Matt Drewno discusses the benefits of growing quinoa with Assistant Farmer Trainer Matthew Gammett and interns Teresiah Nyambura Njai and Philomena Njeri Njoroge. Photos courtesy of Daniel Blake.
By Daniel Blake
In a world where almost one in eight people suffers from acute malnutrition, Buddhist Global Relief and its project partners provide an oasis in a desert of hopelessness. In one branch of its anti-hunger work, BGR supports projects that help communities become food independent over the long term in a way that is resilient to the cascading challenges posed by climate change. In my recent visit to Victory Gardens for Peace in Mendocino, California, I learned about a truly inspiring vision for accomplishing these critical goals through a method called Grow Biointensive (GB). The GB method was pioneered over 50 years of research by John Jeavons, the founder of BGR project partner Ecology Action. As one of the main education and demonstration farms for Ecology Action, Victory Gardens for Peace offers residential internships to small-scale farmers and community leaders from around the world who come to Mendocino to learn an effective way to sustainably grow their own food over the long term. Through this internship program, Victory Gardens founder and lead educator Matt Drewno extends Ecology Action’s tradition of research and practical skill-building at a time when the need for scalable sustainable agriculture methods is more urgent than ever.
Matt, Teresiah, Philomena, and Matthew with BGR Board member Daniel Blake.
During my visit I met two interns, Teresiah Nyambura Njai and Philomena Njeri Njoroge, both skilled farmers from Kenya who plan to bring Grow Biointensive back to their communities after their internship concludes in December. I got an introduction into the ambitious goal they are working towards: planning a ten-bed design with rotating crops in a space the size of a typical backyard plot of land. This is referred to as “microscaling,” in which the objective is to grow a complete diet for an entire household within a minimum of space. Matt Drewno is a masterful spokesman for this method, possessing not only an intimate knowledge of the research but also an expansive vision for how it could benefit humanity if practiced widely. He posed to me a hypothetical: “What if everybody did this? Almost 900 million people are on the brink of starvation. We need to find solutions where we are decreasing that gap.” The name “Victory Gardens” invokes a WWII-era government program that promoted kitchen gardens as a weapon in winning the war. Given the realities of climate change and the appallingly high rate of hunger and poverty in the world, the need for solutions surely must be as urgent as the epochal war effort for which the organization was named. I felt convinced and ready to learn more.
My first question was how Teresiah and Philomena planned to transfer the skills they learned in the humid and cool climate of Northern California to the hotter, drier climate of their home country. Teresiah, who directs a project called “Garden of Hope,” described a technique of digging sunken beds, in contrast to the the raised beds used at Victory Gardens. Matt observed that this could potentially be a beneficial practice to adopt at Victory Gardens, because sunken beds help desalinate soil by encouraging greater water retention and leaching than the raised beds. This led to a fascinating conversation around the internship program as a model for the kind of cultural exchange that is helping to continue to refine the Grow Biointensive system.
Matt Drewno shows cilantro seeds in the Victory Gardens for Peace community seed bank.
By emphasizing a set of interrelated sustainable farming techniques that can be practiced by virtually anyone anywhere in the world, Grow Biointensive has the potential to revolutionize how people get their food; Matt told me that “after your third year, you can parachute in anywhere on the planet and start growing food.” Through microscaling, GB practitioners are able to overcome expensive barriers to entry such as fertilizers, irrigation systems, and heavy machinery. Following the “60-30-10 ratio,” 60 percent of the crops grown by GB farmers are protein-rich grains such as quinoa, which is nutritious and filling to eat as well as being beneficial to the soil as compost. The practice of seed banking is another powerful tool for extending one’s food supply beyond a single growing season, as well as being a great way for farmers to earn income from their garden. Finally, GB gardening hinges on a carefully drawn out plan with month-by-month descriptions of the crops to be grown in each planting bed. Taken together, these practices can help communities become truly food independent while simultaneously having a restorative impact on the local soil quality while also returning carbon to the Earth, where it belongs. As I also learned when I visited the BGR partner Grow Biointensive Agricultural Center of Kenya (GBIACK), systems like GB farming are especially important given the pernicious influence of profit-seeking multinational companies like Monsanto. These companies seek to control the food supply by selling impoverished farmers proprietary fertilizers and genetically engineered seeds, which yield poor outcomes and contribute to perpetuating the cycle of poverty.
Matt shows an example of “mature compost,” a topic of great importance to effective GB farming.
While contemplating the magnitude of the human suffering that exists today can easily lead one to despair, after visiting Victory Gardens for Peace, despair was not an option. There is a joy that begins to permeate the mind and body once a practical, effective, and scalable solution to global hunger like Grow Biointensive comes into view. While there is no shortage of urgency in the work being done by Matt Drewno and his students, the atmosphere remained light-hearted, supportive, and full of laughter. Behind this joyful-yet-serious work ethic lies a shared common goal: helping individuals and communities to sustainably and restoratively take control of their food production. A few days after my visit ended, I realized that the feeling of inspiration I left with was mudita, the joy we can experience when contemplating the good deeds and accomplishments of others. There is a spiritually nourishing quality to this joy, as it gives rise to a determination to redouble our efforts in this work. Victory Gardens for Peace is on a mission, one that could really do a lot of good. May we continue to find our own place in this mission, and may we not stop until everyone is free from the scourge of hunger and malnutrition.
Daniel Blake is a multi-instrumentalist and composer with a wide-ranging career that spans jazz, contemporary music, education and activism. From 2010 to 2019 he produced the annual Concert To Feed the Hungry for Buddhist Global Relief, which featured Grammy-winning performers like Esperanza Spalding, Fred Hersch, Arturo O’Farrill, and many others. He is the recipient of a 2022 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in music, and his work has been commissioned by the Jerome Foundation, the Tri-Centric Foundation, Arts Westchester, and New Music USA, among others. In 2023, Daniel Blake received a Humanities New York grant for his work designing a multidisciplinary workshop based on his ballet Got My Wings, which helps high school students and educators use the arts as a vehicle to think about social justice. Daniel Blake holds a Ph.D. in composition from the City University of New York, is a part-time Assistant Professor at the New School for Social Research, and is proud to serve on the Board of Buddhist Global Relief.
