Sustainable North Florida
Discussions with the people building a sustainable future in North Florida
Sustainable North Florida
Eartha's Farm and Market with Sarah Salvatore
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Join us as we chat with Sarah Salvatore, Farm Director of Eartha's Farm and Market, part of the Clara White Mission. Learn about the background of this important Jacksonville institution, and how the Farm is using regenerative agriculture to nourish and support the community members in this historic neighborhood.
https://www.clarawhitemission.org/earthas-farm-market
Sustainable Agriculture at Eartha's Farm
Speaker 1Welcome to Sustainable North Florida . I'm your host , Lorianne Santamaria .
Speaker 2We submitted produce samples from our site to the Bionutrient Food Association . So what we learned was that our farming practices actually produce more nutrient-dense foods , and compare it to farms that were farming conventionally .
Speaker 1Hi , welcome to Sustainable North Florida . I'm Lorianne Santamaria , chair of the Jacksonville Climate Coalition and host of the podcast . Today we're talking about a very special place in Jacksonville . Eartha's Farm and Market , which is part of the Clara White Mission , is a community leader in sustainable agriculture . At the core of their work is a dedication to providing education and access to resources for farmers and agricultural entrepreneurs . Education and access to resources for farmers and agricultural entrepreneurs yes , it's about farming . Yes , they focus on sustainable practices , but as you speak with anyone involved at Earthas , you'll quickly learn that the common passion that drives them is the desire to restore meaningful , dignified lives to those in need within their community , and sustainable agriculture is just one way in which they are doing this . My guest today is Sarah Salvatore , who is the farm director at Earthas . Sarah , welcome , thank you . So I'd like to start with your background . Can you tell us your story and what brought you to Earthas ?
Speaker 2Yeah , so I am not originally from northeast Florida , I'm actually from a small town in Ohio . I grew up in rural America , in the country . I actually lived on a farm , but we were not the farm owners . We rented the farmhouse but I was surrounded by acres and acres of corn , soybean and wheat . My dad was a fisherman , he was a deer hunter , he had a garden . I sort of just grew up around agriculture and the world and I grew up cultivating land and I grew up living this way and not knowing that it was kind of unique .
Speaker 2So when I went away to college I moved to the big city and I started studying sustainability , urban agriculture and English . I actually have a full degree in English and sociology and so when I was studying sociology I realized that cities really did not have as much access to food and agriculture as I imagined that they did . So from there I kind of took my love of growing food , my rural upbringing and my desire to have community and to bring food to the cities together . I started working in community gardens . I worked in a group home there , I worked with youth and installed a community garden there as well for the youth , and I just realized that the more I did this , the more I felt really connected with people . I felt like it was a great opportunity to not only bring food into the cities but bring that connection that I was really missing in rural America .
Speaker 2So from there , you know , I kind of delved in urban agriculture for maybe like five to seven years and then I wanted to move to the South . So I moved to Jacksonville and when I was moving here I was looking for a job and I said I would love to stay in this world of agriculture and I found Earth is Farm and Market and since then I've been here . I'm going on five year in July and I have just spent my time here really , you know , learning so much about Jacksonville and being able to do my work here for this community .
Speaker 1That's . That's really great . It really sounds like from the beginning , from the very early stages of your life and everything up until then , you've been walking this path to where you are right now .
Speaker 2Yeah , absolutely . I really think this is a dream job for me . I couldn't imagine like a better career for myself .
Speaker 1So Earth is Farmer is a program of the Clara White Mission , which was founded by Dr Eartha White . She was really a remarkable woman . Can you tell us about her ?
Speaker 2Eartha M M White . She was the daughter of Clara White . So Clara White was actually a slave and she , when slaves were free , she actually fed men and women returning from war . She fed unhoused women with children from war . She fed unhoused women with children . She used to have an old folks home , a soup pigeon model , and she adopted Eartha White . So Eartha White was Clara's 13th child and Eartha learned everything from her mother and was so inspired by the work that she did that she incorporated the Clara White mission in her mother's honor and she spent the rest of her life really following in those footsteps .
