Linda Falkenstein
Anderson Park Friends president Roe Parker at the food pantry garden, in front of the newly installed well house.
County parks are usually home to hiking trails and boat landings, swimming beaches, and other recreational opportunities. And 310-acre Anderson Farm County Park, in the town of Oregon, is no exception, with woodland trails, restored prairie, and a newly completed off-leash dog area. But some of its land is being devoted to a more altruistic purpose — feeding people — with community garden plots, a food pantry garden, and an orchard.
The park’s agricultural focus starts with the Anderson family, which had farmed the land since 1886. The county purchased the original 127 acres from the family in 2009; the park’s master plan, completed in 2013, includes space for future garden plots and a “farm education center” in accordance with the family’s interests.
Now, behind the old Anderson farmhouse, its white siding and gray trim punctuating the bright leaves of fall, are the community gardens — 12 acres and 23 plots, plus a special area of raised beds where volunteers grow vegetables to donate to food pantries.
“‘Community gardens’ is kind of a misnomer,” says Roe Parker, president of the Anderson Park Friends group, which, along with community agriculture nonprofit Rooted, helps support the gardens. “The plots here are large, 100 by 100 feet. It’s really leaning toward small-scale agriculture.” This year, the community gardens’ second year, all 23 plots were used, with the gardeners paying $50 a year for a lease. Many of the farmers are Hmong, who have “an agricultural tradition and intense motivation to grow fresh produce,” says Parker, “and Asian vegetables not usually planted in Wisconsin.”
This year a community orchard was started with 10 peach and 10 honeycrisp apple trees. These should bear fruit by 2023, Parker says, and the harvest is also earmarked for food pantries, while he foresees harvesting as a learning experience for school groups.
The food pantry plot, which launched in 2019, is co-sponsored by the Friends group and the Oregon Area Food Pantry. Vegetables, including broccoli, cucumbers, carrots onions, squash and green peppers, were donated to the Oregon pantry as well as Badger Prairie Needs Network and the Belleville food pantry. Squash, including acorn, delicata and butternut, became part of the Oregon food pantry’s Thanksgiving baskets. Sheri Pollock of the Oregon pantry says that people loved seeing the fresh carrots “still with dirt on them” and that the produce also helped the pantry stretch its budget.
Parker says the group also donated to Little John’s Kitchens and wants to expand its involvement with that nonprofit organization, which uses surplus food to make meals for those in need.
“It’s public land, and we want a cooperative approach,” says Parker.
Gardening equipment including a Kubota tractor was purchased with funding help coming from Rooted and the U.W. Extension Dane County. Most crucially, a state of the art well, pump and pump house were installed in March 2021 with funding from Dane County Parks. “It’s a major agricultural well, but it stays under the DNR’s regulation for big farms,” says Parker.
The top priority now, says Parker, is to secure funding for an irrigation system, a series of PVC pipes that will run underground to all plots, each of which will have a spigot and hose connector. The proposed irrigation system will increase the quantity and quality of vegetables; this year’s drought cut onion size in half, says Parker, and the food pantry plot lost most of its broccoli.
The irrigation system will serve the current gardens. The project will cost $18,533 in total; the Friends group has pledged to provide $4,600 of that. A benefactor has also pledged to match $3 to every $1 donated. The goal is to have the system installed by April 2022. (Donations can be made via the group’s webpage, andersonparkfriends.org.)
An adjacent 24 acres is targeted for expansion of the gardens. There, two- to five-acre plots with two- or three-year leases are planned, accommodating five to 12 growers. These will be primarily for those earning their livelihood growing and selling at farmers’ markets.
The acreage, currently rented out by the county to farmers who’ve been planting corn, next year will be planted with green cover crops beginning a three-year transition, unofficially, to organic. (Full organic certification is too complicated, says Parker, so Anderson Park will not seek it, but “we watch and monitor,” he says, to keep the farming pesticide-free.)
Does this focus on food access signal a trend in county parks? Silverwood, another Dane County park near Edgerton, also has an agricultural focus and has garden plots that are leased to small-scale growers, says Dane County interim parks director Joleen Stinson. But Stinson isn’t aware of any other counties in Wisconsin that are earmarking parts of county parks for food production and sees the approach as “innovative.” Stinson distinguishes Anderson and Silverwood from Badger Prairie Park’s community gardens, which have much smaller plots.
Stinson says the “stars would have to align just right” for this concept to expand to more Dane County parks, though. “You need the right property and the right partner organization, like a friends group, or Rooted,” says Stinson. The parks department “doesn’t have the capacity” to maintain or oversee community gardens.
Sheena Tesch, deputy director at Rooted, confirms that using park land for agricultural production is “not seen very often.” Rooted helps recruit and organize growers, says Tesch, and acts as liaison with Hmong farmers, who have been losing some of the land they use for growing as Dane County continues to lose farmland to development.
Anderson Park Friends president Parker has been involved with food accessibility issues since the 1970s, when he went to college at UW-Oshkosh. After graduation, a job as a community organizer in Rock County raised his awareness of senior citizen meal programs, food access and hunger in general. That began his work with food pantries, including teaching volunteers how to run them.
He became involved with Anderson Farm Park early on, calling a meeting at the public library for volunteers to start work clearing the forest segment. “About six people showed up and four were senior citizens,” he remembers. “And we were going to be hauling lumber out of the forest.”
Nonetheless the Friends group was born, supporting first the woodland restoration, then a prairie restoration in 2017; volunteers are also expanding a bluebird trail and working on other citizen science projects like monitoring a trail camera for the DNR’s Snapshot Wisconsin program. The Friends group now has a core group of 10 to 12, says Parker, with an additional handful of casual volunteers.
“It’s a great story of volunteerism,” says Parker. The Friends group logged 3,300 volunteer hours in 2020 despite the pandemic. “People knew their goals, and two to three persons would get together and work.” Parker expects that volunteer hours will exceed that in 2021.
It’s not all food access, though. The Friends group is even hiding handcrafted “fairy doors” at the bases of trees in the woods to stimulate kids’ interest in the outdoors. “There are a lot of neat aspects to the park,” says Parker, “especially considering it started out as a blank canvas.” n
