Dream it, Plan it, Promote it, Integrate it, Build it and They Will Come

Synopsis: We need land and a small investment to begin building a farmers market that has a sense of space.
_________________________________________________________________________

Roll up your sleeves, this is no easy task. Building a sense of place takes sweat, hard work and the joy of community building. This project is starting with an effort to develop a more mature farmers market than what the area currently has. This is perfect starting point because a farmers market, more so than any other aspect of this larger project, contains the requisite components of direct connection, not just to place, but to the actual land. It also invites a recognition that we are connected to the land because it nourishes us, mind body and soul. This is an endeavor that will require manifold functional bonds of community.

Amazingly there is a farmers market here that has survived for years despite little support, few suppliers and the disrespect of having been shoved into a dirty and crowded parking lot. The Brazos Valley can do better than this. We have tremendous resources from the university and beyond. We have a wealth of consumers from across the Brazos Valley who, when informed, will embrace our local produce, the people who bring them to market and the community that grows out of this endeavor. The fact that we all eat, makes a community farmers market ultimately inclusive.

A farmers market provides us with a strong sense of place, but it needs a sense of space to do that. So, what is the difference between a sense of space and a sense of place, you might ask. It is scale. A sense of space is contained by the space what you sensually experience where you are in the moment. A sense of place is a composite that includes the various spaces and the social and environmental constructs that link those spaces. So, for example, you might have a nice sense of space sitting under a water oak, but your sense of place would have included everything as you walked to that nice location and everything in the Post Oak Savanna biosphere. Sitting in front to the old Carnegie Library in downtown Bryan looking across at the Howell Building one has a wonderful sense of space. That space is contained in, and largely defined by, a sense of place that is the Brazos Valley which includes our identity in history, culture and environment.

It is connection of space to cultural and environmental history that creates profound meaning and context. This is why tomatoes on the back of a tailgate in a hot and dirty parking lot on a Saturday morning does not a farmers market make. A farmers market must be composed of the identity of our area and it must be nurtured in a space that highlights the connections that build a sense of place. It is for this reason that the city of College Station in conjunction with the county, the city of Bryan and the university should dedicate land and resources to began design on a campus setting that would include community gardens, an arboretum, a farmers market, a sustainability center, and a community resources center.

Such a campus would help educate farmers and consumers on a wide range of information including food production, landscaping, rain water harvesting, green building and much more. This center would not just serve the city of College Station, it would serve all of the Brazos Valley and even draw from across the state as we provide a unique setting and information that can not be acquired anywhere else. In a center like this our local farmers could learn about intensive production methods and how to better recognize and serve their market. Our residents would grow into an appreciation for our natural and rural settings that would motivate preservation.

Such a community master plan could be built in pases. The first phase might be a community garden and a section of built space for a farmers market that could be expanded on over time. A farmers market is dependent on exposure and accessibility. Exposure can come from being on a busy street where real estate is pricey and parking is dicey. A better approach is to create exposure by connecting the facility in community, which we do by providing nice space, classes in sustainability and local crafts, community gardens and by the cities making it the sort of priority that gets promoted at every level.

Local Agriculture

There are few things as profound as locally grown food to give folks a connection and a sense of place for where they live. There is something very basic about consuming food that was grown in local soil. Compelling as that essential connection is, there are many corollary connections to a sense of the place that we live that are to be made by eating locally grown food. Eating locally grown foods provides a profound sense of season. Eating locally means eating the foods of the season that you live in. Luckily, we live in a place that provides food the year round. Locally grown fruits and vegetables are allowed to ripen in the field providing more pronounced taste.

Best of all, when locally grown foods are bought in a farmers market from the farmers themselves, the direct connection to the producers provides an intense sense of connection to the place that we live and what grows from its soil. As a bonus, open air farmers markets tend to be a place of community gathering attracting a broad cross section of the community. A trip to the grocery store is a chore to be rushed through; going to a farmers market is an enjoyed event that lends itself to the sort of leisure that builds community.

In the Brazos Valley local agriculture is largely about big production: cotton, sorghum and cattle operations that sell their goods in the world market. For several generations there has been very little agriculture, outside of back yard gardens, that has connected or nourished local residence. But due to changing conditions, such as the cost of fuel and global warming, there is an increased demand for locally grown produce. Unfortunately, the supply is lacking. It is lacking because we do not have a tradition of the sort of small intensive production methods that make production for local consumption more possible. In the absence of this sort of production we have not evolved the methods and plants specific to our climate and soils as has been done in other areas of the country.

These obstacles will be overcome and the demand will be met. The only question is how this will happen. The potential of local agriculture as a means of reducing stress on the environment, providing improved products, and building community is too great not to deal with this intentionally, as the precious resource that it is. Without intentional planning and design, this will happen more slowly, haphazardly and without the full benefit of community development. To make this happen we must take a holistic approach that includes all stake holders.

This is a process that is anathema to the prevailing reductionist paradigm of compartmentalization and specialization. As such the process itself provides heuristic and an opportunity for community building, as matters of necessity.

While we seek an organic and holistic process that seeks permeability of specialization and compartmentalization we must, nonetheless, categorize the components of the process in order to manage details. But we first we must define the boundaries of the system that we seek to affect. That system, as I see it, is contained by the intersection of agriculture for local consumption and community.

