Coker, Alabama
In the Deep South, folks are pretty independent-minded, according to Jean Mills of Coker, a town on the western edge of Alabama just outside of Tuscaloosa. So when she and partner Carol Eichelberger enlisted neighbors and friends to come together and be part of their farm community, it was something of a revolutionary act.
In 1990, the couple founded Tuscaloosa CSA, a Community Supported Agriculture farm made up of members who pay up-front for shares of the harvest and receive weekly boxes of produce throughout the growing season. Social Worker gone organic farmer, Jean doesn’t claim the CSA has radically transformed their rural community, but without it, she and Carol would not be farming and probably would not have stayed in the area.
Besides being their livelihood, the CSA has provided the couple with a large, culturally diverse community of people ranging from University of Alabama faculty and students to professionals and home-schooling parents.
“The community of CSA people has given us a broader social network and it has made us more knowledgeable people. It has made our world bigger,” said Jean, referencing conversations over washing lettuce about Bolivian culture, Italian art, and a variety of social and political issues. She and Carol have observed the night sky with a physicist CSA member, explored the insect populations in their garden with an entomologist CSA member, and viewed a grain of pollen up close with a CSA member who does microscopic imaging.
Jean and Carol had been growing organic vegetables for themselves and giving away the extra for 10 years before they went commercial. Without support from the extension service or any organic farmers around to teach them about improving soil fertility, pest control or marketing, the couple read and experimented a lot.
Their friends became the first CSA members. Jean and Carol expanded the garden to five acres of mixed vegetables and cover crops and set up an innovative system to involve members in the work of the operation. They organize roughly 100 members into neighborhood groups that share responsibility for the weekly produce deliveries–each person comes to the farm once or twice in the season to clean and pack produce and deliver it to the rest of the group.
“It is so critical to the success of our CSA that people bond with us, bond with the farm and bond with each other,” said Jean, explaining that happens primarily on those harvest days when a handful of members who may be strangers in the morning spend a few hours doing light work together.
People like having a reason to come out to the farm, Jean says, and she and Carol put extra effort into making the land lovely to behold.
“Our garden is really pretty,” she plainly states. “It’s not about making a fru-fru agritourism thing—that’s not a notion that appeals to us.” Rather, Jean explains, it’s about building on the inherent diversity of sustainable agriculture. Playing with color, they plant crimson clover as living mulch between rows of broccoli, potatoes, lettuce and green beans. Besides adding nitrogen to the soil and keeping weeds down, the cover crop adds brilliant red blossoms to compliment the blue-green, lime and purples of the vegetables.
Carol is an artist. For eleven years while she and Jean grew vegetables in spring, summer and fall, there was no time for the studio, so she directed her creative energies into the garden.
But after a few particularly hot, dry Alabama summers, sore backs and a few bouts with skin cancer, the couple let go of summer production, scaling back to two and a half acres. That has enabled Carol, who has a master’s degree in fine arts, to paint again, and Jean more time for social movement-building.
Jean works part-time for Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group, coordinating its annual conference.
“I really need to have my hands in the dirt and growing things for this community … but I need to know that we’re part of a bigger movement,” says Jean. To her delight, she has discovered people all over the South growing healthy food, trying to reduce environmental impact, and finding ways keep their multigenerational family farms from being sold to developers.
“Here we are in rural Alabama and unfortunately farming is novel and growing food for the local community is very novel and doing it organically is virtually unheard of. That just doesn’t make sense to us,” she stressed. After seeing her parent’s dairy operation go down in one of the federal buyout programs, their catfish farm left behind by technological advancements, and many other family farms and kitchen gardens disappear in her lifetime, Jean wants to help Alabama build back a local food supply.
That’s why she and Carol put more than just vegetables in the weekly boxes they send to their membership. Tucked in between the lettuce and the kohlrabi is a little piece community built around a productive Alabama farm.