How the San Antonio Food Bank is Farming the Future (Mitch Hagney)

Cory Ames [00:00:00]:
Most people think of food banks as warehouses, places that receive food and distribute it to families in need. What if I told you that right here in San Antonio the food bank is also growing its own food on a historic 300-year-old farm at Mission San Juan, part of National Historic park, where the San Antonio Food bank has turned acres of farmland into a thriving forward thinking operation. They're growing resilient crops like Nepal cactus, figs and amaranth to fight food insecurity, adapt to a changing climate, and protect this land's agricultural legacy.

Mitch Hagney [00:00:39]:
Behind us here is Mission San Juan. It's a little bit more of a modest church site, but this is my favorite site of the park because the grounds are so large. There's 130 acres total here, and our.

Cory Ames [00:00:51]:
Food bank has the privilege of being able to cultivate about 50 of those acres. I'm Corey Ames and in today's ensemble Texas episode, I sit down with Mitch Hagney, the director of food sustainability at the San Antonio Food Bank. Mitch is leading the charge on farming practices that are not just about feeding families today, but building a food system that can withstand the challenges of tomorrow. We talk about sustainable agriculture, climate resilience, and how this historic site offers lessons for the future of farming. If we are what we eat and we are all the cells in your body over the course of seven years will cycle through. You are only in existence because of what you're able to consume, then you might as well eat your region because you are an expression of this place. So what does farming on a historic site look like? What can we learn about growing food for today and for the future? Let's get into it. I'm Mitch Hagney.

Cory Ames [00:01:49]:
I'm director of Food sustainability for the San Antonio Food bank, which means a couple things, but the primary thing is that I get to lead our farm team. We have a team of five farmers and then an army of volunteers who come and help us consistently on two different properties. We have 25 acres here at the San Antonio Food bank and we have about 50 acres that we cultivate on at Mission San Juan, which is a national park site. I have been farming for quite a while in many different places. I have been in San Antonio for 16 years or so and I own a hydroponic farm called Local Sprouts. It is also a food hub with food manufacturers like coffee roasters and food truck commissary. I have worked with the Food Policy Council of San Antonio for many years. I was the president for seven years working on food insecurity measures, urban agriculture initiatives.

Cory Ames [00:02:48]:
And I've farmed in a bunch of other places, Massachusetts, Costa Rica, Kentucky. And I really find San Antonio to be fertile ground to grow. Well, there's a lot that we'll get into there, starting first with leading the farm team at the food bank, because I don't imagine that that is something that many folks can say throughout the United States of comparable institutions. So when did that start, the farming initiative with the San Antonio Food Bank? And are you the first one to hold this role? No. The San Antonio Food bank has had a Farm program since 2012, and there was a lot of foresight in the institution here to acquire land behind the warehouse here, which actually is historic farmland in its own right. It is part of a larger area of land in San Antonio that was farmed by a Belgian family, the Van der Wahleys, for almost a century. So has been cultivated kind of many, many times. The farm work as a food bank was initially set up to make sure that we had a steady supply of produce as an institution, but also to connect individuals in the city to agriculture.

Cory Ames [00:04:06]:
As agriculture gets further and further away, it's important to ground people's experiences in food connected somewhat with the land. There have been several directors of that farming program. Mike Persein is actually one of the initial Vanderwalles. He was the first head farmer for the food bank, and there have been several since as well who have each done a great job in their own right. Something interesting happened in 2016, which is that the National Park Service, as it was, expanding Mission San Juan by purchasing some former residential areas to conserve more of the park area and the historic agricultural land around the mission. They knew that they wanted some agriculture to take place on that site. They just didn't have the means to be able to produce themselves. And so the Food bank and National Park Service created this really interesting collaboration to be able to leverage this historic farmland.

Cory Ames [00:05:02]:
So now our food bank manages acreage here, but we also manage acreage on the oldest annual farmland in the city of San Antonio.

Mitch Hagney [00:05:15]:
We are here at the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park. There are five missions that were built originally that are still standing. One is the Alamo, which is managed by the state, but the other four, Espada, San Juan, Concepcion, San Jose, they are all part of one contiguous national park site. Behind us here is Mission San Juan. It's a little bit more of a modest church site, but this is my favorite site of the park because the grounds are so large. There's 130 acres total here. And our food bank has the privilege of being able to cultivate about 50 of those acres. Something that is interesting about this site is that it's still very much in active use by the indigenous community.

Mitch Hagney [00:06:07]:
So the American Indians of Texas at the Spanish colonial missions, they utilize this. This courtyard area fairly often for ceremonial events. Once a year, they actually come and camp out and stay here. This is the site that they interact with the most because it's such a large, expansive, open area, because it's so open in front of the church, you know, a meeting place for traders, for, you know, soldiers, for people that were blacksmithing and different things like that. So the church is still standing, but the ancillary structures were not conserved perfectly, partially because if there's residential areas that are built up with limestone blocks, those limestone blocks are useful elsewhere. So some of the deconstruction happened not just from erosion, but because those buildings were repurposed. But this site was a really dynamic location. About 300 years ago.

Mitch Hagney [00:07:06]:
That was the epicenter of where these communities were interacting. Both Spanish colonists and the indigenous communities, for better and worse, interacting with those groups simultaneously.

Cory Ames [00:07:18]:
How much were you influenced to become a student of this place after the fact of working at this site versus what did you know before?

Mitch Hagney [00:07:28]:
So I am from New Hampshire. I did not grow up thinking about the Spanish missions in San Antonio. But being able to cultivate here is such a privilege. It's tough not to think about the context of the place. And so I've become a lot more interested over time about how all of it works and what it means to be part of that legacy. The weather patterns are slightly different. There's more moisture around here, partially because it's, like, slightly lower lying, so some of the fog and other things kind of accumulate. So this morning, for example, we received some rain here.