Speaker 2Eartha White started an old folks home here on the north side that's still standing today . She opened a spring fed swimming pool for the Black community on Moncrief Road . Moncrief Creek , which divides the farm , used to actually be Moncrief Springs and people were baptized in that pool and so it's a really cool story . But Irva , the land that we farm on , she actually purchased this from AL Lewis . Al Lewis was the first African-American millionaire in the state of Florida . During the big great fire downtown in Jacksonville , ertha actually went in to his business , which was the African American Business Association . She went in and saved all of his business records during this fire and as a thank you he gave her about 10 acres on the north side for pretty cheap , and this is the land that we farm today . So it's full of rich legacy . But I like to think that Ertha was a woman who did anything and everything for people . What an incredible legacy .
Speaker 1So your role is as the farm director right . So you're focused on sustainable practices in the farming that you do today . You're helping people get through and overcome some of the issues that they might have today , but you actually kind of go back in time and write some of the wrongs that have been done in the past . Can you tell us a little bit about the history of the farm ?
Speaker 2Okay , so Bertha's Farm Market . We are located on a former ash dump site which was called the Brownsfield Dump . Excederator ash was dumped on this land that we farm from the late 1940s to the mid 1950s and it sat there all the way until the early 2000s , so about 50 years this land was sitting with incinerator ash . So if you can imagine , in the late 40s until about the mid 60s , all of a sudden this bustling , really successful Black community on the north side just kind of got a lot dumped on it , literally dumped through incinerator ash . The spring was closed down as part of a water improvement plan , so a lot of businesses left , a lot of people left . They didn't want to be here anymore , and this is a story that happens all over the globe .
Speaker 2Minority communities are affected the most by environmental issues , and so we kind of deal with this very heads on . And so the EPA came to the city of Jacksonville in about 2006 with a request to clean up the dump site and then from 2010 until about 2012 , the property sort of set bank it and then our CEO wanted to create a farm here . Jacoby Pittman reached out to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection Agency and they were able to basically clear us to start the farm . We get our soil tested biannually with the EPA to make sure that we are safe to farm . I'm proud to say that the farm we are below residential standards , which means that my farm here is probably a little safer than your backyard . So we do a lot in terms of our farming practices to ensure that we do not bring up any contamination .
Speaker 1That's really remarkable to see such a transformation like that . So when all this remediation happened , I believe you guys were focusing on conventional agriculture and then at some point in time you switched towards regenerative agriculture . Can you tell us about that ?
Speaker 2Yeah . So from 2012 until about 2018 , the farm was far , very conventionally so tractors , herbicide , pesticide , chemical fertilizers . Really , the goal was just to start farming the land . But then in 2018 , jirobi Pittman , our CEO , and Alan Skinner from Soil Life Organics they got together and started to talk about how can we make this farm organic , how can we make it more environmentally friendly for the neighborhood . So Alan , with his expertise , wrote an NRCS grant . We were rewarded this grant . So this grant is a conservation and innovation grant and it focused on transforming the soil from this very conventional bare soil , I was saying . It didn't have much microbial life .
Speaker 2So Alan was specialized in thermophilic composting . He is trained under the Soil Food Web from Dr Elaine Ingram , who is one of the leading experts on microbial farming kind of techniques . She is all about increasing the microbial life in farming and agriculture and rehabilitating soils through natural processes . We do thermophilic composting , which is essentially hay and straw and wood chips and leaves , some clippings from cover crop that we grow on the farm , some horse manure that's brought in from a local horse farm , and we mix all those ingredients together in this perfect ratio and it heats up really quickly . What's really great about thermophilic composting is , those temperatures kill off pathogens , but they also increase the rate at which the materials break down . So we were able to make a lot of compost really quickly and apply it to the field .
