Grounded Hope with Jack Algiere of Stone Barns: What Plants, Soil, and One Little Carrot Teach Us About Change
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RSS Feed Jack Algiere arrived at Stone Barns Center in 2003 as its very first employee, hired to build a greenhouse on a former Rockefeller cattle operation thirty miles north of Manhattan. More than two decades later, that greenhouse has never seen a chemical, the farm he built with chef Dan Barber and Blue Hill at Stone Barns has become one of the most influential in the country, and Jack has written his first book, Seeding Hope: What Plants Teach Us About Being Human, out now from Chelsea Green.
In this conversation, Jack and I talk about the difference between repairing land and stewarding it, and why he walked onto that property thinking, don't mess this up. He tells the story behind the fence carrot, the tiny Mokum carrot Dan Barber asked him to pick smaller and smaller until it earned a place on the Blue Hill menu that it has held for 23 years. We dig into why flavor is the front door to changing the food system, why training brilliant young farmers isn't enough when there's no runway waiting for them, and why he believes change happens community by community, because local is a metric. And we talk about grounded hope, Jack's term for the understanding that this work is worth fighting for even if you know you won't solve the whole problem.
In this episode
- How a plant scientist from a small farm on the Rhode Island coast ended up stewarding a Rockefeller landscape
- What Stone Barns looks like today: 10 acres of organic vegetables, a half-acre soil greenhouse running year-round since 2003, orchards, grains, and a conservation plan across 1,500 acres of preserve
- The fence carrot story, and what it says about the conversation between field and kitchen
- Why annual production alone isn't sustainable, and how integrated systems with livestock and perennials restore land
- The Leaf program, bringing plants, compost, and vegetable shares to community gardens in the Bronx
- The arc of change: reduce waste, substitute, change systems, build networks, then networks of networks
- Why everyone, from journalists to gardeners to podcast listeners, has a role in fixing the food system
Links from this episode
Get the book: Seeding Hope: What Plants Teach Us About Being Human by Jack Algiere (Chelsea Green)
Learn more about Jack's work: stonebarnscenter.org
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From your plate to the rest of the world, One Bite is Everything explores the connections between food, health, community, the environment, and the economy. Through conversations with farmers, chefs, researchers, advocates, and food system leaders, host Dana DiPrima examines how food touches every aspect of our lives and why understanding our food system has never mattered more.
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