Dirty Hands Sift Through Mounds of Paperwork

Organic farming a way of life for East Greenwich farmer

By FRANK CARINI/ecoRI staff

Ledge Ends Produce farm manager Erik Eacker and production manager Danielle Martin get their hands dirty working the land at the historic Briggs-Boesch Farm in East Greenwich. (Frank Carini/ecoRI staff)EAST GREENWICH — All the paperwork has made Erik Eacker a better farmer. It forced him to better track his methods and taught him to more easily spot trends.

Besides, with the exception of an occasional ink smudge dispensed from a worn pen, writing up reports and filling binders with detailed information momentarily keeps his hands clean.

Organic farming is dirty work. The New Hampshire native should know; he’s been cleaning dirt out from under his fingernails for the past 13 years.

“There’s a lot of hand labor involved,” said the farm manager for Ledge Ends Produce Inc., on South Road. “Growing up doing landscaping, I knew this was what I wanted to do — be good to the earth and friendly to the environment.”

He just didn’t realize the amount of paperwork the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management — and all similar state agencies, for that matter — require from organic farmers. They need to keep a detailed written record concerning every aspect of production, from the field to the point of sale.

Eacker’s collection of work sits in different colored binders that fill several shelves on a wooden bookcase.

An avid surfer, Eacker began is organic-farming career in rural upstate New York, on 170 acres of farmland owned by his parents. He operated Son E’Acres Farm from 1996 to 2003, but it’s tough to catch a wave in northern New York.

In 2004, he relocated to the Ocean State, to the town-owned Briggs-Boesch Farm, which has roots that date back to 1672. He signed a 20-year lease to live and work on the 72-acre property, which is on the National Register of Historic Places. The East Greenwich Municipal Land Trust acquired the site in 2001 from the Boesch family with the intention of preserving the property as open space.

Soon after beginning his Rhode Island farming career, Eacker started calling local farmers for advice. One of his first phone calls was to Mike and Polly Hutchinson, who were then running Casey Farm, a nonprofit operation in North Kingstown.

The Hutchinsons quickly became his mentors.

“They were very helpful right from the start,” Eacker said of Polly and Mike, who now own and operate Robin Hollow Farm in Saunderstown. “They helped me make the transition to Rhode Island. The whole agricultural community here has been open and welcoming.”

Ledge Ends Produce is now one of 23 certified organic farms in Rhode Island — a farming trend that is growing here and across the country. The number of organic farms in the United States jumped from 12,000 in 2002 to 18,200 in 2007, according to the Earth Policy Institute.

“More farmers are going this way,” Eacker said. “The market is asking for it, especially in Rhode Island and especially at farmers’ markets.”

Ledge Ends Produce sells its fruits and vegetables at five farmers’ markets. But most of the vegetables and fruit grown on the farm are sold to families enrolled in the farm’s community supports agricultural (CSA) program.

From April through November, a full-time staff of eight, including Eacker and recently hired production manager Danielle Martin, tend to 12 acres of vegetables and two acres of fruit.

The farm also is a compost-licensed facility, which allows the staff to turn the nearly 4,000 gallons of coffee grounds supplied annually by Blue State Coffee in Providence and other organic materials, such as manure donated by local stables, into nutrient-rich soil.

The farm’s 14 acres of working land enables Eacker to produce about 50 different crops, from apples to zucchini, for a maximum of 240 CSA participants. He’s again maxed out for the coming season.

The cost is $600, and participants, during the different growing seasons, receive weekly bags of fresh produce, from arugula to beets to broccoli, to scallions, peppers and radishes, to onions, kale, melons and carrots, depending on the time of year.

Since his arrival in Rhode Island, Eacker has become an active member of the agricultural community that was so quick to embrace him. He’s served as a member of the Organic Advisory Committee and as president of the Coastal Growers Market.

The nonprofit branch of the farm — the Ledge Ends Learning Center — is focused on providing fresh organic vegetables to low-income families and providing educational opportunities for both adults and children, by holding cooking classes, lessons on growing and using culinary herbs, and hosting discussions about biofuels and alternative energy.

For the past year and a half, he’s served as president of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Rhode Island, invigorating the once-stalled organization. Currently, he’s creating a program that will compensate experienced organic farmers willing to work with those new to the business.

Besides helping cultivate the next generation of organic farmers, Eacker hopes the program also manages to save some farmland.

“I wish we would value our farmland as farmland and not as houses,” he said. “Protecting farmland is a complicated problem; farmers making thirty thousand dollars a year can’t buy farmland that is valued at three million dollars. They have to get into an alternative-type situation like I am in now.”

When his alternative-type situation lapses 15 years from now, Eacker hopes he winds up surfing in Peru.

