Convivium Urban Farmstead is the closest I’ve seen to a Hallmark movie plot come to life. Mike Muench and Leslie Shalabi left their corporate jobs, bought land in downtown Dubuque, Iowa and literally started digging.
It’s been several years since Shalabi and Muench started their nonprofit urban farm. Since then, they’ve converted some of the area into an event space and charming coffee shop. Their large kitchen allows for cooking classes and other activities centered on building a positive relationship with cooking.
Some highlights from the interview:
“One of the big problems that I see, and it ties into large agriculture too, is just the prevalence and preference of processed food. I'm not a hard liner in that – I eat junk food too. But, when a majority of your diet is coming from highly processed food, it's a problem on a lot of levels. Childhood obesity, adult obesity, and other diet related diseases, hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, all of that is directly related to your diet. It’s directly related to highly processed food, which is directly related to large ag.”
“We're doing what we can do to gently educate, gently start creating preferences in adults and children for [good] food.”
On my tour of the farm in 2016, I remember their farm manager, AJ, talking about “the power of the father,” and how his perspective on food and life changed after having kids, and that family units, especially new parents, who perhaps didn’t have great examples of fatherhood, need community support to build a healthy family.
The past two years we’ve seen an explosion of books and academic papers on the importance of fatherhood. AJ’s words ended up being very predictive of where that literature would be heading. Similarly, Leslie’s observations about the eating habits also track with the data.
Nutrition related diseases, especially in children, have been rising for years with no plateau in sight. The incidence of type II diabetes has increased since the 1980s from about 5.5 million Americans to now more than 37 million while the prevalence of high blood pressure has also increased since the 1980s from about 18 percent of U.S. adults to about 47 percent.
The Federal Government has thrown money at the problem, trying to study and understand why this is happening. Leslie said about improving public health, “I think it's going to have to be small organizations, like us, creating that pull at the bottom, at a grassroots level, that’s going to make a longer term, large change. And I think we're at the very cusp, at the very beginning, of that movement.”
Speaking to how they will make progress towards that change she said, “Our goal is education. Everything we approach is through that lens. To teach people how to grow, to teach people how to compost, to teach people how to slow down and enjoy their food, to teach people to be neighborly, and teach people how to come together and create connections. Those are the things that we aim for, and we are using food as a vehicle to accomplish those things.”
Check out the interview transcript below for more of Leslie’s insights and a bigger picture of their operation.
Patricia: I took a tour of your facility my freshman year of college and thought it was a really wonderful operation. On social media there is a pretty popular genre of content that is labeled “guerrilla farming.” A part of your operation is knocking on doors and offering to build flower beds, would you classify yourselves as guerrilla farmers in any way?
Leslie: Yes, that's a huge part of what we do. If you want to define it as guerrilla farming– great – we just call it community building.
We have about 13,000 square feet of production garden space and most of that is in our neighbor's backyards. We did ask one neighbor if we could put it in their yard, and then all of the other neighbors approached us because it was cool and looked nice.
So, that's how that came to be.
We also have what we call “common beds,” we just made up that word. They are raised bed gardens that are in smaller spaces throughout the neighborhood. They are mostly in people's front yards or in the curb strip. We plant and tend those for the public, and anyone is welcome to come and take vegetables from those beds.
The Common Beds are yellow, they have signage on them explaining:
How to pick it
What it is
When it's ripe
Patricia: I was wondering if you could tell me about any permitting considerations or permissions that you had to deal with?
Leslie: Luckily, we did not run into a lot of those s. The big stumbling block that we did hit wasn't necessarily related to gardening.
We have bees and we have chickens – both of which are allowed by the city municipal zoning statutes. e can legally have urban bees and chickens. We can actually have as many chickens as we want, but no roosters allowed A lot of cities actually limit people to only six chickens.
For our own purposes, we have those on a piece of property that's maybe a block away from Convivium for safety reasons. We want to be cautious in case they swarm or someone gets stung. We made that decision on our own, but we can have as many hives as we want, which is pretty cool.
