From Food Stamps to Home Production

View the project final report

Commodities

• Animals: bees

Practices

• Education and Training: study circle
• Energy: energy conservation/efficiency, energy use
• Farm Business Management: marketing management
• Sustainable Communities: local and regional food systems, community development

The project “From Food Stamps to Home Production and Farmers’ Market” is implemented by the Center for Permaculture as Native Science on the Rosebud Lakota reservation in south central South Dakota. Started in 1995 as “Garden for Health, “ with the purpose of encouraging residents to garden and thus exercise in the sunshine, eat what they grow, and take a step toward the prevention of diabetes, which is prevalent on the reservation. Slow but real progress is being made, participants stronger in body and spirit, activities of shelterbelt planting, honeybee keeping and small renewable energy added. Outcomes of the new project of this ongoing program are participants changing their attitudes to be aware of their own abilities, to renew their traditional knowledge, to gain self-confidence. They are raising their own food, improving their household diets, and beginning to work together in the economic endeavor of local produce marketing. In the context of rural poverty and alcoholism, isolated on the prairie, the project’s method is that self-selected participants attend non-formal lessons, and then put these lessons into practice at their own houses, with needed equipment from the project and guidance and follow-up from the project’s stipended program assistants (PAs). The project’s evaluation data are gathered at the end of the season by the Pas, and analyzed during the winter. Adaptations are made at the start-up meeting in the spring. Data gathered include numbers of new gardeners, numbers of gardeners who continue and observation of changed attitudes and behavior in the neighborhoods.