Sandbox Center

We empower young entrepreneurs to create food systems change. Join us and grow more!

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There is huge appeal in having as much as you possibly can eat and knowing that no one is going to tell you not to eat it. Not wanting the quantity, and wanting the quality, is usually because you don’t ever have to worry that there’s not enough. It’s a privilege to want less. It’s a luxury to worry about how the animal was raised. And that, I think, is what is lost in this whole national discussion about food. Because it’s led by people who don’t have to worry.

Jane Black, in Servings of Small Change, Meara Sharma interviews Jane Black and Brent Cunningham - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics (via guernicamag)

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Website templates using the only program I'm totally adept at. If only building sites was as easy as drawing stuff in PPT. Really excited to launch, hopefully by mid-August! You can tell I like using the same models. Kinda want to start using Lorem Ipsum translated to English as as super profound quote. --Jeny

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Conceptual art for 2014 member trading cards; now comes the endless cycle of debate and redesign. But the torch is being passed! --Jeny

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Iconography with the SOS interns; so hard to teach! Mostly it's like, please draw! Think about line density! But it's a great opportunity to simplify imagery and convey your purpose in a very succinct way. I feel like half-assed skills-building sessions are like the dual-purpose parlor tricks of the startup world. --Jeny

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New Journeys and Old - Jeny

At some point, my ancestors were farmers. This is a versatile truth, like how you can say parents are farmers. Teachers are definitely farmers. Student athletes are farmers. When you talk about producing what is necessary, cultivating true nourishment -- while dealing with unknown elements, endless input, attitudes rejuvenated with each new year -- then certainly, many people can be considered farmers!

It's not accidental. For example, I say my family comes from Hong Kong because the people who literally brought me into the world grew up in Hong Kong, and the remnants of their journey are so ingrained in familial history that I feel obligated to carve a space for it in my own identity. That pride and tradition is easily, seamlessly handed down. The fact is, my father was raised by farmers. His grandparents lived on a piece of arable land in the New Territories, the remote perimeter of metropolitan Hong Kong, and a few years after his younger brother was born, he moved there to live with them. While jogging around the indoor track of the Shoreview Community Center, he used to tell me stories about eating tomatoes straight off the vine, of sleeping with the dogs in the barn, slaughtering chickens, using a lantern to guide his grandmother back from the center of town after watching a film, so they wouldn't get lost out on the old rural road. 

Ghost stories happened in the countryside of Hong Kong. It was eerie, disturbing, not to have your neighbor within shouting distance. Who would you go to for help? My cousins, who also grew up in Hong Kong, would buy comic books where horrible things would always occur in houses, never in apartments, never in the city.

I inherited this too, though it took time to realize it. I've always felt that parents like mine have lived a lifetime, and then some. Lots of movement, lots of big leaps. Eventually my father moved back to the city to start school, to graduate as valedictorian, to become the first in his family, in his generation, to attend university overseas, to earn a Ph.D. Am I supposed to mourn the loss of his agrarian experience? It shaped who he became, but it has little presence, now.

Lives are not always rooted to the land, and that's ok. I've made my own way back to the farm, which means these things are cyclical, and have a habit of circling back.

Read more from our July Newsletter here.

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Spent both days of the weekend at the farm, which is rare for me. Practiced taking pictures, might've recruited a part-time bunny wrangler. --Jeny

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Late night site-building. Sandbox will soon have an online marketplace for you to meet our members and check out their products! --Jeny

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The design evolution of the Sandbox General Flyer. --Jeny

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Summer of Solutions (SOS) and Environmental Justice Advocates of Minnesota (EJAM) tour! We're hosting 3 SOS interns this summer; learning how to teach, and learning how to learn. --Jeny

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Every/any opportunity I get to take some of the kids I work with to the farm, we're so there. It's a good excuse to get out of the city, dig into some picnic food, and in turn, provide food for the mosquitos; literal life cycle! --Jeny

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Growing Community - Josh

It is an era where the phone call becomes excessive to sending a text and television news reports are drowned by ticker-tape news feeds at the top and bottom of the screen.  No doubt sharing meaningful information and maintaining relationships rooted in face-to-face interactions sometimes falls by the wayside.  It’s hard not to get caught up in it all.  It’s exciting!  Sharing information like that and moving that fast is supposed to be exciting!  We all do it.  So where is the balance?

