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Amber Dawn
Beginning Farmer and Kids Farm Director
Hollygrove Market & Farm and Grow Your Own
September 17, 2013

We were lucky enough to meet Amber on a trip down south to New Orleans this past summer, where we communed with other fine folks brought together by the Southern Food & Beverage Museum. It's always inspiring to meet someone who has completely transformed his or her career - in this case, from construction manager to urban farmer. Amber embodies the passion and spirit associated with doing what you love to do.

When did you know that you wanted to work in food?

Years working in construction management - watching wastefulness and feeling out of touch with meaningful work that served my community in a positive way - made me take a hard look at how to find a better way to make a living.  After some soul searching, I found the answer to more meaningful work in the food system.

I believe that the food system and how it is managed is possibly the single biggest influence humans have on the planet.  The more people know about how food is grown the more they become aware of how their choices influence the environment. My goal is to learn to grow food and teach others, to use sustainable practices and to support others in those practices.  When I first looked for work in gardens and garden programs, I found skilled gardeners hard to find.  This motivated me to become a skilled gardener in my own right to support these gardens and garden programs.

How did you get your current good food job?

In a garden community so small, I sought out the most obvious places to work with skilled growers.  In New Orleans, I started volunteering at the local food hub, Hollygrove Market and Farm.  Our farm has a mentor farmer that works with volunteers and interns to train in growing for market on small spaces that are easy to find in my city.  Our program teaches resource management, growing season, crop planning, harvest and garden maintenance.  I applied for the newly developed Beginning Farmer program, where an intern that had demonstrated a commitment to learning, growing and training with the mentor farmer could apply for a field space of equal size on the property to grow for our market, under the mentor's continued guidance.  During my apprenticeship I was also invited to develop a kid's garden program and became the Kids Farm Program Director.  It launched last spring. We partnered with a local school and successfully ran a 4 week program: "Where My Food Comes From?" for 98 first graders, as well as offering a Kid's Club that meets 3 times a week for garden activities.  All this while developing the Beginning Farmer field amplified my ability to plan and develop the space, the activities, volunteers and an educational program.

How did your previous work or life experience prepare you for a good food job?

I was a project manager and designer of renovations prior to my work in the garden.  I spent years walking into a space, looking at it and deciding how to rearrange it to be comfortable, maintainable, space efficient and feel like home.  It is exactly how I approach my garden planning.  I had already spent most of my career working hard, both physically and mentally, so I felt quite prepared to scale up my garden to be a whole market space because I was able to project timelines, resources, materials and manage teams of people.

What was the greatest obstacle you had to overcome in pursuing your Good Food Job dream?

My passion gave way to knowing what I had to do with my life.  It meant starting over, learning a new skill and working as an intern.  I was challenged with having to learn the very special growing calendar for Louisiana, find a place that I could learn and become proficient...all of this meant becoming dedicated to learning and not necessarily earning.  I struggled to follow my instincts while watching my savings dwindle and wondering if I was really making the right decision.  Having left college over a decade ago, I didn't expect to start running construction projects, but as I got better, I made a comfortable living.  It was difficult to stick with it - I had to take a waitressing job at night so I could build out the farm and develop the children's program.  I was dirt tired all the time and felt frayed for many months.  Taking over the Beginning Farmer field was terrifying: it was weedy, filled with trees that needed to be removed, and hadn't been cared for in years.  The first crop that came out of the field and sold to our market gave me a second wind.  Then, implementing the 'Where my food comes from?' workshops for the first graders, watching them enjoy eating from the garden and having our city kids hold bunnies and chickens and get excited about worms, that was like a dream come true.  This past spring was both the hardest and the most validating in my time since I started on this path.

What can you identify as the greatest opportunities in food right now?

Going back to our roots.  Food for thousands of years has been a way we share, it's something we do on first dates, family reunions, with those that we love and make peace.  Making food the centerpiece of how we treat ourselves and the community has been somewhat of a renewed vision in the local food movement.  I have a lot of faith, being a grower and educator in food systems, that people are begging to go back to the basics in where and how food is made.  That quality is about variety and knowing your farmer, or chef, or learning how to prepare good healthy wholesome meals both in the garden and in the kitchen.  To take that a step further, as the conversation deepens, we see that the food is a part of an ecosystem, that so much life takes part in that system?in which at the end of the day, we are sitting with our food and drinks and laughing and sharing.  All this can and will need to be more sustainable and it doesn't mean we sacrifice good for cheap, but quality and health over wastefulness and dis-ease.  I think the great opportunity is to find appreciation in what is simple and know that simple always doesn't mean easy, it means mindfully done with our community - and by that I mean the eco-community, at the table.

If you could be compensated for your work with something other than money, what would it be?

I have the benefit of working with volunteers and children daily at the farm.  It's likely the most valuable experience I have in my work, not to mention the immense fun I get to have with my little Sprouts and Seedlings, in the Kids Club.  This summer I had a regular volunteer that was such a joy to have around and took such pleasure out of our work together.  She constantly brought more people, brought her family to meet me, and spent her last day in town before returning north to school, at my farm.  We made a big lunch that day, and when she left she wrote me the most touching letter, in which she revealed how each hot summer day (and in New Orleans they are HOT summer days) that we sweated through our garden time together, she was learning to grow as a person.  She said the real lesson in that work was to allow oneself the space to experiment and take risks, no matter what the practice.  Cultivating a space where young people see that what we learn in the garden are the lessons life won't teach in a book, is more reward than any check I've yet received.

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