New Faces at Seeds of Change

Terry Allan

I gained my initial love of gardening picking strawberries from my grandfather’s Victory Garden as a small child in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. But it was not until I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kenya, working with subsistence farmers (mostly women) on water catchment systems, that I recognized the need to understand more about where our food comes from. On my way home from Kenya I spent 6 months in India. I happened to travel through the city of Bhopal just a few years after the 1984 gas disaster at the Union Carbide pesticide factory there. I met many survivors and activists struggling to recover from exposure to the poisonous gas cloud that enveloped the city and realized the tremendous unseen cost of our chemically based agricultural systems. It was then that I decided to become an organic farmer and advocate for safe, sustainable farming systems.

Since completing my studies in Ecological Horticulture at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1991, I have worked as a farm manager, landscaper and designer in many diverse climates around the world. I also served as the Vegetable Research Manager at Johnny’s Selected Seeds in Maine, a position similar to the work I am doing here at Seeds of Change. Just prior to joining Seeds of Change I returned to India for 4 years to volunteer at the Sambhavna Clinic in Bhopal. An independent initiative of the same friends I had met there before, the clinic provides free treatment to the gas-affected community of survivors using a pioneering blend of allopathy, Ayurveda (India’s traditional system of herbal medicine) and Yoga. I worked to establish a 1-acre organic herb garden on the grounds of the clinic to produce the herbs used to make the Ayurvedic medicines dispensed. The three gardeners I trained continue to run this inspiring garden located in the shadow of the pesticide factory that caused so much suffering. To find out more about the clinic and garden, as well as the ongoing 25-year long struggle for justice please visit www.bhopal.org and www.bhopal.net.

I am so grateful to be a part of the incredibly important mission of Seeds of Change.

Terry Allan
Sebastopol, California

Lindsay Dozoretz

My first meeting of hand to soil came while studying abroad as an undergraduate at Cornell University.  I spent a semester in Nepal on an anthropology program where I was given the opportunity to live in a remote village in the Solu-Khumbu region of the Himalayas.  I had gone there to study women’s inheritance rights, and found myself ankle-deep in a larger problem: the steep, mountain terraces upon which the women farmed their staple millet were collapsing, and the village was facing a severe food shortage.  This experience woke me up to the realities of our global food situation. I began to realize the ways in which social inequities, environmental problems, and international policies influence the lives of individual people in specific locales everywhere in the world, by impacting how they farm and eat.

Returning to school, my studies shifted towards food systems and policy. I sought a farming apprenticeship at Blue Heron Organic Farm in Ithaca, New York.  At Blue Heron I was initiated.  I prided myself on being the fastest basil-picker, and could frequently be found barefoot between the rows of bountiful greens, pieces of kale stuck in my teeth.  I loved the feeling of carrying a bunch of freshly-harvested beets by the stems, the round fruit dangling at knee-height, scarlet and glorious.  I loved the spectacular emergence of Brussels sprouts from within their layered leaf packages.  Even more, I loved working behind the array of produce at our farmers’ market stand, and offering the colorful, delicious bounty to my community.  It was a connection to food and eating and people that I had never felt before, and it changed the trajectory of my life.

After Ithaca, I returned abroad to work in agricultural communities.  I went first to the Atlantic Rainforest in Brazil, where I engaged with coffee farmers looking for a more sustainable livelihood by growing organically.  Then I went as a Peace Corps volunteer to Senegal where I spent two years coordinating sustainable agriculture programs in a remote community challenged by poverty, resource depletion, and changing ecological conditions.  These experiences re-affirmed my commitment to sustainable farming practices, and the way that this type of relationship to food can bring health, prosperity, and hope to communities.

Before coming to Seeds of Change, I completed a dual Master’s degree in International Affairs, Natural Resources and Sustainable Development with a focus in sustainable food systems.  During these years of study, I had the privilege to spend a season doing a practicum as an intern on the Seeds of Change Farm and Gardens. Falling deeply in tune with the Seeds of Change mission, and inspired by the possibilities of the El Guique farm, I returned to the farm to write my Master’s thesis, simultaneously beginning my involvement in outreach efforts, and sustainability initiatives at Seeds of Change.  I am honored to now take on the position of Education and Marketing Coordinator, Sustainability Lead, and look forward to supporting the Seeds of Change endeavor, both within this community, and in the world.

