nrcs

After a morning visit to the White House Kitchen garden, 27 students from Ecole Du Breuil, the leading school of Horticulture and Landscaping Techniques of the City of Paris, France, spent the afternoon visiting the USDA People’s Garden. All of these students are interested in landscape design and are receiving special training so they can pursue this important work as a career. These young people, like many others from around the world, are taking an interest in agriculture after being involved in a People’s Garden project in their community.

Recently, representatives of USDA Rural Development and other federal agencies held a collaboration meeting with the federally recognized tribes of the Ahtna Region, Alaska. The meeting was the fourth in a series of government-to-government Tribal Collaboration Meetings scheduled with tribes in Alaska. The venue for the meeting between federal officials and tribal leaders was in the beautiful remote Copper River valley at the Tazlina Community Hall. Tazlina is located seven miles south of Glennallen on Alaska’s Richardson Highway.

Tribal representatives and other partners from the region used the session in early August to discuss issues affecting their villages. Leaders from Rural Development, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, Farm Service Agency, Small Business Administration, Housing and Urban Development and the Economic Development Administration (EDA) were on hand to listen and participate in the dialogue.

The First Stewards: Coastal People Address Climate Change symposium was recently held in Washington, D.C. This meeting brought coastal area Native Americans, Alaska Natives and indigenous U.S. Pacific Islanders together with scientists, non-governmental organizations and policy makers to discuss the impacts of, and develop collaborative solutions to, climate change.

Adaptation to climate change is a pressing issue for indigenous people, who have lived closely with the ocean and coastal land for generations and depend on them for cultural survival.

The Quinault Indian Nation, Quileute Nation, Makah Nation and Hoh Tribe hosted a gathering of over 300 people July 17–20 at the National Museum of the American Indian.

One of the panels was moderated by an employee of USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), Ciro Lo Pinto, District Conservationist in Wellsboro, Penn. As part of the discussion, he shared the new Indigenous Stewardship Methods and NRCS Conservation Practices Guidebook.

USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) is working with Land’s Sake, a non-profit organization in Weston, Mass., to improve soil health and to install an irrigation system and a high tunnel on their working organic farm.

The Land’s Sake farm has been in operation since 1980, when the town bought the land from Harvard University, which owned it as part of the Arnold Arboretum. Land’s Sake’s mission is to connect people with the land through farming and forestry through educational programs on their farm and local conservation lands.

Deacon Willie Moseley nurtures not only his church’s congregation, but also the 40 acres of forest that surround it. Antioch Baptist Church in Lauderdale County, Miss. has owned the land for almost a century, but the church has recently formed a new vision for caring for this forest.

Starting in the 1920s, trees on the church’s property were harvested periodically to help finance church projects, but a major harvest in the 1990s left nothing but stumps and idle land. Moseley wanted the church to benefit from the forest—sustainably managed forests can provide a steady income to their owners—and he turned to USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) for help.

Moseley had worked with NRCS on his own land, so when he recently was chosen to head the church’s Board of Trustees, he started talking to the other deacons about how NRCS provides financial assistance, expertise in planting trees and other help with stewardship of forests and other natural resources.

Each July, more than 9,500 people pedal across the state of Iowa, covering a total distance of more than 400 miles in just seven days. The Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa (RAGBRAI) attracts cyclists from across the globe.

Cyclists travel from one Iowa town to the next, enjoying the Midwest hospitality. Iowa residents living along the route can watch the swarms of bicyclists ride by for hours straight.

The annual Feds Feed Families food drive is a summer-long effort, but USDA employees in Missouri donate to the Food Bank of Central and Northeast Missouri all year long. Eight years ago, Tara Griffin, a Missouri Farm Service Agency state office employee, took the initiative to organize USDA employees to volunteer once a month at the Food Bank of Central and Northeast Missouri. Employees repackaged bulk food for individual use and sorted food products, giving them the chance to see first-hand the impact the food bank has on local communities.  The experience was so powerful that Missouri USDA employees have continued to volunteer at the Food Bank once a month ever since.

Thus, it is no surprise that Missouri USDA employees are so eager to give back to the food bank each year through the Feds Feed Families campaign.  Collaboration between USDA agencies within the Missouri office has allowed for friendly competition and spurred the generation of creative ideas to help make the state’s Fed Feed Families campaign a success.

A Kansas family and their neighbor  are working with USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) to increase habitat for the lesser prairie-chicken—while also benefiting their grazing lands.

Glen Mull and his daughter, Amy Harter, collaborate with Tom Turner to co-manage the grassland they own and the grassland he manages next door. Together, the Mulls and Turner have enrolled roughly 3,000 acres in Edwards and Stafford counties in the Lesser Prairie Chicken Initiative.

Pennsylvania USDA officials and retirees recently partnered with a local producer to donate huge boxes of cantaloupes and fresh-picked sweet corn as part of the 4^th Annual 2012 Feds Feed Families Summer Food Drive. The food drive is a voluntary effort undertaken by federal employees around the country to collect and donate perishable and non-perishable goods to food pantries and banks in their communities.

Locally, USDA agencies are partnering with Henry and Brett Stehr, brothers who own and operate Kenny Stehr & Sons Fresh Fruits and Vegetables of Pitman, Schuylkill County. The brothers can be found every Tuesday and Friday with fresh, local produce at the Pennsylvania Farm Show Complex Farmer’s Market in Harrisburg. The Stehr brothers donated a box of fresh cantaloupe to the USDA food drive’s donation to the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank, and current USDA directors purchased an additional box from Stehr & Sons to add to the donation.  On hand for the occasion were Terry Stehr (former Schuylkill County Farm Service Agency (FSA) County Director); Bill Foose (former Program Director for FSA); Thomas Williams, USDA Rural Development State Director; Tim Kinney, representing USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS); Kevin Pautler, National Agricultural Statistics Service; Brett Stehr of Kenny Stehr &Sons Fresh Fruits & Vegetables and Bill Wehry, USDA Farm Service Agency State Executive Director.

James K. “Rooter” Brite, Jr. is a born-to-the-land Texas rancher and participant in USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) conservation programs.

Brite was born and raised on the ranch his grandfather, J.A. Brite, purchased in 1929, near Bowie, Texas.  These days he runs more than 850 cows and yearlings on 3,400 acres of shallow, rocky soils, tall grass prairie and post oak cross timber in an area that receives less than 30 inches of rainfall annually.