Apple Project with EJ Brandt. 

Apple hunting is painstaking and time intensive. In addition to Benscoter and Brandt scouring nursery ledgers, plat maps, county fair records and the internet for potential leads, they received 600 tips last year alone. Each fall, they send 200 sample bags of found varieties to the Temperate Orchard Conservancy in Oregon for identification. The group offers grafting classes and sells trees to cover costs. 

Since Benscoter started the project, he says he’s gained a deeper understanding of how difficult life was back in the early days after apples were introduced to America. “The truth of the matter is these apples saved [the] lives of pioneers,” he says. “The apple was by far the single most important thing you could grow; it had so many uses.” Homesteaders needed summer and fall apples. “Each apple had a specific purpose,” he says. “One was really good for drying, another for canning.” Sugar was produced by cooking down really sweet apples. 

There were particular varieties of apples that ripen in October, such as Ben Davis apples, that people grew because they kept best. These varieties didn’t taste good until the spring, says Benscoter, when they were the only fresh fruit people would have. Hogs or horses gobbled up rotten ones.  

E.J. Brandt and David Benscoter prepare to ride a 200 yard tram across the Clearwater River in Idaho to look at some orchards believed to be planted by settlers. Photo courtesy of the Lost Apple Project

The project is a vivid reminder that there used to be a greater variety of lettuces, peas and the like available, says mycologist Melissa Flora, who runs Lost Apple Project’s Michigan arm, which formed earlier this year.  She grows heirloom vegetables in her garden, often from seeds she’s saved or swapped. “We’ve become so reliant on grocery store chains to tell us what we need to eat. To me, that’s just crazy,” she says.  

Some lost apples don’t taste good, but are important for historical reasons and because they can be used to breed other apples, says Benscoter. In 2018, the Lost Apple Project re-discovered the Excelsior, the first apple bred in the United States. Benscoter says the project has botanical and plant-breeding value because some of the apples it is finding have characteristics that are very favorable. The Goldridge, which the project found in 2019, is not susceptible to a disease called apple scab. 

Ben Gutierrez, the curator of the USDA’s National Apple Collection, says that the project is exciting because we don’t fully know the potential of future finds. “Genetic diversity is part of sustainability,” he explains. The more apples that the project rediscovers, the more there is to learn about which apples might grow better in various climates and conditions.  

“Each apple discovered carries a legacy, interesting genetics, and a unique story,” Gutierrez says. “Like people, every apple is unique. Each helps us tell that story a little bit better so we can understand the genetic composition and where we can go in the future.”

A Gold Ridge apple. Photo courtesy of the Lost Apple Project

George Raino is an apple lover who helped the project find the Kittagaskee variety in 2017 in an orchard in Boise he’d visited since his early 20s. He calls it “one of the holy grails for lost apples.” The Cherokees grew this apple, prized for its exquisite flavor and historical significance, in eighteenth century North Carolina, before being forced from their land. Raino describes it as “not overpoweringly tart nor overpoweringly sweet, well enough balanced that the bouquet floral overtones of the particular cultivar come through. The base notes of complex tannins add substance.”  

That’s enough to make one salivate. Similarly, what does Benscoter do when he finally stands at the foot of a newly found tree? “The very first thing I do is taste an apple,” he says. “I just want to know what it tastes like.” 

The post Why Apple Detectives Are Tracking Down Lost Varieties appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Thanks to an innovative seed-saving venture that began in 2017 on a patch of land in Kingston, New York, for the first time in decades, the Akwesasne can eat a much greater variety of their long-established, healthy foods. They can use those seeds in planting and harvesting ceremonies, just as their ancestors did. Seed saving is an ancient practice in which seeds and reproductive matter from plants are saved for future use. In nods to the past and sustainability, seed libraries and seed-saving projects are popping up across the country.

