Mark Tollefson

Mark Tollefson

Executive Director, The Center for Urban Agriculture at Fairview Gardens

“It makes things much simpler if we focus energy in one direction…We are really clear about our mission.”

Erin and Maddy: I’m Erin Ristig, a Claremont McKenna student studying Environmental Analysis. I’m Maddy Stein, a Claremont McKenna student studying Government. We are interested in hearing about your background in bringing about local change. We were wondering what your most important initiatives and challenges are in doing so.

 

Erin: How many years have you been at Fairview Gardens?

 

Mark: 5 years.

 

Erin: We’ve read that you’ve done work in the Wilderness Youth Project and some work in Belize in management positions.

 

Mark: Yes.

 

Erin: In the past, there were issues on the farm with the surrounding community and city regulation. What was your experience with overcoming those obstacles?

 

Mark: There are a few ways to answer that question. We are a non-profit education farm. There is an old boy scout saying; having lost their way, they doubled their effort. Another important saying, referring to financial aid, is a lack of planning on their part does not constitute an emergency on my part. Those two things said, I look at when community engagement was an issue. I don’t mean to be critical of the management at the time. The management was an indicator of a lack of outreach to the community. We’re a non-profit so we’re here to serve our community. If we’re at odds with our community, then I question whether the service is really there. The exception to that is when there’s an organization and people don’t understand what it’s offering. Then that’s more of a question of restructuring. I’ve focused on how we best serve our community. We’ve looked through the community lens to understand problems like permitting issues. We’ve gone to our neighbors and said, we want good relations with you, how can we best do that? In permaculture, the problem is the solution. In the past, there has been conflict with the city of Goleta. I went to the city of Goleta and told them that we’re written into their city plan. I went to the city and asked them how we can make it work. As opposed to an adversarial relationship, I want to be an ally. We’re all people. We all have dreams, hopes, and ambitions. We all want to live in safe neighborhood. We need to recognize that we have the same needs.

 

Erin: As a leader on the farm, how do you form supportive relationships with neighbors and the city? Is it formal or informal networking?

 

Mark: It’s a multi-pronged approach. In one way, I’m deliberate by going into the city of Goleta and talking to the Director of Planning and Development. Another way is by getting city council members to walk the farm and tell them what’s happening here and asking for their support. In any municipal setting, typically, there are three minutes for public comments. It became abundantly clear to me that when someone goes into a meeting like that, the decision has already been made.

We fundraised enough to build the farm again and make the farm stand the face of the farm. People didn’t know what was happening here. Reopening gave us a face in the community. There was the ability to have clear and open communication whether it was through gardening classes or other programs. That’s been a huge success of getting the stand open. Our education programs are also a part of the success. We could stop growing food tomorrow and no one’s going to starve to death. In the bigger future, we should consider the 2,000 school kids who come here and all of the kids and adults who come for other programs. It’s an opportunity for families to connect to the land. That’s where communities start. The focus and the community building comes with the education programs, which have been the crown jewel of what we do. There are 300 kids in summer camps. Our after school programs are full. We teach adults how to re-skill themselves, like in a sourdough bread-making class. We built wood-fired ovens, and they made pizza with the sourdough. There’s a secret sauce to building community. There are 3 ingredients: food, music, and ceremony. Getting people together is really powerful. We’ve had different musical events at the farm. Ceremonially, we have a fall festival. It’s a common thing around the world. Having some sort of ceremony for summer and winter solstice are helpful in terms of what we can do for our goal of serving the community. Another thing is getting all of our permitting issues solved. We’re down to our last one. We’ll have it solved by the middle of 2015. Then we have no outstanding issues with the city.

 

Maddy: hat is key for engaging youth within the programs?

 

Mark: It’s simple. I could sell drugs to kids or build a hockey rink. But what’s the purpose or the function? Can you rethink your question?

 

Maddy: Focusing on instilling a deeper purpose, what is the ultimate goal for the programs?

 

Erin: I know one of the goals is getting kids in touch with the land. How do you sustain what their learning for the future?

 

Mark: What does sustainability mean?

 

Erin: In the context of the farm, it would be that the purposes of the farm are sustained into the future regardless of who’s running it or other challenges.

