Introduction

For the past 3 months, we have worked very closely with Joey and learned more about the influence of urban farming on the West End community. Prior to the beginning our project, we did not realize that community food insecurity existed to the extent that it does in the West End, as we stereotyped this area to contain mostly well-off, middle to upper-class residents. After spending several hours working at Gordon Neighbourhood House, we gained insight on how the GNH’s several food initiatives contribute to alleviating this insecurity. As our group members come from a wide range of backgrounds, we all found it very interesting to learn about urban farming and crop planning. We learned to appreciate the logistics and considerations that go into creating a successful crop plan that maximizes the yield and quality of healthy, fresh produce for the community. We shared our experiences with the LFS 350 students and faculty, as well as other community partners on Monday through our infographics presentation in order to promote the understanding of how a crop plan is designed for urban farming. With our newfound knowledge, we can all start growing produce in our own backyard!

What

           A moment of significance that recently occurred in our group was when we received feedback from our professor, Will, about the infographic we designed for our final presentation. Initially, we put a lot of focus on how we designed our crop plan and the ways it contributes to community food security, rather than providing context about GNH and the West End. We were also repetitive with our take-home messages, restating our methods for designing the crop plans instead of putting focus on why crop plans were important in achieving our objectives. Will allowed us to realize that the crop plans were meant to help the GNH maximize crop yields, which in turn allowed the GNH to address community food security in the West End. As we didn’t initially make that connection, it was a bit difficult for us to make the direct link between crop plan to community food security, and our initial infographic was rather vague and unfocused.

 

So what

Our moment of significance gave us a lot of insight as to how our community project actually fits within the concepts and discussions that we’ve had in the lectures this term. Having just completed our tasks for the project, our group was very excited about our work and the future for the GNH urban farm plots, and by focusing on communicating this, we were distracted from our overall message and goals. We had to change our focus to how our project contributed to community food security rather than discussing the details about how we went about completing our project and the final results of our plans. Having spent hours and hours on the project with Joey discussing the crop plans in great detail, it started to feel as though we were becoming a broken record, and we began to forget that the other students in our class had been working on completely different projects. The students and faculty that we presented to likely would not know much about the GNH or the West End, nor would they understand the concepts we were explaining in the same depth that we did. Will’s feedback urged us to think about what was most important in our process and accomplishments by reminding us to return to our original objectives, as well as what effects we hoped our actions would have on the GNH and the surrounding community. We needed to pare down what we wanted to express and decide what was most important to discuss, finding a succinct and eloquent way to do so.

Our moment of significance reminded us to take a step back from the project, and although at first our project did not seem to have clear connections with the concepts we were learning about in lecture, it forced us to think critically and make larger associations between sustainable crop planning and the concepts of food justice and community food security. By providing more context on the GNH, as well as how our communication with Joey helped us design our crop plans, we were more effective in helping the audience understand how our crop planning project would contribute to improving community food security.

Struggling through the process of making our infographics clearer and more succinct was integral to helping our group find the true connections between lecture concepts and our community project. In a Ted Talk, Tim Harford (2016) discusses that while  it can often feel as though messy problems are simply obstacles standing in the way of our success, we don’t realize that this uncertainty can actually make our problem-solving skills more robust and our ideas more creative. Therefore, we can appreciate the challenges that we had to face while working on our infographic, and we believe that it gave us a good opportunity to reflect on our original project objective. It also taught us how to better deliver our experiences and knowledge to a general audience more effectively.

Another problem that we encountered was trying to decide what concepts to prioritize in our infographic, since we wanted to present our ideas in a concise way. Our group members had different perspectives regarding this problem (e.g. some people wanted to introduce the West End community and its food security while others wanted to focus more on the GNH itself). Even though we had to overcome the disagreement and communicate to reach a consensus, this process allowed us to appreciate diversity. Diversity helped us view the problem from different perspectives and how we can improve the quality of our content by collaborating and incorporating different ideas. Furthermore, as we considered the perspectives of the other LFS 350 students and faculty members, we realized that we needed to simplify our presentation and avoid speaking in too much detail, since they did not have as much insight or perspective into the topic as we did. By including the diverse perspectives of our group members and considering the perspectives of our audience, we were able to create a better product. This is just like what Katherine Phillips mentioned in her article, How Diversity Makes us Smarter. “Diversity works by promoting hard work and creativity; the pain associated with diversity can be thought of as the pain of exercise” (Phillips, 2014).