Mitch Hagney [00:08:08]:
The rest of the city, or the northern portion of the city, downtown and up, did not. That is likely partially because of the topography, but also because this really large space without a bunch of buildings and a bunch of concrete soaks up and contains that heat less. And it's just a really obvious example of how planning and development affects the temperature, the moisture, and the biodiversity. This acequia is the exact same irrigation ditch that was dug out about 300 years ago. Saquias themselves were something that the Spanish brought over. But as the Spanish were colonizing in Texas and in the Americas, they were bringing lessons that they had received after being invaded and colonized themselves. So the Romans, when they came into Spain, they brought knowledge of aqueducts and kind of advanced water engineering. And when the Moors came up from the Middle east, they brought their own tactics about water management, of which they were really, really effective at.

Mitch Hagney [00:09:13]:
Those kind of combined with the opportunity of springs and rivers to create these acequias, which are ultimately the bedrock of the city. Because the agriculture relied on this water directly from the river being moved into flood channels that could be used then to grow enough crops to sustain the population. The pressure from the river pushes some water into the channels that were dug out. And then enough little gates and locks and channels choose where that water goes so you can manage which fields to go in when. And that is simply how the agriculture worked in the region. Because there's never been enough rain alone to sustain crops like in other parts of the world. And so we've always had to manage water effectively to cultivate crops here. The total distance of acequias that are freestanding today are over 30ish miles.

Mitch Hagney [00:10:09]:
I think, although I'm not exactly an expert at the time, when the sequias were at their height, it was hundreds of miles. Broadway, for example, is built on top of a historic acequia that led to the Alamo. So a lot of the transportation infrastructure that we have in our city follows the same course that water used to. And that is the way that the city organically developed around the resource.

Cory Ames [00:10:38]:
Can you talk about Morrison? You mentioned this briefly, the role of. Of farming, of the agricultural programs for the food bank in the greater means of how the food bank serves its, I think, 100,000 families every single week, say a little bit more for us as to how that fits into the bigger picture, the strategy or the language that we try to use to think about what our role is, is to provide food for today, food for tomorrow, food for a lifetime. Our farm produces nutritious crops. We generate those organically for food for today. So we feed the line with the highest possible produce. The same quality prod that would go to the most gourmet restaurants in San Antonio or Whole Foods. Those are going to families that really need it. And so hundreds of thousands of pounds, millions, over the course of the farm program at the food bank, have directly gone out to distribute that food.

Cory Ames [00:11:34]:
That's a very reliable source of really high quality product to be able to get out to those families. If there are price changes elsewhere in the country or the world that affect our ability to get that really nutritious product, we are somewhat insulated from that because we're able to generate a portion, not the majority, but a portion of that produce ourselves. So that's something that's quite significant. We also, at the same time are able to connect mentally the relationship between food and the land for the people who are in the city. We know that kids who are around cultivated environments, if they see a carrot growing, they're more likely to eat a carrot carrot. If you can connect agriculturally with food, then you're going to consume healthier products over the course of your lifetime. So it's an amazing nutritional intervention. It's also really important, as we think about what foods are going to be economically viable moving forward, that you can conceptually connect where that food is coming from.

Cory Ames [00:12:33]:
And something else that we work on really hard as a farm team is to focus on crops we think are going to be really productive over the course of the next 50 or 100 years. We know that conditions are changing. We know that droughts are becoming more intense, that heat spells are very intense, soils can be very degraded. And so we as a nonprofit can choose to cultivate things that we think are going to be forward looking. So we've planted large volumes of nopal cactus, for example, or figs. We're looking into grain programs like amaranth that we know are going to be drought tolerant. Different crops that we think are well adapted, we can take on some risk, try to cultivate those, integrate them into our offerings, so that as time moves on, other farmers might be able to learn from that example and adopt what succeeds and avoid maybe what doesn't succeed as much. Well, I'd love to dive into that further as to what is the environment like of farming and cultivating food in San Antonio? Like, what's something that, you know, laymen like myself certainly wouldn't understand about what it requires and what's unique about San Antonio area.

Cory Ames [00:13:42]:
But also I think maybe what's unique about San Antonio, this community, historically, our relationship to agriculture. San Antonio has some real benefits when it comes to crop cultivation, and it has some real challenges. We don't have huge volumes of vegetable production around our city. There are other parts of Texas that have a lot more. Around the valley, there's also an area of Texas called the Winter Garden. And then there's huge areas, obviously in Mexico. There's reasons for that. Our climate is very challenging.

Cory Ames [00:14:12]:
Our summers are very, very intense. We have a benefit in that you can grow year long here, but you have to be quite selective about what you're cultivating. It's very challenging to grow tomatoes in this region, for example, now, more so than it even used to be. And Perhaps there are other regions of the country where those crops are better suited. Our soils, if you're further away from river areas, can be fairly thin, and our rainfall is relatively minimal. So you must irrigate if you're going to produce any large volume of crops. That irrigation can be challenging. It can use a lot of water, which can be expensive.

Cory Ames [00:14:47]:
It can use a lot of materials like drip line, which can also be expensive. And it requires some real technical know how to be able to do that installation and maintenance efficiently. But we also have some real advantages. The fact that we only have a couple freezes per year means that our winters are relatively productive. The fact that we do have some rivers in our region, so that our soils, some of our soils are quite rich. That's quite a large asset. And some of our native plants here are actually very edible and delicious. Pecans evolved right around San Antonio.

