"Peace Farm?" "No, PEAS Farm." "I'd say the first name works."

The land on which the PEAS Farm sits is owned by the City of Missoula and Missoula County Public Schools. But someone whose name I didn’t catch advised their previous owner to make it impossible for them to pull the rug from under you, in other words, establish your presence so strongly that it would be labyrinthic (extremely difficult) for any stakeholder to extricate (remove) the farm from the land without harming the community. So the PEAS Farm set off to construct buildings like the barn, bring in people from the community like Kayla and many students from UM, and plant trees. Audrey Hepburn said, “To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.” And so the PEAS Farm went ahead and planted gardens, sowing seeds in Missoula’s tight-knit community, and was eventually granted a 40-year lease––a victory!

So what does the PEAS Farm do for Missoula’s community? In a nutshell: nurture a sense of community and purpose in volunteers, apply scientific principles to increase real-life food access in the community, and support local farmers.

(1) Their main volunteer activity is having students work on the farm and bring home produce, while concomitantly growing food for Food Bank and The Poverello Center that provides food, shelter, and help for the homeless and hungry in Missoula, donating about 15,000 pounds of food per year to these centers of aid for the indigent (needy).

(2) They also facilitate Community Supported Agriculture (CSA): the process of farming is often costly in the beginning and farmers who lack the capital to buy seeds and equipment at the start cannot fulfil the potential of their land and labour. Thus, PEAS Farm gets the community to chip in and financially support the farmers’ inputs, and they get paid off during harvest. In a way, they purchase a weekly subscription of fresh produce they can collect at the farm.

(3) Sometimes they set up farmers’ markets in senior citizen homes where produce is sold at reduced prices. This way, senior citizens can buy fresh, local, and healthy produce, increasing their access to nourishing and cheap food, while the interactions between youth volunteers and seniors benefits both parties.

(4) Farm-to-School for second graders gets the children of Missoula to understand, from a young age, where their food comes from and to understand their part and responsibility in food supply chains. From their tender age, such an experience sears into their brains that their consumption derives from somewhere that they now know first-hand, prompting them to understand their part in supply chains and to act with greater caution in consumption practices.

We then received a farm tour and began in the fruit orchard. Why are there so few apples on the trees? First off, when bears and humans come into contact, it is often the bears that are endangered because humans react to potential physical threats with weapons that could seriously hurt or kill them. Grizzlies are a threatened species, and the farm wants to protect breeding sows in particular. As a result, they pick the apples off their trees in a process called gleaning to make sure the orchard doesn’t attract any bears, for the sake of the bears, so they are not around to be hurt by our responses to their presence.

We amble to plots of corn, squash, and kale. There were questions about GMO but I’m certainly not as qualified as other YSEALI Fellows to speak about this––please add in the comments if you have anything to share! What I did hear, however, was that our speaker had no strong opinion of GMO’s health effects on human health and was much more concerned about their effect on farmers. Oftentimes farmers who plant GMO varieties have to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to pay companies for GMO seeds, whereas traditional agricultural practices often involves saving seeds every harvest for the next year. Hence she argues that the real damage is to the farmer, not consumer. She also described various lawsuits where non-GMO and GMO varieties mix due to wind dispersal, adding that the patenting of seeds was an interesting topic. You can tell from the vagaries of my words here that I’m not confident of my notes in this portion, so please share anything you recorded!

Apropos of water, a topic many Fellows are interested in––they use an interesting technique where they tape water tubes to the soil so that water is fed directly to the crops, saving water and preventing the watering of weeds simultaneously. A win-win! I asked about where their water comes from and she said they have water rights on Rattlesnake Creek, and mountain and creek water is directly delivered through pipes to the farm, whereas rainwater collection comprises a marginal proportion of their water resources.

Now for soil fertility! This section was where I gleaned the freshest insights. 2 methods to increase soil fertility: composting and cover cropping. The finale of our tour was visiting their composting mounds, composed of brown material like sawdust, straw, dead plant material without water; and green material like fallen leaves and old plants. These turn into humus, consisting many nutrients that improve soil fertility. “If you stick your hand into one of our compost piles, it’d feel really warm.” Why? Because of all the biological activity of decomposition occurring.

Their second method, cover cropping, was something I’d never heard of before. They plant certain crops not for sale or subsistence, but strictly for increasing the nutrient content of the soil. One example is the hairy vetch from the pea family––famous for being nitrogen fixers. Nitrogen is crazy important! And hairy vetch germinates quickly, which means it outcompetes weeds and shades soil to prevent dehydration. Another example is sorghum sudangrass which is simply left to decompose into organic material (OM). I took a module on soil science before: OM possesses nutrients, but more importantly, it binds soil particles into aggregates. In soil structure, aggregates are critical –– they are the groups of soil particles that bind together strongly so that they can resist degradation by water and wind erosion, shrinking and swelling processes, and tillage. And the pores between aggregates greatly increase the soils’ capacity to uptake and hold water and nutrients.

In an era of climate change, reducing our use of chemical fertilisers to nullify nitrous oxide emissions is very important. Composting and cover cropping are thus organic means by which to improve soil fertility. We ended our visit to the PEAS Farm picking green, royal burgundy, and dragon’s tongue varieties of beans, in addition to sticking bean leaves on our clothes and being fascinated at how they cling to fabric. Beans and lettuce seeds are easy to save, so the PEAS Farm saves them to exchange with other Garden City Harvest farms.

Aren't we cool?

Only we really ended our visit taking boomerangs on the swings and I very distinctly remember Ivan shouting “Xin Huuuuui!” from the benches and impersonating my mother. I remember, too, Lily accompanying me to the toilet and us talking on the way back about our shared dream of having a small farm when we’re older that we can eat from but also have some produce to sell. Ivan and Lily, I miss you two very much, this post is for you!

For more information: https://www.gardencityharvest.org/peas-farm

(4 September 2019)