Mark: Sustainability is one of those words that has had the life sucked out of it without a lot of real understanding. A lot of farms talk about being sustainable. A lot of farmers abandon their social lives and focus entirely on farming. Is there lifestyle really sustainable? My suspicion is no. I see that a lot when farmers borrow the land then go into debt; they say they know it’s good work, but it wears down on them. In 8 or so years, they’re done. It hasn’t been sustainable for them. I look to big picture sustainability. Are we being sustainable for the land? If we design social structures correctly, people will keep coming. We have to branch out to look at our whole community. How is what we’re doing here at the farm upholding sustainability?   Let’s come back to the programs: Where is the value? Occupational therapists have focused on vestibular systems. Children today have issues with their vestibular systems. They have come up with this idea to make kids walk from rock to rock by taking rocks out of the creek. They’re patting themselves on the back. I think they should take the rocks back to the creek. They’re not giving kids what they really need. How do we get there? We’re not that impressive as a species. Bears or wolves have better adaptation than we do. We have the most prolific species, relatively speaking. Our senses are designed to keep us connected to the natural world. The way we’re headed today does not give the younger generation the skills for long-term survival. We find places where people live closer to the earth.

When you go out in the forest, if you see a bird call, people turn, they’re not screaming and yelling. People are paying attention to what’s going on the forest. The Bushwicks in the Kalahari Desert have a simple way of developing awareness: lions have eaten a lot of Bushwicks. So Bushwicks learned to be aware because their lives depended on it. We’re not designed to be looking at walls and electronic devices. There’s a book called Biology Transcendence, which talks about a study done at the German Institute of Psychology. They tested the same age group over 20 years. They tested kids to see how many shades of primary colors they could distinguish. Kids lost two thirds of the ability to discern primary colors over time. That says we have lost our ability to discern subtly. How can we conduct ourselves if we don’t know how to discern subtleties? I look at the programs we run, and we are teaching them to discern subtleties. The gross story, not meaning terrible, but like how eggs don’t come from a carton. I have many stories of kids asking questions such as why are the carrots in the dirt. Those are big picture stories that we do get. It’s great for me to tell stories because they’re so evident that they’re jarring. There are so many more subtleties. We have kids running around barefoot. Don’t tell my insurance company. It’s great for them to run through gravel and not stop. Other kids can’t do it. Kids who have a strong connection to nature are better leaders, more resilient, healthier, smarter, and more balanced. So what’s the balance? The occupational therapists are only treating a symptom. Parents know their kids. They notice the spark in their kids in our programs. They have ability to play and live in the moment. They say, I don’t know how you do what you’re doing, but I want more of it.

 

Erin: In terms of economic sustainability of the farm, one of your goals was to make it self-reliant on its own revenue without outside funding sources. Can you speak to that?

 

Mark: There’s an old saying. If you want to make a million dollars farming, start with two million. Farming is not very lucrative. We have to look at the economics of agriculture in a very challenging market. Farmers have to go to 12 markets a week to make same money they made at three 20 years ago. We have to think about what the cutting edge of agriculture is. The demise of Blockbuster is a parallel story. A guy came into Blockbuster to drop a movie off, 3 weeks later he had a $50 fine. He started Netflix, and Blockbuster is no longer here. They started online streaming. They’re making a statement that Blockbuster missed the boat in terms of the changes of technology. What does Netflix have to do to stay on the cutting edge? Farming is no different. What’s the changing niche and need? I don’t feel like I have that all figured out. One of the cutting edge techniques is having food that it’s way different than the past. Remineralizing the soil occurs when a volcano erupts. Likewise, the overall health of the soil is important. The ratio is 4-17 pounds of topsoil, that’s the lost ratio. People don’t really talk about this. I saw an article last week. We only have a certain number of years left. We don’t have any soil left. That article was the first in the mainstream to talk about it. If you go on Google Earth and look at the Gulf of Mexico, that topsoil is washed off in the Mississippi River. There’s severely depleted nutrients. Food doesn’t have the same nutritional quality. Another culprit is the institutional factory farming. Tomatoes are a dramatic example. Large-scale farms don’t harvest ripe tomatoes. At the grocery story, you think you’re going to splurge. I do a test on the food. For example the measure of carbohydrates relates to amount of sugars. If you have enough sugar to make wine, look for that. I test for this as well. On my tomatoes, I wanted to test the ones I bought at the grocery store and compared to my tomatoes. It was a very simple test, after 3 times. Von’s tomatoes have never tested higher than 1, my tomatoes test around a 12. That’s an indicator the available nutrition. There are orders of magnitude of more nutrition in my tomatoes. My joke is buy my vegetables, you’ll have to eat less. If you look at people who have autoimmune issues like thyroid or diabetes, what we’re doing to treat is insufficient because we haven’t cured it. It’s really about what we should be eating. If you talk to Chinese doctors, when plums are ripe, people eat a lot of plums. Historically, we didn’t have the ability to store and fly in plums from Argentina. When plums became ripe, everyone ate a lot of plums. The health benefits of plums coincided with health problems that come up this time of year. On the broader perspective, I’ve been looking again to see what are the needs of the community we serve. Sustainability has to go beyond soil, especially if we’re working ourselves to death. Financial sustainability is important too. We’re looking to diversify our programs so that one program alone can provide income if other’s fail. We’re looking to diversify our income. I could have a graveyard here, but that’s not in our vision. By not doing fundraising, I’m taking away people’s opportunity to be involved. Humans are generous by nature. We feel gratitude as the giver. I want to give people that opportunity as well to support us financially.

