A Talk with Ben Shleffar

August 25, 2024

The following is an interview with Ben, Teravana’s Community Garden and Outdoor Education Developer. The questions are asked by Michael Collins, Teravana. 

Ben, it’s been great to have you as part of the team at Teravana. Would you like to share any background info? 

Sure, I’m 39 years old, I live in Cazadero with my two boys, Isaiah and Kashaya, ten and seven. I’ve been working in native food and seed sovereignty in the Bay Area, North Bay for eleven years, helping to distribute free food, seeds, and teachings to the Native community of Sonoma County, the Bay Area, and elsewhere.

Can you explain what seed sovereignty is for people who don’t know?

Seed sovereignty ensures not only the genetic integrity of culturally significant seeds but also that the keepers of the traditional people’s seeds maintain access to those seeds. So not only growing them to increase genetic diversity and keep the lineage but also redistributing back to the original communities that the seeds come from.

Following up on that, what makes the food from Teravana’s community garden different from the produce people normally come across?

From the seeds to the soil tending all the way through harvest, packing, and distribution, we reach for best practice. This is true for many organizations and farms, but who sets those best practice standards? The USDA? The CCOF? County ag bureau? We look to the land, water, animals, and the resources we farm and live with every day to teach, guide, decide, inform, and hold us accountable for our practices. 

How did you first get into agriculture and ecology?

I’ve always been raised in the world of it. It’s always been my backdrop, my surroundings, and my lens. I worked with incarcerated youth in the East Bay for five years and started taking a group of kids with court-appointed hours to a farm. And I was working with them in the school capacity and group home capacity. The work out in the farm space was very clearly the most impactful work that I was doing in all the different environments. It became imperative that that kind of be the direction that I gear my community work towards, and that I also work with and find out more about my people’s traditions with farming and land tending.

Since joining the team in May how have you been spending your days at Teravana?

Lots of planting, lots of soil tending, lots of irrigation set up, fixing some fencing here and there, but also just walking around and getting a broader picture of where this garden space that I spend most of my time fits into it to a bigger landscape, and the way water moves over the land, under the land, just to kind of explore, getting to know the all the non-human relatives on the land, all the trees and the birds and, you know, bees and bugs and all the different inhabitants.

With the community garden and agroforest beginning to take shape, what do you think Teravana can add to the community as a place for outdoor education?

This is a very unique county and part of the county. There’s so much open space and beautiful habitat, but very little of it is accessible and not private. So it’s a really interesting dynamic to be living in a place where there are uncountable acres of huckleberries to go pick and stuff like that. There’s access to open space and to multiple, thriving ecosystems within one property. And, the garden and all it can provide, is all part of that. There’s a unique opportunity to show the connections between cultivated gardens and wild spaces and forest edge ecology and to intentionally alter a space for our benefit without negatively impacting the larger ecosystem around you.

How would you describe your approach to gardening and farming?

I know the plants and animals of this area very well and already have a good sense of what they like and what they don’t, and all that’s based on, I guess, on just deep, deep observation and understanding that my job is not just to plant or to weed or to harvest. My job is to always be observing everything and making sure that the way that I’m doing things is a way that allows me to continue that observation. So I don’t use tractors, I don’t use implements, I don’t use things like that. Even if it’s just a whole day of carrying a wheelbarrow back and forth, that means that I get to see that same path every 20 minutes, and I get to see how it changes throughout the day and through that, through that process, I get to really kind of crush the learning curve in terms of knowing the space and understanding it’s a larger kind of web of ecology, and it’s larger kind of place within a bigger ecology. 

What is your vision for Teravana’s community garden and surrounding food forest?

To help co-create a dynamic web of processes that meets community needs and understands community needs as they change and can change. We understand that there’s no way we can grow all the cucumbers and tomatoes we want, but that’s not what’s going to create, that’s not what’s going to help people in terms of complete food systems. Ideally, diversifying food offerings, eggs, fresh meat, wild harvested foods. I think all these things should be, are necessarily, part of food security,

Also, getting the support of local businesses, local youth, job training, development, and resource allocation. The reality is there’s a lot here, resources that are ready and accessible to share.