From the Ground Up

When David Cooke started promoting a new program called Grow Appalachia to help people in Appalachian states and counties grow their own healthy produce, some residents were a bit skeptical and thought it might be too good to be true.

At no cost, they could simply come to a designated site to pick up plants, seeds, gardening tools, fertilizers and organic pesticides, and attend gardening classes to learn how to put them all to use? Was there a catch?

Cooke is director of the Grow Appalachia program based in Berea, a small central Kentucky college town. But even he has had occasional moments of disbelief.

“This is one of those programs that never should have happened,” he said. “It sounds funny when I put it that way. This was not a deliberate goal on anybody’s part.”

Perhaps even more surreal is the fact that the program is funded by self-made billionaire and haircare mogul John Paul DeJoria, founder of Paul Mitchell Systems. Dejoria and his senior vice president of training and development, Tommy Callahan, who grew up in Harlan County, Kentucky, decided in 2009 to help the Appalachian region Callahan knew so well to become more food secure through empowerment. They reached out to Berea College for help.

Berea College is different from most, and Cooke said he doesn’t believe Grow Appalachia would’ve succeeded anywhere else. The 163-year-old private liberal arts college charges no tuition and enrolls students from across Appalachia and elsewhere who agree to work on campus in exchange for their education. 

Berea College’s philosophy fits right in with Grow Appalachia’s mission, Cooke said, and officials there agreed to have the program on campus and to assist with pre-planning. 

Cooke, who’d graduated from Berea in 1982, was conveniently poised for the role, as he also serves as director of the Appalachian Fund at Berea, which supports organizations working to improve the health, education and general welfare of people living in the Appalachian Mountains region.

He was previously the program coordinator of Entrepreneurship for the Public Good, and also worked as a shop teacher and for county extension programs years ago. He’s had a strong interest in helping people improve their eating habits to combat ailments that greatly impact health, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity.

Cooke said he didn’t pattern the program after any other, and had the flexibility to design the program as he wished. He conducted his own research, traveling far and wide to consult with others overseeing successful community gardening programs. DeJoria liked Cooke’s initial proposal and said he’d mail him a check. 

Ten days later, the program had $150,000 in the bank.

With its new ‘seed money’ in hand, Grow Appalachia began in four counties in eastern Kentucky that were deemed to need the help. A movement was born with the goal of helping as many families grow as much of their own food as possible by providing the supplies and knowledge to make it happen.

Grow Appalachia partners with rural nonprofits in the areas served, Cooke said, because these organizations know the residents and their needs, how to reach them, and how to generate maximum response. To gauge success, participants are required to track their harvests. The partnering sites provide Grow Appalachia with that data.

Though there’s no income requirement, many participants are in lower income households, Cooke said.

“We see everybody as being the same in this program,” he said.

Each site has a garden tractor for participants to use. Gardens can be established at participants’ homes if enough land is available, and in other instances community gardens are created by schools and community groups. 

The growing season can be extended by using protective but unheated hoop houses that can be provided to participants, Cooke adds. More than 100 of these have been erected so far.

To help ensure success, participants must attend six classes on gardening topics that include organic gardening practices, pest management, garden planning and how to preserve and prepare food.

Serving in two states

One of the partnering sites in Grow Appalachia since 2011 is Scott Christian Care Center in Oneida, Tennessee. In its first year the center was able to help residents establish 34 individual gardens and another four community gardens. 

Director Lisa Cotton said the center originally started as a food pantry and free medical clinic, but now offers the gardening component thanks to Grow Appalachia grants.

“It’s amazing how it all has connected,” she said, explaining that patients in the clinic can be referred to the gardening program to begin growing and eating healthy produce. Gardeners sometimes wind up donating produce to the center’s food bank.

“It’s like a farmer’s market out there on food bank day at harvest time,” she said.

A garden behind the center is funded by Grow Appalachia as a teaching garden. Its produce is used for the food bank, to provide meals for clients, or for making jams or jellies to sell.

Even students are getting in on the act, Cotton said, with gardens and greenhouses established at some local schools and academies. Other community gardens were cultivated at two low-income housing projects, a senior center and even at a local jail.

The center has expanded its reach into neighboring McCreary County, Kentucky, putting in some raised bed gardens at a soup kitchen there, and one at a senior center. Now both Scott and McCreary counties have farmers markets thanks to the prevalence of community and individual gardens, Cotton said.

Between both counties last year there were more than 100 individual garden sites and 80 family gardens.

“There’s so much to talk about just in the few years that we’ve been doing this,” she said.

Cotton said it is impossible to measure the wide impact of these gardens, particularly in how they will shape a new generation’s attitudes about where food comes from and how they can make healthy food choices.

“It’s really just planting seeds that are going to continue,” she said.

