Interview with Gus Schumacher: Planting the Seeds of Change Starting with Farmers

Gus Schumacher, a founding member of Wholesome Wave, has been pioneering the farming /food connection for nearly 30 years. Growing up on a vegetable farm in Lexington, Massachusetts, Gus has remained a steadfast advocate for the benefits that locally-grown, fresh foods can have for everyone in a community. This has translated to both statewide and national policy initiatives during his years with state and federal governments –and with national foundations Gus sat down with us to explain the farmer connection and why it is such an integral piece to the Wholesome Wave movement.

Let’s start with the beginning. What is the farm connection for you?

My great-grandfather, John Schumacher, emigrated from Germany in 1848. He was on the wrong side of the revolution and had to get out of the country. So he came to New York City and rented a farm at 72^nd and Broadway where he farmed until 1888. His son, my grandfather, Fred Schumacher, then moved the family farm to Flushing and later to New Hyde Park in Queens County. My father met my mother in Massachusetts while on vacation. Once married, he moved from the Flushing, Long Island farm to Massachusetts. In 1938, he purchased the Ballard Farm in Lexington, outside of Boston. That’s where I was raised. My brother later bought a farm in South Natick. Over the generations, the family operations focused on northern European crops like lettuces, cabbage, carrots, parsnips and leeks.

What is the Broken Pear Box story?

This is the moment that started it all for me. In August 1980, I was selling at the Dorchester Fields Corner Farmers Market in Boston for my brother. As I was packing up the truck after the market one day, a box of Bosc pears broke and the fruit all fell into the street. I went to grab a shovel to throw them out, but when I walked around the side of the truck, there was a woman and her two young children picking up the pears from the gutter.

I was quite surprised so I asked her what she was doing. She thought I was going to arrest her. And I said “No, no, no. I just wondered why you were in the gutter picking up my brother’s pears.” She said, “Well my husband left me about 6-8 months ago and I’m on food stamps but I can’t afford to eat healthy fruits and vegetables and certainly not buy them for my children who really need fruit. So I saw these pears fall and we were watching to see if you would go around the truck and pick up the pears and you didn’t so we tried to pick them up for the kids.” And I said “That’s not right. You shouldn’t be in the gutter picking pears.” And I gave her a couple pecks of pears to take. Six years later, when I became the Commissioner of Food and Agriculture for Massachusetts, I still remembered that woman and her two boys.

How did your story go from pears to policy?

The USDA WIC Program in existence at the time (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance for Women and Children) did not provide for fruits and vegetables. It was mostly processed foods – you had a little bit of cheese, little bit of processed cereals, milk, orange juice, some baby food formula, but it was all shelf-stable.

One night, I was talking to some friends of mine from the Tuft’s Nutrition School and I mentioned the story of the woman and the broken pear box. We started kicking some ideas around, basically saying, “Why don’t we develop a program where we give women and children vouchers to exchange for fresh foods and vegetables at local farmers markets in Boston?” That was sort of the genesis of all this work. It was 1986 and our first vouchers went to WIC mothers who would pick them up and go to local farmers markets.

It was a success. The vouchers were so popular, it spread to four more states two years later, and then Massachusetts Congressman Chet Atkins then put it into national legislation. Today the program operates in 47 states. In 2009, the Federal Government adjusted the traditional WIC program to add monthly fruits and vegetables vouchers. A little program that started in 1986 with $17,000 in Dorchester, Massachusetts is now at $700 hundred million annually, benefiting an estimated 4 million women and children. In 2000, USDA and Congress also added the seniors to this Farmers Market Nutrition Program

At the same time, you were also doing work with farmers correct?

The Kellogg Foundation was very interested in helping these new refugee farmers and made a series of innovative grants to support their development. At the same time, Chef Michel Nischan was reaching out to these small new and beginning farmers to source new ingredients for his NYC “Heartbeat Restaurant”. These new refugee farmers had just arrived in the country and did not want to work in a factory on an assembly line. They wanted to do what they did back in their home countries, which was to grow healthy food. While I was the Undersecretary at USDA in the 1990’s, working for President Clinton and Secretary Glickman, we wanted to make sure that those new farmers would have the same access to federal programs and nutrition programs from the USDA as a third generation Iowa corn farmer does.

Michel and I worked out a program called the New American Farming Initiative (NAFI) where a farmer in Western Massachusetts (David Jackson) would consolidate products sourcing local, innovative ingredients grown by refugee and immigrant farmers in Massachusetts and take them to Boston, New York and Washington restaurants to sell.

The Kellogg Foundation was very supportive of this refugee farmer initiative and granted nearly $2 million into programs supporting refugee and immigrant farmers around the country and it worked out very well. This was the beginning of a new “Buy local, Buy fresh” movement by refugee farmers who began providing produce to restaurants. Jackson’s truck would come in twice a week to NYC from Massachusetts with products chefs had never seen before –bitter melon, water spinach, water leaves—really interesting flavors that the chefs were keen to use in their cooking. USDA and HHS also stepped up their funding for these new farmers, with HHS creating a Rural Refugee Agricultural Program.

How did farmers become so closely aligned to Wholesome Wave’s mission?

As Chef Nischan and I worked on this effort to link refugee farmer produce to NYC restaurants, Paul Newman and his daughter Nell felt there needed to be a little more attention toward the connection between health and nutrition in our country. With a grant from the Newman Foundation in 2008, they helped fund Wholesome Wave. We started what was called Double Vouchers (now known as Double Value Coupon Program) – a food stamp family could go to a farmers market that had an EBT (Electronic Benefits Technology) machine to swipe food stamp cards and Wholesome Wave would double your amount.

So if you brought your WIC or food stamp card to a local farmers market, many which included these new refugee farmers as vendors, and it had $10 to spend on it, a food stamp recipient could get $20 worth of fruits and vegetables courtesy of Wholesome Wave. It was the follow-up to that Broken Pear Box story; people who really needed fresh fruits and vegetables could now get them at an affordable price. And they are locally grown and the benefits go to them, their children and the local farmers supplying them. Food stamps or WIC vouchers can also be used to sustain the local small farm community in this way.

How will farming continue to play a role in the future of the nation’s health?

I think we recognize that the American farming system is changing very rapidly. To keep providing fruits and vegetables to underserved at-risk families, we need to rebuild and re-regionalize our traditional food system with some new technologies: extending seasons, fostering inexpensive green houses, introducing new varieties of produce, to work toward helping local farmers play a lead role in ‘healthy food hubs’. If we do that, the price can be competitive with produce that we’re basically flying or shipping from other distant parts of the country or increasingly from overseas. We’re trying to help improve nutrition and health of our vulnerable populations.

I think that the new Administration is really focusing on this issue, led by the First Lady and the President. They see that 30-40% of our children under 12 are pre-diabetic and overweight. This has become a national food crisis.

If you add more fruits and vegetables to a diet – you can reduce blood pressure, manage weight and reduce obesity. Some experts say that children will not live as long as their parents! Our objective is that farmers can support healthy food hubs to nourish their neighborhoods and provide additional income to their farming families, while providing better health to customers in vulnerable communities. The small local farmer is becoming a ‘health provider’ by improving the diet and care of folks that traditionally would be on some kind of expensive medicine. I think this is something new, and that we’ve got some new leadership with the Administration on this issue. We’re proud of it.