Alice Award Nominee: Melanie Plies

This article is the seventh in a series profiling the varied and amazing nominees for the 2009 Alice B. Toeclips Awards, which will be presented to five winners at the Alice Awards & Auction on March 7th. You can also read the list of nominees online. This profile was written by BTA correspondent John McLaren.

Melanie Plies uses a bike and a very heavy-duty trailer to deliver healthy produce to ten households in Southeast Portland. Another ten customers pick up their produce at a half-acre plot she is farming in the Milwaukie area. She calls her operation “Backyard Bounty.” And that it is. She produces more than 100 varieties of vegetable, herbs and fruits.

It all began about three years ago in the backyards of her parents and some of their neighbors. Plies, now 30, had developed an awareness of global food systems, and became concerned with the labor, environmental, and distribution practices of corporate farming while a student at Occidental College in Los Angeles. She became acquainted with some small farmers in the L.A. area through farmer’s markets and their lifestyle inspired her.

After six years in Los Angeles, she moved back to her native Portland. She began her own farming by turning lawns into cropland at the Southeast Portland homes of her parents and five of their neighbors, to form an eight-member Community Support Agriculture (CSA) operation with her friends. A CSA allows consumers to have a direct relationship with the farmer – and the farming. By making a financial commitment to a farm, people become “members” or “shareholders” of the farm in return for a weekly basket of the harvest.

In her second year, Plies partnered with Kollibri Sonnenblume’s Sunroot Gardens (another bike-based urban farming operation, also nominated for an Alice Award). Together they converted more than 20 lawns to mini-farm plots throughout Southeast Portland and expanded membership to 18 households. “We did lots of biking and toting with the trailer,” she says. That’s putting it mildly. The trailer, which can carry up to 300 pounds of food or farm implements, was created from a bed frame and part of a ladder – a real load in itself.

Although bicycling has figured in her farming operation for just the last two years, Plies is a lifelong biking enthusiast who gets along without a car. For pulling the trailer, she uses a converted mountain bike which she has had since she was 15. She has a second bike for commuting.

Today, she no longer harvests from other peoples’ lawns. Instead, she is farming on a large property called Lovena Farm, where she plans to live in a trailer. She leases the half-acre, seven miles from downtown Portland. It’s a great place, she says, for growing vegetables and herbs, and for harvesting from 50 fruit trees and vines.

A full share in her operation costs $500. In return, shareholders get 22 weekly deliveries of a large box of organic produce. For 10 of the 20 shareholders, she delivers the goods by bike to a drop off point in SE Portland at Belmont and 30th. The other 10 customers, who live near Plies’ farm, go there to collect their orders.

By using private lots to grow organic food and then transporting CSA shares with a bicycle, Plies and Sonnenblume are opening a new path to sustainability.