Speaker 2So for three years we were on a research project where we did a lesson compare beds . So we would have , for example , like six sets of kale planted with just organic fertilizer and traditional compost , and then we would have six sets that didn't use much fertilizer but used a lot of thermophilic compost . And then we would compare and we found really three main things . One , the plants were much healthier and stronger and had less disease much healthier and stronger and had less disease . Two , they would produce at a much faster rate , sometimes one or two weeks sooner than the crops that were in the traditional beds .
Speaker 2And the third thing that we learned is that the beds would stay more hydrated . They would have a lot more activity , a lot more worms , a lot more bugs and less weed pressure . So this is something that we did for about three years and we were able to reduce our fertilizer use by 30% in those three years and we were able to increase our production on the farm for these techniques , and so it's something that we've since adopted . One of the practices that we adopted out of that study was also no-till farming . No-till is very important , not only for the biodiversity and the soil biology , but it was also very important because it reduced our chances of bringing up any former contaminated soils .
Speaker 1Do you have any data on the nutrients of the food that is grown ? Is that different when you use conventional methods or regular fertilizer versus what you're doing right now ?
Speaker 2We've submitted produce samples from our site , as well as soil samples , to the Bionutrient Food Association .
Speaker 2So what we learned by sending in samples was that our farming practices actually produce more nutrient-dense foods and , compared to farms that were farming conventionally , you can buy an entire clamshell of spinach from the grocery store and consume that when it has the same amount of nutrients that two or three pieces from a regenerative , sustainable farm .
Speaker 2Or even farms that were organic but still using herbicide pesticide , farms that were organic but still using herbicide pesticide , traditional fertilizers and compost .
Speaker 2So we submitted kale samples was one of the main crops we were submitting at the time , and our kale tested in the 98th percentile for antioxidants and polyphenols , compared to 3,500 samples submitted worldwide .
Speaker 2And so that's really just testimony to how important soil biology and biodiversity is in farming , and I think that is really going to be the future of nutrient density studies and increasing nutrient density in our foods is going to be this correlation between our farming techniques and the nutrient density . And I will say for me , you know , working in a nonprofit farm in a food insecure community , it is really important that every bite of food that this community eats comes from a farm that is growing in a way that is not only sustainable for their land that they live near , but also that is giving them the most nutrients that they can possibly receive . That's really important . I think often that people who are food insecure are getting the worst food honestly expired food , food that's about to go bad and really if you are the most in need in our community , you should be receiving the food that is most nutrient dense .
Speaker 1I did not realize that . There are many places where you can buy you know I'm using air quotes here organic , organic food . But the fact that it's so nutrient dense and you guys are so far ahead of everybody else in the country , that that's really quite impressive . We're lucky to have access to that resource in Jacksonville , absolutely . So you mentioned a little bit about no-till farming . Why do we usually till in general ? Why is that the standard practice ?
Speaker 2Yeah , so tilling is really born out of big agriculture . If you have 300 acres that you need to plant , the easiest method is going to be mechanical intervention . And when weed pressure is very high , you know a fallow field is full of weeds . Weed pressure is very high , you know a fallow field is full of weeds . Tilling it under , bringing up new soil , just makes it really ready to plant . Also , tilling often breaks up compaction . In many parts of the world you see heavy compaction layers through either clay or some sort of sediment , and so tilling helps bring it up , makes the soil pretty aerated and brings out any of those weeds , turns them under and kills them . So the field can be immediately planted .
Scaling Regenerative Agriculture Practices
Speaker 2The problem with tillage is it causes many issues .
Speaker 2For example , if you think of the Dust Bowl , that was primarily caused through heavy tillage . So it causes not only topsoil erosion , it causes water runoff and the more loose soil is when it doesn't have structure like roots holding it together , the more likely you're going to see that wash away . So I would say , if anything , minimize tilling . That's the way to go , and there's really a lot of innovative ways to do that . So you can tarp your soil for a period of time just to kill off the weeds . You can lay down wood shifts and mulch pretty heavy .