The rest of what we're doing is on private property. Our operation looks like gardens in people’s yards and that's part of what we're trying to do.
We want to make sure that what we're doing is aesthetically pleasing.
Appearance is a common criticism of community gardens. There is a lot of energy and excitement at the beginning of the season, but as the season wears on, there's more weeds, people lose interest and they end up looking kind of shabby.
We make sure that everything that we do, that has our name on it or that we're associated with, looks really, really nice. We're trying to kind of give that sort-of-gardening, or even landscaping, a good name.
The farmhouse that's associated with Convivium has an entirely edible landscape. We believe that it is the only yard in town that you can eat. There's no traditional landscaping – there's a couple of rose bushes and that's it. That's unique, and there are no zoning issues there.
We have heard that there are some zoning issues regarding what's planted on the curb strip, for visibility reasons. But, we plant this giant patch of zinnias every year, and no one has ever said anything to us. We’re not running into any issues. If there is any sort of issue, no one seems to care too much – which is pretty cool.
We did have some zoning issues with our geothermal system. We are committed to the environment in all its forms, in terms of improving the soil and making sure that we're providing healthy food for people, as well as our carbon footprint.
We were very deliberate in designing the space how we did. We have 99 solar panels on the roof and then we have a geothermal system for heating and cooling. The problem that we ran into with the geothermal system was with space.
We don't have a field where a person typically has to dig all the wells for the system. There's three different ways that you can have geothermal energy.
One way is to pump and recirculate [the water], so you dig down, and you pull the water up, recirculate, circulate through the heating and cooling system, and then it goes back down into the earth into the same well. We couldn't do that because of environmental reasons. Another way is to pull from various wells, pull up from one and go down to another, but we didn’t have enough space. The third option is the “pump and dump” system. We pump the water up, circulated through the system, and it gets dumped into the sewer system drain in the street.
We couldn't do the first option for environmental reasons, we didn’t have the space for the second option, so we were left with the third: “pump and dump.” However, that operation would have been a zoning violation. We could have done it technically, but it was against our zoning laws.
Which is strange, and I question it, because large companies in the city run this type of operation here in town. Compared to the others, ours is very small and is a drop in the bucket compared to what others are adding to the storm drain system.
So, we fought that. We fought it pretty heavily. We went back and forth with the city for a long time, and we ended up being able to get a variance. That was really the only zoning issue that we had.
Parking access was another thing that we had to seek a variance for, but that was fairly easy. The city actually has been very cooperative. They’ve been helping us in the ways that they can, they have to be fair and equal, but I feel like the city's been pretty good about all the things that we've asked for.
Patricia: That's nice to hear. Did you represent yourselves, or did you have to hire a lawyer with the drain variance?
Leslie: The geothermal system we handle ourselves. My partner, Mike, is a seasoned sales person who has a lot of very strong negotiating skills. In a town our size, we all somewhat know each other. We’ve met the City Manager, many of the City Council members, and they know that we're solid people and that the mission that we're pursuing is good and worthy.
I think that really goes a long way in a smaller town.
In terms of legal barriers or financial barriers – I think knowing the players involved in your city is really important, letting them know you, and having a relationship with them outside of anything that potentially could be contentious, making sure they understand your mission coming for tours.
The City actually calls us all the time, “We have so-and-so visiting fellows from Vietnam. Can you give them a tour.” All of that stuff goes a really long way. Developing a neighborly and good-citizen sort of relationship with the City has been a priority for us.
It’s not so calculated.. but it’s not without recognition, on our part, that that's important.
Patricia: Yes, totally. Have you been a mentor to other people that are trying to start similar projects around the state?
Leslie: Yes, we have. We've had actually plenty of people come, and take tours and pick our brains. I don't know if I would define it as being a mentor - that to me, implies a long term, close relationship over a long period of time. We have not done that yet.
