The mission of the Winter Cache Project is to free ourselves from a dependence on industrial agriculture and to increase our community food security by developing sustainable local food systems. By growing and storing our own food to last throughout the winter, and educating ourselves about agricultural issues, we aim to create a working example of how we can come together as a community to provide for our basic needs using the principles of mutual aid, equal access and self-determination.

    The Winter Cache Project is an initiative aimed at uprooting and overgrowing, or overthrowing the global industrial food system, and replacing it with diverse local networks of farms supported by their communities. The current food system jeopardizes the livelihoods of Maine’s farmers, relies deeply on fossil fuels, threatens our health with pesticide laden food, and disregards the health of the earth to make massive profits for the few corporations that control the system. The WCP believes that instead food should be grown using ecologically and socially responsible methods. Farmers and their workers should earn a living wage. Communities’ diets should be based on seasonal, locally abundant resources. The soil, water and living beings that help make it all possible should be treated with respect and care.

There are many community gardens, backyard plots, and farmer’s markets offering good local produce in the summer. However with Maine’s short growing season, come winter, most everyone is dependent on out of season, imported food. The Winter Cache Project seeks to address this problem through a cooperative community based effort to grow, store, and preserve our own food for the winter months.

The WCP was organized in an effort to strengthen our community food sovereignty through increasing access to local organically grown food throughout the winter. By working with farmers during the growing season, the WCP volunteers learn about the origins of their food, and actively work to ensure the future of open-pollinated seed. The goal is to achieve food sovereignty: the ability to control the production of our own food. In the short term, this means having our own cache of food to eat for the winter, in the long term, this means protecting our common seed bank from the invasion of genetically engineered agents.

The project believes that food is a basic human right and that all people should be able to freely choose the source of their food, ones most basic life support. Currently that right is deeply violated by a system of industrial agriculture, private land ownership, and a dependence on fossil fuel. Genetic contamination from engineered organisms is a huge threat to the diversity of food crops. Barriers such as the high cost of organic food, lack of access to land, and rapidly disappearing knowledge of land based skills threaten for each of us, the ability to choose freely where our food is going to come from. In order to regain this self-determination, and to protect our basic human rights, the WCP supports efforts to move away from dependence on corporate-controlled industrial agriculture, fossil fuels and private ownership. The Winter Cache Project believes that food must be produced through sustainable, diversified, community-based efforts. In addition, WCP is committed to removing economic barriers to eating local foods by creating a mutual-aid economy instead of a cash economy.

In the last two years, folks involved in the Winter Cache Project have been turning these ideas into reality by cultivating ½ acre of land at an organic farm in Cumberland, 15 miles outside of Portland. Work is done in the farmer’s summer gardens in exchange for the use of the land. WCP grows winter storage vegetables, including potatoes, carrots, beets, turnips, cabbage, brussel sprouts, rutabaga, parsnips, kohlrabi, winter squash, leeks, and onions, which are then stored in an urban root cellar. Tomatoes, basil, green beans, cucumbers and greens, are grown and then preserved through canning, drying and freezing. The majority of the work gets done on Sundays, when work-parties are held, at which 5-30 people show up each week to work on various projects in the gardens.

Most of the food is harvested in the middle of October, at which time it gets packed in sawdust and cardboard boxes and stored in the root cellar. Some of the vegetables, such as onions and winter squash will find homes in other urban spaces. In November the bi-weekly food distribution begins and folks come to a central location in the city to pick up free vegetables. Those who have helped grow the food throughout the season are encouraged to be the ones eating it, as this project is not a charity organization that simply gives food away for free. However, there is an understanding that there are many demands of life and that not everybody who could benefit from some free local healthy food can make it out to the farm for workdays. Through the donation of organically grown vegetables, the project supports and contributes to the efforts of community groups that are working to make positive social change.

The Winter Cache Project also has a strong educational element. The educational goal of WCP is geared towards teaching each other both the raw skills that enable the community to be more self-sufficient, such as gardening, canning, and cooking; as well as teaching each other the facts about industrial food systems and agricultural politics. Through this exchange, the community gains the power to tear down the unjust system currently in place. Free skill-shares and workshops as well as hands-on education in the fields are held open to the public. A resource book written and compiled by WCP core-group members called “Growing Roots: Resources, Thoughts and Inspiration for Community Food Security” is sold for the cost of materials. The aim is to strengthen the community by bringing people together over food in the fields, in the kitchen and at the dinner table. There is a deep belief that by building strong communities, educating each other, and working together towards greater food sovereignty, systems will be created for survival and justice, free from the grip of oppressive and destructive industrial structures.

The Winter Cache Project is in its second year and continues to learn, grow and change on a daily basis. The members look forward to the future of the project here in the Greater Portland area and also dream about similar models sprouting up throughout the state. Feedback, comments, suggestions and support on how to move forward are deeply encouraged and are welcomed from all people in the community.