(bright music) (milk burbling) (sandwich sizzling) (chopping board thwacks) Um, now you know better than to interrupt a moment between a man and his sandwich.

But since you're here, I'm getting all the goodness.

I'm enjoying breakfast at The Urban Farmhouse Market and Cafe in Midlothian.

And they practice a concept called farm to table, meaning they source as much of their food as possible from local farms so the food is fresh, tasty, and full of vital energy and nutrients.

Today, we will shine a spotlight on agriculture in Virginia.

It's the topic of today's episode of Spotlight Earth.

(bright music) Helping me do that, it's Ellen in the studio.

Thanks, Jarrell.

That looks so good.

We may not have sandwiches here, but we do have statistics.

Let's look at how important agriculture is to the state of Virginia.

Agriculture has an $82 billion, that's billion with a B, impact on Virginia's economy.

That makes agriculture Virginia's largest private industry.

According to the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, there are over 41,500 farms spread across a whopping 7.7 million acres of land.

This industry provides over 380,000 jobs and helps other services and industries add over $43 billion in value-added impact to our state's economy.

Now, that's a cash cow.

(cow mooing) Speaking of cows, cattle are among Virginia's top agriculture products.

Let's take a deeper dive into top crops and livestock.

It starts with chickens, specifically broilers.

They're a type of chicken that are larger and meatier than egg-laying chickens.

Broilers are the number one agricultural product in the state, bringing over $900 million a year.

Virginia agriculture is a worldwide phenomenon with exports valued at more than $5 billion in 2022.

China and Canada are Virginia's top two export destination.

But it's not just about making money.

Family is at the heart of Virginia's agriculture with 97% of farms being family owned.

Virginia is also home to nearly 19,000 new and beginning farmers.

And Virginia farmers are leading the way in controlled environment agriculture in enhancing conservation practices.

To truly appreciate the marvel, that is agriculture, let's explore the natural processes and resources that make it possible.

Let's start from the ground up and discuss soil formation.

Soil is essential because it's the foundation where our food grows.

Soil is a living ecosystem of broken-down rocks, decaying organic material, and living organisms from tiny bacteria, to plant roots, to large worms, and burrowing, mammals, and reptiles.

It can take over 1,000 years for an inch of soil to form.

And then comes the rain.

Plants need water to grow.

And as we learned earlier in the series, the water cycle is how water moves through the environment.

It rains and the plants take up the water and release it back into the atmosphere through evapotranspiration.

Using water efficiently is key in agriculture.

And plants need nutrients.

That's where the nutrient cycle comes in.

It is a reciprocal relationship between plants and soil.

Plants absorb nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus from the soil to grow.

And the plant matter breaks it down.

It returns nutrients to the soil.

And pollination is an important buzzword when it comes to plant health.

Bees, butterflies, birds, and even the wind play a crucial role in helping plants reproduce by transferring pollen.

This is vital for the production of many fruits and seeds.

Genetic diversity of crops and livestock is also critical.

Having a wide variety of crops and livestocks make agriculture more resilient.

It means that agriculture can adapt to different conditions, resist diseases, and also provide a variety of tastes.

Each of these natural processes work together to support a flourishing agricultural sector.

Virginia's farmers know this well and are finding it's necessary to change or adapt industrial agriculture practices to ensure these ecosystem services are intact and healthy.

But research can only get us so far.

Let's go learn from the farmers themselves.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) Jubilee Climate Farm is a unique farm focused on tree-based food systems, so also known as agroforestry or carbon farming.

And it's a really critical kind of agriculture because it does multiple things at once.

And it's based on traditions that go way back.

And more recently we've discovered that this kind of farming was the original design throughout Mesoamerica and in the tropics, was the most diverse, most productive food systems per acre that humanity's ever developed.

So a tree-based food system has layers to it, right?

So it's a multi-strata.

So it's not just one field of, say, corn.

It has multiple things going on at once.

So all of a sudden, you've got a food system that is actually healing the earth, so what we'd call restoration agriculture.

So these kind of systems can rebound places that have been highly degraded and damaged by the techniques that we're incorporating here.

The farm is a unique place that you're able to recognize like the beautiful entanglement of culture and nature.

And days like today made me recognize and just reiterated the versatile meaning of the word growth.

And you can apply it in every aspect here.

You can grow in food security.

You can grow in carbon capturing.

You can grow in farming techniques.

You can grow in knowledge.

But then you can also grow in love, and grow in community and grow in peace, and grow in mindfulness, and grow in learning how to be present.

Yes, we are here building our relationship with nature, but it's also here strengthening our relationship to one another.

It's so nice because I feel like as a student, I'm just so thrown into like academics and obviously like the typical social stuff in college, but coming back here like really grounds me, and it's so like peaceful, lets me connect with nature, and I'm also giving back to the environment.

It's really, really rewarding and like fulfilling to do work like this.

And it just puts life back into perspective for me personally.

(bright music) I started off studying engineering in college, got really interested in agriculture and where our food comes from, and how that relates to our health, and all of those kinds of questions.