Speaker 2There's so many different methods . We actually here on the farm , practice high intensity planting , which means that our crops are probably two or three inches closer than typical , because therefore there's not as much surface space available for weeds to grow and for the sun to degrade the soil , so it stays nicely shady and moist and also blocks the sun from letting anything grow up in that soil . And not only does that increase the microbial life because they prefer a moist , dark condition then it also reduces that weed pressure and it's going to be your number one competitor for nutrients in the soil .
Speaker 1So I understand from what you've described the benefits of regenerative agriculture with respect to nutrient density and how you're creating this environment for the microbes that are going to be more beneficial for the plant as far as being able to have regenerative agriculture at a large scale . The two questions that I still have in my mind from what you just described was how do you address compaction ? I understood one of the reasons for tilling was compaction , and how do you address that with regenerative agriculture ? And then the other question would be the reason that the tilling is used is because it's easy and it's efficient . So how do you scale up the practices that you're talking about ?
Speaker 2So how do you deal with impaction in agriculture ? I think when you're immediately breaking ground , it is absolutely okay to use some kind of mechanical intervention like tilling , but the goal is to get rid of the habitual tilling . So the way to do that is something that I've learned , you know , working here at the farm is through cover cropping . So cover crops are a mixture of different crops and species that sort of live on land . When you're not growing a vegetable for profit , you can also grow cover crops as feed for animals . And so what cover crops do ? Which is really interesting , is that there's many varieties . So , for example , one that we use for compaction here at the farm is called the tillage radish . It's also a daikon radish , so that very long , deep-rooted radish . So when you plant those out in the field they will push themselves in and sort of loosen up that soil and aerate it , and then when they decompose they're leaving these really nice long divots . And I will say also , compaction is often solved by having a healthy microbial population . So microbes , these little organisms , and even worms population . So microbes , these little organisms and even worms , when you can go all the way up from microorganisms to worms and nails and lizards that we have here in North Florida . When they burrowing in the ground and the worms are there , they're creating channels in the earth .
Speaker 2So again , when you're tilling it , you're tilling everything and leaving it , you know , as a blank soil . It's the same thing that happens on the beaches or the sand . When you walk on the beach it's very compacted . You're not going to be able to dig down unless you have a tool in certain parts of the beach . Same thing is true . So when you're tilling and tilling and tilling , that soil actually over time will become more compacted . The more you can keep your soil alive and you can keep it full of vegetation , the more opportunity that you're going to have below the soil Because again , those microbes are going to be there creating those channels . Those roots are going to be there decomposing and when they're decomposing they're creating air holes .
Speaker 2And I would also say one of the important things too is including a lot of organic matter in your soil . The more organic matter , the less compaction you're going to have over time . So wood chips and leaf molds , anything that sort of you know , has a little bit of decomposing matter . It goes a long way . You want to prevent having just dirt you , you know , with nothing else in it that compacts very easily . Any kind of cover crop is really going to do . Work on your soil and keep it loose and then mow it down . Don't pull it up . Leave those roots on the ground and those will help create air pockets and loosen their compaction .
Speaker 1Sarah , are you familiar with Project Drawdown ? I am not . I actually love to take a look at their website anytime I'm looking at different climate solutions when I want to learn about what the actual impact might be . So they have a list of several different things that we can do as a society or as an economy to impact carbon emissions , either to help to draw down or to prevent future emissions . So if you look on their website , under regenerative annual cropping , it actually states that , if we move to the types of practices that you're talking about , there's a potential to reduce or sequester 23 gigatons of carbon emissions between now and 2050 , which is pretty substantial . You know , agriculture makes up a really big part of our carbon emissions . One of the things that I think about , though , when I hear the practices that you're talking about . I understand it for a smaller farm and some of the things I'm going to implement in my own garden , in my backyard , but how do you scale that up on a larger farm ?
