Fulfilling the Promise of the Land Grant University
[Music]
[Music]
you might not know
this but land grants can change lives
i want to tell you about my friend walt
bonn when i first met
walt three years ago he was looking for
an opportunity
he was working for a small juice bar
startup in downtown mansfield ohio his
hometown
but that was no place for a man with
walt’s skill and abilities
this guy has a business degree and he’s
managed more than a dozen employees at a
time in his life
he was hustling for this tiny little
startup for what amounted to less than
minimum wage
because he had been served a terrible
injustice
few years ago he was finishing up a
business meeting
when all of the sudden out of the blue
four men started to harass
the sister of the man that he was
meeting with who was waiting for them in
a car outside of the bar
walt rushed out to their defense to hurt
her defense
and he found himself suddenly being
faced down by two very large
very drunk very angry white men who
backed him up across the parking lot
and then pounced on him they started
kicking and punching
now walt warned them off and he was
scared
for his life and two things you need to
know about this night
first even though walt was at a bar
he had not been drinking because second
he was carrying a gun something he’d
done
legally for the previous nine years and
walt feared for his life
and the men were punching and kicking
and so he pulled his gun
and he started to fire and even though
he hit
one of the men twice the assault
continued
and they overpowered walt and they took
his gun from him
and they turned it on him now walt knew
he’d emptied all five chambers before
they got the gun from him but the men
did not and then the police arrived
and things went from bad to worse for
walt because
even though he was so injured from this
assault that he spent several days in
the hospital
he was the only one arrested that night
and he was charged with a second-degree
felony
long story short walt didn’t have the
resources to mount the kind of defense
that this case required and the lawyer
he
hired didn’t tell him as much and he
showed up on the day of the trial
to learn that his lawyer wasn’t calling
any witnesses
and had allowed a jury of all white
non-gun owners to be seated
so walt told me he knew if he let the
trial go forward that day
he was not walking out of that courtroom
a free man
so he was essentially coerced into
pleading to a lesser fourth degree
violent felony charge
a charge that wouldn’t come with any
jail time but a charge that would
prevent him
from ever getting a job again and when
walt realized that he was unemployable
he returned to his hometown of mansfield
and he started looking for an
opportunity and that’s when i met him in
the sandwich shop
he was just looking for an opportunity
and i’ve been thinking a lot about
the value of opportunity in those days
about opportunity
is a kind of social justice because i’ve
been thinking a lot about
justice and what it means to bring
justice
and i noticed a couple of things the
first
is that we often conclude that simply
removing that injustice is sufficient to
deal with the harm that it’s done
so you might think about slavery
terrible injustice
we ended slavery or jim crow segregation
also terrible injustice and we made it
illegal
but i’m not sure that’s ever enough
because
second the most egregious injustices
keep happening
to the same groups of people in the
united states over time and i’m speaking
now as a u.s historian
these things keep happening to african
americans
and native americans and so i was
wondering whether removing the injustice
was ever sufficient
in itself and i was thinking about where
opportunity might
fit in the matrix of social justice and
human improvement
as a u.s historian i knew that
land-grant universities like the ohio
state
university where i worked had been
critical
social justice institutions in the 19th
century
they prepared a nation of 18th century
farmers
for the opportunities of the 20th
century world
i mean if you think about it opportunity
of social justice is
kind of the land-grant dna and so
i’ve been thinking about how i might
enlist urban food systems
as precisely this kind of economic
opportunity
and i’d already been working with deanna
west torrance
another mansfield native and the founder
and executive director of the north end
community improvement collaborative
deanna had already led her community
through a planning process
in which they had identified food
systems
as a viable asset based economic
development solution
something that they wanted to do and
deanna had already started building
community gardens
and she’d already started training urban
farmers
deanna and i were both interested in
food systems
because we were interested in finding a
more just
solution to the problem of food
insecurity
we both knew that the delivery of that
free box of tomatoes
was insufficient to address the real
cause there
which was in fact household wealth or
income enter the microfarm project
an urban farming project created by a
land grant to deliver social justice
by capturing food dollars to grow
individual and household wealth in food
insecure communities
it starts with the microfarm a
right-sized urban production site
small enough for an individual or a
household to operate
large enough to bring a profit the right
size is about a third of an acre
5500 square feet of growing area
