Drumlin Community Garden

Here's a beautiful and timely letter from Rich Eggleston followed by several others on the same important topic. For more information about Drumlin Community Garden, check out their website here. -- Terry

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Date: November 3, 2008
To: Elected officials and planning staff
From: Rich Eggleston, Fitchburg

Much of Fitchburg's celebration of 25 years as a city has focused on our strong rural roots, and as we contemplate our next quarter century, it behooves us to consider how to combine the best of our urban future with the lessons of our rural past.

One way to do that is to bring agriculture, even on a small scale, to families that otherwise might not enjoy the rewards and frustrations that come with tilling the soil. And I can't think of any program that is better at that than Drumlin Community Garden.

The northeast corner of Fitchburg has been an issue since before we were a city, and maybe that's a good thing, because we know more about what we've gained -- and lost -- through development than we did in the 1980s.

Maybe we're learning that every spot that brings us closer to our rural past is special.

Drumlin Community Garden is one such place.

It comprises more than 40 families working together to provide roughly 1.5 acres divided into family-size garden plots rented out on a sliding-scale basis, and two acres of larger plots managed cooperatively where crops are grown for the South Madison Farmers Market and local restaurants, all of it managed in an environmentally responsible fashion that's about as organic as can be.

Besides hands-on experience in sustainable, small-scale urban agriculture, the garden partners with neighborhood organizations to educate families and youngsters in sustainable food production, and offers workshops in some of our rural traditions like composting, canning and making meals from scratch.

Drumlin Community Garden isn't just a "commercial zone" on a land-use map. It's a doorway to our rural past. It's a very special place.

Preserve Existing Gardens

Submitted by: John Fournelle and Judith Munaker, Fitchburg
November 3, 2008

Dear Planning Commission

We would urge you NOT to change the Southdale/Rimrock Neighborhood's zoning to "commercial" status.

In this time of growing difficult economic conditions, it is becoming increasingly obvious that we should not necessarily rely upon food coming from long distances -- which assumes low transportation costs. The day may not be far away when food grown locally will be considered absolutely essential, rather than an idiosyncrasy of a minority of citizens. Thus, zoning away a local community garden and replacing it with asphalt and luxury hotel rooms, is nuts.

Rather, if anything, you should instead insert language to "preserve existing gardens" with specific mention of Drumlin Community Garden located at 2849 Oregon Road. The decision to eliminate one of Wisconsin's first organic urban garden projects, now supplying healthy food to forty families, should not be made without exploring all the options available. We owe it to ourselves and our children to save all the urban farmland that we can.

Fantastic Opportunity

Here's an excerpt from another letter regarding Drumlin Garden. -- Terry

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Submitted by: Shannon Day, Fitchburg
November 3, 2008

Dear Fitchburg Officials,

... I feel that City Planners are missing a fantastic opportunity here in Fitchburg. We can preserve Drumlin Community Garden and work within the confines of current neighborhoods to make Fitchburg great. We should PROMOTE the gardens and the community it represents and be smarter about using surrounding land to promote the long-term health of greater Fitchburg!

Proposed Development a 'Homebuilding Debacle'

Jan. 10, 2008 Letter to the Editor, Fitchburg Star
By Gary Leverington / Resident of Fitchburg

(Emphasis added)

I'm writing again to express concern about the proposed NE neighborhood plan. It is my hope that sensible leadership will prevail at the City Council to once and for all put a stake in the plans to turn the NE neighborhood area into a massive homebuilding debacle.

I ask all members of our community to consider where we are in the real estate cycle and vigorously oppose the NE neighborhood being turned into additional houses (and lots for sale) that we do not need and most citizens do not want.

More importantly, there are a plethora of valid environmental reasons to put a stop to turning the NE neighborhood area into paved roads and houses that just add to the oversupply of homes and lots for sale in Fitchburg. Creating a huge new supply of houses here will also place additional downward pressure on existing home values in Fitchburg.

To take land that could be used for organic farming, teaching and organic retail - with the ability to provide good quality food for those that live here now, and those that will come after us - and turn it into another grouping of paved roads, over fertilized lawns (with pesticides), and more houses is beyond irresponsible.

As for developers of new houses - once they've already acquired the land, asking them if we need more new houses is like asking the owner of a shoe store if it's a good time to buy shoes.

Let's request that our community leaders maintain control over what's in the best interest of the community. Adopting a people over profits theme.

As an alternative, perhaps the developer can come up with a plan for an organic farming village that can be a shining legacy for future generations - not just here, but for the entire area! Just imagine how popular this would be for the growing number of people seeking healthy, locally grown, organic food products! What a wonderful and beneficial legacy to leave to our children!

Consider the following: Mortgage performance has suffered: An alarming 5.6% of the nation's homeowners have fallen behind on their mortgage payments — up from roughly 4.7% a year earlier and the most since 1986. The percentage of homes in any stage of foreclosure has jumped to 1.7%, the highest since the Mortgage Bankers Association began tracking it in 1972.

According to some estimates, as many as 2.2 million homeowners could lose their houses over the next 24 months!

We've already seen the price of an American home lose 6.1% from a year ago, according to the well-respected research group S&P/Case-Shiller. The Census Bureau shows the price of new homes down even more — 13% in October, the sharpest drop in 37 years. Lending standards have also tightened so fewer would-be buyers can qualify for loans - this also adds to downward pressure on home prices. More supply with fewer buyers is supply and demand 101!

I fully expect more declines in 2008. Home values will likely fall by the mid-single digits nationwide, and more in select markets. For those that think Fitchburg is immune from a downturn - just ask the people in Florida that bought condos at the top of the market and now owe way more than their homes are worth. They too felt they were immune from a downturn. Let's not allow Fitchburg to become overbuilt and place our home values at risk!

