VHF Soil Project Followup

Since 2015, Veterans Healing Farm has donated over 35,000 pounds of produce to veterans and their caregivers at the Charles George VA Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina

We recently teamed up on a expansive soil improvement project with Veterans Healing Farm, Living Web Farms, and The Redesign ML-43 Leadership Team - Sarah Fiel, Maxine Howard, Kelly Gallant, Jay Mercado, Jared Brindle, Volkan Aksakal, and Cooperate WNC Director Zev Friedman. Our goals were to do the physical work to apply soil amendments and biochar to Veterans Healing Farm's fields, increasing the productivity, nutrient density and medicinal potency of the foods and medicines that are grown by and for Vets.

Thank you to everyone who donated! We raised over $9,000 to fund this work and make a contribution to the Veterans Healing Farm general budget. And much gratitude to the volunteers who came out to do the work!

Here’s a photo gallery for you to enjoy and feel connected with the project, with more detail about the project below.

Through working to amplify the existing production of healthy foods and medicines that Veterans Healing Farm is already doing, we harnessed our love to get connected to these humans who are dealing with trauma and damage from military service, and connect them more effectively with larger community networks, to support their healing and the healing of the human family that they are part of.

After initially planning with the VHF team to build a large solar dehydrator to support the expanded processing and drying of herbal medicines produced on farm for vets, we received feedback from their staff that what they really needed instead was support for soil fertility in their growing areas.

So, we pivoted and worked with them to create a soil fertility improvement plan. We introduced biochar as a strategy to support not only short-term vegetable production but also long term soil fertility, carbon sequestration, climate resilience and production of nutrient dense foods. This led to the idea to build a biochar kiln that could be used by their staff to produce char in perpetuity for use as biochar both on their site and for other community farms in the area.

During the build weekend, our team worked with volunteers and VHF staff to complete two large batches of biochar, mix biochar with compost and mineral amendments, and apply this mixture to all of their growing spaces.

We appreciate your generous support of funds & time in helping to do this work.