When it comes to youth programs centered around gardening and farming, a common mantra is, “We’re teaching kids about where their food comes from.” Sounds laudable, but to Marcos Giossi, such a feel-good goal is too limiting when it comes to exposing young people to the realities of the farm and food system that dominates.

“There’s not this imaginary happy place where all our food is coming from, you know?” says Giossi on a wintery Friday afternoon while sitting in the East Saint Paul, Minn., offices of an organization called Urban Roots. “The food system is really big and complicated and oftentimes a really unjust thing. It’s part of my responsibility working with these young people and engaging them with the food system to recognize the ways that it’s so deeply broken.”

He’s in the right place to do that.

Urban Roots is a nonprofit enrichment and empowerment program that works with Saint Paul public high school students. It has programs centered around cooking with fresh, healthy food, as well as habitat restoration and market gardening. Giossi, who’s worked there for six years, believes ardently in not only helping young people learn about the negative side of our dominant farm and food system, but also helping them see the positive things that can propagate when they get involved in something as basic as raising a garden and selling its production in the local neighborhood.

Striking such a balance requires the ability to, at times, step back and guide the young gardeners through a decision-making process that questions whether a path you are on is effective, or whether it’s just being done out of force of habit.

Giossi picked up the skills required to do the kind of goal setting that’s based on such distinctions while enrolled in the Land Stewardship Project’s Farm Beginnings course. Now, as the manager of the Urban Roots market garden program, he feels he’s better equipped to show high schoolers not just where their food comes from, but also where it could come from.

“I’m still rosy eyed and I think we can win,” says the 28-year-old with a laugh. “I think we can build a better world here.”

Kicking Dirt

Giossi started his journey toward building a better farm and food world when he was the same age as many of the young people he works with today. As a high school student, he gained experience on an urban farm in South Minneapolis through Urban Ventures, a nonprofit that works to give low-income youth an opportunity to attend college. The roughly quarter-acre vegetable plot on the Midtown Greenway was part of a soccer field, and Giossi has not-so-fond memories of digging up mesh that was left over from when the sod had originally been put down for the playing surface.

“At an early age, I saw the great and beautiful things and all of the terrible things about trying to start an urban farm,” he recalls.

On the positive side, Giossi saw firsthand that a surprising amount of food can be raised on a city lot. On the other hand, besides learning how much we abuse our soil, Giossi was exposed to how city regulations and zoning are not amenable to urban agriculture. Even when vegetable production is allowed on a plot in the city, it’s often seen by officials as a temporary placeholder until some sort of “best use” can be put in place like a parking lot or a soccer field. That was Giossi’s first brush with how institutional decision-making can have a big impact on a community’s access to fresh, healthy foods.

After studying biology and botany in college, he spent a year in Bolivia working in agriculture and habitat restoration. It was through that experience that Giossi saw how farming and the natural environment could be blended in a way that both food production and the land benefits. That philosophy dovetails with the mission of Urban Roots.

“We’re exploring that ethic of, ‘What does it look like to be good stewards of the world around us and of our communities?’ ” he says.

The nonprofit has vegetable plots and an orchard in the flyover area of the Saint Paul Downtown Airport, as well as gardens in various spots around the eastern side of the city. The program works with a cohort of around 80 high school students during the summer and around half that number the rest of the year. The youth come from a variety of backgrounds — some face issues of food insecurity and live in neighborhoods that lack access to consistent sources of fresh, healthy food.

After working at Urban Roots for a few years, Giossi felt, despite his extensive background in production agriculture, that he needed to learn skills that relate to agricultural financial management and goal setting.

So, in 2022 he enrolled in the Farm Beginnings course. Through the class, LSP introduces students to holistic business planning, a system that provides a big-picture view of farm management by putting the land, finances, community, and the farmer’s quality of life on the same level of importance. Giossi says he particularly appreciated the goal setting and planning skills he learned in the course.

“I loved the focus of the Farm Beginnings class on centering the decisions you make and the structures that you build on a farm around what your values and your core goals are, and expanding that to the whole human behind those goals and values,” he says. “Some useful, practical skills were combined with prioritizing things like, how is this a meaningful way to spend my time?”

In fact, such skills in prioritizing came in handy after Giossi finished the course and Urban Roots was facing a decision as to whether to continue its Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, which allowed eaters to buy shares in the produce operation ahead of the growing season. Urban Roots had been doing the CSA for several years, and it had become the driver of how the farm was operated — from what was grown to how food was marketed and delivered.

But Giossi says his Farm Beginnings training gave him the skills to reassess the difference between doing something out of daily habit, and management practices that help reach overall goals. One thing he’s aware of is that as a nonprofit working with young people, Urban Roots’ goals might differ from a market gardener who is focused on trying to make a living from their production.

“When we sort of stepped back and thought about, okay, what are our main goals with this urban farm, it was trying to get food back into the community, trying to take good care of the land, and trying to take good care of ourselves and empower youth in the process,” recalls Giossi.

It turned out having two marketing deadlines — one for the CSA delivery in the middle of the week and another for a farmers’ market and neighborhood farmstands at the end of the week — was stressful and cut into time that could have been spent on programming and educational activities for the high schoolers. Plus, the young people enjoyed selling produce face-to-face.

“They get really excited about showing off things that they grew and sharing what they’ve learned about preparing those foods,” says Giossi. “There’s nothing like connecting with other people over food.”

So, Urban Roots dropped the CSA and now focuses on marketing through farmers’ markets, as well as via neighborhood farmstands and food distribution sites in East Saint Paul. Surprisingly, the farm’s former CSA members were supportive of the shift. They wanted to support the farm, and were willing to do that by seeking out its produce via farmers’ markets and market stands.

Building Life Skills

Part of the community building Urban Roots is involved in centers around helping youth see how institutions — from city councils to legislatures — impact their lives. Just as the food system’s realities aren’t always positive, decisions made at various levels of society can also have negative impacts. As the old saying goes, if you don’t have a seat at the table, you’re likely to be what’s for supper.

For example, at one point young people involved with Urban Roots realized they knew little about the governance of an institution that’s integral to their lives: school. Who makes up the school board? How are decisions made? How do people impacted by those decisions get heard?

When the Saint Paul School Board was up for election recently, some of the Urban Roots students organized an informational session with the candidates and invited their peers to take part. It was a good chance for the students to see not only how decision-making is done on the institutional level, but how they can have an influence — whether it be in the garden or the conference room — in ways that create a positive future.

Giossi and other staff at Urban Roots are under no illusions that every teen who works in the market garden will go on to be a farmer. But good decision-making and goal setting skills are needed beyond the vegetable plot and greenhouse.

“Because no matter what you do,” says the young farmer, “you’re going to be on this Earth and you’re going to be part of a community.”

This profile was originally published in the No. 2, 2024, Land Stewardship Letter.