Another battle with rush hour traffic, this time riding in the first bench seat in a twelve passenger Wilmington Housing Authority van. I’m riding with Lynn, a few kids from public housing, and the Chief of Community and Support Services for WHA (also the van driver) Randolph Keaton.

In the crawl of traffic, Randolph asked me a billion questions about growing organically, everything from pest control to “what does organic mean” with a few queries thrown in on my background and where I was from. I answered the organic questions with all the detail I could muster, in a van that was blasting the air conditioning and music that was a little too loud.

Let me back up a second…How did I end up in this van? This local food adventure will take me where it wants, and I thought I was going to check out some land that might be brought into organic production. When Lynn picked me up to go meet with Randolph, I found out that we were actually going to harvest a bunch of produce for distribution to Wilmington public housing residents. I kind of laughed and thought about it. Good thing I always wear boots.

We were headed to Columbus County, the fifth poorest county in the state of North Carolina. We were on our way to Randolph’s family land, where he has a home and a large garden, and also where his brothers and sisters have homes and gardens.

Randolph talked a lot about how out-of-county farmers were planting and harvesting on Columbus County land with no involvement of local folks and how people are putting up trailers instead of homes only to be put in the situation of losing family land to the bank after not being able to pay on loans.

The area we drove through reminded me of my hometown in New York, of the rural poverty of agricultural counties that rely on out-of-county agribusiness to provide farm jobs and a way of life. In many cases, people would have been surprised at the images along the Columbus County roads, but I had seen it all before, in a different culture with different people in different trailers. Yet all of it was the same, and I was transported to the muck in rural Genesee County, NY riding in a van with out of state plates, daydreaming.

Randolph’s family land is near a slave cemetery that he said he is trying to get the State to restore. His family has 30 acres and used to have a 5 acre tobacco allotment, which they sold some time ago. The farmer who bought it never grew tobacco, instead growing soybeans. This year the land was fallow, and Randolph had it bush-hogged. This was where I saw an incubator farm in the future, a place to teach self sufficiency and how to generate an income from sustainably tending the land.

Five acres is a lot of land for an incubator farm. Split into 1/4 acre plots, this land could train twenty new growers every season, or be less ambitious and train five farmers for a career in sustainable agriculture, something that would make this county stand out and deliver the organic produce that the whole country is calling for right now. It just needs a start, some push to bring the neighbors in on the idea.

When we got out of the van, we immediately walked to the end of the garden and set to picking cucumbers. We picked a couple nice bushels, and headed on to the potatoes, green beans, squash and cabbage.

I hadn’t seen cabbage that big in awhile, not since my teen years spent harvesting tons of it every day in the summer. The cabbage we sell at the store is in the 5 pound range. This was 15 to 20 pound cabbage, the kind that - if this were a commercial farm - would end up going off for processing into canned coleslaw, cabbage rolls, and flash frozen stir fry mixes.

We harvested several bags full of produce for the kids to take to their families. Lynn filled a bag with green beans, potatoes and cucumbers and also grabbed a big cabbage. Lynn and I also pulled up a few handfuls of wild garlic, one head of which I ate right on the spot, which Randolph found very strange.

For my help, Randolph gave me a peach tree in a pot and let me cut a luffa gourd to take home. He wasn’t sure what it was that was growing, and he didn’t want any part of it when I explained to him what it was. I’ll probably dry it out and use it…maybe.

As the threat of thunderstorms approached, we loaded the veggies and trees and people into the van for the ride back to Wilmington. Unfortunately, there was a stop at the fast food oasis, which didn’t make sense to me. Here we were picking all this great fresh produce, and we stop at McDonald’s, the vortex of empty food? It saddened me that this was a reward for the kids for their work instead of the reward being at trip to the country and bags full of good food. Lynn and I sat out the McDonald’s detour. I snacked on green beans and thought about the gazpacho sitting in the fridge.

If we’re going to get an incubator farm going in Columbus County or anywhere in eastern North Carolina, we have to get out of the habit of supporting unsustainable, unhealthy and unfullfilling food. We have to appreciate and understand the rewards of produce, meat, diary and eggs from small community farms before we can talk about encouraging new farmers. New farmers aren’t going to sell to fast food places; they are going to sell to us. If we don’t start eating what they produce, we’ll be back in the same situation again, wondering where we went wrong, discussing things over a cheeseburger made with meat from Chile.

I have to bluntly connect the dots, so forgive me if I don’t support certain food choices…