How to Build Food Security in Your Community Without Spending Any Money
Feeling frustrated by the skyrocketing cost of food? Here's a free way to create an abundance of food that can be shared amongst people in your neighbourhood
Photo credit: Andrew Millison, YouTube video -only 4 years between Then and Now.
Last article I talked about community seed banks as a way to generate money to start a business.
Today I want to talk about a different kind of seed banking, one that uses real seeds.
I recently saw a video that jogged my memory about a way to create an abundance of food, for free, with just a little planning and some patience. It was something some people in my hometown used to do, so I have personal experience with this idea too.
This could be a brilliant way to help your family and immediate neighbours gain more food security for an extremely low cost.
With the rising cost of inflation and supply chain issues with imports and exports due to tarrifs and conflicts around the world, this is a very timely idea.
In the video, How 8,000 Food Forests Grew Africa's Great Green Wall, posted on YouTube in 2024, Andrew Millison interviews a Senegalese family who turned a tiny dry, sandy quarter acre of land into an edible oasis and food forest within 4 years.
Creating Abundance through Planting Edible Food Forests
Photo credit: How 8,000 Food Forests Grew Africa's Great Green Wall, posted by Andrew Millison - and this photo shows what has grown in just 4 years!
As a bit of backgroud, the reason Millison was in Senegal was because he was invited to document the progress of a massive project happening in Africa to stop the advance of the Sahara desert. They are planting a green belt of intentionally planted tress and shrubs that are thriving and preventing desertification.
That’s impressive in itself, but I thought the story about this Senegalese family that was showcased half way through the video was a real golden nugget, because it’s an idea that would work anywhere in the world.
This family’s food forest is already producing enough food to support their family year round, by selling what they don’t eat. They harvest food from different trees and shrubs at different times of the year.
An additional benefit is that this family no longer has to depend on a single crop, and hope for good weather to have a good harvest.
They don’t have to hope for a good export market price in order to earn enough to survive. And they always have food they can eat, a diversity of healthy food.
Sharing their Green Wealth
But the really great thing is that each established food forest is being used to establish more. They are gifting seedlings to neighbours and neighbouring communities, so they can start food forests too, without spending money or getting bank loans or going into debt to get big machinery to harvest big fields of a single plant.
No one needs to buy big pieces of land or sign contracts with Monsanto or other agricultural mega corporations.
All the food forests are creating healthy and thriving communities.
Informal Backyard Tree Fruit Exchanges in Canada
I saw a similar idea in action in Alberta, Canada years ago. I grew up in a neighbourhood that was newly built when my family and all our neighbours moved in.
As a very young girl, I remember the blinding light and scorching heat of the pavement because no one had trees. Everybody spent the first ten years planting and landscaping and waiting for the young trees to grow big enough to be attractive and provide shade.
Only a few people planted shrubs and trees that produced edible fruits and seeds and my father was one of them. He grafted an apple branch onto a crab apple and we had the only applecrabs in the neighbourhood.
I remember seeing grocery bags filled with handpicked apples being passed over the backyard fences to neighbours and getting gifts of bags of fruit from other people’s trees too.
Different trees were ready to harvest at slightly different times, so it was a good way to get some things in spring, and some in mid and late summer.
And so, they created a free flowing bounty of food with minimal effort.
But in retrospect, they could have done so much more.
They didn’t take the idea of creating food abundance very seriously or coordinate their efforts.
I remember all the ornamental trees in our neighborhood, many of which were not native and died within a few years.
Had they each agreed to plant a tree that produced fruit that was native to our climate zone, a plant or tree that could survive the harsh Canadian winters, and simply exchanged bags of fruit with each other, everyone would have benefitted and saved money.
Everyone had big enough yards that we could have become food self sufficient as a nieghbourhood, with minimal effort, since trees hardly need any effort once planted.
Fruit trees are just as attractive as the ornamentals, in my opinion.
Is it Worth It? What would it cost?
Here’s a list of what it would take to establish a food sharing network and make edible forests that span a neighbourhood.
A bit of time talking to your neighbours and getting to know them. Deciding who will grow what and who wants to participate in a fruit exchange.
Spending some time to research and find out which trees are likely to thrive in your area
Source where to find slips and seedlings or suckers sprouting from an established tree in your neighbourhood, or where to buy a tree or plant you want.
Spend a few hours harvesting your shrubs and trees when they are ripe.
Spend a few hours preserving them (freezing them, making jam or canning preserves).
It would only take a few hours a year, really. More time in the first year to get things coordinated and the trees planted.
What a great way to get to know your neighbours and develop a network of trust and support.
Well worth it, I think, given the cost of fruit imported in the middle of winter in Canada, especially with recent tarrifs on all imported US goods and produce. of fruit imported to grocery stores in winter, this idea could make a big difference in people’s annual food budgets. No money wasted in driving out to a U - Picks. No need to dish out a lot of cash to get local produce at a Farmer’s Market.
If you live in an apartment and don’t have a yard or any access to a place where shrubs and trees could be planted, then consider growing and exchanging microgreens and tiny tomatoes or herbs n your kitchen counter in Aerogardens, or converting a kitchen cupboard into a growing space so you have something to exchange instead.
For inspiration, you might want to check out my article about a young man, Owen Chase, whom I interviewed and wrote an article about recently who started growing microgreens under his dorm bed at college that he gave away, donated and sold.
Where there is a will, there is a way!