Appendix:  Some examples of our experience:                                     Back to Info Sheet

At Crescent Hill Presbyterian Church in Louisville, Kentucky a community garden was established 11 years ago to honor John Leake a member of the church for some 83 years.  For the past six years that community garden, coordinated and worked by a group of volunteers belonging to Sustainable Agriculture of Louisville (SAL) has hosted gardening day camps that have brought hundreds of children from local schools and neighborhoods into direct contact with the soil, with planting, composting, weeding, harvesting, canning, food processing, and cooking.  Various young adult counselors have been trained and have served that camp, some of them members of the church.  Countless other people have volunteered in the garden.  Corn has been ground by campers and made into corn bread.  Produce has been picked and made into salsa and pickles and jams, given away or distributed to farmers markets. 

Together with the Community Farm Alliance, members of Crescent Hill Presbyterian Church and of the wider community, have supported successful efforts to establish new farmers’ markets in poor access working class areas, as well as strengthening the markets in the middle class areas.  This is a win-win strategy providing a livelihood for local farmers who otherwise would have to leave the land, and providing healthy foods to people who otherwise would not have sufficient access to avoid the low-quality and expensive food purchased in convenience stores at gas stations.

 But the biggest result of all of these efforts:  community has been strengthened, revolving around the collective efforts of producing food on a small scale, distributing food to those with less access, and seeing food as a justice issue affecting immigrant farmworkers and neighborhoods of color systematically marginalized by lack of access to healthy food. 

Agricultural Missions, in the course of rural justice tours featuring speakers from rural organizations from across the globe and from the back lanes across the U.S., has encountered and made common cause with urban agriculturalists nurturing tender life literally on the rubble of collapsed inner city landscapes.  We have exposed youth and adults to the achievements of organic and urban agriculture in Cuba, developed there when Cubans were faced with real hunger.   We have inspired young farmers and activists from the U.S. and Canada at international gatherings of rural social movement representatives in places like Brazil, Kenya, Venezuela and Ecuador.  Did I mention Atlanta?

 We are connected with networks involved in fair trade.  We are involved in the work of re-establishing basic infrastructure for food distribution as part of LIFE in Kentucky.  And internationally we accompany and support some of the most dynamic social movements on the Planet, such as the Via Campesina.  

More than anything, we hope to strengthen partnerships between congregations who walk this path with the networks and coalitions and movements that we work with both in the U.S. and abroad.  We see this effort as one of helping to strengthen local communities everywhere with a strong spiritual understanding of humanity's connectedness with the Earth and on-going Creation, and over time linking those community groups with each other to make some of the larger policy transformations humanity is desperately in need of.   The modus operandi we think can work for movement building:  Organize locally and nourish communities of faith in action, and as you get strong locally, to advocate at all levels!  Nourish the spirit through direct contact with the land, as part of faith groups! 

Agricultural Missions, Inc (AMI) has since 1930 worked with rural peoples’ organizations and communities to defend a healthy agriculture on the land, enjoyed equitably as a part of natural and diverse human cultures.  AMI is in the irrigation ditches, terraces, orchards, and forests (not to mention the occasional press conference and board room) with organizations across the country and the world trying to promote and defend what profound experience tells us is the most sustainable, just and healthy form of agriculture.  While rural people, especially youth, continue to leave the life of farming due to hostile economic models, inhuman economies of scale and the political drive toward monopoly control by agribusiness under an increasingly industrialized and unhealthy agriculture, communities everywhere are seeking ways to reconnect to and exert appropriate control over food production, processing and distribution, in the creating of a solidarity economy with the potential for reviving hope and health.

Be part of that movement with us at AMI.                                                Back to top
 

FOOD: A Justice Issue

Children's Gardening Day Camp

Linking Community Groups

Rural Justice Tours

Want to walk

on the wild side of the soil? 

Give us a Ring!

AMI can work with

your group step by

step, providing

guidance, suggestions

and

ideas, and if

necessary providing training in both the

practicalities of

gardening and in

organizing techniques.

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AGRICULTURAL MISSIONS, INC.

475 Riverside Drive

New York, NY 10115

www.agriculturalmissions.org