Purposefully named the Native American Seed Sanctuary, this initiative to safeguard and produce seeds to return to the Akwesasne is a collaboration between the tribe, Seedshed, the Hudson Valley Farm Hub and the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network. For Native Americans, it is spiritually meaningful because they believe that seeds are living, breathing beings from whom they are descended. Native Americans also believe in a symbiotic relationship in which the seeds, or seed relatives, take care of them by providing food. In return, they protect the seeds for the future.

“Much of the importance of revitalizing our traditional foodways and bringing back these heritage varieties of seeds is that they are a cornerstone to our cultural identity and our understanding of who we are,” says Rowen White, a Mohawk seed keeper who created the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network. She collected seeds from elders and entrusted Ken Greene, founder of Seedshed, to grow them. “These foods and seeds figure prominently in our cosmology, our creation story and many of our cultural stories,” she explains.

Sunflower seeds by Bekshon / Shutterstock

Greene established the country’s first seed-saving library in Gardiner, New York, and owns the Hudson Valley Seed Company. He believes that, like water, seeds should be treated as a resource that’s available to all, shared and protected. Each year, the Native American Seed Sanctuary grows one variety of corn, eight varieties of beans, two varieties of squash and one variety of sunflower in a “four sisters” configuration to return to the Akwesasne. White calls this seed return “rematriation” instead of the more commonly known term “repatriation” because the work of seeds belongs to women in Native American culture. She describes rematriation as “powerful healing.”

Greene says one of the most emotional parts of the project is the three-day harvest, where he invites the Akwesasne, local farmers, high school students and Mexican migrant farm workers to participate. “Through seed work and handling and conversations that explore historical and current traumas between these groups, there’s a lot of peacemaking and healing that can happen,” he explains.

Greene and White’s references to healing are the underpinning of the project, the painful recall of colonialism and the Trail of Tears, in which Native Americans were forced from their lands. James Beard Award–winning chef Sean Sherman, Oglala Lakota, says that Native Americans hid and sewed seeds in their clothing to protect them. “The European colonial culture had no sense of those really deep connections and stories at all,” he says.

Sherman is on a mission to revitalize and bring awareness to indigenous foods, which began when he sought to understand what his ancestors ate in the late 1800s. In his research, he discovered how unsung indigenous agriculture is, even though these seeds that are now traditional in all corners of the world changed the entire world, he says. “You see corn in its many varieties and all the different kinds of squash, beans, tobacco, sunflowers and amaranth,” he says. “So many beautiful seeds are out there.” His cookbook, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen, won a James Beard Award last year. In May, he received the group’s leadership award for his work, which includes founding the nonprofit North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems and opening a not-for-profit restaurant and training center called the Indigenous Food Lab in Minneapolis.

Squash by Hong Vo / Shutterstock

Sherman and White serve on the board of Seed Savers Exchange, the country’s largest public-access seed bank. Last year, White forged an ambitious and successful trial partnership, similar to the Native American Seed Sanctuary, between Seed Savers Exchange and her Indigenous Seed Keepers Network to return 25 seed varieties to 11 tribes in New Mexico and the Upper Midwest. Fundraising covered costs, the exchange’s farm grew seeds, and culturally sensitive guidelines, protocols and best practices were developed. More importantly, the tribes retained control of their seeds, many of which are traditional, culturally appropriate and not commercially available. This year, 20 individual varieties will be rematriated to 16 tribes across the country. White expects the effort to grow. The organizations have identified hundreds and even thousands of varieties with tribal origins found in the vaults of public institutions, seed banks, universities, seed keeper collections and elders.

“Rematriation allows Native Americans to produce foods and seeds and gain a true sense of sovereignty,” says Sherman. “This work honors the grand lineage of ancestors who kept these seeds alive despite adversity and challenges,” adds White. “It’s a renewed commitment to make sure that younger generations have them for generations to come.”

The post How Seed Saving Is Repairing a Painful Past for Native Americans appeared first on Modern Farmer.