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Budding farmers train at Iron Roots
YOUNGSTOWN
Eric Moore wants to become a farmer.
The Iron Roots Urban Farm is giving him paid on-the-job training to help him achieve that goal.
Moore, 31, who lives on the North Side, became a trainee at the farm this month and will remain there until fall.
The 1.7-acre farm at 820 Canfield Road in the Idora Neighborhood on the city’s South Side is a project of the Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corp.
Now entering its fifth growing season, the farm will give preference to city residents as it seeks five more apprentices this year.
Moore said his goal is “to farm on probably a few abandoned lots around the city, just to help out the city — to beautify the city.”
The Chaney High School graduate’s passion for agriculture arose out of his having lived and worked for three months in the summer of 1996 on his uncle’s Tennessee farm.
“On this farm, I had some of the best times of my life, and I hope to recreate that here” at Iron Roots, Moore said.
“The trainers are great. Everybody is wonderful,” Moore said of his experience during his first week at the Canfield Road farm. “I wouldn’t dream of a better place or a better environment to work at.”
“I like being outside, I like working with my hands, and I like seeing something grow from the ground up,” Moore said.
Funded by federal, state and foundation grants and sales of produce grown there, the farm promotes food growth and business creation on vacant urban lots, facilitates healthful eating and educates local residents about good nutrition through healthful cooking classes.
Crops grown and harvested at Iron Roots are sold to local restaurants and to consumers at the farm, at farmers’ markets and through buying clubs.
Two of those farmers’ markets are the Northside Farmers Market, which operates on Saturdays most of the year, and YNDC’s own farmers’ market, which operates Tuesday afternoons and evenings, June through September, at Glenwood and Sherwood avenues.
Customers using Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program electronic benefit-transfer cards can double their card value for eligible purchases at these farmers’ markets under a program sponsored by the Mercy Health Foundation.
“We can double your purchase, so if we take $20 off of your card, we will give you $40 to spend at the vendors on SNAP-eligible foods,” explained Liberty Merrill, YNDC’s land-reuse director.
“The purpose is to create more food access, to create jobs, to teach people about healthy eating and healthy living,” Ian Beniston, YNDC executive director, said of the Iron Roots project.
To prolong its growing season and increase its productivity, the farm starts seedlings under lights in its training kitchen building and grows plants in four aluminum-framed hoop houses of varying sizes, the largest being 30 by 120 feet.
The hoop houses feature translucent plastic covers, but they have no heat or light sources other than the sun. One hoop house is hard-sided, but the three others have sides that can be rolled up to let outside air in as the weather warms up.
Some hardy plants, such as spinaches, kales, mustard greens and carrots, spend the winter in a hoop house.
“We keep the ground from freezing by using our plastic cover, and then we use interior row covers as well to really keep the heat close to the ground” inside the hoop houses, Merrill explained.
Other plants get transplanted from the kitchen to a hoop house; and still others grow in a hoop house before being transplanted outdoors.
“Anything that we’re going to harvest early in the year is actually growing to maturity inside the hoop houses in the ground,” she explained.
“We want to stagger our harvests, so we want to have early tomatoes, middle tomatoes and late tomatoes. We will be starting things continuously from now through the season so that we have kale early and we have kale late,” Merrill said.
“We want to keep a really diverse product mix throughout the season and not have stuff just available in August,” Merrill said. “Our goal is to have food available all year-round.”