For our community leaders, I know it's difficult to resist the temptation to accommodate developers, but in the example of the NE neighborhood plan in particular, denying approval is quite obviously the right thing to do for our wonderful community.

Calling All Localvores

Localvore -- A person committed to eating foods grown within their local food shed. (No, not a building!)

In case you haven't already heard about this, here's an event to seriously consider that was sent to me by a Sustain Dane Board Member (http://www.sustaindane.org/). What better way to support your local producers/growers and reduce your carbon footprint to boot? --- Terry

Eat Local Challenge – a 10-day challenge for you – and your organization

Join us in the challenge of eating locally for 10 days in September.
Fresh, locally grown food doesn’t just taste delicious, it can be better for our health, for our communities, for the Earth. When we eat locally grown food we support local farmers and our own community. The challenge is to have at least 10% of our food be local during the 10 days September 14 - 23. Go to http://www.cias.wisc.edu/eatlocal to register or for more information.

The challenge is to spend 10% of your food budget on locally grown or produced food during the 10 days from Friday, September 14 through Sunday, September 23.

What is “local”?

Buy food that is grown or produced as close to your home as possible. It could be from your own garden. Or it could be from your local Farmer’s Market. For the purposes of this Eat Local Challenge we are counting any food from Wisconsin or within 100 miles of your home as local.

Local also includes foods prepared or processed by locally owned companies or restaurants, preferably from locally grown ingredients.

Eggleston's Review of "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle"

From Rich Eggleston (emphasis added by Terry):

I recently picked up Barbara Kingsolver's book, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life," a back-to-our-roots look at industry-driven, petroleum and other chemical based agriculure, that shakes its head at how far America has been led down a path chosen by the agribusiness community, not a bunch of people you'd want your kids associating with.

The book explores how Americans in particular have chosen Big Macs over shepherd's pie, and in the course of doing so we've brought down on ourselves all kinds of health problems. If you want to know what health problems, read the book. They're too depressing to repeat here.

By focusing on a family's year-long adventure away from America's bad food habits, the book somehow avoids being overly judgmental and preachy. It's evangelical, true, but the evangelizing is below the surface of a narrative that flows from asparagus to zucchini, a time for every vegetable under heaven.

Being by nature a political beast who is losing my patience with a lot of today's policies that seem to cater to Wall Street instead of Elm Street, I tend to look for the villains lurking behind the gingham curtains in the kitchen.

And I find them aplenty: the folks who not only took the bread out of bread (replacing it with air), but the taste out of tomatoes and the nutrition out of a host of factory-farmed plants and animals. Kingsolver calls the chain of events "The Case of the Murdered Flavor."

When our friends in agribusiness were through murdering flavor and neutering nutrition, they put the result in microwaveable containers and added enough chemicals to give any particular food a shelf life approximating the half life of radium.

This enabled them to put farmers on an economic treadmill, running as fast as they can to stay in place so they can barely afford higher pesticide and chemical fertilizer costs. Only 19 cents of every food dollar ends up in the farmer's pocket, according to an aside on page 208 of the book.

No wonder farmers are hurting. The government responds by directing nearly three-quarters of farm subsidies to corn and soybean producers, who produce animal food, not people food, the book notes. The subsidies total some $80 billion a year when you factor in transportation, according to Kingsolver's husband, Steven L. Hopp, who provided some of the grim statistics.

Ain't this a great country? And I still have two pages of the notes I wrote on the book to sift through. I'm somewhat proud to have written this junior diatribe (The Fitchburg Star will get the fullblown version) after having eaten a true locavore's supper: lamb chops purchased at the farmer's market in Phillips yesterday and corn from a little ways down Highway 13. The green beans came from Michigan, though. All brought to Dane County at the end of a glorious week in the northwoods.

I somehow escaped tomatoes from our garden in Fitchburg, but I'm sure I'll have to pay for my sin of omission.

Rich Eggleston

Take the Local Produce Pledge

I found this reminder of how important it is to buy locally grown food on the New American Dream website. This month's Carbon Conscious Consumer (C3) pledge is "Buy 1 Pound of Locally Grown Food a Week." Why? "Because 'going local' is a small step that can lead to big change. Food in the U.S. typically travels 1500 miles and the transportation of conventional food generates five to 17 times more carbon emissions than food grown locally."

After reading the pledge, my first thought was that I wouldn't have to do anything different this week because we are already harvesting more than a pound per person from our garden. But, then I realized that since many of us are fortunate enough to be in this position, it's all the more reason to go beyond the "letter of the law" and embrace the spirit of the pledge. So, I am choosing to take additional steps to reduce food transportation miles and build a stronger local economy this month (and every month).

My pledge: To purchase an extra pound of [insert locally available food item here] at the Fitchburg Farmers' Market each Thursday. I will also connect with some local growers to obtain food each week throughout the winter or to stock up by preserving local foods ahead of time. (See the MACSAC website for info about sharing in the local harvest.)

If each Fitchburger (or Fitchburgian for my vegetarian friends) took the pledge, a mere one pound a week per person reduction in food shipped from California would total over 10 tons of food products each and every week that wouldn't be traveling cross-country!

Less traffic. Less noise. Less road maintenance. Less foreign oil. Less carbon emissions. More money recirculating in the local food/farm economy. More beautiful gardens. More friendships between growers and eaters. Pick your benefit.

Let's take our pies off the freeways and put them back into the sky where they belong!

I need your help. What changes could you make to replace one pound of food each week for each person in your household with locally grown food?