Montana Food System Council

In the nonprofit world, “paying it forward” is a way of life. But the Great Falls Community Food Bank has found a creative way to give back to those that are so generous to them as well as help the environment.

With the assistance of Mike Dalton at Sunburst Unlimited, a local sustainability group, the Food Bank recently built seven compost bins to dispose of an estimated 40,000 pounds of green waste each year. Utilizing a unique cold compost method, unusable produce and bakery goods and are mixed with a compost accelerant called bokashi and wigglers to generate rich compost within 90-120 days; far shorter than typical hot composting processes.

Once the compost is ready, it will be made available to community gardens and others who donate their harvest to the Food Bank. It is estimated that the 40,000 pounds of waste will produce 20 cubic yards of compost each year at a cost of about $6 per cubic yard to process.

“This is a winning situation for everyone”, said Gayle Gifford, Executive Director of the Great Falls Community Food Bank. “Composting helps reduce our waste removal costs, reduces the amount of waste we contribute to landfill, and helps area gardeners that support hunger relief efforts in our community.”

Since this is the first composting project currently being done by a food bank in Montana, the Great Falls Community Food Bank is hoping to provide a model for other emergency food services around the state. So far, more than 3,000 pounds has been added to the compost bins and the first soil is expected to be ready by the end of September. The system is set up to provide for continuous rotation of waste-to-compost – as the last bin is full, the first bin is ready to distribute to gardeners. Exactly how much will actually be produced will be better known in six to nine months time.

For more information on the cold compost process being utilized, contact Sunburst Unlimited at (406)868-2359 or the Great Falls Community Food Bank at (406)452-9029.

A new projected has sprouted up in the Flathead Lake area for senior citizens who don’t have a lot of space or time for growing their own food. The Montana Conservation Corps (MCC), Agency on Aging and Nourish the Flathead, are working together for their second year of an initiative that helps seniors obtain container plots using locally sourced materials so that they can do “square foot gardening.”
The Flathead has a fairly high elderly population. “There are quite a few folks who have the interest in gardening but who aren’t physically able to go about that task easily or they just don’t have the space at their home to make a huge garden plot,” says MCC leader Kate Mower. “They might also not be able to get to a community garden.”
MCC worked with the Agency on Aging to identify seniors who were interested in the container gardening. And the agency provided a budget. The MCC workers volunteered their time, working with Nourish the Flathead—an organization aiming to get more interest in local food consumption and food production sustainability in the area. (One initiative they’ve worked on is creating a new community garden in conjunction with the Flathead Valley Community College). With the container gardens, Nourish the Flathead provided sheet mulching lessons to MCC leaders.
The permaculture gardening technique involves actually creating your own soil taking into consideration the ratios of nitrogen and carbon. They used a process of layering (“like lasagna,” says Mower) composted manure (which they got from a local dairy) and leaves (you can use grass clippings or hay, too) that are already broken down a little. Over time the material decompose into a rich soil.
“It took a little bit of convincing [to the consumers] that it was going to break down and be a good choice for their plants,” says Mower. “But as we found last year it was a great choice and last year folks got a lot of food out of their boxes.”
The container boxes are 3 feet wide by 5 feet long, and 2 feet deep. This year, the MCC crew took diseased trees from downtown Kalispell that the city was going to remove, milled them (with the help of a local woodsman) and used the boards to make the container boxes, which they delivered all over the Flathead Valley along with seeds and starters.
Despite such small containers, Mower says the amount of food harvested from each box was amazing.
“You split the box off into foot by foot sections and you can plant pretty densely because there’s so much room for the roots to grow downward,” says Mower. “The box looks super crowded but the plants are actually thriving.”

Several years ago, Big Timber residents participated in the Northwest Area Foundation’s Horizons Program, a program to help communities identify areas of poverty. Poverty is not always just financial need but those human needs missing in the community that are essential to a sustainable way of life.

After eighteen months, and some three hundred plus people meeting in discussion groups with different themes, several needs bubbled to the top. One was the need for a sustainable food system in our community. A food group, now known as Sweet Grass Food, sought answers to questions concerning equal access for all to nutritious food, availability of local food to the community, and how to manage a sustainable food system in Big Timber and Sweet Grass County.

Big Timber has a Farmers’ Market so the group decided the next step toward a food system in Big Timber would be a Community Garden. The City of Big Timber leased a piece of abandoned property to the Group, and in the spring of 2008, the Big Timber Community Garden was born. Thousands of dollars from Horizons grants and community donations helped rid the garden of rocks, fence it, deliver water to it, and then nineteen intrepid gardeners came forth to plant it.

The gardeners had varied knowledge about growing a garden. They shared plants, exchanged seeds, took turns watering for one another, and a few spent many hours on the internet looking for secret ways to grow the biggest pumpkin. Weeding was not popular, but they all worked hard to make the garden a beautiful place to visit. At season end, a bountiful harvest was realized and celebrated with a Harvest Feast in the garden. Some of the produce that year was donated to the Senior Center and to the Big Timber Food Bank.

Year two, thirty-one gardeners came to work the soil in the garden and then the summer of 2009 threw everything at them from late and early frost, hail (twice), and lots of high, dry wind, and yet the gardeners prevailed again. Good local food went home by the basket full, was shared and traded with other gardeners, sent to the Senior Center, the Food Bank, and sold at the Farmers’ Market. The gardeners look forward to the upcoming growing season of 2010. I can hear the pages of seed catalogs turning even now!

Sweet Grass Food intends to start a mostly local food co-op in the coming year as a next step toward a sustainable food system. Sweet Grass Food has completed and is now updating a second printing of a local producers’ food guide and continues to meet with community organizations to spread the word about the importance of eating nutritious local food and of supporting local food producers. For more information or to share ideas, contact Diana Taylor, Montana Food Systems Council member at: Dilota@yahoo.com.