A visit to Gaining Ground

Meredith Days, Outreach and Communications Assistant

​Gaining Ground is a 3-acre farm in Concord, Massachusetts that utilizes no-till practices, and is one of the Gleaners’ longtime partners! All of the food grown at Gaining Ground is donated to local hunger relief agencies. They have 18 hunger relief partners that they donate produce to, 15 of which get produce every week. Their growing season is generally from May to early October, but they distribute to some hunger relief partners all winter. Food insecurity increases in Massachusetts in the winter months, so Gaining Ground also spends time thinking about how they can serve their partners by growing storage crops. Examples of storage crops include squash, root vegetables like carrots, and onions - crops that last in storage! Gaining Ground is also interesting in that they do maple sugaring in the winter, driving around Concord to tap over 50 different trees. With all of the produce going to food pantries, Gaining Ground experiences consistent demand. This gives their crew the flexibility to harvest entire fields and plant cover crops when it is most advantageous to them. 

The land where Gaining Ground is located is the traditional homeland of the Nipmuc and Algonquin Nations. The land was farmed for about 100 years for rhubarb and asparagus. Gaining Ground has been there for a little over 20 years.​

​The intention of the farming practices at Gaining Ground — being no-till and low-till — are to minimize the disturbance of the soil. There is a focus on working in reciprocity with nature, using natural resources and hand tools instead of mechanical ones to service the soil. The farmers use a lot of mulch and compost to cover the soil, getting most of their mulch from an app called Chip Drop (not sponsored, just a cool thing!) and also from connections with landscaping tree companies for leaf drops — they get leaf mulch in later October once the leaf collection is in full swing and there are less grass clippings in landscape materials. Their favorite type of compostable cover, however, is actually salt marsh hay from Newburyport — the benefits include no weed seeds being added to the soil and the salt marsh hay comes from a nutrient rich environment. We also discussed co-planting and the benefits for plants and soil - for example, Gaining Ground plants parsley with kale because parsley has a strong fungal system underground where brassicas (like kale) don’t — the plants work together to benefit the soil and make sure the kale gets the right nutrients.

At Gaining Ground, the farm runs on volunteer labor. This year alone, there have been over 1800 volunteers out to help the farmers with their harvest. In years past, the number of volunteers has been over 2500! The volunteer program connects people to the land and helps expose them to food access issues. This year is the first year Gaining Ground has had a farm Education Manager, Erin, who was nice enough to show us around and answer our many questions when we visited! In the last year, the organization has tried to push for the volunteer program to be mission oriented and educational as a way to engage people beyond volunteering.

We also learned a lot about soil preservation from Erin, and the importance of thinking about the soil content.  We got to see one of their high-tunnel greenhouses full of carrots with no weeds at all - Erin told us that “when you build microbes in the soil through no till practices it’s much harder for weeds to grow” which was incredible to see.  No-till practices take a long time to show their impact though, so the work is a long term investment into the land for the future. The benefit of no-till means not having to feed the soil as much with fertilizers, having way less pests, and spending less time weeding in general!

Gaining Ground has worked with the Gleaners for a long time, and we consider ourselves very lucky to have this partnership! We were very excited to have the opportunity for our apprentice crew to spend the afternoon volunteering and learning about their work firsthand. The best ways to engage with Gaining Ground and support their work are to donate, check out their website, sign up to volunteer and help with their harvest, and follow them on social media (@gaininggroundconcord on Instagram, Gaining Ground on Facebook)! We are so grateful to the work Gaining Ground does, and we hope you consider supporting them :) ​