There’s a Buzz in the Air

at an Olneyville Community Garden

By FRANK CARINI/ecoRI staff

Jenna Sicuranza has gotten a kick out of her new hobby — beekeeping. (Joanna Detz/ecoRI staff photos)PROVIDENCE — It took Danielle Blasczak and Jenna Sicuranza longer than needed to open the little, wooden case. They had picked up the buzzing package in Massachusetts, and spent the ride home to Rhode Island pondering how they would open it.

Blasczak admitted they weren’t as aggressive as they should have been.

A swarm of 10,000 honeybees has a way of making you proceed with extreme caution.

Now, less than a year later, the two friends are old pros when it comes to getting stung. “We’ve both been stung multiple times on multiple occasions,” Sicuranza said. “Getting stung in the hand is the worse — it swells up and it hurts. But if you get stung in the hand and your throat swells up, you’re in trouble.”

In between pulling out countless stings, however, the two women have become adept beekeepers.

The neophytes collected 14 pounds of honey this summer — a pretty good haul, considering some novice beekeepers still have to buy the sweet nectar that first year— and plan to give the 28 8-ounce jars as gifts to family and friends.

The two friends also have grown their initial 3 pounds of bees into a colony of about 100,000.

“When we started, we thought we had a lot of bees,” Blasczak said. “Now, we have a way lot of bees.”

Many of them were buzzing around their wooden home Sunday morning in the Manton Avenue Community Garden, in the city’s Olneyville neighborhood, as Blasczak and Sicuranza inspected their bees.

They are preparing to winterize the hive. The bees basically take care of everything, but Sicuranza said they want to make sure their human-constructed home keeps air circulating without too much moisture.

“Bees are real good at regulating the temperature of the hive,” she said.

During the winter, honeybees cluster in a tight ball to keep warm, and need about 70 pounds of honey to make it through these cold months, Sicuranza said.

Despite the use of a smoker, which calms the bees down and masks their alarm pheromones, Sicuranza is stung several times during Sunday’s inspection. The pain of a sting, however, can’t mask her enthusiasm for the hobby.

“It’s very fun,” said Sicuranza, as she proudly displayed a welt on her right forearm, courtesy of one of the hive’s many worker bees. “It’s exhilarating.”

Beekeeping had been something Sicuranza envisioned doing for a while. She found a willing accomplice in Blasczak. The two women originally met two years ago at the Providence chapter of the Stitch & Bitch knitting club.

Neither of them knits much anymore. It must not produce the same adrenalin rush as driving a box of bees across state borders.

Danielle Blasczak and her Manton Avenue Community Garden honeybee hive.To prepare themselves for handling a swarm of bees, the semi-retired knitters took an eight-week class in Walpole, Mass., sponsored by the Norfolk County Beekeepers Association. The $40 class met once a week, and had about 75 students.

Once they bought their own honeybees — $80 for bees and another $400 or so for the hive and other equipment — Blasczak and Sicuranza’s biggest concern was keeping the colony alive.

They visited the hive nearly once a week for several months, despite knowing they only really needed to inspect it once a month. They also hung chemical strips to keep colony-killing varroa mites out of the hive, and added an antibiotic to the hive’s sugar syrup, to keep nosema parasites out of their bees intestinal tracts.

The first-year beekeepers, however, would like to go chemical-free next year.

“It was our first year and we didn’t want to lose them to disease,” Blasczak said. “They don’t need much from us, we just wanted to make sure we kept them disease-free.”

Both women, however, are well aware of the reports about the collapse of honeybee colonies across the country.

In 2006, some of the country’s nearly 2.5 million honeybee colonies went still, almost overnight. The worker bees that make hives run simply disappeared. In fact, during the past three years, nearly one-third of all honeybee colonies have collapsed this way, according to various reports. The phenomenon has been dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD)— and scientists are still searching for answers.

“It’s bad,” Sicuranza said. “People who know a lot about this are concerned. It’s a big deal. Every little hive that is surviving makes a difference.”

A number of possible causes for CCD have been suggested, from viruses to parasites to environmental triggers such as pesticides or even cell-phone transmissions.

Pollination by bees and other animals, such as birds, bats and butterflies, is necessary for the production of fruits and seeds in many wild and cultivated plants. These animals and others pollinate more than 80 percent of the planet’s 250,000 species of flowering plants.

This smoker kind of keeps the bees from stinging.In fact, honeybees provide $15 billion worth of value to U.S. farmers, pollinating crops that range from apples to zucchinis.

The Manton Avenue Community Garden’s one hive has an array of plants to pollinate. The women hope to introduce more bees to more places this spring.

Blasczak, a Brown University employee, is talking to friends of her parents about letting her erect a honeybee hive in their backyard. Sicuranza, who is moving to Iowa to become the assistant curator of seed plants at Seed Savers Exchange, hopes to continue the hobby in the Hawkeye State.