Cory Ames [00:15:20]:
Nopal, and prickly pears evolved in the same place. Chili pequins. There's lots of different things that our region is well adapted to be able to produce just based off of what perhaps indigenous peoples propagated and what is just naturally here. And so we have a lot of natural food assets, and if we're willing to leverage those. But they won't look exactly like the annual tomato that our supermarket tells us is what our cuisine might look like.

Mitch Hagney [00:15:47]:
So the farm here is broken up into three different main sections that we think about. One is what we call the Spanish colonial demonstration farm. And in that area, we are constrained slightly in that we are not allowed to use modern irrigation techniques. So we have to either use the gravity flow flood system that the Spanish used at the time, or, and this is a new project for us to produce some crops in what we call a dry land context, which is no irrigation. And we've chosen to do that with crops that indigenous peoples relied on. The backbone of this new project is nopales. And this is an amazing diversity nopales here that were provided by the community. We went to the community and said, we want you to give us a paddle from your favorite cactus.

Mitch Hagney [00:16:43]:
We're gonna root it, and then we'll plant it on national parkland. So every nopal that you see here represents a different family and a different story. And so, as a result, there's a fair amount of diversity between some of the stronger, more rigid ones, and then some of these absolutely gorgeous soft varieties. So this is actually a variety that we call citrus nopal. And it tastes a little bit like kiwi or like green apple. And it is really Tender and really delicious. What do you think?

Cory Ames [00:17:30]:
Oh, wow. Not expecting that.

Mitch Hagney [00:17:33]:
Yeah, very tender. Really, really nice in a smoothie. But Nopalius have a huge diversity. So some produce these gorgeous, you know, prickly pear of tunas themselves. Some produce nice kind of thick paddles that are perfect. And some produce these beautiful, I think optimally raw or salad based crops. Now, some of these that are a little bit more tender like this, they're going to struggle more as they freeze. And so we'll be insulating them with straw.

Mitch Hagney [00:18:02]:
Some of them are a lot stronger. They have more lignin or more kind of like a vegetal skeleton to hold them up, thicker cell wall so that they're able to deal with freezing more. So this is also an experiment. Which varieties do best in our context, not just through our intense summers, but through our occasional freezes as well. And on this site, in addition to the nopales, we'll begin planting native trees. We'll be planting Texas persimmon, Mexican plum, live oaks, mesquite, some mulberries, as well as some under canopy items that were really important to indigenous peoples prior to colonization, like sotol, chili pequin, agarita. And as we expand, this is just the beginning here, but this area will span all the way to the end of this field. We're filling up this front section here, but we're really trying to bring community partners in on this section, particularly from the indigenous community, to help frame what this design is going to look like, what crops are appropriate.

Mitch Hagney [00:19:04]:
No irrigation means this has to be maintained pretty delicately because the summers are so challenging. But we're choosing very drought tolerant crops. Ultimately, this site thinks that some of the lessons from the past are going to be critical for the future. And growing resilient crops that need no irrigation is likely a useful investment as we move forward. And today, a lot of our challenges in the food system are driven by our purely kind of corporate quarterly return notion where annual crops are the only option, maybe perennials. Similar to how indigenous peoples were thinking about then, is also a useful lesson for how long term resilient food systems can exist in this landscape. This is the Acequia channel and lock system, where you would drop a gate here, the water level would rise, and then you could raise the gates on either side to send them out to the flood channels to grow the crops. So this is what irrigation looks like with no electricity.

Cory Ames [00:20:12]:
So over the course of maybe this last year, what's been the most productive crops for y'all? We have really, really good experiences with squash, in particular, our butternut squash. There's some varieties that we're able to produce all through the summer that were intensely productive. We got about £20,000 out of a two acre plot that we were able to put down. That's a good yield for an organic, organic production, and that's our summer production. There's other things that are really productive during that time as well. Okra, eggplant. Summer is one season for us, but winter is even more productive. We are getting huge volumes of cabbages and brassicas in general, which includes cauliflower, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, kale, Swiss chard, all of those.

Cory Ames [00:21:05]:
Incredibly productive through the wintertime. And root vegetables, things like onions, beets, turnips. And we're actually very, very good at growing radishes because we grow organically. We don't use herbicides, so we can struggle a little bit with weed pressure. One really nice thing about radishes is they grow so fast, you can actually outpace the weeds. And so we have a large harvest coming this week. Actually.

Mitch Hagney [00:21:32]:
These are our radishes, which I think they're harvesting some radishes over there right now. These we didn't maintain perfectly. We planted them too dense. So we planted. We tried. We were trying to get too, too clever on it. So we planted four rows of radishes for each bed, but it meant that they were too close for us to be able to get our cultivation tines inside. So there's.

Mitch Hagney [00:21:52]:
There's way more weeds in here than we wanted. We think that three rows is probably appropriate for our bed size. But you live and you learn. So most days I come out here in the morning with my team, and then we'll just be doing different farming things. So we might be disking or cultivating or seeding or transplanting.

Cory Ames [00:22:12]:
Yeah, check these out.

Mitch Hagney [00:22:19]:
We like radishes because they grow so fast. They're culturally appropriate. A lot of the populations that we distribute to know exactly how to use them, it's just a cool crop. So actually we had a volunteer group come out on Saturday and they were helping us harvest radishes. But we didn't get quite as many volunteers as we wanted. So there's a lot still in the field we got to get out.

Cory Ames [00:22:41]:
How often are those opportunities available?

