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All images by Shula Neuman
Melvin “Skip” Cook: Initially it was all truck gardens. It used to be just acre after acre of celery growing out here. You drive down Schaff Road and all you could smell is celery. So it was for almost a hundred years. But it all changed in the 1970s, Cook says. Improved technology made imported fruit and vegetables from California or South America plentiful and cheap. The farms in the Cuyahoga Valley couldn’t compete - what, with their high overhead from heating and labor. Cook’s 5-acre farm and market is one of just three remaining. And for Cook, it’s not a full-time job. Melvin “Skip” Cook: If I had to rely on this farm to survive, I couldn’t do it. I have a small shop, manufacturing facility which provides me with my main source of income and this is more like a hobby. I do it because I love it not because I’m making a lot of money on it.
Brad Masi: We’re finding increasing markets for local food - a lot of restaurants, institutions are looking for local. But for us the bigger challenge is finding suppliers.Masi says it’s encouraging that the interest is there, but the cause of the greenhouse industry’s extinction - cheap imports and rising energy - hasn’t changed. And that leads one to wonder if recreating an urban agriculture scene could really work. Masi says, there are challenges to rebuilding the industry - challenges he sees as opportunity.
Holly Harlan: I don’t know if it’s our fixation on high tech being our savior, but how many jobs do we have in the food industry in Northeast Ohio? About 128,000 people work in food service in Northeast Ohio, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In all Ohio, nearly 6,000 work in agriculture and farming. Holly Harlan: The food industry can provide jobs at a lot of different levels. In this community we have blue collar, white collar, high tech and we need opportunity and inspiration for all of them. The food industry can provide that. We’re not all going to work at the Cleveland Clinic, so we need to find other opportunities. Agriculture offered Scott Gordon an opportunity he never expected. Gordon came from the corporate world, an internet marketing firm where suit and ties were the uniform. Now he’s general manager at Rosby’s Garden and Berry Farm on Schaff Road where his daily-wear is mostly jeans. He says it’s tempting to romanticize agriculture - but that’s a mistake.
Brad Masi and Holly Harlan are so hopeful that it will make sense that they’ve convinced Leadership Cleveland to adopt Veggies in the Valley as one of its projects this year. Harlan acknowledges it’s not a done deal. She says Leadership Cleveland could examine the initiative and decide it’s untenable - but even that, she says, would mean people are open to a variety of ways to improve our economy. In Cleveland, Shula Neuman, 90.3. |
Melvin
“Skip” Cook is a third generation farmer. His family’s
farm is on Schaff Road near the boarder of Brooklyn Heights - nestled
in the crook of the Jennings Freeway and I-480. This whole area,
Cook says, used to be the greenhouse capital of the country. 
Cook
says he doesn’t see why anyone would willingly go into farming
in the Cuyahoga Valley these days. But Brad Masi believes the time
has come to change that. Masi is part of the Northeast Ohio Foodshed
Network, one of the groups that is working to build connections
between local farmers and consumers, institutions and processors.
Holly
Harlan is director of Entrepreneurs for Sustainability, a group
devoted to encouraging sustainable practices in business, and is
involved with efforts to restore what they’re calling “Veggies
in the Valley."
Gordon
says Rosby’s survives because it’s business: the company
is innovative, it’s always testing new products like sunflowers
or pumpkins. And it’s kept its products diversified yet inter-related
- each arm feeds off the other but none could survive alone. So
he’s cautious to endorse reviving the greenhouse industry.