It’s Been a Rerwarding Ride

for ‘Father’ of East Bay Bike Path

A section of the trail soon will be named in George Redman’s honor

By FRANK CARINI/ecoRI staff

Next year, Rhode Island will name a section of the East Bay Bike Path in Providence in honor of lifelong Ocean State resident George Redman, who many consider the ‘father’ of the popular trail. (Frank Carini/ecoRI staff)EAST PROVIDENCE — It’s been more than three years since George Redman was able to ride his trusty 10-speed Schwinn along the bike path he helped create, but that doesn’t mean his broken heart keeps him away from one of his true loves.

On many Saturday afternoons, the 85-year-old go-getter can be found sitting under a tent along a section of the East Bay Bike Path in Warren. There, a few pedal cranks from the Your Bike Shop, Redman hands out apples, water, cider and pieces of watermelon to grateful walkers and bikers.

Several heart operations and a pacemaker have forced the bicycling enthusiast to navigate his small apartment with a walker. Except for his visits to the doctors and his somewhat regular Saturday trips to Warren, the retired truck driver/warehouseman has been a shut-in for the past three-plus years.

But that hasn’t stopped the affable Redman from tracing his family genealogy back to the 1400s or kept him from his latest hobby — reading. The mere mention of the East Bay Bike Path, though, draws a smile, and uninterrupted stories and memories about what it took to get the trail completed.

Those who enjoy the East Bay Bike Path have Redman to thank for the 14.5-mile, unobstructed path that takes them through historic towns and picturesque hamlets, past beautiful homes and quaint shopping districts, along coves and marshes, over bridges and into state parks, from Providence to Bristol.

The now-popular and nationally recognized bike path didn’t start out as a warmly received idea. Opponents feared increased vandalism and break-ins from transient traffic using the proposed path.

But proponents such as Redman were persistent in their determination to turn a section of an abandoned railroad corridor into a useful bike path. There were plenty of arguments, disagreements and political posturing during the nearly two decades it took to plan, design and construct the trail.

“We had some good donnybrooks over this project and what to call the bike path,” Redman recalled with a laugh during an interview last week in his living room. “We dealt with a lot of politics, and I was squawking all over, in the newspapers, about the importance of the project.”

In fact, the bike-path battle became so contentious that Redman had to tone down his passion for the project because he “didn’t want to make enemies, which I was on the verge of doing.”

By the number of framed awards hanging on the walls and tucked away in cabinets of his and wife Adeline’s East Providence apartment, it’s difficult to imagine that anyone was ever against what turned out to be the East Bay Bike Path.

The Greenways Alliance of Rhode Island, the Ocean State Bike Path Association, the Narragansett Bay Wheelmen, the city of Providence and Rails-to-Trails Conservancy have all thanked Redman for his tireless work in support of the federally funded pathway.

Upon honoring him in 1997, the Greenways Alliance had this to say about Redman:

“Every time the project hit a bureaucratic snafu or delay when opponents sought to portray the project as an expensive boondoggle that wouldn’t be used, and at every public meeting, George was there quietly and persistently insisting that the idea was sound, workable and in the public interest.”

But his most distinct honor can’t easily be hung on the wall. Next year, Rhode Island will dedicate a section of the bike path in Providence in honor of Redman, changing its name from the Washington Bridge Linear Park to the George Redman Linear Park, in recognition of the man who many consider to be the “father” of the East Bay Bike Path.

Redman’s community spirit and his environmental activism, however, didn’t start or stop with the East Bay Bike Path.

Long before he became a leading advocate for the bike path’s creation, the assistant scoutmaster for Troop 29 and the Boy Scouts under his leadership spent hours cleaning the shorelines of East Providence — the city he and his wife have called home for more than 50 years.

The lifelong Rhode Islander served as head of the Shoreline Improvement Association, was the chairman of the Fort Hill Waterfront Park Committee, helped develop the East Providence recycling program and worked to make the development of Bold Point Park a reality. He also wrote letters to Gov. Carcieri and the acting director of the state Department of Environmental Management urging them to keep the since-demolished old Jamestown Bridge for bicyclists and walkers.

But once the East Bay Bike Path was completed, Redman became a frequent user, until his damaged heart forced him to stop riding.

Often dressed in a gray sweatshirt with “USA” embroidered across the front, the former Navy diver and gun captain used to ride the bike path almost daily, cycling 20 miles or more as he visited the towns, shops and restaurants that line the trail.

The East Bay Bike Path now is part of the ambitious East Coast Greenway, a 3,000-mile work in progress that organizers hope will one day connect cities and towns from the Canadian border in Maine to the Florida Keys.
In the meantime, Redman continues to promote the East Bay Bike Path’s significance.