 

Now what

           Since the very beginning of our project, our group had trouble making strong connections between crop planning and community food security. We tried to develop coherent linkages to the course materials in past blog assignments, but we failed to look at the bigger picture and include the context of the GNH’s role in the West End community. Receiving feedback from Will helped shift our focus back into the right direction, allowing us to be confident and prepared for writing our final project report. Moving forward, we will use this feedback and advice to maintain our focus on the most important aspects of our project. Our final report must critically analyze the connections between food, health, and the environment within food security discourse, and how food insecurity can be addressed by interdisciplinary efforts. Hence, it requires that we understand and portray the connection between our project within broader food system theories. In order to achieve this goal and write a successful and comprehensive report, it is important that we take Will’s advice into consideration, as well as the questions that we received during our infographic presentation. This will allow us to communicate the most important aspects of our project, our objectives and the broader food systems. We were faced with confusion about our project throughout the semester since our project seemed to be different from other groups’, but Joey was truly integral in helping us gain understanding and insight on the concepts. We plan to maintain contact with Joey, and maybe even volunteer during the upcoming growing season. It would be incredible to see how our project is actually being carried out and contributing to the organization.  

 

Conclusion

In conclusion, this was a very interesting project to work on for this course, and we are sad to see it come to an end. Our group comes from a very diverse range of academic backgrounds, and this was helpful because it allowed us to integrate different points of views in the way that we approached the challenges we encountered throughout the term. We definitely faced some moments of uncertainty, and at times, it was frustrating because we were struggling to find ways to connect our project with the course content which made it difficult to understand the purpose of our project. For future students who are coming into a similar project like this one, we would like to advise them to come up with questions regarding the connections between the project and course materials prior to coming to each class. Through these questions, they are able to consult with the TA or the instructor to ensure that they have the right focus when developing the proposal or the infographics. 

Our group greatly appreciates the support and input that our head farmer, Joey, provided us. We definitely all agree that this project would have been much more difficult and taken a very different direction without her help. We have grown our understanding regarding community gardens and how they can be utilized (as GNH does) to supply food for other affordable food initiatives within a community to improve community food security. After finishing the project, the next step for us is to take the valuable knowledge of crop planning as well as our understanding of community food security and food justice to help promote more food initiatives to benefit more communities and people. The next step for GNH is to implement the crop plan, but also willing to alter the plans as they seem fit as unpredictable problems may arise during the growing season.

Overall, giving our final presentation to the faculty and other students was a pivotal moment for all of us. We really enjoyed working with the GNH for the past few months, and will keep these memories and experiences with us for the rest of our lives.

 

References

 

Harford, T. (2016, Jan 11). Tim Harford: How messy problems can inspire creativity [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_harford_how_messy_problems_can_inspire_creativity

Phillips, K. (2014, October 1). How Diversity Makes us Smarter. Retrieved from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-diversity-makes-us-smarter/

Introduction

It’s unbelievable that we’re already heading towards the end of our CBEL project! During the tutorial session, our group had a chance to reflect back and evaluate our overall performance from the beginning of the term to the present. We all agreed that we have done and gained so much more than we initially expected. Crop planning sounds simple at first, but in reality is extremely complex, involving holistic perspectives and aspects that need to be considered. Due to Joey’s gracious guidance and support, we have successfully achieved our goals. After weeks of working on the crop plans, we have begun preparing the plots themselves for the upcoming growing season.   

This post will take you through a quick summary of our achievements and experiences since our last post, as well as some thoughts on our remaining time in the project.

 

Weekly Objectives

Our weekly objectives since the first draft of our second blog post have been:

Feb 25 – Mar 3: Submit our second blog post and receive feedback.

Mar 4 – 10: Have our third meeting with Joey, complete all crop plans and help physically prepare the farm plots. Edit our second blog post and begin writing our third.

 

Achievements

We began our third meeting by sorting out Joey’s seed box, removing seeds that were too old to sprout and organizing them into vegetable/herb groups. Additionally, we managed to finalize the Jervis location crop plan. This location receives the least amount of sunlight among all of GNH’s plots, so Joey mainly wanted to plant herbs and salad greens here. It seems that these plants grow very well in shaded and cool conditions (J. Liu, personal communication, March 5, 2018). We also visited some of the plots and harvested vegetables and herbs to be used in the GNH kitchen and Farmer’s market, such as salad greens and parsley. The group visited the Crystal Court location and helped prepare the site for the upcoming growing season by removing cover crops, chopping bean leaves and tilling the soil in order to return nitrogen into the soil. We also almost completed the Nicola location crop plan, however, ran out of time and could not visit the site to confirm some final details, so it is the only crop plan that we have left to finalize. We will be meeting with Joey one last time to complete this crop plan. All in all, this was a very productive meeting! It felt really good to finally see the project coming together, and to physically see the plots be prepared for our plans.  