We think of ourselves and talk about ourselves as a regenerative farm.

And so that starts with the soil life, and then that life, you know, is ultimately gonna work its way up to more life in the pastures, more vibrant life in the animals.

And that's gonna create healthier food to help create healthier people.

The way we manage our livestock is to stimulate or accelerate the natural systems.

When a plant is growing and then gets grazed, it has to rebuild all of that growth that was just consumed by the animal.

And through that growth process, cycle nutrients, cycle carbon into the soil, build soil organic matter, build soil aggregates to allow greater water infiltration and kind of all these different systems working in harmony with one another.

So you just get sort of more abundant life in the soil through greater diversity of plants.

And then all those plants are gonna have different nutrient profiles for the animals to graze.

The diversity of nutrients that the animals are consuming is gonna, a, make the meat more nutrient dense, and it also impacts flavor a lot.

If a pig has only eaten corn its whole life, it's not gonna taste like a lot.

But because our pigs are chowing down dozens of different kinds of plants, there's a lot richer flavor to their meat as well.

The industrial model is about confinement and control so that you have a super consistent product all the time.

Whereas, this is biological, we're allowing the animals to just behave the way that they naturally wanna behave.

Cattle want to graze.

Pigs want to root around.

Chickens wanna be catching crickets and forging on plants as well.

They all want sunshine and fresh air and fresh water.

I'm optimistic that there is a future for farms like ours.

We've seen the growing interest in how food is being produced, how food relates to our overall health.

Customer interest and support for this, that's been growing.

You know, I think there's more and more interest in applying these kinds of principles, you know, on a family or, you know, very small community scale.

And I think that's a great thing, you know?

I think the more people who are involved in food production, the better.

(bright music) Everything about farming is either gonna have a positive compounding effect or a negative compounding effect.

And when you can begin to observe the positive versus the negative, you can make choices.

Second to being a mother, I am a farmer.

I farm with my husband, Garrett.

After that, I would say I am a scientist, (laughs) because I'm constantly trying to learn how to cook with the food that we are raising.

I'm trying to learn about the soil.

I'm trying to grow different plants and raise certain animals to help this whole system work together.

Our main mission and goal is to work with the land that we have access to and to take care of it in a way that benefits the grasses and the soil as deep down as to the microbes and the roots and the bugs.

And it's our job to create a platform where that biology can work in harmony.

Well, if you can build healthy top soil and you can raise a diversity of grasses, then you have the ability to regenerate and provide nourishing food for your animals that then becomes nourishing food for yourself.

It's all a big part of the microbiome.

I knew that the food that I put into my body was going to be the fuel, and applying that to the farming system, it makes perfect sense.

We have our online store, and we do a lot of the local farmer's markets.

It's really hard these days as a farmer to make a profit or to make a living doing it.

And so you becoming the middlemen for all of your enterprises is one way to be able to secure your finances so that you can continue following your passion and your visions.

People have to eat.

But I think the difference is the consumer gets an opportunity to have a relationship with us.

And they're gonna feel a lot better about the food they're choosing to fuel themselves.

And I think it's an incredible opportunity that you're not gonna get at the grocery store.

Take a step back and see how you can help facilitate the bigger picture.

That's what regenerative agriculture is.

It's like seeing that this is a whole system working together.

So as you can see, farmers in Virginia use technology and innovation, as well as time-tested science to help keep us fed and our ecosystems healthy.

Speaking of staying fed, let's head back to Midlothian where Jarrell is contemplating dessert.

Yeah, Ellen.

The sweet stuff here comes in the form of milkshakes made with locally sourced dairy.

As humans, food is a great connector.

And the sharing of food is universal throughout the globe as a cultural tradition.

Mealtime is where communities and individuals form bonds, friendships, and family.

And it's awesome to see how restaurants like Urban Farmhouse bring communities together to eat locally produced foods.

But not every household in the United States or even in Virginia can comfortably put food on their table.

Some families suffer from food insecurity.

That's when access to affordable food is restricted due to economic and geographic circumstances.

And it's not just about having food, it can also be about having access to nutritious and healthy food, as well as food that reflects your cultural preferences.

In fact, in Virginia, about a million people live in food deserts.

These are locations where there is no healthy food available to purchase.

They may live in an area that does not have a nearby grocery store.

According to Feeding America, in 2020, around 658,470 Virginians were food insecure, which is almost 8% of the population in our state.

Food insecurity has far-reaching impacts.

From affecting physical health, to social and emotional wellbeing, it even affects how students perform at school and how adults perform at work.

Sadly, children are often the most affected.

But there's hope.

People in Virginia are taking steps to combat food insecurity.

Virginia's roadmap to end hunger aims to increase access to nutritious food and decrease food insecurity by 2025.

The roadmap includes goals like expanding child nutrition programs and the availability of farmer's markets to those in need, providing nutrition support to seniors, connecting people with the right foods to support their health, and investing in food and agriculture for marginalized communities in food deserts.