Mitch Hagney [00:22:42]:
We have a volunteer day at least every two weeks, usually more often for people to come and help us weed or transplant or harvest. And that's part of the Food Bank's larger network of opportunities. So if folks are interested in the farm. That's great. But if you're more interested in helping, our warehouse kind of pack orders that are going to go out to the community or to do distribution events or to help in our kitchen to be able to prepare school lunches, things like that. The only way that the food bank works is with large volunteer involvement because we're providing free opportunities. So we need help to keep those costs down as much as possible. Gonna meet the farm team?

Cory Ames [00:23:24]:
Sure, let's do it.

Mitch Hagney [00:23:25]:
They're really good at what they do. Are you looking at the big ones?

Cory Ames [00:23:36]:
Check it out.

Mitch Hagney [00:23:37]:
Yeah, they grow so fast. It's like maybe we need to grow only those. We probably won't get all of these by the time that they grow too large without another large volunteer day. But we'll probably get 1500, 2000 pounds or so. These will go directly out to the community through our curbside distribution program within the next couple days. So we need to. We need to wash them because there's dirt on them. But then each of them get bunched into individual bunches, and then those will go out as part of our normal distribution practices.

Mitch Hagney [00:24:10]:
So you might receive a jar of peanut butter and a can of tuna fish and a bag of lentils or some radishes and then some other produce that we've gotten from elsewhere as well. The curbside program that I'm talking about is at the food bank. So it's something like three days a week, people are able to drive up and directly receive a food benefit that then they can bring home. And so these will go out within a couple days. Now, these are cabbages as well. These are going to be really large heads. This field we might get over £20,000.

Cory Ames [00:24:51]:
Which would be awesome.

Mitch Hagney [00:24:52]:
So, yeah, we've been using different methods to be able to. To come and try to get these weeds out using different tractor implements, something called a finger weeder that spins really rapidly and it can spin around the seedling and then kind of fire everything else out. But then once they get big like this, then we have to come in and do some additional weeding control at the same time. Still, they're big enough now at this point that they're not going to get totally. Yeah, they're not going to get totally overrun. They can even shade out some of what's directly around them. So these guys are now ending their teenagerhood and becoming adults, which is really all you can ask for as a farmer is to try to get them to that spot. The rest is up to them.

Mitch Hagney [00:25:38]:
But this field we're Very excited about for us, we plant cabbage September or October and then harvest January, February, depending on the size. Some cabbage heads are supposed to get smaller and some get really big. Obviously those take longer and if you can hit them with a little fertilizer, then they'll, they'll do a lot better. We also have been conscientious about managing pests here. So there's a specific type of caterpillar that is kind of the bane of a lot of farmers existence called a cabbage looper. Cabbage loopers are little green guys. They look like little inchworms. We have been using a really safe organic pesticide occasionally when we encounter these.

Mitch Hagney [00:26:17]:
And so for the most part, there's very, very little pest damage that's kind of cropped up on these so far.

Cory Ames [00:26:26]:
What have been the greatest challenges for you to step onto this acreage when you first started the position? That's a reasonable amount. And you've been mostly in urban farming in your career, at least in San Antonio, as far as I understand it, and even closet hydroponic systems with local sprout. So when you started the position, 75 acres, what were some of the biggest challenges for you to understanding the land and working with it most productively? Farming at scale is fundamentally different than gardening at a small scale. And that's especially true in terms of what supplies you're going to need, ways to most efficiently utilize your labor, and ways to leverage your equipment effectively. So we utilize tractors, for example, we do some tilling, we put put down drip line irrigation, and there's no way to weed by hand at the volume that we're playing with. We knew that we did not want to leverage herbicides and large volumes of pesticides. We knew, especially if we're growing on park conditions like at Mission San Juan, and when we're directly distributing what we grow to families, we want to be as organic as possible. And transitioning from being able to leverage those chemicals to not requires a lot of really specific production styles.

Cory Ames [00:27:41]:
So one thing that we've gotten a lot better at, that we struggled quite a bit at the beginning, was how can we manage these weeds mechanically, at scale without taking out all of our plants, but also managing enough of those weeds that we can actually get a good yield at the same time. It will be a lifelong learning process, but we are getting much better at those techniques over time by getting precision in the tractor implements that we utilize to go around those crops to try to remove what we don't like as much. Long term, we really want to leverage cover crops to replace the seed bank of weeds that we don't really like as much with plants like oats and peas that we can terminate at the right time just before we're able to plant, so that we're able to suppress those. Those other. Those other plants. The key for us is, I think, the key for the food system in general, which is we want to think perennially as opposed to in a single season. When we're growing trees. Like we just planted a five acre fig orchard.

Cory Ames [00:28:43]:
We're planning on planting a plum orchard this spring. We already have a really successful peach orchard. You really have to think long term, not just how can I maximize my irrigation or my cultivation this time, but how can I continue to push that forward for multiple years at a time. That's obvious for trees. It's very important for our annual crops as well. So when we're thinking about COVID cropping and rotating our crops from one place to another and avoiding herbicides and protecting our soils, it's not about your yield for one season at a time. It's about how you're able to create land that we'll be able to produce for you over a long period. And I think for the food system in general, that same transition is what we ultimately need to get some resilience and stability, Is not to just extract as much as we can for this season, but to make sure that we're sowing the seeds and increasing the fertility of the ground to protect the food supply as we move forward.

Mitch Hagney [00:29:41]:
It's rare to find organic peaches in Texas now. They struggle a lot with pests and diseases and different challenges. The ones that we get out of here Are just unbelievably delicious. But I also, I like to draw a contrast between this orchard and the one that we're about to see next because of their resilience to climate conditions. So the peach orchard that's here is similar to orchards that were around in the hill country for the past probably 150, 200 years or so. Fredericksburg obviously, is known for peaches, but it was grown throughout the hill country. They did fairly well. But things have changed over the course of that time that are more challenging for peaches as time goes on.