Lindsay Dozoretz
Seeds of Change Research Farm, New Mexico

Eero Ruuttila

There was no garden in my backyard when I was young, living in the new suburbs of the early 60’s in central Illinois. A farm, to my uninitiated eye, was one of those vast enterprises that seemed to stretch from Saint Louis to Chicago, nearly uninterrupted, in thousand acre blocks of feed corn and soybeans. I was ignorant of the human scale, of the relationship of loving hands nourishing a living soil, ignorant of multi-colored seeds sprouting armloads of joy-invoking flavor and good-health nutrition.

In college my interest in American and Asian literature lead me to some of the world’s esteemed Nature writers: Thoreau, Gary Snyder, Basho, Su T’ung Po, and others. There were orchards and bamboo groves, herb gardens and fields of flowers, mountains and rivers and fireflies and loud roosters in their writings and during my discovery of these writers I also had the good fortune to travel. I lived a year in Finland, spent a semester in northern Thailand, worked a winter break in the Caribbean. I always ate the local foods; they were less expensive, fresher and better tasting than the tourist fare and always there was the discovery of something new.

Produce-purchasing experiences when I was traveling (fresh herbs for a Saint Thomas restaurant from a mountainside farmer; vegetables in Chiangmai’s farmers' market for monks as barter for university living quarters) led to seven years of work experience post-college, as the local produce buyer for a New England consumer food co-op federation. I traveled to farms throughout New England to source fresh (and organic) produce for the food co-ops and experienced vicariously farmers’ lives.

Home gardening became an extension of my work experience. While in Boston I helped organize a neighborhood community garden and in Harvard, Massachusetts my roommates and I tended a quarter-acre backyard garden.

Near the end of my tenure with the food co-ops I received a fellowship to write a handbook about the potential health risks of post-harvest pesticides. I had become concerned about exposure to post-harvest pesticide residues on conventionally grown fresh produce and the possible risks to warehouse workers as they were exposed to these materials in the enclosed environment of produce coolers. I also served during this time as Massachusetts’ first organic farm inspector. As inspector I observed directly the plans and management practices of both small- and large-scale organic farms.

In 1987 I was hired as manager of a 40-acre nonprofit farm in southern New Hampshire (Nesenkeag Farm). My partner, Liana Eastman, who also shared a desire to farm, joined me. During the first years at Nesenkeag I transitioned the farm to its current organic certification status. For nearly 20 years, immigrant market gardeners from Cambodia (mostly middle-aged women) have been the farm’s skilled harvest crew. They showed me how they utilize, creatively, different parts of the same vegetable plant for their traditional cuisine. They also introduced me to many traditional Southeast Asian vegetables and herbs.

I experimented with techniques I had learned from experienced organic growers, acquiring farm implements that fit the scale of the farm and contributed to improving farm soils and managing weeds. I spent many years learning how to fit green manure crops (combinations of legumes and grains) into the farm’s crop rotation plans.

For the last decade Nesenkeag Farm targeted the high-end chef community of southern NH and Boston for most of its sales. Culinary herbs and vegetables, particularly salad greens and heirloom tomatoes, comprised the more than 100 crops grown at the farm annually.

Last year I trialed 30 varieties of spinach in spring and fall plantings for Seeds of Change. The farm also hosted a Seeds of Change Biodiversity tasting event for local chefs, small-scale farmers, and food writers.

These events with Seeds of Change led to an extended dialog with staff members and the eventual opportunity to come to northern New Mexico as the new Farm Manager of the Research Farm and Gardens. I envision many challenges as I experience the microclimate of the high desert Rio Grande Valley. And I am very excited to try my hand at growing out the extensive diversity of flowers, herbs, and vegetables Seeds of Change offers to its customers.

Eero Ruuttila
Seeds of Change Research Farm, New Mexico