Part of the beauty of the local food movement is that it calls to mindfulness the pace at which we are living our lives.  Slow food?  Let’s look to slow everything.  Running so fast most of the time, we hardly get a glimpse of everything happening in our peripherals.  The local food movement chooses a path that can’t necessarily be the lightspeed provision of what we eat, but takes a route that draws to focus what is important.  It is a value-based system that, among other things, when done right centers around community.

For one, this could not be more right.  The major issues we face today all hit on the same issue of community, be it the weakening of the community as a whole via lack of human rights, industrialization, etc.  Food that roots itself in not just the land but in the community is food that grows more than itself.  As Sandbox grows, we’re choosing a community and a path that grows more than just the food on our land.

As excited as I am for the beginning of the growing season, you will find that I really become giddy as our community grows.  The potential for our space to be shared with so many people working to better the land and to connect to people around them has me more than ready to kick off this first year.  We’ll be growing a lot this summer, but we’ll really grow more when you all are there with us.

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Sandbox at MOSES Conference 2014

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Rooted - Eric

Farming is a human relationship with nature bounded together by roots. Sometimes the relationship is like a newly infatuated couple, puppy love, when the plants are growing 2 inches a day (perhaps why I love hops) and just the right amount of rain comes at just the right time. Other times, Nature plays the one roommate who doesn't do their dishes: late frost, early frost, hail. Through the thick and the thin, roots are the common bond that hold nature and humans together.

For plants, roots are a deep source of power. Roots provide direction, stability, and communication. Generally, the healthier the roots the better the plant. Their importance to the plant is obvious, there is no chicken and egg between roots and shoots. Roots come first. One shoot may die but the roots will grow another in its place. As we all very well know, if you want to rid yourself of weeds, you have to go to the root of the problem.

Human roots are less tactile, but are they any less important? How healthy can a human be without contact to their roots? Imagine what roots you have in your life. Many take the form of traditions; recipes, music, structures, or stories. Family, arts, and culture play an important role in human roots.

A common cultural phrase describes my roots: “You can take the person out of the farm but you can’t take the farm out of the person.” Like many young farmers these days my parents left the farm and raised me in the suburbs. I didn’t garden, I didn’t cook, I didn’t like to get my hands dirty. My favorite meal was Pizza Hut’s monster 16” 4-cheese pizza with breadsticks and dipping sauce.

But you can’t take the farm out of the person; and my entire life, four generations of roots, were calling me home.

So here I am heading into my third season of farming. Great-grandpa is gone. Grandpa is 90. Dad is still in the burbs. Yet their roots are here with me everyday. Dad’s belt is around my waist. Grandpa’s name is on my ring. Great-grandpa’s photo is on my desk. Their hands are mine in the soil.

For now though I am just another young person struggling with my roots. I wonder: Is my heart healthy enough for all these rooting activities? Should I consult my doctor if I experience rooting for longer than 4 hours? Does this path lead me away from my peers to an isolated place in the country where I complain about "kids these days"? How do I maintain my urban relationships? And more importantly: Why am I so uncertain? Shouldn’t farming be like the spiritual, physical, emotional end all be all of my entire life?

But then again, I feel like this is the nature of a committed, rooting relationship. It is uncertain, it is doubtful. There are questions. But in the uncertainty and the doubt is the room for growth. The room for roots.