half of which is under two high tunnels
for extended season grow
the microfarm is successful because it
focuses on growing the very
most popular crops so the things on your
everybody’s grocery list tomatoes
cucumbers carrots
greens there’s about a dozen crops in
all
but a single microfarm is too small by
itself to be successful and we knew this
the microfarm only becomes successful
when it’s part of a
system of microfarms which can aggregate
production from multiple
sites and this is accomplished through
an old school farmer cooperative
a microfarmer cooperative the
the cooperative can then buy
aggregate brand and market the produce
ideally before a plant even goes in the
ground
and the cooperative marketer can in this
way coordinate
crop plans with buyer needs creating a
whole lot more certainty for our farmers
and for our buyers and the whole system
is designed to simplify farming so our
microfarm producers can focus on growing
the very
best quality produce that they can
when the whole system is in full
operation
a microfarm has the potential of
delivering up to
35 000 of supplemental household income
those are real dollars in places where
dollars are needed
microfarming in opportunity poor
households
to deliver wealth in food insecure
neighborhoods and this isn’t just an
abstract idea
since 2019 deanna and i have been
building this system
into the landscape of mansfield ohio
with a million dollar matching grant
that ohio state university received
from the foundation for food and
agricultural research
we wanted to see if the idea had legs
and what a ride it’s been since 2019
we’ve trained a dozen new microfarm
producers to grow market quality crops
we have built 10 new microfarms in
mansfield and the surrounding
countryside for these farmers to work in
and my microfarm producers have already
served up
hundreds of pounds of fresh local
organic produce
to households and cafeterias and
restaurants from mansfield
to columbus and they’ve provided an
additional hundreds of pounds of surplus
for the food insecure households that
surround these microfarms
in the community we prepare for 2021
with the whole system for the very first
time
fully in place ready to see what it can
do
ten new microfarm businesses
owning one new farmer cooperative the
richland grow up
as part of a community university vision
of urban agriculture for economic
development
the ohio state university will continue
to provide and leverage its research
expertise
and its commitment to social justice to
ensure this project is a success
and we hope to provide a new model of
urban farming
that can deliver wealth in the places in
the united states where wealth
is needed and hopefully to model the
kinds of community engagements
that land grant universities should be
participating in
and my friend walt bonham he formed a
business
called the food lab and he trained to be
one of our microfarm producers
when the ohio state university needed a
contractor to source
and assemble our microfarms walt
bonham’s food lab
bid for and won that contract
so when i put in my first microform on
the ohio state mansfield campus back in
2017
it took me about three months to put
that thing in walt bonham’s food lab put
those things up now in three
days when deanna west torrance was
gifted 12 acres of industrial brownfield
she needed a manager to prepare that
site for her to put in electricity
and water and to build assemble and
manage four microfarms
she hired the food lab and walt bottom
got the necic
urban farm built
necic was happy over the last few years
when its farmers market would bring in
two thousand dollars in sales
last summer they brought in over
seventeen thousand dollars in sales and
we’re
just getting started
walt bonham’s food lab is one of the 10
microfarm producers in the richland
grow-op and so he provides his share of
the needed aggregate for the market
and the food lab is about to go under
contract with the rich and grow up
to provide a strategic operations and
marketing plan
to ensure their success in 2021 and
beyond
so my friend walt bonham is no longer
looking for an opportunity
ohio state university provided an
opportunity
and walt bonham seized it and now
he’s creating opportunity for his own
neighborhood
and he’s building wealth wealth for
himself
for his family and for his community
now walt has not resolved
the legal injustice to set him back a
few years ago
but guess what he’s soon gonna have the
means to try
and he’s just one of several inspiring
microfarm stories that are blooming
right now in mansfield ohio
and proof that land grants can change
lives
so stay tuned and
while it’s pretty obvious i’m really
excited about the microphone project
and about my friend walt and about his
successes
the real story here is about land grants
and social justice when the moral land
grant act was
passed in 1862 it delivered social
justice
by providing opportunity it prepared a
nation of
18th century farmers for the
opportunities
of the industrial world we stand at a
similar inflection
point today and if land-grant
universities looked around their
communities
and they identified geographies where
people were most at
risk and they worked with those
communities
to develop sustainable systems to
mitigate those risks like the microfarm
system
and bring opportunity and deliver social
justice they will have
ample work to fulfill the promise of the
land grant university
in the 21st century thank you
you