Mitch Hagney [00:30:34]:
For example, all stone fruit requires what's called chill hours. That's when temperatures are between 32 and 40 degrees. Peaches in particular require those chill hours to enter full dormancy before they can kind of re emerge in the springtime. Our warmer winters are making it harder to get those chill hours. So people are trying to breed new varieties of peaches and other stone fruit that need fewer of them. It used to be that the minimum number of chill hours you would need for peaches is 800 hours. Now we're getting down to varieties that are below 400 or so. So that's one challenge.

Mitch Hagney [00:31:11]:
Another challenge is when we get freezes. It seems like it happens late January, maybe February, as it happened during winter Storm Yuri peaches have one of the first flowers that emerge in the spring. And so if they flower in mid February, but then there's a large freeze in late February, then it can wipe out an entire crop. And then just the intense heat puts a lot of stress on them. And they're already very sugary. Not just the fruits themselves, but all of the juices that are kind of coming up the trunks and the stems. They're also things that pests and fungus can take advantage of. And so if the tree is stressed out, then it's more susceptible to those conditions.

Mitch Hagney [00:31:56]:
A lot of peach producers in the region now say you'll get a really good crop once every three years, which makes the economics of peach production pretty challenging here. So long term, we'll probably see fewer and fewer peaches produced in our region over time, Even though they're absolutely fabulous. Because they're not perfectly adapted to where we're headed. Peaches can recover beautifully when we trim them. When we prune them over the winter, we prune them almost entirely to the base. And all of the canopy that you see here is new growth each year. So if a peach tree has a bad year, it can come back really, really well. Well, it's just that there are more bad years for a peach than there used to be.

Mitch Hagney [00:32:34]:
Irrigation is critical. Fertilizer is important. They are likely to get iron deficiencies, so it's useful to give them an iron supplement. And you really want to prune them. You want to prune them every year. It helps them a lot to develop a thicker root system to come back. Well, there's drip line that runs throughout. And we approached irrigation differently on the new orchard than this slightly older one.

Mitch Hagney [00:32:57]:
This has surface level irrigation line, which is harder to maintain. If you mow, for example, you're more likely to be able to hit that. We spent more money and more time installing the irrigation on the next orchard. We're going to see all of that is buried. And so it took more on the front end, but it maintains a little bit better. And so as we continue to plant more trees, which we will, as a food bank, create more orchards Both here and at the food bank site, we'll be putting more into the irrigation on the front end to bury those systems so that they're easier to maintain long term. So this is our newest orchard. We planted this in March and by contrast, I think this orchard is quite well adapted to the future.

Mitch Hagney [00:33:42]:
We buried the irrigation line, which took a lot more work, of course. But these are fig trees and figs are enormously resilient. We just had quite the summer that lasted all the way through mid October. And you still see fruit beginning to produce on these plants. We have 500 fig trees on this site provided by tree mitigation dollars through San Antonio Parks and Recreation. So as people have been developing land and cutting down trees in other parts of the city, it pools a certain amount of money that then can only be spent planting more trees, which is what we were able to take advantage of here. And for us, this is kind of just the beginning. We'll be planting more orchards as time goes on.

Mitch Hagney [00:34:30]:
Not just of figs of other varieties we think are well Adapted. Of the 500 figs that we have here, there's a hundred of five different varieties. And so this is also a really dynamic experiment to find out which is the most productive, the most resilient to heat, most resilient to, to winters over time. One of those varieties is called the Black Mission fig, which is we think named for figs that were produced, you know, initially in San Antonio. And so far that has not been the absolute quickest growing. Instead, another variety, Texas ever bearing, has been doing best so far. But we'll learn over time. How do they respond to the winters, which ones produce the best fruit, the most fruit, and it's just a really cool site.

Mitch Hagney [00:35:13]:
When we distribute these, they're gone within a couple days in Eaton, probably the same day because they're quite good.

Cory Ames [00:35:20]:
Transitioning a bit more broadly to talk about the food system in San Antonio, not just what's being produced at the food bank. You've talked a lot about this with your work at the Food Policy Council. I'm curious, where do you feel like San Antonio's greatest opportunities are for securing our food system? And yeah, let's start there. Where would be on you on a list of priorities if something were to change or adapt about San Antonio and our relationship to urban farming? Because the farms at the food bank are quite close and, and proximity to city center, where would you begin? Well, we have great assets in terms of the land that's available. So just in terms of city owned properties that Potentially could be leveraged for urban agriculture. We did a study with a group at Stanford called the Natural Capital Project to utilize satellite images to determine how much city owned acreage is potentially viable for cultivation. And we found about 16,000 acres. That's really big.

Cory Ames [00:36:24]:
That's bigger than certain other cities in the United States just on their own. Urban farms are really challenging, I think, to do at scale. I think that you need equipment like tractors, you need efficiencies that come with the economies of scale. But we really think that food forests and perennial trees are great assets, not just for food production, but for providing other environmental services like urban cooling water infiltration at the same time. So if I saw an easy opportunity for us, it's to look at things like floodplain areas that aren't great avenues for residential or commercial development and consider what if those are pecan orchards or for figs or other relatively low maintenance orchard sites that would be able to produce multiple cross cutting benefits at the same time, including food. So that's one just in terms of materials. Culturally, we are so close to Mexico that I think we have an opportunity to steer our culinary environment towards more resilient foods. Mexico has this fabulous tradition of growing and eating cactus, for example, an extremely resilient crop, leveraging different protein sources like insects, thinking about really resilient and sustainable foods as a culinary opportunity, not a constraint.