In terms of the categories by which we might look at this system, there is supply (farmers and ranchers,) demand (consumers,) the market and community. To be sure, there are other ways to categorize this system, but if development in, and connection between, these categories can be achieved then success is likely.

The matrix of success would include increase production of foods grown locally; a clearer demarcation of urban and rural land; increase public investment in local agriculture in terms of education and the development of public space to provide and support market; increased public awareness of the value of local consumption; Increased and broadened activities happening in conjunction with the sell of local produce.

Development along each category is inherently nonlinear. Demand cannot be met without supply and the market will not grow outside of the context of community. Success will depend on the integration of a wide range of entities including, educational, production and civic each working together and informing the other.

A&M has the ability to provided unique resources in this effort. But universities are uniquely geared to a reductionist and protectionist paradigm that tends to punish cross fertilization even within departments much less across disciplines. This project would be well served by input from programs in agriculture, public policy, sociology, anthropology, cultural psychology, architecture and many others. This project provides value in its ability to provide real word applicability and cross discipline collaboration.

Similarly, we will seek cooperation from various municipal entities that are not well practiced at collaboration. City, County and even state interests should be brought to bear on this project.

While the scope of this project presents difficulties, reducing the scope would diminish its effectiveness and sustainability.

Funding sources for this project should include the university, municipalities, the state, community and philanthropic outreach as well as self funding.

What Is Social Entrepreneurship?

From Wikipedia:
Social entrepreneurship is the work of a social entrepreneur. A social entrepreneur is someone who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change. Whereas a business entrepreneur typically measures performance in profit and return, a social entrepreneur assesses success in terms of the impact s/he has on society. While social entrepreneurs often work through nonprofits and citizen groups, many work in the private and governmental sectors.

Localism is Not Provincialism

There is an important distinction to be made between localism, which the Post Oak Savanna Project promotes, and provincialism, which he project does not support. For example, while we may work with the Arts Council to celebrate art that reflects our area, we would not discourage outside art. And while we will work to encourage locally grown food, we would not discourage imported foods. We seek local identity in a global community.

Wondering what the Post Oak Savanna is?

http://www.scpr.com/tfs/Postoak.aspx

The Post Oak Savannah Project

The Post Oak Savannah Project is an effort to bring recognition to the beauty and diversity of the Post Oak Savanna of Central Texas and to encourage community that reflects and celebrates this subtlety beautiful part of the world. We seek to build this project with various components that will focus our uniqueness through art, commerce, natural history, agriculture, architecture history and other aspects that reflect our unique character.
By embracing the unique aspects of our area we build value in our quality of life and we build stock in our ability to be a destination of interest.
This project seeks to be a resource providing communication and collaboration among the various groups that embrace its mission. We also seek to provide outreach to promote the Post Oak Savanna of central Texas.

The Alchemy of Place

Some of the components that go into creating a unique sense of place are:

• Natural History
• Cultural History
• Art
• Commerce
• Custom
• Community

What we wish to identify and create is a unique sense of place. Sameness is created by a lack of diversity. A corn field in Iowa is pretty similar to a corn field in Kansas, just as a McDonalds in Bryan is similar to a McDonalds in Boston. Creating a sense of place is a process of discovery of diversity and a celebration of that diversity. Here in the Brazos Valley we have all kinds of diversity including biodiversity, cultural diversity, ethnic and racial diversity... in fact we are diverse in our diversity.

To the degree that it is assumed that we have a mono-culture that is because we have failed to fully celebrate our diversity.

More than a quarter century ago my wife and I left the University of Texas where we were Freshmen and set out for the Northwest to find natural beauty, progressive community, independence and rugged individualism. We set out to find the rest of our lives. We chose Moscow Idaho because it was somewhat more remote. Our adventure was a beautiful failure.

The plan had been to work for a year before we started school so that we could get instate tuition. But in Idaho we found an economy that had busted. The lumber mills that made up the biggest part of the economy had shut down. As a young carpenter from Texas I was competing for work with people who had connection in the area that was generations deep. I worked full time just scrounging small jobs that provided less than 20 hours of work a week. I was happy for a long, miserable, cold winter because not everyone was willing to shovel snow off of roofs and crawl under houses to thaw pipes when they frozen, but I was.

To make matters worse we had been wrong about finding progressive community. Idaho turned out to be isolated, provincial and it lacked diversity. We had not so much escaped the red neck mentality of Texas as we had traded it for the backwoods mentality of Idaho.

In a dark and bleak winter of despair what is one to do but read dark and bleak Russian novels. I read Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol and Turgenev by the light of the fire that we used to heat our house. The Russians, after of being tied to the same land, found new opportunity when the industrial revolution came to their western cities such as Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Having left the land and its people these adventurers found great opportunity, adventure and isolation. The connection to their land and their past had been more profound than they had anticipated. But they could not go back because the land would no longer support them in their new knowledge of the world and material wealth.

Fortunately for my wife and I, no matter how analogous our plight was to these displaced Russians, right down to the name of the city that we were in, there were no such barriers to us returning home. It was snowing as we pulled out of Moscow Idaho in early March. Three days later as we crossed Texas the blue bonnets were in full bloom and we knew that we were home.

Few things are more profound than a strong sense of place. It is something that we hold inside our being where memories, like synaptic connections, build context in our lives. It is also very external, where the transcendence of shared context builds community from mere proximity.

Places that are blessed with a strong sense of place have authenticity.