How Green Cover's MILPA Program Grew—And the Partners Making It Bigger

0:00 So here at Green Cover we've been working with the milpa program and the first acre program now for three or four years. It started out pretty small. We started out with just a handful of folks in Oklahoma who were doing this.

0:13 Donated to food banks. Jimmy Evans and that group did a great job of connecting with the Oklahoma Food Bank, and that's really how this program got started. We saw how successful they were, how much produce they were able to.

0:26 Donate to their local food banks and their communities. And it really inspired us to say hey, why can't we take that and do that in other areas as well? So it started there in Oklahoma and now it's expanded and every.

0:38 Year it's grown and it's grown in green cover. You know we're committed to trying to get that free seed out to the farmer who's willing to donate the land and donate the time, and farmer landowner, anybody that's.

0:51 Willing to donate that we're willing to donate the seed. Well, the program has grown, it's caught on in popularity. It's grown every year, and so this year we're ready to make a big jump because we've got some additional.

1:04 Partners involved in this now, so it's not just Green Cover doing this now. We've got a couple of very faithful and great partners. So first of all, The Nature Conservancy has seen what we were doing. They read about what we were.

1:16 Doing they've been to our farm a few times and saw what it was doing, not only in the field but also for the communities where our first acre people are donating, and they said hey we'd like to be part of this too, so they're

1:41 Because of their generous donation we're able to get the seed to you completely free, even the shipping. So that's a big part of what the Nature Conservancy is helping with. They're also helping a lot with the marketing and the promotion of.

1:52 The program as well and then Syngenta Seeds. Syngenta has been working with the Nature Conservancy on a number of projects as well and they wanted to get involved and they're one of the largest vegetable seed growers in the world.

2:06 Didn't even actually know that myself until kind of going down this path, but they're a huge grower of vegetable seeds across the world. And so Syngenta is stepping in as a partner on this as well and they're.

2:17 Donating a huge amount of seeds, so a lot of the milpa seed that you're going to be seeing in this first acre free kits is going to be from donations from Syngenta, as well as some of the seeds that we have here on hand that we're using as cover crops for grazing for livestock and for soil building. So it's a combination of Green Cover, Syngenta, and The Nature Conservancy all working together to make this program not only a success but to make it successful at a much larger scale than we can do by ourselves.