Cory Ames [00:37:51]:
I think San Antonio's creativity gets us to be able to move in that direction in a way that other cities will ultimately be quite jealous of because we're able to take advantage of our lands and our climate in beautiful ways. What do you think is like the realistic impact of taking, say, that research that was done with the group out of Stanford. We're not going to cultivate 16,000 acres, obviously. And there's also this very big issue we have in the United States, the housing crisis. And so I'm sure much of that will become residential, if that, you know, thinking far out, what, what do you think is, is one, realistic, but two, the impacts of actually taking some sort of action on this. Like what would be a different experience of San Antonio for the community? Like what, what does a greater security in our food supply chain mean for the community as well as some of those ancillary benefits? You know, what trees can provide for the community with the perennial food, forestry. Like what would we be experiencing that we otherwise aren't in this moment by having that underutilized acreage? So urban agriculture in general is never going to be able to solve all of hunger in A city, particularly in a city like San Antonio that's growing this rapidly, it can provide some baseline volume of food, maybe up to 5% of consumption in a region. But urban agriculture is just part of the agriculture in general that the city can rely on.

Cory Ames [00:39:17]:
It's very easy for folks to understand watersheds because water drops in one location and it's easy to watch it flow. But foods move in similar ways. And thinking about the food shed of San Antonio, I think, is pretty important. If we can connect urban agriculture as a city conceptually for kids, for people who are moving into new workforce development training programs to allow them to farm, it doesn't necessarily have to be on public land or in your backyard. Regionally, there are opportunities for cultivation. There's also opportunities for ranching. There's opportunities for trapping wild hogs. For thinking about food resources in a broader way as a food shed, not just as a city, the boundaries of San Antonio are not the most important ways to think about how things are moving in and out of the city.

Cory Ames [00:40:04]:
We need to think about regionally. How is food in Bernie? How is food in Castroville? How is agriculture in those regions affecting food supply here? Because ultimately, we need to be able to produce regional product to increase the resiliency of our community. We know that there will continue to be international crises that affect the price of those products. And as those crises occur, they can affect the prices of food that will make it very challenging to have good access. That will also affect the nutrition that's available. So products that stay good for a long time are often not as nutritious. We want to make sure that we have access to good produce in order to maintain better health outcomes, reduce diabetes and obesity. So when I think about producing as a food shed and even producing as a food bank, we're trying to make sure that we are healthy and we are economically viable for the next 50, 100 years after that.

Cory Ames [00:41:07]:
Because if we don't invest in a resilient type of agriculture in our region, then food banks are going to have too large a job to even be able to process on their own. And so shoring up regional farmers, regional soil production, regional food availability, all of that is necessary to shorten the line ultimately and provide food for a lifetime. And so, I mean, we talked about some of the tactics, but maybe the will or more of like, where action needs to be taken in the greater ecosystem of San Antonio for us to secure the future of our food in our region. Is it encouraging more young people to pursue farming and agriculture as perhaps a Profession. Is it something strictly coming down to the city, providing greater incentive to perhaps cultivate land within the city limits? Where do you see those levers besides the tactics of actually doing it, cultivating more land, how do we execute on that? We need more farmers, there's no question about that. We also need to be able to protect, farm and conserve farmland. Between 2017 and 2022, almost a million acres of Texas farmland, farm and ranch land was lost. That's pretty challenging when there's only 23 million acres to start from.

Cory Ames [00:42:30]:
Lost to what? Lost to residential development? Lost to commercial encroachment? Lost to the failed economics of the farms themselves. So things that we can do to intervene, there are local policy things that we can do to leverage land to. To plant, to make it easier to start urban farms and to start regional farms. There's culinary practices that we need to take. If you are a cook, a home cook that wants to make a difference, showcase resilient crops, showcase figs and nopales and lots of different products that we know are going to continue to be viable as time goes on, and show your friends, make them delicious, innovate recipes that can become a unique culinary environment. We need to value what is grown regionally. So if you have to pay a small surcharge for organically produced or locally produced product in order to invest in that person being in the future for the next 10 years, I think that's an investment worth making. And go participate in farming, go to a pick your own strawberry patch, engage with those farmers, meet them, learn them, become part of the community, become part of the food shed.

Cory Ames [00:43:42]:
As opposed to only trying to source food from centralized locations that are getting that product from far, far away. How important do you feel like, and maybe you could offer some basic definition is organic versus non organic for farms in our area? And maybe the feasibility, I mean, I think I'm like, I wish all food was organic, you know, for one. But you someone who has on the ground experience, what is the practicality of that? And then maybe even venturing into new territory of more of like a popular buzzword in sustainability circles of regenerative organic. So I'm curious what you think about that spectrum there and what are the impacts of, you know, opting for maybe as a consumer's perspective, you know, one versus the other, or likewise, you know, whether you're at the farmer's market or just at the grocery, being able to understand what the differences are between who you're procuring your produce from. At a basic level, organic production Means that you are not utilizing synthetic herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, in order to cultivate your product. In practice, that gets quite confusing and conventional, which is what we call the alternative to organic. We owe a lot to large scale conventional production. In the 1950s, new chemicals and agricultural production techniques vastly increased the yields, Leveraging mechanical and scientific breakthroughs that occurred during World War II.

Cory Ames [00:45:13]:
When World War II ended and the workforce returned, both scientifically and in terms of actual manpower, we hit the ground running. We really increased our yields and we consolidated those farms. Family farms closed down as farming became more of a large corporate production and prices of foods dropped. There was in fact an overproduction of food such that we started to feed corn to cattle, for example, Rather than leveraging grass as the primary feedstock. We got used to that system. We got used to really cheap food that we were overproducing in pretty destructive ways. But at the same time, that was not the most hungry time. Because the price of food was lower for Americans than it has been per capita for almost any people in the history of the world.