Speaker 2That's a challenging question , and that is one that I sit with often , because I do believe it has to change on the large scale , because the majority of farms are hundreds of thousands of acres big . I would say a very simple method that can be incorporated immediately on any farm is cover cropping , so growing these cover crops for two or three seasons on land that may be got a lot of nutrients taken out of it from intense farming . Grow cover crop for a couple seasons , and you will see a tremendous amount of rehabilitation to the soil . And then I think also , we have to make regenerative agriculture and sustainable agriculture just as affordable as conventional farming . I will say you know , we've been farming this way since about 2018 , and I am just now seeing the payoff from that , meaning that I can stop investing so much money on this transition , and now I can start reaping the rewards .
Speaker 2And I think often farmers do not have the luxury of waiting , you know , five to 10 years for the change to happen in order for them to recoup their money that they invested .
Speaker 2So , again , this goes back to how can we incentivize farmers ? I would also argue , though , that large-scale farming is a problem of itself . Regenerative agriculture is a way that we did things before modern times that have led us to a lot of our climate crisis and a lot of our problems . So I would say a return to local food , eating locally , shopping local , supporting the development and the growth of small farms , being willing to say , hey , why don't we put some money here and see what happens ? Or , hey , why don't we grow more small farms and see if we can do this model maybe just in Jacksonville , and I think it's possible in Jacksonville let's see if we can become a sustainable local food economy and then we can scale out . There's got to be investments and buy-in from the larger community and from our community leaders , and so I think that the work we do here is very important , and to me , I always say that my work is important , but sharing my work is the most important part of what I do , because that's what's going to influence the change .
Speaker 1So it's perfect segue there , sarah . So sharing your work , if we could leave off with how people can get involved with the work that you're doing or how can they engage more with the farm , what parting thoughts do you have for our listeners ?
Speaker 2Yeah , so I would love anyone in North Florida to come visit our farm . Like I said , we have volunteering three days a week Wednesday , Friday and Saturday . We teach classes and all of these you can find on eventbritecom hours to our upcoming workshops . The first Saturday of every month is intro to organic gardening . The third Saturday of the month is always compost 101 . And then the last Saturday of the month is always a youth day , where we teach the youth everything you need to learn about agriculture . It's like a crash course for them . And then we have special events .
Speaker 2We have a fall celebration coming up this November which is going to highlight the one-year anniversary of our Farmers Market opening , as well as our founders' birthday and Veterans Day . So it's one of the major populations we serve at the Clara White Mission of Veterans . So that opportunity is going to be available to the community to come and take classes and workshops and enjoy the farm to pork dinner . So there's a lot of ways to get involved and I always tell people whether it's just coming and volunteering to give back , or spending your time getting to know your neighbors here on the north side or shopping at our farmer's market , anything you can do , make the difference and make sure that this farm can be here for years to come . With that , I will also say our market is open every Saturday .
Speaker 2We double snap benefits through partnership with Feeding Northeast Florida's Fresh Access Flux Program and so that food is here . We have about 10 to 20 other vendors who also provide agricultural goods . We have herbalists , we have a guy who makes pickled veggies , we have a juice lady , we have hot food , arts and crafts a lot of cool things happening , but I will say my final thing I always say is that you should think global and care deeply about what's happening to all of mankind , but you should really start to activate locally in your own community and what you can do here in your own neighborhood and I think that Earth is Farmer Market is an awesome opportunity for the Jacksonville community to give back and to continue this movement for years to come .
Speaker 1I absolutely agree with that . Thank you so much , sarah , for your time , and I definitely will see you this Saturday at the market . Thank you so much , sarah , for your time , and I definitely will see you this Saturday at the market . Thank you so much . Thank you for tuning into this episode . The Sustainable North Florida podcast is brought to you by the Jacksonville Climate Coalition , whose mission is to work collectively to propel equitable and proactive solutions that address the cause and effects of climate change through advocacy , education and community involvement . To learn more , follow us on social media or check out our website at wwwjaxclimateorg . Thank you .
