AIO Food and Energy Assistance

Dear fellow human,

My name is Tobey Williamson. For as long as I can remember I have had a vision of people growing healthy food together indoors, year-round in any climate. My work in land use planning, agricultural policy and sustainable development projects has only convinced me more of the importance of following this vision wherever it leads. The voracious appetite I have developed for systems thinking, ecological design, and East Asian medicine (I practice a Japanese style of acupuncture ) has led me to seek solutions to complex, interrelated problems that address root causes with durable, dependable innovations AND ancient wisdom.

Bringing a Freight Farm to the AIO Food and Energy Assitance campus is one of these types of solutions and fits perfectly into my vision for inspiring community around the growth, preparation and eating of food together. This video describes the results of a similar effort in Boston's Metro South by the Boys and Girls Club.

In a nutshell, a Freight Farm marries an idea from one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World -- the Hanging Gardens of Babylon -- with innovative modern technology -- LED lighting, water pumping, computer software, insulation, and HVAC equipment.

The result is a 40-foot shipping container fitted out with the potential to grow more than 3 tons of greens, lettuce, herbs, flowers and root vegetables each year. For every year that this yield potential is met, 1/3 of the value of the produce will cover operating costs, leaving 2/3 of the value to feed people for free! This is truly a "teaching people to fish" kind of a project, and not just an endless handout of "free fish (or lettuce, as the case may be)"!

Furthermore, this project is also a seed for something much larger. The structure of the partnership between the non-profit organization I am creating, Long Table Wellness (website coming soon,) and the AIO Food Pantry will allow AIO to freely use the Freight Farm for 5 years. Hopefully, during this time they will save enough money (otherwise spent on fresh produce for their clients) to purchase this freight farm outright or to buy a brand new one. Either way, at year 5, the value of the equipment or the equipment itself can be transitioned to another, bigger, more exciting project for bringing people together to cooperate on year-round agriculture and food preparation. See here for a more detailed description of how these projects fit together; and here and here for some inspiring ongoing projects that have helped shape the long-term vision.

In the end, the next dome/greenhouse project will grow organically from this first Freight Farm project. They will both be powered by the ideas and the energy coming from people like you who believe in a better human future on this planet.

Your donation will help real people, in a small, but tangible way to transmute these inter-related challenges into opportunities:

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT! +~~~~+~~~~+ PLEASE SHARE THIS CAMPAIGN WIDELY!

Hi Andrew Laidlaw and Darrell Belile, here. We are 7th Graders at Camden-Rockport Middle School. In Social Studies class we are working on a Solutionaries project in which we have identified a problem, brainstormed solutions to the problem and are implementing part of our solution. Our Solutionaries Action Project is focused on raising money for AIO. AIO is our local free food market. In Maine there are more than 179,000 people who are food insecure, people who have to make choices everyday between eating a healthy meal is paying for shelter, of medicine or electricity. We are trying raise money for AIO who helps close the hunger gap.

Thank you so much for considering this and donating to our GoFundMe page to benefit AIO. We really appreciate it.