take a tour...
Northampton Agri-bicycle tour 2015 It’s the year 2015 and visitors are coming to town to take the popular bicycle agri-tour of Northampton’s local food system. From the newly extended bicycle path network, tourists can visit the exciting prototypes and food hubs in each district to learn new techniques for food cultivation and gather ideas about how a local food system could work in their hometown. First stop on the tour is in the Agricultural District. The cyclists ride around the expansive Meadows and visit with farmers producing vegetables en masse. Next, they stop at the food hub at the Fairgrounds and an employee shows them where the vegetables are cleaned and sorted, and explains how they are distributed to farmers markets, grocery stores, CSA shares, and through bicycle-powered delivery services. The group learns about the economic and social importance of shared community infrastructure such as processing and storage facilities, greenhouse to extend the growing season, and space for a year-round farmers market and mobile slaughterhouse. To see how the food waste is re-integrated into the system, the last stop in the district is at the Municipal Composting Center at the Bleiman Property— a city-owned farm—where they get to take home a sample of rich, dark compost and learn about the city’s mandatory composting program.
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Feed Northampton Districts
Next stop is the Smith College neighborhood where a tour guide for the Urban District awaits. Biking around with the group, he shows them all the latest innovations in urban agriculture strategies—intensive raised-bed gardens abound in residential quarter-acre lots, roof-top gardens and edible vines cover apartment buildings, potted herbs and veggies line student dorm balconies, productive, educational gardens are dispersed throughout the college campus, a glassed greenhouse room sits on the south-facing side of a commercial building, and fruit trees line sidewalks next to the park. Riding further away from town, the group visits a prototype neighborhood in the Suburban District. Each of the lawns of the eight houses around the cul-de-sac are predominantly producing one type of food that homeowners and renters harvest for trade with each other every week. On Saturday mornings, the tour finds neighbors gathering at the cul-de-sac, one with eggs, one with dark leafy greens, another with blackberries. On these mornings, they exchange foods, socialize, and tend the neighborhood greenhouse and compost heap. Before leaving the district, the tour stops at a church and hospital grounds. Inside the commercial kitchen at the church, they watch a demonstration of how to take the curds and whey of goats milk and turn it into cheese. At Hospital Hill, a gardener takes a break from harvesting sunflower seeds to show the group the community garden plots, shared irrigation system, equipment, and tool shed, and the farm incubator site.