Illustration by Stacy Harrison ’13
* What’s a CSA? CSA stands for “community supported agriculture,” a farming model in which customers buy shares in a farm’s produce, stabilizing cash flow for farmers and providing weekly in-season produce for customers. For links to the websites of these enterprises, see oberlin.edu/oam.
Chaw Chang ’95 describes his time at Wheatland Farm as “life changing.” With his wife and children, he now owns the certified organic Stick and Stone Farm near Ithaca, New York. The farm’s vegetables are wholesaled and sold at the Ithaca Farmers’ Market and the Park Slope Food Co-op in Brooklyn. Stick and Stone also launched a low-income CSA* called Healthy Food For All.
Build it Green NYC (BIG NYC), a reuse, recycle, reclaim operation founded by Justin Green ’95, provided 57 tons of lumber for local community garden beds last year and is a Brooklyn drop-off station for Chaw Chang’s Stick and Stone Farm.
Our virtual Oberlin family farm took root with Potomac Vegetable Farms in Vienna, Virginia, which began more than five decades ago almost as a hobby for Anthony “Tony” Newcomb ’58 and Mariette Hiu Newcomb ’58. Since becoming full-time farmers in 1970, the Newcombs have engaged various family members—and a fair share of Oberlin students—at the farm. Potomac has survived divorce and death (Tony died in 1984) and has experienced rebirths and remarriages: Mariette is now married to longtime friend of the farm Michael Lipsky ’61. Today, Potomac is run by oldest daughter Hana Newcomb ’80 and continues to be worked by the next generation, including Jesse Bradford ’08, Michael Bradford ’13, and Rebecca Groisser ’14. In 2000, the family built the first of 20 houses for a co-housing community—an intentional neighborhood governed by consensus—called Blueberry Hill, so future generations of Newcombs could raise their children together and share in the experience with like-minded folks. Blueberry Hill is home to Anna Newcomb Bradford ’84, Jim Bradford ’84, and David Giusti ’08. Charles “Chip” Planck ’62 and Susan Hilgart Planck ’63 learned farming from the Newcombs in the mid-1970s. From 1979 to 2010, the Plancks operated their own farm, Wheatland Vegetable Farms, in Purcellville, Virginia, using ecological methods and selling at producer-only farmers’ markets in the D.C. area. The Plancks adopted the Newcomb practice of hiring students, Obies among them. Twenty-five of the Plancks’ 250 former workers have gone on to run their own farms, including Chaw Chang ’95, Jen Smith ’03, and Giusti.
obies at The root
Lynn Peemoeller ’97, who worked at the Plancks’ Wheatland Farm at the same time as Chaw Chang, organized and managed farmers’ markets in New York and Chicago; worked as a program director for Family Farmed; and served as cochair of the Chicago Food Policy Advisory Council and as president of Slow Food Chicago. Now a food systems planning consultant in Berlin, Germany, she collaborates with artists and architects on work that is “more creatively focused on engaging the imagination through mobile gardens, metabolic kitchens, experimental games, and the like.”
David Giusti ’08 has been in the Planck/Newcomb orbit for years, starting with two college summers working for the Plancks. He has rented land, equipment, and infrastructure from them, and last year he managed a farm on some former Planck land. Giusti lives in the Newcombs’ co-housing community, worked for their farm, and continues to sell them produce. Like many a good planter, Giusti has diversified: “I’ve been making a living farming since I graduated,” he says, “but never doing the same thing two years in a row.”
Jen Smith ’03 worked on the Plancks’ farm after graduating and now operates Crimson & Clover Farm, a three-year-old, 300-member CSA* farm in Florence, Massachusetts. She and her husband—whom she met at Wheatland—farm 87 acres of land saved from development by activists and owned by a community nonprofit. Smith participated in an apprenticeship in ecological horticulture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, along with Kim Allen ’99, Violet Stone ’01, and Emily Chu Finkel ’10. Like David Orr’s sustainable agriculture class at Oberlin, the apprenticeship in ecological horticulture at UC Santa Cruz is a hotspot for alumni interested in farming and food.