Organizations like Cultivate Charlottesville are at the forefront of this movement.

My co-host Michael is in Charlottesville exploring how these pioneering organizations are fighting food insecurity in Virginia.

Hey, Jarrell, we're here in Charlottesville, at a community garden.

We're about to meet the folks who are responsible for this cornucopia of goodness.

This is Aleen Carey.

She's the co-executive director of Cultivate Charlottesville.

Cultivate Charlottesville is a local nonprofit, and we have an integrated approach to looking at food equity in our city.

So we have three programs: City Schoolyard Garden, Urban Agriculture Collective, and Food Justice Network, where we kind of come together to look at the different areas personally in community and at a policy level that affect us as far as food justice in Charlottesville.

So for our community gardens, they were actually started by residents in public and subsidized housing, folks who decided that they had some space in their neighborhood and wanted the ability to grow their own food.

We have weekly markets so that residents can come through and pick out what produce they want at no cost.

So we make sure we're asking them ahead of time what they'd like to see us plant, and then they get to reap those rewards when they come through on market days and get fresh food for their families.

We've got some green peppers right here.

And this is something that community members have asked us for year after year.

So you'll see there's a couple right here.

And actually we just had someone come through and grab a couple.

So I'm guessing that's going into dinner tonight.

Nice.

And then back here, we've got some squash plants.

I can always spot those by the squash blossoms, which are great to stuff with cheese and fry.

We also have green beans here that are growing and will be harvested soon.

So it really is something that can be farm to table for the neighbors who are coming through to get the food.

(bright music) This is Charlottesville High School, home of the Black Knights and a schoolyard garden.

Jordan Johnson is the City Schoolyard Garden Program Director for Cultivate Charlottesville.

So our program focuses on three specific projects.

We'll focus on the youth engagement in the gardens.

In the elementary schools, we have weekly programming in the gardens.

In the middle school and the high school, they actually have urban farming classes that they can attend.

And then we have our Healthy School Meals Initiative, is the second one, where we focus on leveraging that student voice to incorporate more healthy options in the cafeteria and specifically prioritizing what the students want.

And then the last one is our Paid Youth Food Justice Internship Program.

That's a six-week session in the middle of the summer where we focus on going into each of the gardens and focusing on some of those Healthy School Meals Initiatives and learning a little bit more about general food justice advocacy.

What's the benefit of introducing kids at a younger age to this?

When you get them that early, you're able to focus on connection and building up more of that knowledge and more of that experience.

And we have students in high school that we've talked to and asked them what elementary school they went to, and they remember their elementary school garden at this point.

So it's really good to draw that connection between the programming that they're doing, which is very much finding bugs and digging in the dirt and learning about compost and worms, and then coming to the high school and being able to focus more on, what does small-scale farming look like, how do we get things to market, and focusing more on production.

(bright music) How does this initiative incorporate the values of racial equity into its work?

We are looking at how those issues have impacted the food system that is in place today.

When you talk about Vinegar Hill, it was a thriving Black neighborhood.

Before it was raised in 1964, there were grocery stores there.

At this point in our area where we are today in the 10th and Page neighborhood, there is one accessible grocery store, but it is not necessarily financially accessible for everyone.

So there has been a huge shift in what is food justice, food access, food equity in Charlottesville.

And what we're hoping to do is through that racial equity lens, work with city partners, city council, city offices, and coming up with a plan and then revisiting that each year.

These are recommendations we have based on community input and research that we know in the field of equity.

These are things we'd like to see happen in the city of Charlottesville to make Charlottesville not only a foodie town, but a food equity town.

When we're talking about food insecurity, what's the importance of having locally sourced food?

We believe that food is a human right.

So we know that people have that need for food, we all do, to be able to thrive.

Whether you're talking about students who need that to be able to sit in their classes and do their best work, or as athletes and doing their extracurricular activities, having what they need each day, to adults who are, you know, feeding themselves and their families, you wanna have the best food possible.

And really there isn't anything better than something that's coming out of your backyard or out of your neighborhood.

So for folks to be able to go to our markets each week and get something that was grown either in their backyard or in their neighborhood means they know they're getting high-quality fresh produce and that that's what they're feeding their families with.

(Jarrell slurping) The bond between person and milkshake is a beautiful thing.

(bright music) But even more beautiful is the connection I feel now that I know where my food comes from and the care that was put into cultivating the ingredients.

So the next time you bite into a BLT or sample a salad, eat an egg, or share a shake.

Remember, you can choose to support a piece of Virginia's agricultural legacy and eat locally sourced foods.

And there's even more you can do to help address food insecurity in Virginia.

You can donate to emergency food systems, advocate for policies that improve food access and healthy agricultural practices, grow nutritious foods in your backyard, farm, or community garden, shop at your local farmer's market, educate yourself and others, and organize your communities to address barriers to healthy food access.

Let's work together to sow the seeds of change for a thriving agricultural industry that stewards the land while ensuring nutritious food access for all.

Thanks for joining us on Spotlight Earth.

(merry music) (merry music continues)