A Bumper Crop of Gardeners
In the early days of the pandemic, when those of us who’d reluctantly gone to the grocery store were met with empty shelves, Carrie Sachse had an idea.
Sachse owns French Street Farms, the pioneering commercial urban farm at the corner of East 22nd and French streets in Erie, PA. The farm’s mission is simply “to give the people of Erie more and better options for fresh, local produce.”
Like most farmers, however, Sachse couldn’t yet know if the farmers’ and flea markets where she usually sells her produce could be held this season. And since she entered the University at Buffalo’s Master of Urban Planning program with a specialization in community health and food systems last fall, she had anticipated scaling back the farm this summer: commuting to Erie from Buffalo three days a week to run her incredibly popular community-supported agriculture (CSA) harvest subscription program.
But the pandemic moved her program online and brought her right back to Erie. And though she’d obviously never have hoped for a pandemic, she says it has reinforced French Street Farms’ mission and vision.
“With the ways that the pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated issues in our food supply chain, a lot of people are thinking more about where their food comes from,” she explains. “Everything about the farm’s mission feels more important than ever. So I am back in Erie and I’m farming my heart out.”
In the early days of the pandemic, Sachse asked herself: “How can I help people with their food security right now?”
That question inspired her to create Victory Garden Starter Packs, which included one beefsteak tomato, cherry tomato, sweet pepper, cucumber, zucchini and basil starter plant, and two lettuce seedlings. They also came with growing instructions for each plant, and—to the absolute delight of a friend of mine who received one—sunflower seeds.
Sachse’s inspiration was essentially the “teach a person to fish” proverb, she says. “I thought that although I can’t grow enough food for everybody, if I can help people grow their own food, then it’s a way for me to stay true to the farm’s mission and also have a positive impact in all of this craziness.”
Sachse distributed over 300 starter packs, about half of them purchased and the rest sponsored for others.
“I like to think that there were 300 Victory Gardens growing in Erie this summer,” she says. “A lot of people who had not planted a garden before participated and were really excited, sending me pictures of their gardens as they progressed. They’re already talking about what they’re going to grow next year, so I think it’s been a huge success. And I was able to distribute packs to people who couldn’t afford to purchase plants, but who were probably even more in need of growing their own garden this year. The generosity of people in our community made them want to sponsor packs for other people who are hurting.”
Empowering others by creatively sharing her knowledge and passion for local food comes naturally to Sachse. Her fermentation and canning workshops, often held at local bars, have been wildly popular. “If we want to make a serious shift toward eating more locally produced food in a climate like Erie or Western New York, there has to be a lot of preservation of fresh food. So part of my running workshops was to share that knowledge, but also just for the joy of it and getting people hooked.”
French Street Farms’ CSA is also in high demand, especially this year, as she’s partnered with Ember & Forge Coffee, Majestic Baking Company and Copley’s Fresh Start Farm to offer coffee, bread and egg add-ons. “The original idea at the beginning of the pandemic was that things were so scary, and the grocery store was so weird—with random shortages of things you wouldn’t expect. Without having any idea what the future held, I thought it would be nice to add to the CSA so that it’s like a one-stop pickup for folks, and they can get a few more of the essentials that they need this year.”
In only three growing seasons, Sachse’s French Street Farms has genuinely changed the way Erie thinks about fresh food access. And incredibly, when she moved back to Erie in 2014, commercial urban farming wasn’t even permitted.
She first had to get the zoning changed. So this dedicated, energized woman in her early 30s, excited about the potential brewing in her Rust Belt hometown, starting talking to the Redevelopment Authority, the City Council and the Planning Commission. It took over a year of showing up, talking to leaders in person and making her case wherever she could.
“A lot of people have said to me, ‘Why don’t you just give up?’ But it never occurred to me to not keep going. Nobody ever told me, ‘You can’t do this.’
“I think I’m just extraordinarily stubborn,” she laughs. “I’m not willing to accept failure.” Nor did she have to. In June 2017, Erie passed its urban farming ordinance.
It’s no easy task to change a city’s zoning. But if you spend a little time observing Sachse, you realize she is the perfect person to engender cultural change. Last September, I attended French Street Farms’ excellent farm-to-table dinner, prepared by Proof Kitchen, where Sachse addressed our group of about 100 diners. I could feel her electric confidence pulsing through the room. It’s not arrogance by any stretch of the imagination. Rather, it’s the sort of energy that lifts a community like Erie—one that’s historically been a little too timid and risk-averse.
But this city seems to be changing. And people like Sachse, who pursue their passions with both boots firmly on the ground, shoulders squared and eyes on the prize, have the power to shift a whole community’s consciousness—even if they don’t yet have it all figured out.
“Most people would probably go apprentice on a well-established farm for a summer before they started a farm,” Sachse says. “I’ve never worked on anyone’s farm but my own. I decided I was doing this and I did it.”
Sachse is now winding down her first season as a full-time farmer. But incredibly, she’s still only farming on less than half of her land—about a quarter-acre.
“I’m excited to show people what a small farm can accomplish, and I know that I’m still only scratching the surface,” she says. “So I absolutely want to get bigger over time.”
But she also wants to explore other ways to address the current problems in our food system at the local level, and the pandemic has made the importance of that work crystal clear.
“I’m going to farm for the rest of my life. I know that. But I also have a lot of interest in urban planning. I see myself as a planner-practitioner, who also speaks and writes about these food system issues that I spend all of my time obsessing about. We have to come up with some solutions to these huge systemic problems.”
Sachse acknowledges that small farms cannot singlehandedly fix our food system. “Our strongest and most resilient food system is going to be made up of a lot of small farms, but at the same time we have a lot of mouths to feed. A resilient food system has a lot of diversification and redundancy built into it, so our food system will be the strongest when we have numerous small- to medium-sized farms operating close by.”
Despite our current landscape of challenges, Sachse sees reason for optimism. “I’m excited that other people are getting into small farming in our community. And I think as I continue to grow my operation, and more people learn about what I’m doing, hopefully more and more of them will decide to follow this path.”
Who knows? Maybe one of those 300 Victory Gardeners is dreaming of her own farm right now.