Cory Ames [00:46:03]:
And still in the United States, our per capita food pricing is lower than almost any other place. Even though inflation feels like to us, these prices are out of control. If you go to anywhere else in the world because of their agricultural production, it's more expensive, but it didn't come without a cost. Organic production gave us an alternative away from large scale pesticide uses that have really dramatically decreased insect populations. They have poisoned rivers. Large scale synthetic fertilizer use has affected riverways and ultimately coastal ecosystems. Because nitrogen effluence causes algal blooms, it causes big challenges for oxygen levels in those aquatic ecosystems that can cause large fish die offs. That nitrogen fertilizer runoff can also volatilize into the air and is one of the most powerful greenhouse gases, Even more powerful than methane, which itself is more powerful than carbon dioxide.

Cory Ames [00:47:01]:
And large scale herbicide we know has had serious health effects. Glyphosate, for example, which is what Roundup is, the science is relatively conclusive that it does increase cancer rates when used in large volumes of in agricultural communities. And agriculture workers, whether those are Anglo farmers that have historically worked in the Great Plains region or in the valley in Texas through California, primarily low income Latino, often temporary worker migrants. They're experiencing the brunt of what those health effects are. Organic gives us an imperfect move away from those systems where you're using many, many fewer herbicides, fewer pesticides, fewer fungicides to decrease the impact of those. But if you were to Mandate from the top today that only organic production is possible. The price of food would skyrocket and hunger would really be exacerbated pretty quickly. It's on us to figure out, I think internally, what is our personal relationship to those things.

Cory Ames [00:48:07]:
How much would we like our individual purchasing to affect those as an economy and as a community to think about what economically viable alternatives look like. There are transitions towards more controlled environment agriculture systems like hydroponics, which don't leverage pesticides or herbicides because they grow in very different conditions. They are very expensive to build. These farms are very expensive in terms of capital outlay. And so making them viable with soil based conventional farms will continue to be very challenging. Certain crops, they're already doing fairly well. Large scale greenhouse tomato production and hydroponics in West Texas and Arizona are at real scale that's been economically viable for about 15 years. Leafy green production, it's getting closer.

Cory Ames [00:48:56]:
But getting away from conventional corn production towards controlled environment corn production, it's just not going to happen. But drones, robotics, precision sensing, precision execution of these things may decrease the waste of many. Much fewer herbicides, much fewer pesticides, for example. As a country, we should really be investing in ways to continue to produce these things at scale, leveraging our technologies really effectively. To tie it off a little bit here, Mitch, I'm curious to talk a bit about water and your thoughts on its availability and access in San Antonio. Is there any different way that you think about our relationships to water as it relates to agriculture within the San Antonio area? Should we think about that in any particular way that we might not be already? The reason why San Antonio is where it is is because agriculture was viable due to springs and rivers. And so thinking about the future viability of San Antonio requires that whatever foodstuffs our city relies on continue to have some durable volume of water access moving forward, even at Mission San Juan, where we are leveraging historic infrastructure, the acequia that's on site. That acequia is affected by regional weather patterns and the availability of water in the San Antonio River.

Cory Ames [00:50:18]:
Legally, we have access to water coming out of that river and we will as long as there is water in the San Antonio river, which. Which there will be. But in general, the effects of increased and prolonged drought make it more challenging to cultivate in general. But they give us a real opportunity to think about ways to cultivate much more efficiently. There are certain crops we've mentioned already that are more resilient to drought over time. Figs and nopal being just two of those Drip line irrigation is the transition away from flood type irrigation that we used to use when the Spanish arrived. They would dig off channels and they would flood those channels to be able to produce as many crops as they wanted. But it was quite inefficient.

Cory Ames [00:51:01]:
Our drip line irrigation is much more precise and as we move forward, water sensors that go in those individual fields are going to be able to determine where those locations are over time as well. We need to manage that water effectively and we need to individually make choices for where we think that water should go. Are lawns worth having our crops, our most and highest, our best and highest use for those water systems, or do we want to try to only use controlled environment agriculture systems that are going to have enclosed cycles of water? I think we're going to have some interesting conversations moving forward. We know that some volume of climate change is happening. We know that we're going to have to make some difficult choices. I think your question is an important one that we're not going to avoid entirely the conditions that are going to make previous production techniques more difficult. The question is, what production techniques do we want to leverage? Which ones are we comfortable with and which ones do we hope for so that then we can make those investments to move towards in the future? And do you see there being any way in which agriculture, given its size and scale, both regionally and then state in United States, can make an impact on the changing conditions? Like are these strategies, whether it's organic or otherwise, or particular ways in which we work with water or think about the retention of water, are there things that can be done to help maybe mitigate the severity of these conditions over time? I think we can frame agriculture in the future as producing net more in the future than it does today, using less water, probably fewer workers that have unlivable conditions. Everything about agriculture in our region can be better if we choose to invest in systems that we find replicable and ethical.

Cory Ames [00:53:02]:
It requires changing what's on our plate, requires us thinking seasonally, and it requires thinking about agriculture as land use with other aspects. So we know certain regions of our community are going to flood. We know that certain trees adapted to be able to withstand occasional floods. Pecans, for example, evolved to be on riverbanks. If we decided to allocate flood prone areas to be agricultural, not only would you get more production, but you would be able to reduce the tragedy of when that flooding does occur. But it requires us to be proactive about anticipating those problems that we're quite confident are going to emerge. So I'M excited about the prospect of reframing our culinary culture here around what will be viable. I'm hoping that it doesn't require multiple shocks to our prices and our system before we're willing to make those adaptations.