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MOSES Conference 2014 - Libby

Sometimes you have to leave home to know home.  After mulling over the pros and cons of taking a few days away from home, my dear friend/co-worker and I decided to attend the Midwest Organic & Sustainable Education Services (MOSES) organic farming conference.  With 2 gifted tickets to Organic University, we woke before the sunrise and sped out of town on perhaps the coldest and iceist day of our frigid winter to date with a rising temperature of -12.  With little time to prepare, I threw random “emergency items” into my car haphazardly; these items included 20 tea lights, a few Luna bars, the title to my car (just in case), and my friend added 3 jars of frozen curry “for the road,” and about 200 ounces of brewed coffee.    

As the sun rose, we laughingly belted out Michael Jackson tunes, munched on fresh donuts from Red Wing, and soon we were rolling through the white-capped bluffs of what could have been the breathtaking scapes of Colorado or Montana, but was in reality, just LaCross, Wisconsin. (It is also likely that only a midwesterner would make that comparison). With excited energy akin to childhood holidays, we refilled our canister of coffee, and settled into a day-long session with Mark Shepard on Farm Scale Restoration Agriculture.  With a renewed devotion to perennials, keylining, and microbusiness, I left the 8 hour workshop ready to turn Sandbox into acres of perennials and polycultures.

But unfortunately, outlawing annuals, would likely pose a problem to many of our incubating new farm businesses.

On a similar thread, I was heartened by a keynote speech given to thousands at MOSES, focused on the values and processes of Permaculture, because we, as young farmers, are entering a time of immense economic and environmental shifts, and we were reminded collectively that now is the time to “creatively use and respond to change.” This sentiment is the 12th Permaculture Principle by David Holmgren, and also sticks with me more than the others for some reason. To learn more about permaculture principles follow this link http://permacultureprinciples.com/principles/

As we begin to thaw off, MOSES demarcated the divide between the depth of winter and the faint hints of a shifting landscape.  While we left Wisconsin with fresh knowledge and new connections, I also came away with a strengthened sense of purpose and self, and for that I am ready to tumble head first into the growing season and anticipate the inevitable challenge of creatively using and responding to change as we grow together. at home.  - Libby

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It's Easy Being Green - Jeny

For whatever reason, green energy sounds about as sexy as a bird feeder. I can’t speak for all millennials, but sometimes, going green seems like this unreachable star of semi-retired activism; if only I had a day or five to read up on the technicalities, then I’d totally be engaged! In the meantime, clean energy and carbon offsets makes me cringe with inner guilt, doesn’t prompt much else. I mean sure, I recycle, I compost, I turn off the tap with the wrist not curled around the toothbrush, but thinking about the merry-go-round of research and applications required to take green energy seriously inspires some significant lag time.

I should backtrack: there’s no question that Sandbox is committed to minimizing our environmental impact. This means that Sandbox carefully considers the downstream impacts of our operations, and is supportive of other organizations who are doing the same. Likewise, we look upstream at what we consume, use, inhale, etc. and make our choices as deliberately and as informed as possible. Most of our leadership team already commutes via public transportation, biking, or walking, while our communication methods and project management tools are entirely paperless. And with a floating office and four laptops as our only hardware, it's incredibly easy to maintain low energy consumption.

...So maybe it's important to acknowledge that for us millennials, sustainable energy and environmental conservation is already common culture. But as Sandbox begins to set up an urban workspace and host events at the farm, we are determined to do better. This weekend, our team took inventory of reusable materials that will go towards building our members' cubicles in the cattle barn, and transitioned a big chunk of our operational processes using cloud-based infrastructure. As the spring season begins, we'll be taking a more active role in the economics of production and waste reduction. It's definitely a learning process, but this type of challenge is what Sandbox epitomizes as value-based work -- we do this because we feel that it's the right thing to do. And as always, we welcome feedback and conversation; if you have any ideas on how Sandbox can go full-out green, we'd like to hear them! Happy spring, and hope to see you on the farm soon. - Jeny

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Bossy meme for the Moses 2014 Organic Farming Conference

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This.

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The Road goes ever on and on Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, And I must follow, if I can, Pursuing it with eager feet, Until it joins some larger way, Where many paths and errands meet. And whither then? I cannot say.

J.R.R. Tolkien