Episode 3 - Set to Refresh

I’m Diana Mazzella, and this is Sparked, a podcast from West Virginia University Magazine about the people who are changing Appalachia’s future. This past year, we decided to follow Ben Gilmer who is taking on one of the biggest challenges facing the region and the nation: creating jobs. And he’s doing it an area that will always be in demand: food production. 

It all started in Huntington, West Virginia. There’s this giant old factory next to a rail line. It’s got red brick walls and plywood over the windows. Inside is the kind of antique wood that’s trendy in restaurants today. In fact, some of the wood has been salvaged, and bought by a bar in New York City. The factory, which is being redeveloped, has these old church pews where the Coalfield Development Corporation has meetings. The space makes you think: Bar. Church. Factory. Bar. Church. Factory. 

Outside, there are these makeshift greenhouses with metal rounded frames wrapped in plastic. Farmers call them high tunnels, and they’re a less expensive way to grow crops in winter. Logs covered in mushrooms lie in the shade against the factory wall. 
BEN GILMER: We’re walking around past the loading dock to the north side of the factory and you know it definitely has that good, solid, West Virginia abandoned factory look to it, which I like, the graffiti, the ivy, boarded up windows. 

MAZZELLA: Gilmer is giving us a tour. He runs a part of the development corporation called Refresh Appalachia, which is creating a food hub to distribute farmer’s products, piloting farm projects that creatively use space – like a rooftop dual fish and vegetable farm. He’s also training ex-coal miners like Joe Duncan, who you heard at the beginning of the episode, and others who are out of work in a program that combines farm work, community college classes and life skills. 

GILMER: So this is the old Corbin factory. They used to make men’s clothing. If you would have walked in here in the ’80s [TRAIN HORN] there would have been a thousand or more people working here. They shut down I think in the ’90s. You sort of you see the state of disrepair here. It became a real issue for the community here. This is the Westmoreland neighborhood of Huntington. But it became a center for a lot of drug dealing happening here, overdosing, things like that in the community. 

MAZZELLA: Coalfield and its partners looked into tearing down the building but saw that it had good bones. Once restored, it will house businesses. The neighborhood, dotted with blooming dogwood trees has already improved with their presence. Gilmer said that police saw a decrease in drug activity at the factory after Coalfield moved in and this was about the time Gilmer started Refresh Appalachia. 

GILMER: You know I personally grew up on a farm, my dad’s a coal miner. I have a serious passion for this work in and of itself. And but when I was in Morgantown, I started sketching together a potential workforce development program around agriculture and mine reclamation with some partners there including the Brownfields Center at WVU. You know I was like getting ready to apply for different funding and that’s when I met Brandon Denison at Coalfield and he was like, “Why don’t you do that here? That’s what we do, workforce development, and we’ve already thought of agriculture and have some leads there.” 

And next thing you know, here I am. But you know for me personally, I’ve just have been itching to be a little more on the ground on the personal development side like working with folks that are sort of transitioning into these new industries. 

MAZZELLA: Gilmer gives off a farmer vibe with a button down shirt with rolled up sleeves and denim pants. We watch him haul seeds, or take a phone call, or give an elevator pitch with the speed of a startup founder, which is what he is. A Virginia native, he’s got a master’s degree in geography from West Virginia University, a lot of energy, charm and a keen interest in people. You talk to him and you quickly realize that this guy is a true believer in the idea that the southern coalfield are of the state is turning around. His part of the turnaround started at the factory in Huntington with one makeshift greenhouse. 

GILMER: This was our first site. That high tunnel, that first high tunnel we talked about that was our very first project was putting that in. And it was donated by a partner of ours, Unlimited Future and the Wild Ramp. The Wild Ramp is a local market here in town. So they helped us acquire that high tunnel. I think it was me and one other crew member and Hudson Farms, another partner of ours. And it’s like OK, I guess we’re doing this. This is real now. So we built the high tunnel and planted in it a few weeks later, and now we have six sites. 

MAZZELLA: Inside the factory, there are microgreens, used for garnishes that spruce up food at restaurants. The greens are growing under lights in a makeshift walk-in refrigerator. 

GILMER: We do the microgreens. We’re still in the factory. We’re on the south side, so you see how much light is coming in those windows. And these are growing racks and the goal with this project is to grow this high-value commodity, this high-value product, microgreens, in an old factory using whatever stuff we can rig together. Because this stuff you’re looking at can sell from 30 to 35 dollars a pound. This is a huge opportunity. How do we create models that can work? This can work here. I mean you just need. It’s all indoors in an abandoned factory, so that’s what agriculture can look like in some respect in the coal fields. 

MAZZELLA: The factory was the first Refresh site. Now there are six in a corridor from Huntington to Nicholas County on the eastern side of the state. All the projects are farms with some sort of twist. There’s another high tunnel greenhouse complex on a family farm in Nicholas County. There’s the year-round farm in partnership with Lincoln County High School producing pasture-grazed chickens, vegetables and hydroponic tomatoes. (A note: hydroponics is when you grow plants without soil and instead feed the plants with nutrients in water). There’s the rooftop greenhouse in Williamson. And there’s the aquaponics facility that’s being developed in Kermit that will grow hydroponic vegetables and fish using power from geothermal and solar energy. 

GILMER: One area is around the farming and then the other area is our food hub. So we aggregate products from our farms but also other farmers in the region to help get them in the markets. Because that is a big barrier to sort of creating this food system. The farmers we do have and we need way more of them to meet the demand, a lot of them want to farm, they don’t necessarily want to market their product or distribute or they don’t have the time to do that. And so we’re trying to help alleviate some of those barriers by sort of playing that distribution role. We’re working with buyers to figure out what they need and when they need it and what quantities, and then we can go work with producers and say “Produce in this way, we’ll move your product for you.” 

