Soil Born Farm

Since our time in Napa, we've been to an urban farm in Sacramento followed by Redwoods State and National Parks. We're now in Grants Pass, OR, and will be here for a few more days before heading north to Washington.

We had the pleasure of spending a week working with a crew of dedicated volunteers, apprentices, and full time employees at the Soil Born Farms Urban Agriculture Project in Sacramento. The mission of Soil Born Farms is to "create an urban agriculture and education project that empowers youth and adults to discover and participate in a local food system that encourages healthy living, nurtures the environment and grows a sustainable community." The farm runs a 60 member community supported agriculture (CSA) project, sells produce to stores, operates a farm stand, and has a Youth Corps program in which local youth earn a wage and build a solid work ethic in exchange for a few hours of work a day on the farm, among many other projects.

The CSA program provides fresh, seasonal produce from the farm for local residents every week. The program works like this: a family chooses to purchase a share in the CSA and pays an upfront amount of $570 in May for 26 weeks of food, or $483 in November for 22 weeks of food (approximately $22/week); the money paid to the farm early in the season helps to cover operating costs and splits the inherent risks and potential bounty between grower and purchaser; and each week, the shareholder picks up their box of produce from one of three locations. While we were working with Soil Born, we had a chance to help with the harvesting and packing of produce into the CSA boxes and we were amazed with how much food each share got for $22 a week.

A CSA box in the making.

The farm is an oasis in the middle of an urban area. The farm is situated adjacent to a park, a parkway, and a residential area and is surrounded nearly entirely by trees and wildlife. Many of the apprentices and Youth Corps members talked about how easy it was to forget that the city of Rancho Cordova lay just beyond the border of the farm. The fact that the farm raised chickens, sheep, milking cows, and a pig served to enhance that feeling. On our first morning of work, we watched the farm manager hand-milk one of the cows--she produces two and a half gallons of milk a day--and then went into the fields to harvest tomatoes, while chickens ran down the rows.

Bounty from the farm critters

Sheep surrounding a plum tree, catching dropped fruit harvested by Jared


Piggy.


Rows of veggies, irrigated with drip tape

Our one week stay (the farm limits WWOOFing visits to one week, once a month) was a great experience. We had a chance to learn what it takes to run a 25 acre market farm and had our first opportunity to work in a non-profit, educational setting as well as our first opportunity to work with a CSA program--something we're doing at our current farm in Grants Pass, OR and at our next farm in Long View, WA. We will be posting about those farms in the near future.