My name is Briana Liu. I live in Rockville and am a junior at Princeton. This summer, I’m working as an Innovation Fellow at the Office of the County Executive. My role is to write a plan for a local sustainable food system in Montgomery County. In MoCo, there’s plenty of entrepreneurs who want to run a business or non-profit directed at food recovery, composting, job training or local gardening. The idea is to link them in a supportive network—a novel system for food cycling in the county.
I’m imagining a food system with three major components: farm, kitchen and workers.
Farm
The community farm would be placed in the Agricultural Reserve, a 90,000 acre land reserve in the county. It would be about 150 acres, and help supply around 3% of the county’s fresh produce. We’re talking about healthy table foods like fruits and vegetables, not the big crops (wheat, soy, corn) that are currently way overproduced. This farm would use sustainable growing methods such as drip irrigation, integrated pest management and tree buffers. I am also looking into the possibility of a training farm and family orchards.
Kitchens
The kitchens would have a food waste recovery and job training aspect. They would collect surplus food from farmer’s markets and restaurants and cook it into healthy meals for underprivileged people in the county. The kitchen staff would be composed of professional chefs, volunteers and crucially, otherwise unemployed or homeless people in need of job training and life skills support. The kitchen would thus serve as not only a supply of healthy, locally-sourced meals, but also a tool for empowerment and integration of the community.
Workers
The third component is jobs. MoCo is so incredibly diverse, and the Office of Community Partnerships envisions it as the “most welcoming county in the U.S.” Providing jobs for immigrant workers is a key part of that goal. This could be integrated with the kitchen and farm components easily, and especially with the farm, as many Latino immigrants have abundant agricultural experience. An important step is to find reliable transportation for the workers to the farms.
Urban Greening
I have a strong personal interest in urban planning and sustainability, so it’d be great if I could incorporate that element into my plan. I want to look more into rooftop gardens and green roofs, urban greenhouses and hydroponics agriculture. The more people are involved in local gardening, the more interest they’ll have in buying and eating local.
The Road Ahead
So how am I going to get this ambitious project done? Well, what’s good is that I’m not starting from scratch. Three years ago, intern Andy Lowy had already outlined a variety of possibilities for MoCo to pursue in his Sustainable Food report: http://www.mocofoodcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/mcsustainablecommunityfoodinitiative.pdf
Reading his report was very helpful to get a sense of what could be done. From there, I sifted through the options and pinpointed the three or four initiatives I’d like to focus on. Then, I looked at potential models in greater detail: for farms, Intervale Center in Vermont; for kitchens, D.C. Central Kitchen and La Cocina; for urban farming, Will Allen’s projects. The next step is to apply those models to MoCo and find out which would be most feasible. There’s so much more to do. Meeting with Food Council members, using GIS technology to see the mapped out supply chains for food in the county, finding and vetting locations for the community farm…
I’ll provide an update at the end of the summer about the research and hopefully give some recommendations about next steps.