 

Maddy: When you were talking about changing the nature of the farm, how do you balance the need to change with any resistance to change?

 

Mark: Where does resistance to change come from? The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over again. It’s really in education. Here’s what’s happening in agriculture. Getting to the point where it’s self-evident of how we need to change helps people deal with resistance to change. It’s also about helping people see that change meets people’s needs. That can be done through really good communication.

 

Maddy: How do you think your farm fits in with other local initiatives? Has there been information-sharing?

 

Mark: There is still a lot to be done in terms of what organizations like ours have to offer. What we have offered is pretty valuable even for people just to find support here. Families can come to the farm any time they want. Houses, churches, and schools surround us. People can walk around the field, hang under the trees, and spend time with the chickens. There are reminders of how we used to live. I received a call from a company that’s a global landscape design firm. They didn’t know anything about urban agriculture. The city of El Monte had put out a request for proposal for an urban agriculture project.   It’s a city with a high immigrant population and violence. If you look around the city, there is no place for people to spend time outside, bike, or walk. People need to get outside to build communities. Going back to the secret sauce of building community. El Monte knew they had a high immigrant population. Most of them have a real experience growing food. How do you integrate that within the urban setting? The message I give to people now is that starting a farm is nothing special. That’s not that hard. Where we provide value is by providing opportunities for communities to flourish. Society has eliminated our understanding in the world. Someone could grow great peaches, and I could say, I can just get peaches at whole foods. In traditional times, the worst thing to do to people was to excommunicate them from the tribe. The only way to live was to pool our resources. The idea of having an abundant fruit tree was something for everyone to share. The way we live is the antithesis of that. We need to find ways to build resilient communities. One of the ways we can do that is by having people connect back to the land. People start to fall in love with each other. We don’t all have to be Democrats and Christians. This country is born on the idea of a cultural melting pot. For a very long time, that was true. Now we’re starting to specialize. You can find a left-handed optometrist who plays golf on Thursdays. We don’t recognize and celebrate differences. When we aggregate ourselves, typically in religion and politics, we tend to move to areas with more Democrats. The only way to stand out is to be more liberal. When I was a kid, kids biking together would look up to the most daring kid. People now look for extreme qualities. Without diversity that comes from a resilient community, we tend to spread farther to the edges and we lose the center ground. Look at our senate. It has 13% approval. No one likes what happens in our government. We’re sick of Obama, but no one will like the next president either. It’s got to start on a community level. It’s got to start with places like Fairview Gardens. We can bring people together and recognize that resiliency has to start with the inside out. As an elder says, the small seed of government is family fire. Until we have healthy family fires, we cannot have healthy civic fires, at the county, state, and national levels. If we can bring families together on the farm, people start to recognize each other and look at each other. I see parents who are very tense and kind of barking on their kids. I also see parents relaxed, smiling, holding hands. If we can do that well enough and enough times, where people continually run into each other, We came to a gardening class, both shop at farm stand. People can become closer.

 

Maddy: How do you balance getting enough resources for community and having enough revenue, particularly with the El Monte example?

 

Mark: We charge for our summer programs. Frankly, we are in an affluent area. As far as the advocacy, that money has to come from fundraising. Having our farm stand is another way to bring money in. It’s not easy. I think it’s better that our team understands what our mission is. Another way to look at this is how do we do one thing really well? All the other things need to be done. They don’t need to be done by me. When we focus on that one thing we can do well, the thing we do well is build community and educate children. It makes things much simpler if we focus energy in one direction. If you are going to run a marathon, you’re going to run. We are really clear about our mission. It makes it much easier for people to support in terms of financial support and wanting to sign up for our programs.