Economic development a priority

Another partnering Grow Appalachia site is in Pine Mountain, in southeast Kentucky’s Harlan County. The Pine Mountain Settlement School was founded in 1913 and provides environmental education, stewardship of Appalachian culture and craft opportunities for students and adults. The school has been a part of the program since 2010 and farms about five acres of gardens to supply produce for the campus dining hall. 

Pine Mountain Settlement School Assistant Director Preston Jones said there are four high hoop house tunnels on the farm, as well as cattle, hens, bees and sorghum. 

Jones said archives from more than 100 years ago show that residents were self-supporting at Pine Mountain. Now the school is teaching residents and visitors to do the same in a modern era, through workshops and educational programs each month.

“We just really try to model a highly diverse, highly sustainable mountain farm,” he said.

About 80 families participate in these programs, representing about 300 individuals, Jones said. About 25 people on average attend each session to learn about gardening basics.

“We’re really focusing on economic development, and also food security,” he said.

The school also has a new USDA commercial kitchen site, one of five in eastern Kentucky, which allow home-based processors to make bread, jam, jellies and other products for sale.

Jones said a Harlan County Farmers Market is now in its second year and enjoying success.

“We’re looking forward to growing that and getting more people up to the level where they can market produce,” he said.

The school was recently approved for USDA Regional Conservation Partnership Program funding for 45 new high hoop tunnels, and once built, local residents can apply to manage them. 

Jones said over the next few years he’s looking forward to “seeing how people can really increase their production and grow really high-quality, value agricultural products.”

Impact continues to grow

Cooke said gardening families are encouraged to share with others. In some cases as many as 20 families grow, harvest and eat produce from a single garden, he said.

“We literally don’t know how many—of hundreds of thousands of people—have eaten through these gardens,” Cooke said. “It’s a lot.”

In its first year, Grow Appalachia served 100 families from four sites and grew about 150,000 pounds of food. The following year, DeJoria came to check in and attend a potluck with participants and nonprofit representatives. He was impressed, Cooke said, and agreed to continue funding. 

The next year the program expanded to sites in Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia, and by 2017 had spread to 60 counties in six states. So far about 6,000 families have been impacted by the more than 4 million pounds of food that were grown, Cooke said.

Participating families get organic fertilizer for free, but the program sells surplus fertilizer for additional revenue. It also accepts donations.

The staff in Berea is purposely small with only six employees, Cooke said, so funds can be used to make the most impact in the community. Hundreds of volunteers lend a hand, and jobs are being created: staff to oversee participating sites, to transport supplies or to teach classes. Including part-time and seasonal, about 100 jobs are created annually, he said.

Word has spread throughout outlying communities about this new way to put fresh food on the table. Last year program sites worked with 1,600 families.

Plans include reaching even more, working with small producers in Appalachia to create local consumer markets and using a USDA grant to build five certified kitchens licensed under state boards of health so participants can create food products for commercial sale. 

Cooke said the most rewarding part of his job is being able to go out each summer and spend time with the families that are learning to be more self-supportive. During one visit, a woman asked him to come take a look at something inside her nearby house. What happened next stays with him to this day.

“She walks back and she pulls the curtain on this closet and it’s full of canned food,” he said. “‘My kids won’t go hungry this winter,’” she said.

By the numbers:

• 4 – number of sites Grow Appalachia began with in 2009, all in eastern Kentucky.
• 100 – number of families served that first year. Also the number of jobs the program creates on average per year, whether part-time or seasonal.
• 150,000 – estimated number of pounds of produce harvested in Grow Appalachia’s first season. Also this number is coincidentally the dollar amount of the initial “seed money” that got the program under way.
• 6 – number of classes that participants attend to learn how to grow organic produce at home.
• 40 – number of counties where Grow Appalachia had a presence in 2017, among six states.
• 6,000 – estimated number of families Grow Appalachia staff and partners have worked with since 2009.
• 4 million – number of pounds of food that Grow Appalachia programs and participants have harvested since the effort’s inception.

Summer Food Service Program – Grow Appalachia Style

In 2015 there was only one meal site operating in Berea, Kentucky through the USDA’s Summer Food Service Program, which provides free meals to children 18 and under during the summer school vacation months.

In 2016 Grow Appalachia and Berea College began to help sponsor the local program, and with the aid of local volunteers and community groups expanded the effort to more than 12 sites, serving nearly 14,000 meals.

In 2017 the program served more than 15,000 meals and with the start of a new school year began serving after school snacks provided by Grow Appalachia and Mountaineer Dining Services of Berea College.

The goal is to increase summer programs moving forward and provide more meals, as well as fun and educational activities, for participating children and their families.

(sources: growappalachia.berea.edu/summer-feeding/, Berea Summer Food Service Program on Facebook www.facebook.com/berea-summer-food-service-program-542048865956483/)