 

 

Even though we didn’t necessarily meet any concrete failures over the course of our project, our group has faced some huge uncertainties, both involving our academic performance and the project itself. Additionally, Joey has met and resolved many uncertainties and setbacks from her previous urban farming experiences. For example, the reason we were asked to sort and discard the seeds harvested before 2015 was because when Joey had previously tried to plant older seeds, she found that they couldn’t grow well. This caused her to waste time and space that could have been devoted to other crops. Even though we were not doing a “premortem” like what was discussed in the “Failure is Your Friend” podcast, we were able to draw lessons from previous experiences and “spot the potential failures before things have gone wrong” (Cohn, 2014).

At this time, our crop plan is mostly finished, however, we are aware that there will be a lot of uncertainties when the crop plan is actually being executed. Unfortunately, this won’t be a part of our project. The manual that we used to decide what crops to plant, when to sow, etc. is based on general coastal BC weather, but there are many potential variables (e.g. soil condition, humidity, sunlight etc.) that may result in a different growth pattern of crops in our three garden sites. This is similar to Dan Barber’s story in the This American Life podcast, “Poultry Slam” (Glass, 2011), which tells us that it is normally difficult to replicate other people’s operational models in different environmental settings, especially when it comes to dealing with nature which always “has its own idea.” Joey has prior experience with urban farming, so hopefully these variables will not provide many setbacks for this growing season. Since we are planning on having at least one more meeting with her, we can also assess the plots and provide any changes that might be necessary, and hopefully, some of our group members will be able to keep in contact with Joey and the GNH to provide volunteer work over the season.

 

Moment of Significant Change Workshop

During our session 8 tutorial, we were asked to reflect on our experiences with the CBEL project in the past few months. We were also instructed to individually graph the progression of our knowledge/skills and emotions regarding the project, and then we were asked to construct two comprehensive graphs illustrating these as a group. Overall, we felt that this was a very important workshop, as it allowed us to really reflect on the time we’ve spent working on this project, how much we’ve learned and achieved, and the emotions that we’ve experienced from the start of the term to now. In addition, this was a chance for us to really be able to share our personal experiences regarding the project within our group, and it turned out that there were some similarities and some differences within the group. For example, a couple of us were unable to attend the second meeting with our community partner, Joey, and those individuals felt slightly lost about the project, wishing they were able to contribute more. However, these negative feelings were addressed as we made plans to and actually went to meet Joey a third time. After finalizing the crop plan for the Jervis location and helping out with plot preparations, we’re now feeling more confident about finishing up our project.

In addition to reflecting on the time we’ve spent so far on the project, we also came up with a projected section of the graph that represents how we believe the next couple of weeks will unfold, as well as how we hope to wrap up our project at the end of the term.

 

Shown above is the group graph plotting our emotions and our knowledge and skills over the course of the term. The smiley face indicates a high positive feeling/sense of knowledge and the sad face indicates a low negative feeling/sense of knowledge. Some key points are described below:

• At the beginning of the term, we were feeling overall quite positive and excited about our GNH Crop Plan project, although most of us were from food science major and were not very knowledgeable about urban agriculture, or what the project would really entail.
• We had a better idea of what was expected of us in this project after our 1st meeting with Joey. However, both curves dropped slightly after writing our 1st blog post and receiving feedback for it because we noticed that we were still confused about some concepts we learned from class (e.g. food justice and community food security).
• Notably, we hit a low point in both curves during our first Moment of Significance, which was when we were working on our Proposal Outline and Report, as this was when we really realized that we had been focusing on the wrong area, learning that we should have been focused on creating a suitable crop plan to increase community food security, rather than trying to integrate too many components from our course materials and making the scope of our project too broad and unfocused.
• For those of us that attended the 2nd meeting with Joey, a lot more knowledge was gained and there was an overall positive feeling about the project, as we managed to come up with the plan for Crystal Court, which was the most challenging garden to plan.
• Our overall feelings soared over reading break, as we were all excited for this time to be away from school, although our knowledge and skills stayed stagnant as we didn’t meet with Joey or do too much work on the project.
• Then, from writing our 2nd blog post up until today, both graphs sat at a slightly lower level to reflect our slight dread at writing blog posts as well as our uncertainty about whether we approached our Moment of Significance properly.