MAZZELLA: There’s one other site that Refresh operates that maybe shows the most clearly what you can make out of one of the more plentiful sources of land in West Virginia: former coal mines. In the fall of 2016, we visited the Refresh site in Holden, West Virginia, on 22 Mine Road. It was a coal mine from 1986 to 2001. After that, it was reclaimed with non-native grasses, shrubs and trees covering the hills. Now four people who all used to work in the coal industry – Gilmer calls them crew members – work the land, using animals like pigs, goats and chickens, who eat cover crops and fertilize the soil with their droppings. Gilmer walked us over to where an orchard was planned. Since then the site expanded to hold greenhouses and beehives. 

GILMER: The Mingo county crew, they’re all dislocated from the coal industry, laid off coal miners. Lola Cline, who’s one of our crew members there, she’s been laid off for three years I think. Four kids, single mom, drives over an hour to work every day for a job that started at $10.50 an hour, which for a training job is actually decent pay, sadly. And the sacrifice she makes to show up every day, I mean I literally can’t wrap my head around it. Whether it’s the child care hurdles or just the bottom line of her finances every month, it’s serious circumstances that she deals with on a daily basis to participate in this. 

MAZZELLA: On this day, the crew was planting cover crops, including rye, winter peas and triticale – for the livestock to graze on. Cline is sitting on a tractor under a blue sky. She’s got her blond hair pulled back and drives the tractor forward, distributing seeds along the ground. I talk with Cline and her coworker, Joe Duncan, about the the work. It’s similar to what she used to do, running equipment at mines. 

LOLA CLINE: Yeah, we’ll finish up these crops. Anything that might happen. Sometimes our fence falls. We take the day by day. 

MAZZELLA: She likes the work. But a hard part of this job is that farming, as Gilmer and Cline acknowledge, doesn’t pay like the coal industry did. 

CLINE: Just barely we could get by. It’s a big pay loss. Barely we can get by. Big pay loss, big from what we’re used to. 

MAZZELLA: Duncan started in coal mining just before the mine where he worked shut down. 

DUNCAN: Oh, I knew before I even got out of high school it was coal mining. I already had a job lined up. Graduated, wasn’t two months went to work underground. First year made 82,000 straight out of high school. Couldn’t beat that. Why go to school and go in debt when you can go out and make 100 grand your first year. Now it’s gone though so gotta go back to school. (Laughter.) A year after I started it was when stuff started turning around. [CLINE: It was rocky.] It started getting rocky and you just knew it was coming, and you rode it out until you could.

MAZZELLA: At that point, at any point were you thinking about agriculture or? 

DUNCAN: No, this is all new to me. I’m just up here learning. I seem to really like it. I’ve been looking at a little bit of property for myself try to get some hogs. 

MAZZELLA: I asked Gilmer how he noticed the need for this kind of work. 

GILMER: There’s a lot of thoughtful people in this state, including a lot at WVU who have spent years outlining the needs and opportunities in agriculture, and a big gap I think a lot of people would argue is like there haven’t been as many groups to sort of get some skin in the game and try to actually start these businesses or start a food hub or start a training program. That’s changed in recent years. There’s a lot of folks or several folks doing that kind of work. That was where my heart was. Like I knew I need some skin in this game because I keep talking about it and the need is clear. It couldn’t be any closer to my heart. And just I mean every day I wake up thankful that somehow I got this opportunity. The people that are like really making the change are the trainees. These are folks that, many folks that either had a different vision for their future or were hopeful whether it was in the coal industry or what, and they’re sacrificing a lot to take this leap to get a college education, to get paid less, training program. I mean that’s like the definition of courage what they do. 

MAZZELLA: Gilmer had to get to his next meeting at another site. But I had one more question for him as it started to rain. Does making a food hub, and creating job training and growing more local food change his outlook for where West Virginia’s headed? 

GILMER: Yeah, actually I think it’s a really good question. It has. I mean, people I think a lot of communities you know suffer from lost hope, and a lot of crew members that come on you see that in their spirit, you know that’s where they’re coming from. And then next thing you know they’ve learned to use a chop saw, and then they’ve built this high tunnel, and then they’ve planted these seeds that they harvested. Who knew that they knew that they liked kale? And then they eat the kale and they’re like I love kale, I’m going to buy a bag of kale. To see the hope building in the crew members and to be part of that experience I think is indicative of what the process has to be for our region. 

We’ve been told both externally and internally somewhat that we have this predetermined path that we should follow whether it’s through certain industries or these are our opportunities that are in front of us, when in fact, we don’t even understand what our opportunities are yet and just having that imagination and the space to be creative. It’s been promising for me to see that at a personal level with our crew members and but at a community level, too, and some of the towns we’re working in. There’s definitely like a spark going on and I’m not attributing that just to Refresh by any means, but we’re trying to create leaders that then can take that with them and I’ve seen that. And I just feel like that is the main next step for us as a region like having these little rays of hope and these small wins that we can lift up and give people some hope and signs of sort of a bright future that things are out there for them. That’s sort of a long answer. 

MAZZELLA: You’ve been listening to Sparked, a podcast of West Virginia University Magazine. 

You can find a whole story about Ben Gilmer’s work on building a food corridor in southern West Virginia on our website wvumag.wvu.edu where you’ll find more stories that take place in the state as well as other podcast episodes. This episode was recorded and produced by Raymond Thompson Jr. and, me, Diana Mazzella. 

Sparked is a production of West Virginia University located in Morgantown, West Virginia.