It is on our radar to do that at some point, and maybe have seminars or workshops or ebooks or something similar. Something or someplace where we kind of can talk about how to do this if you wanted to recreate something similar in your own community. Right now, we're still so heavily involved in the day-to-day, that there just isn't time right now. But, eventually it'll be a goal for us.
Patricia: Are you aware of the vertical farm movement and business models?
Leslie: I'm aware of what that means, but no, not really.
Patricia: A big issue for vertical farms is energy use and production, for the most part. The geothermal piece of your story is very interesting as it relates to this other model of farming.
Leslie: Energy production for indoor farming is a big deal, solar and all of that stuff. But, to be fair, we're not using energy to produce because we're not growing anything inside. The activities that we do inside support the outside activities. So, it's a different kind of model.
We never went into this thinking that we were going to be a production scale farm. Looking at this from a profitability standpoint, or a business model – that's not our goal. Our goal is education.
Everything we approach is through that lens.
To teach people how to grow, to teach people how to compost, to teach people how to slow down and enjoy their food, to teach people to be neighborly, and teach people how to come together and create connections. Those are the things that we aim for, and we are using food as a vehicle to accomplish those things.
Patricia: That's very beautiful. Have there been any grants or programs like the federal or state government that were genuinely helpful?
Leslie: God, I wish. If you find one, send it my way.
We kind of scramble from grant to grant. A lot of that is because the way grants are structured. They're all program based. So we have to want to have X, Y, Z program and then they’ll give support for the equipment for the program – when we really just need money for salaries for a long period of time. That's how we're going to really make a difference and have the ability to make plans, and enact real change.
At the end of the day, it is people who are the people who get the job done.
We have not had support either from the state or federal government. And some of that is because we're new-ish. The large multi-year granting organizations probably aren't going to give half a million dollars for a young organization.
So, that’s just sort of the stage of the life cycle that we're at as a nonprofit, but that’s slowly changing. We are getting really large donations from local companies that can afford it. For instance, we just got a $50,000 donation from one of the casinos here in town, which is really exciting for us. It allows us to hire people, have long term plans rather than just making payroll.
Patricia: Are you still farming worms?
Leslie: Yes, we have our worm composting in the basement, and we've expanded our outdoor composting considerably this year. We did receive money from the city – we got a sustainability grant. So we've expanded our outdoor composting area. So we now probably have the we're currently composting between 6,000 - 8,000 lbs of paper scraps each year.
Next year we'll have the capacity to do more than that..
Patricia: Have there been any farmers in the region that have come to you guys for information on composting?
Leslie: No, but restaurants have.
Patricia: How long did it take you guys to identify as farmers?
Leslie: Not too long. We do a lot of different things here, classes and cooking. But the first thing that we did was start growing food and feeding people. So, right away we saw ourselves as urban farmers.
We want to be really clear that we're urban farmers and this is a different sort of farming. But, we're still producing food, and people are still eating it. That is one of the big differences between the traditional Iowa farms and what we're doing, and what a growing number of young producers are doing. We're making food that you can actually eat. It doesn't have to be processed into something else before you can eat it, like corn or soybeans. That's what I hope that we see more and more of.
Patricia: Is there anything else I should you think would be good for me to know?
Leslie: One of the big problems that I see, and it ties into large agriculture too, is just the prevalence and preference of processed food. I'm not a hard liner in that – I eat junk food too. But, when a majority of your diet is coming from highly processed food, it's a problem on a lot of levels. Childhood obesity, adult obesity, and other diet related diseases, hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, all of that is directly related to your diet. It’s directly related to highly processed food, which is directly related to large ag.
I think it's going to have to be small organizations, like us, creating that pull at the bottom, at a grassroots level, that’s going to make a longer term, large change. And I think we're at the very cusp, at the very beginning, of that movement.
We're doing what we can to gently educate, gently start creating preferences in adults and mostly children for food that isn't Lucky Charms.