“It’s the most used bike path in the country, and it will be more than that when I am done,” Redman promised.

RISD Graduate's Life's Work Focused

on Harnessing the Power of Ocean Waves

By FRANK CARINI/ecoRI staff

Bristol resident and Rhode Island School of Design graduate Foerd Ames has been working on ocean wave energy for the past three decades. (Frank Carini/ecoRI staff)PORTSMOUTH — The last thing Foerd Ames remembered was pulling up to his friend’s house and saying good night. It was a cold New England evening, so he left the car’s engine running as their conversation continued.

He woke up three days later in the hospital, confused and frightened. His friend, though, wasn’t as lucky; she died of carbon monoxide poisoning steps from her front door.

At the time of the accident, Ames was a Rhode Island School of Design student interested in the idea of using ocean waves as an energy source. The death of a friend and his own near-fatal experience with carbon monoxide poisoning further fueled his desire to help develop a cleaner renewable energy source.

Three decades later, Ames has expended a lot of time and his own money researching wave energy and designing and testing models. Several of his designs have been patented.

“I’m jaded but optimistic about the future of wave energy,” said Ames, who suffers from short-term memory loss attributed to the 1978 carbon monoxide accident. “There’s wonderful people thinking about this stuff, but like a buzz, it’s not very productive. We’re going over a lot of the same stuff that was discussed in the eighties, but the fact there is dialogue about wave energy and renewables is a good thing. This dialogue has been needed for decades, if not longer.”

Ames created the Ocean Wave Energy Co. in 1978 while he was a student at RISD. He secured his first patent in 1980, the year he graduated from the Providence design school with a degree in architecture.

He’s been struggling for recognition and funding ever since. His mother even told him he was wasting his time with wave energy.

“My Mom used to always tell me, ‘nobody wants to hear you talk about this stuff,’” Ames said. “She said it was dull.”

Mrs. Ames might have had a point. In the 1980s, after Ronald Reagan replaced Jimmy Carter in the White House, alternative energy ideas were scrapped and nuclear, coal and oil power again reigned supreme.

And while others, such as scientists and engineers, did find the topic of wave energy interesting, some didn’t think an architect should be leading the discussion. They certainly didn’t think his wave-energy ideas would fly — or, better yet, float.

“I heard a lot of ‘you went to art school so what do you know about this stuff,’ and I was told lots of times my ideas wouldn’t work,” Ames said.

But the longtime Bristol resident kept working on his wave-energy ideas, and in the early ’80s, one of his early designs succeeded in generating electricity using 5-inch waves in a test tank at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

By the end of the decade that brought us “trickle-down economics,” Ames had secured a small innovation research grant from the Coast Guard and another smaller grant from the state of Rhode Island. It’s the only outside funding his company has received in 31 years.

“I spend a lot of time filling out paperwork asking for funding instead of doing,” the 52-year-old Ames recently said as he sat behind his cluttered desk in a workshop that is housed in a tradesmen’s center off East Main Road. “I’ve put a lot of time and effort into this business for a long time. Ideally, I’d like to be doing more experiments and working with a team, but funding is hard to come by.”

At its peak in the early 1990s, the Ocean Wave Energy Co. employed six people. Today, it’s just Ames, international engineering interns for a semester at a time and a few consultants offering advice.

But a lack of funding doesn’t dampen Ames’ passion for wave energy’s potential.

“Renewables like wave energy are still fighting costs. You hear all the time that renewables are too expensive, but when we are talking about costs, few factor in the environmental costs and wastes associated with fossil fuels,” Ames said. “Wave energy is not necessarily easy, and the technology is expensive, but at least interest is growing.”

Generating energy from ocean movement was first tested in the 1800s — “it was a buoy-based design that had some problems but was a good idea,” Ames said — and now is making waves in the renewable energy market.

The conversion of ocean waves into electricity has the potential to provide clean, reliable and low-cost electricity while producing little pollution. Besides the high cost of this technology, there also are uncertainties about wave energy’s effects on the marine environment, such as equipment breaking up and littering the sea with debris or its impact on the migration of whales, dolphins and large fish.

Despite its high cost and some concerns about where to site facilities, Ames believes wave energy will play a role in the world’s future energy needs.

There are about 100 wave-energy companies worldwide, with Scotland-based Pelamis Wave Power Ltd. and Australia-based Oceanlinx Ltd. considered industry leaders. The world’s first commercial wave farm went on line last year off the coast of Portugal.

Ames, however, believes the two coasts of the United States have tremendous wave-energy potential.

In fact, Rhode Island has had talks with Oceanlinx to build a $45 million wave-energy electricity project in local waters that could reduce the state’s electricity costs.

“Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts are a hot bed of wave energy on the East Coast,” he said.