Amy Rice-Jones brings years of organic farming experience, including the UC Santa Cruz Farm & Garden, where she was Assistant Farm Manager. She now manages Petaluma Bounty, which is working to create a sustainable Petaluma food system with healthy fresh food for everyone. Formed in summer 2006 with initial seed funding from the Hub of Petaluma Foundation, programs include: creating community gardens throughout Petaluma to increase food self-sufficiency and strengthen community; gleaning fresh, healthy surplus food from backyard gardens, farms and food businesses for distribution to food pantries and senior centers; and, creation of an educational urban farm to provide sustainably-grown food to low-income households at affordable prices, and to educate students and the public about the importance of a healthy local food system. In March, 2008, we launched the Bounty Box Food Club as a pilot program at McDowell Elementary School, providing weekly boxes of organic fruits and vegetables to low income-earning families at wholesale prices.

Artist, Fritz Haeg’s “Edible Estates” project is the perfect statement to continue on the White House’s Lawns. An excerpt from “Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn”: FULL FRONTAL GARDENING Edible Estates is an attack on the front lawn and everything it has come to represent! Edible Estates is an ongoing series of projects to replace the front lawn with edible garden landscapes responsive to culture, climate, context and people! Edible Estates reconciles issues of global food production and urbanized land use with the modest gesture of a small domestic garden! Edible Estates is a provocation, a call to arms and a radical intervention on the banal, repressive streets of zombie lawn-lined monotony! Edible Estates is nothing new, growing our own food is the first thing we did when we stopped being nomadic and started being “civilized”! Edible Estates is a practical food producing initiative, a place-responsive landscape design proposal, a scientific horticultural experiment, a conceptual land-art project, a defiant political statement, a community out-reach program and an act of radical gardening! The Edible Estates project proposes the replacement of the domestic front lawn with a highly productive edible landscape. Food grown in our front yards will connect us to the seasons, the organic cycles of the earth, and our neighbors. The banal lifeless space of uniform grass in front of the house will be replaced with the chaotic abundance of biodiversity. In becoming gardeners we will reconsider our connection to the land, what we take from it, and what we put in it. Each yard will be a unique expression of its location and of the inhabitant and his or her desires.

Born and raised on an organic farm in Northern California, Thaddeus took over managing the family farm in 2004 at the age of 24. He has increased the number of acres his small organic farm tills and helped open a storefront selling produce specifically from his farm in downtown San Francisco, increasing brand recongnition and reach. Under Thaddeus’ tenure the farm has increased the number of direct-to-customer deliveries through the farm’s C.S.A. veggie/fruit box delivery service such that it’s now ~50% of their revenues each year, allowing them a steady income that is *not* dependent on a monoculture’s success, and it allows them to keep employees year-round as opposed to solely seasonal employees. The White House Farmer will be growing healthy, sustainable crops for the White House and neighborhood food banks, and Thaddeus’ produce, in variety and quality, will handily meet the need. In addition, his farm is beautifully and thoughtfully planted; he would surely bring these skills to the White House Farm.

Rainbow Vogt is a food forester. Building food forests across the country is how we can meet our most urgent agriculture, water, and health needs. She is tremendously eager to share this simple but broad-based solution to the public at the White House. In addition to being a farmer and food forest spokesperson, Rainbow offers expertise in nutrition-based traditional medicine and can grow crops accordingly to bring back wellness to the people and earth we live on through this innovative endeavor.

Alice Waters was born on April 28,1944, in Chatham, New Jersey. She graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1967 with a degree in French Cultural Studies, and trained at the Montessori School in London before spending a seminal year traveling in France. Alice opened Chez Panisse in 1971, serving a single fixed-price menu that changes daily. The set menu format remains at the heart of Alice’s philosophy of serving only the highest quality products, only when they are in season. Over the course of three decades, Chez Panisse has developed a network of mostly local farmers and ranchers whose dedication to sustainable agriculture assures Chez Panisse a steady supply of pure and fresh ingredients. Alice is a strong advocate for farmer’s markets and for sound and sustainable agriculture. In 1996, in celebration of the restaurant’s twenty-fifth anniversary, she created the Chez Panisse Foundation to help underwrite cultural and educational programs such as the one at the Edible Schoolyard that demonstrate the transformative power of growing, cooking, and sharing food.

I do not know Farmer Al personally, but I have heard him speak and he deeply impressed me with his passion and understanding of farming. He choose taste over production many years ago by going organic before it was in vogue. His farm is an example of sustainability and community. If you are one of the luck local customers to participate in AL’s “Happy Child” CSA program you get to meet your farmer. Al often personally delivers fruit at local neighborhood locations, promoting healthy eating and connecting a larger community to their farmer and his land.

Growing up in central Illinois growing soybeans and sweet corn on long hot summer days on the farm prepared Lou for a career as an established hoticultural and ecological practicioner. Studied Plant and Soil Science, Entomology , Ecology in College. Former farmer (grower) Plant Biologist for UC Berkeley and USDA for agricultural research. Organic farm advisor and consultant for small farm management in California. Helped develop biological pest control programs and IPM for organic farmers in California. Current owner of Bio Friendly Garden’s in Berkeley,CA. Has grown everything under the sun and understands and practiced the biodynamic Alan Chadwick system from UC Santa Cruz.. He thought of being the Farmer in Chief after reading the NY times article by Michael Pollan. Why not, farmed in Illinois, farmed in California, DC is next, so he tells our family. Currently establishing edible rooftops and organic garden’s around the Bay Area. I fully nominate this creative and hard working individual I have known my whole life to indeed fill the role of Farmer in Chief.

The Growing Youth Project began in the fall of 2005 as a youth-led community food assessment, aimed at providing youth in the community with valuable employment, promoting an understanding and dialogue around issues residents face with respect to food, health, and nutrition, and developing a vision and action strategy for addressing food justice issues in the community. This assessment set the stage for the integration of a wide range of food, health, and farming activities at the Alameda Point Collaborative. The program continues to provide teenage youth with meaningful part time employment and also currently employs an adult resident through the APC On-the-Job-Training Program. Thanks to funding provided by The California Endowment, The United Way, HEDCO Foundation and the USDA, many of the recommended strategies for improving food security that came out of the original assessment are becoming realities at APC. For example, growing grounds for fruits and vegetables have been expanded in the community garden such that the project has implemented a free weekly produce delivery service to residents and also contributes food to APC events. There are also quarterly events held in the garden and assistance is available for residents who are interested in growing their own food.

Nigel has created an Eatwell Farm Family. He has a blog and newsletters for regular communication, and has hosted June strawberry days and Oktoberfest. He creatively responded to a quarantine (a fruit fly was found at another farm a few miles away) by inviting us all up to cook tomato sauce, drink bloody mary’s and eat salsa. As a hardworking, innovative and fun organic farmer, he’d be great as the First Farmer!

Nigel has been farming organically since 1993 in Northern California. Nigel was born in Leicester, England, and studied at Writtle Agricultural College in Essex. Though the school taught production farming with chemicals, Nigel received permission to fullfill his practicum at an organic farm in Kent, England. He travelled to Israel in 1985 to study drip irrigation in a country where “if you waste water it’s treason.” He returned to England and farmed there until moving to California in 1992 where he worked at Terra Firma Farm in Winters.

Christof is a highly experienced grower of a wide range of nutritious and culturally relevant crops. He is a committed educator with a passion for building food security and access to healthy food for all. His work as manager of the UCSC Garden has influenced many a gardener and farmer throughout the world!