In the projected section of our graph, we expected our 3rd meeting with Joey to go very well (and it did!), and we expected to feel a bit clueless about writing this current blog. However, after receiving feedback from our 2nd blog, we are a bit more confident about what is expected from us. We may feel a bit reluctant about creating our infographics and expect that we’ll feel pretty in the dark prior to the workshop. We’re all a bit nervous about the presentation that is coming up, but we’re hoping that by that point, we will be very knowledgeable about our project! We’re also feeling pretty positive overall about our 4th and last blog post, and definitely expect to finish this term off on a high note.

 

Upcoming Objectives

During our past visit at the GNH this Monday, we were able to complete our most of the remaining two crop plans, which essentially means that we have finished our entire CBEL project. We still plan on visiting the GNH at least one more time to assist Joey in harvesting and preparing the plots for seeding, but that will be it for our actual Community Project. The end of the term seems to be coming very quickly, and we are sad to see it finish so soon!

 

As for the course, we are entering the final stage of the term, which means that we need to start thinking about working on our final report, presentation and infographic as a group, and individually work on our Academic and Experiential Review papers.

 

Mar 11 – 17: Anticipating another meeting with Joey to prepare the Nicola site. Will edit our third blog post after receiving feedback.

Mar 18 -24: Work on our final presentation and infographic.

Mar 25 – 31: Present our community project and write our last blog post for the semester.

 

Graceful Dismount

With the completion of our Community Project and the end of the school year, it is time for our group to begin our “Graceful Dismount.” We must take what we have learned in our readings, lectures, and tutorials, and reflect on the work that we have done at the Gordon Neighbourhood House. Completing our Community Project was an eye-opening experience that was very valuable in showing us how much time and energy is put into supporting communities, and we will be sure to carry these experiences with us as we continue our journeys as citizens and academics in the food system.

 

In our first flexible learning session (session 3), we watched a couple of videos concerning partnerships and the patronizing and paternalistic nature of Western “aid” (Yakini, 2013), (Sirolli, 2012). We want to ensure that we do not simply enter and exit this project with a saviour complex, simply leaving when our job is done and forgetting about the people that the GNH is serving and the reasons for our work. LFS 350 is set up in a way that will allow us to remain connected with our work even after completing the project, with the final presentation and report allowing us to reflect on it. Furthermore, we are able to use our experiences as a stepping stone for continuing similar work either at GNH, other neighbourhood houses or similar organizations. Working at the GNH has given us a better perspective of what resources organizations are in need of, whether that be time, physical labour, food, etc. Pablo, one of our group members, actually lives in the West End, and has done some volunteer work there prior to our project, and plans on continuing to do so after we complete our project time with them. As for the rest of our group, we can use our newfound experiences and information to better serve our own communities in the future and to increase awareness of the issues that we have been working on.

 

Conclusion

At this point of time, it is really important to look both backward and forward so that we can reflect on our past activities and experiences to better achieve our future goals. Making the reflective graphs during tutorial was really interesting and insightful, helping us trace the fluctuations in our emotions and knowledge during different events and tasks. Despite these fluctuations and uncertainties, we have successfully completed all of our goals on time so far and met our expectations due to the active support provided by Joey. Even though we are very proud of our achievements thus far, we are still a bit worried about the uncertainties that GNH may be facing following the execution of our crop plans, therefore it is also important for us to keep in touch with Joey and provide assistance during growing and harvesting season when needed. We have a laundry list of assignments and projects about the CBEL project to complete in the next few weeks, so it is time to start buckling down and focusing on these, as well!

 

References

Cohn, G. (2014, June 5). Failure Is Your Friend: A New Freakonomics Radio Podcast. Retrieved March 9th, 2018 from

http://freakonomics.com/podcast/failure-is-your-friend-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/

Glass, I. (2011, December 2). Poultry Slam 2011. Retrieved March 9th, 2018 from https://www.thisamericanlife.org/452/poultry-slam-2011

Sirolli, E. [TED]. (2012, November 26). Want to help someone? Shut up and listen [Video File]. Retrieved March 9th, 2018 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chXsLtHqfdM

Yakini, M. [LivableFutureBlog]. (2013, May 3). Working in communities as partners, not missionaries [Video File]. Retrieved March 9th, 2018 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qO9_dgcxdj4