Cory Ames [00:54:01]:
Because it's going to be an exciting process to choose what the culinary region in San Antonio is going to look like in connection with nature. We have to be connected with the soil. We have to be connected with where that food is coming from. And it's an inspiring thing. If you're able to harvest crops from your own garden and bring them to your kitchen. There's something that's fundamentally validating about that. It feels really amazing. We as a city need to think that same way about how we're pulling from our food shed and bringing it into our city's kitchens.

Cory Ames [00:54:34]:
And do you personally know of any chefs or restaurants that yet you're quite excited about within San Antonio who are taking this type of approach? Oh, yeah. There's amazing farm to table folks in San Antonio. Some of my Favorites are Steve McHugh from Cured, Elizabeth Johnson at Farmtable, Jeronima Lopez at Hotel Emma. And we have just an amazing culinary tradition already. In terms of being creative. I would pay as much attention to those folks as I would pay attention to families in the south side that are leveraging figs that are growing in the neighborhood, that are leveraging opales and tunas. Because some of the best things in San Antonio don't come from a gourmet restaurant. They come from the street corner in the same way as the rest of the world.

Cory Ames [00:55:24]:
When they're really paying attention to what's available, it's not the most expensive product. It's the one that they're able to source effectively, play with over time and perfect. And I think that our food bank, our region, is increasingly able to draw connections between that agriculture and those culinary products. I love what you say about reframing it into an opportunity in a very exciting challenge because I think that there's a real interesting balance in agriculture as it seems how we move forward, because there is rightfully so, a lot of previous resistance to what is thought of as conventional farming, at least in people, are in the spaces of sustainability or organic farming. And so for good reason. But it is, you know, you mentioned the sensor water sensors for one. It's this balance of high tech and as well some ancient wisdom and understandings of how to know and work with land. But then as well, I think that there's just a litany of opportunities to bring Food closer to home, you know, whether that's something that provides food security for the entirety of the San Antonio community, that's one thing.

Cory Ames [00:56:33]:
But to just have people and young people and children specifically, I think experience that on a day to day basis more so, I think that's very impactful. I mean, my son will eat anything off of a tree or bush that we grow in our yard, but he's the pickiest eater just out of the fridge. So he'll just try it. He'll just want to know, what is that? That's a peach. And he loves it, Absolutely devours it. And so you see that firsthand, you're like, it's so impactful and to see where food comes from. So I love what you say about that. It is an incredible opportunity.

Cory Ames [00:57:05]:
I believe it. There's some sense that there's sacrifice, but I really love the framing that, no, there's a more abundant future ahead if we really buy in. I think we should to the challenges that are before us because I think it can be a very exciting time. And as you mentioned, some of the chefs in our town have already done so. But one last question for you, Mitch, to wrap up maybe along these lines. If you could wave a magic wand and have everyone in the greater San Antonio community start to understand one thing that you feel like you know or understand about agriculture and our food systems here in San Antonio, what would you hope that other people took with them and started to understand themselves? If we are what we eat, and we are all the cells in your body over the course of seven years will cycle through. You are only in existence because of what you're able to consume, then you might as well eat your region because you are an expression of this place. We have a really cool crop that we're playing around with at Mission San Juan that has a lot of ancient wisdom, but it has a lot of potential for the future.

Cory Ames [00:58:19]:
So amaranth was cultivated at large scale by the Aztecs. It was, some say, up to about 50% of the calories that were produced from the people in central Mexico at that time. When the Spanish came in, they decided that they didn't really want much amaranth to be produced for various reasons. They thought that it was associated with pagan rituals, which it was in a couple different contexts. But they also probably wanted the residents of this region to be consuming western crops. So wheat and ultimately some version of corn, which was native to this area, but ended up being produced at large scales in very different ways in the Great Plains, became the foundational staple crops of this region. Over the course of the last 300 years or so, peoples from this region ended up having to change their diets away from things that they had adapted to towards this Western European diet. At the same time, we see diabetes rates and obesity rates increasing.

Cory Ames [00:59:25]:
When those same people consume more amaranth and nopal and mesquite, for example, we see those chronic disease rates decrease because we are expressions of the place where we are. I think there's if you're proud to be a Texan, if you're proud to be a San Antonian, there's no better way to celebrate that than to take and cultivate what is here and let it express itself through you and through your actions. And knowing that you want yourself and your people to continue in the future, you should make sure that that agriculture is one that will continue to be viable, one that is resilient to the conditions where we are. The droughts that we know are coming, the water scarcity that we know is coming, and the beautiful 300 some days of sunshine are able to produce something that you can then push out through your own behavior and actions. What's happening at Mission San Juan and the San Antonio Food Bank Farm is a powerful reminder. A sustainable food system doesn't just address hunger today, it builds resilience for tomorrow. By growing crops like Nepal cactus and adapting historic irrigation systems, Mitch and his team are preserving the past while solving very modern challenges. It's inspiring to see how land that's been farmed for centuries is still teaching us about sustainability in the future.

Cory Ames [01:01:02]:
If you're in San Antonio, consider supporting the San Antonio Food Bank's work through volunteering, donations or just spreading the word about their mission. If you enjoyed this episode, we've got more stories coming your way about sustainability, food systems and the incredible work happening in Texas. Be sure to subscribe and check out our other videos like our feature on the San Antonio Food bank with CEO Eric Cooper for more insights and how we can build stronger, more resilient communities here in Texas together. Thanks for watching y'all, and I'll see you in the next episode.