Shalom Farms

 

By Elena Durazo

Shalom Farms: Humanizing the Food System

“These are plants that we’re growing for other people, so please make sure you don’t eat them!” Marc Charbonier shouts, distressed, to a group of twenty-odd middle schoolers as they run around the seven-acre Northside farm.

Watching them herd the youths through rows of vegetables and away from fragile seedlings is impressive, to say the least.

Shalom has been offering field trips to Richmond Public School students for the past two years, a program that complements educational modules about nutrition, photosynthesis, or even composting.  It helps that the farm is conveniently located on the bus line.

Giving an overview to the middle schoolers about the work happening on the farm, Charbonier (right), the organization’s Volunteer and Education Coordinator, explains the larger context of historical injustice, involuntary land loss, and the global food system.

Charbonier’s goal is “to humanize the food system,” they explain with a tug on their overalls. “It’s important for [the kids] to realize there are people who grow their food, and that farmers can look many different ways.”

As a William & Mary grad, Charbonier has faced pushback from strangers and family members alike over their commitment to Shalom Farms.

“Everyone seems to want to tell me that I can do something ‘better’ than this,” Charbonier huffs. “Well, those other jobs don’t matter as much as this one does. Working to create a better food system is deeply meaningful to me.”

“We grow 200,000 pounds of food per year,” Amber Albee tells me—an astonishingly high figure. “All that with about 20 full-time staff. And thousands of volunteers, of course.”

Albee, the farm manager at Shalom’s Northside location, said that the community is key in deciding what gets planted. Current crops include blueberries, strawberries, melons, kale, cabbages, broccoli, cucumbers, eggplants, and tomatoes. The Northside location also keeps hives of bees (video, below).

These 200,000 pounds of organic produce are distributed throughout communities Shalom has partnered with via their Mobile Market, a produce distribution program on wheels.

Shalom goes to great lengths not to crowd out smaller, local, profit-driven farms, Albee said. They don’t grow all the produce sold in their mobile market, for example, choosing instead to source those items from farmers of color in the area.

“Of course, we want to grow nutrient-rich food that will work for our labor force, but ultimately, we’re responding to community needs, so we work a lot through trial and error. “

Shalom’s strategy of responding to community needs doesn’t just apply to decisions about crop rotations, Albee said. Its work is done in the hopes that one day, the food system will be fixed and the organization will be obsolete.

“Obviously, we don’t want the community to have to rely on us, but we intend to exist as long as the need persists,” says Erin Lingo, Shalom’s Director of Programming.

“Food insecurity is a complex issue, impacted by poverty and racism and environmental injustice, which aren’t exactly things we can [cure with] our mobile market,” Lingo explains.

“The more anti-poverty work we can do with racial equity and justice, the better we can address the issue at the root,” she says, alluding to Shalom’s partner organizations such as the Richmond Food Justice Alliance, Mutual Aid Disaster Relief (MADRVA), and RVA Community Fridges.

The collective approach among these food justice colleagues is to cover as much ground as possible by working together.

“If someone is fulfilling a need in an area better than we can, we don’t need to be there,” Erin tells me.

As a nonprofit, Shalom is also well situated to fill gaps in the food system that others cannot.

“We’re not profit-driven, so we’re able to avoid a lot of the pitfalls of the NGO world that come from letting the business model infiltrate your operation.”

Shalom receives over 30% of its funding from individual donors and just 10% from sales, an unusual ratio in the nonprofit world. This unorthodox model reflects the organization’s commitment to operating outside the standard model.

“What we’re running is not a charity,” Lingo says. “Charity has its place, but we aim to help people build resilience by providing them a dignified experience of buying affordable, high-quality, fresh food.

“The people in the communities we work with are so much more than this reductive sliver of someone who’s food insecure,” Erin states. “They’re joyful, brilliant, and compassionate, and experience challenges along with successes, just like all of us.”

“We subsidize the growing of healthy produce so that people can buy fresh food at prices that make sense for them. That’s the whole reason we exist.”