A local market for sustainability

Published 10:00 am Wednesday, September 8, 2004

Stacy Marshall and Chris Llewellyn have found synergy between organic zucchini and fair trade, organic coffee.

Customers ordering organic produce from Serendipity Farm, owned by former islander Llewellyn, can also get Marshall’s Grounds for Change fair-trade coffee delivered to their home or a neighborhood drop-off spot.

“Chris and I have very similar missions,” Marshall said. “We’re having a wonderful time.”

Both she and Llewellyn share a focus on sustainability and social responsibility in their products.

Stacy and her husband Kelsey Marshall founded Grounds for Change in a cottage on the property of their Bainbridge Island home last February to promote sustainability of coffee-growing communities and their environment.

The business was inspired by their coffee-picking experience in Costa Rica – it was hot, on steep terrain, and “really hard work.”

Since then Grounds for Change has been growing, and now roasts 2,000-2,200 pounds of coffee a month.

But being a small, family-run business, they were unable to take on new delivery customers. Through the partnership with Serendipity Farm in Quilcene, the Marshalls now deliver coffee to Bainbridge customers once a week, instead of once every two months, while introducing more people to Llewellyn’s produce and organic foods.

The Marshalls lived on Bainbridge for three years before moving to the Suquamish area last month for economic reasons.

“It’s really expensive to operate a business on Bainbridge,” Stacy Marshall said. “We moved by virtue of needing to grow. It was cost-prohibitive to expand on Bainbridge and the opportunities for growing (in light manufacturing) are pretty limited on Bainbridge Island.”

She met Llewellyn through a friend who purchased organic produce from Serendipity Farm.

The third-generation islander ran for mayor in the last election, losing to Darlene Kordonowy.

She fulfilled a dream by moving to Quilcene two years ago to start a 46-acre, organic farm where she grows fruit and vegetables.

Llewellyn makes weekly deliveries to drop-off points for customers on Bainbridge, in Poulsbo and North Kitsap.

Two greenhouses let her provide produce year-round as well as salad dressings and soups. A recent ordering list included eggplant, various tomatoes, zucchini, pak choi, beets, stir fry mix, gazpacho soup, salsa, pesto, Thai basil, eggs, flowers and even wild-caught Alaskan salmon.

The farm runs workshops and hires farming interns who are completing course credits or are part of the “Willing Workers for Organic Farms.” Llewellyn is trying her hand at building a cob kitchen from clay, sand and straw to host small gatherings, workshops and farming camps.

Llewellyn says she partnered with Grounds for Change because “our philosophy is to combine recreation, conservation and sustainable agriculture to provide a model and learning center for sustainable living.

“I’m interested in anything that supports sustainable living.”

Fair trade

At Grounds For Change, the Marshalls roast only fair-trade certified, shade grown, organic beans.

Fair trade coffee guarantees that coffee farmers have received a fair price for their beans, have direct access to North American markets, and benefit from programs promoting social and commercial development.

While farmers of conventional coffee get only 55 to 60 cents a pound, fair trade beans fetch a minimum price of $1.26 per pound and $1.41 per pound for organic coffee.

An economic crisis brought coffee prices to an all-time low of 42 cents per pound in 2001, causing many families to flee rural areas or pull children out of school to work in the fields. A higher price makes coffee-growing communities better able to weather market instability.

“We work with a number of different brokers…and know they are doing great work bringing in high quality coffee and paying attention to the social and environmental issues related to coffee,” Marshall said.

One broker from whom the Marshalls buy does “direct relationship coffee,” in which the broker buys larger quantities of coffee from a specific coffee community and returns a percentage of profits to them for building schools and infrastructure.

A local version of “direct relationship coffee” is Cafe Oro de Ometepe, imported by the Bainbridge Ometepe Sister Islands Association and roasted by Pegasus Coffee House. All of the association’s coffee revenues go back to Ometepe.

Advocates cite the benefits of “shade-grown” coffee: it ripens in the shade of fruit trees that can provide a habitat for more than 150 species of migratory birds and naturally compost the shade-loving coffee plant with leaves and fallen fruit so that pesticides and herbicides are not necessary.

By contrast, the practice of clear-cutting – growing high-yield coffee plants in the sun to increase production – has led to a decrease in the population of migratory birds. Studies in Colombia and Mexico found 94-97 percent fewer bird species in sun-grown coffee than in shade-grown coffee, according to the Smithsonian Institute’s Migratory Bird Center.

The Fair Trade Federation and Northwest Shade Coffee Campaign, which support sustainable coffee agriculture, receives donations of 2 percent of Grounds for Change’s revenues.

“One thing we’ve tried to focus on is working to make positive change,” Marshall says, which extends to the company using only 100 percent post-consumer paper and having an affiliate program where the membership base of nonprofits can purchase their coffee through a special webpage that will return 15 percent of sales to the organizations.

“In 2003, 7 percent of coffee drinkers purchased fair-trade coffee,” she said. “What’s exciting for us is there’s so much room for improvement. People are becoming aware how easy it is to make that type of decision.”