How Growing Food (in a Shipping Container) Connects New American Communities in Vermont

Vermont Public | By Elodie Reed

December 9, 2024

Elodie Reed / Vermont Public

Village Hydroponics Executive Director Nour El-Naboulsi, right, and Operations Manager Camille Jacoby stand for a portrait outside the shipping container farm, which is located in Burlington's Intervale. The mural on the side of the shipping container is by artist Mollie Ward.

As you drive down the hill into Burlington’s Intervale, you may notice something new: a 40-foot-long shipping container in the parking lot. It’s crimson red, with a quilt-like mural of vegetables on its side.

This is Village Hydroponics. The operation grows veggies to share, for free, with New American communities in the area.

Reporter Elodie Reed recently stopped by for a conversation with Executive Director Nour El-Naboulsi as the shipping container farm’s first season got underway.

El-Naboulsi has been a vegetable farmer for many years — though he says he’s new to hydroponics.

Nour El-Naboulsi: It's a flood and drain system. I'm here pretty much every day, and the task, a lot of tasks are just building out the system and working out kinks and fixing leaks.

We are primarily going to be producing in the off-season. We don't need to compete with other farmers, and when the sun can do its job better than grow lights — we don’t need to keep those running.

Elodie Reed / Vermont Public

Nour El-Naboulsi harvests Tokyo Bekana, an Asian cabbage, in preparation for The People's Farmstand's final distribution of the season on Nov. 15. While El-Naboulsi doesn't think hydroponics are the end-all-be-all solution to climate change or food security, he said this kind of farming can save water use, as well as the distance food has to travel in wintertime to get to Vermonters.

Elodie Reed: Can you tell me everything you have in here that you're growing?

Nour El-Naboulsi: Yeah. We have some baby lettuce mixes, Swiss chard, cilantro, bok choy, Nepali mustard greens, amaranth greens — also known as linga linga or palangi — thyme, head lettuce, collard greens, some kale. 

Elodie Reed: How often can you harvest?

Nour El-Naboulsi: Aiming to do weekly harvests.

We collectively run this other project called The People's Farmstand, which is a free mutual aid initiative where we grow and collect surplus produce from local farms. 

We grow a lot of the more culturally relevant produce alongside an amazing farmer named Hyacinthe Ayingeneye in Williston.

We just finished our fourth season, and we work with some really amazing families from the Nepali, Somali, Iraqi communities, Congolese Burundi.

We have a short growing season. Kind of in talking to the families, and, you know, talking about the difficulties they go through, having that lack of fresh produce, or having to make difficult decisions between increased utility costs or getting, like, a nice bunch of local greens in the winter — which is hard to come by for anybody — I kind of wanted this to be the next progression.

[Sound of a knife cutting through vegetables]

So today is our third harvest of Village Hydroponics produce. So we're mainly going to get Asian greens today. Bok choy and Tokyo Bekana, which is an Asian cabbage.

[Sound of voice saying "The Tokyo Bekana came out really nicely."]

Elodie Reed / Vermont Public

A fresh bok choy plant harvested about an hour before being shared with community members in Burlington's South Meadow apartment complex. Nour El-Naboulsi has dreams of more shipping container farms popping up in places outside of Burlington, like in Barre or somewhere in the Northeast Kingdom, and being run by community members there.

Elodie Reed: Why culturally relevant plants?

Nour El-Naboulsi: Our society, unfortunately, can be really hostile and scary to refugees and immigrants and BIPOC community members, and it's hard enough leaving your home and trying to acclimate to a new community, to a new society, anyway.

For these New American community members who maybe haven't seen that produce since they've arrived in the U.S., I love to envision kind of us providing those veggies, them working with us to grow those veggies, and then them connecting with each other to share a meal that makes them feel more at home.

We grow this plant called molokhia, also known as Palestinian spinach. I'm Palestinian, and it's so cool getting to grow this crop, molokhia, because it's a — it's basically like the leafy green version of okra. When I was a kid, it's kind of slimy, like okra, when you make it into, like a stew, and my grandma would make it for me, and I never liked it, because it's this kind of slimy thing. And now as an adult, I'm growing it for our community, and now I really like it. You kind of make a soup, like a cumin-y lemony soup with, like, cooked cilantro and stuff. And it's really delicious. 

Elodie Reed / Vermont Public

The team behind Village Hydroponics, including Nour El-Naboulsi and Naomi Peduzzi, right, also run The People's Farmstand, which distributes free vegetables during the growing season. El-Naboulsi said the new shipping container farm is an effort to continue sharing fresh, culturally relevant produce with New American communities all winter long.

Elodie Reed: And do you want to talk about, like, your identity and how that intersects with the work you've chosen to do?

Nour El-Naboulsi: Yeah, so my family, my grandfather and his family is originally from Haifa, which is now a city in so-called Israel, and in 1948 him and his family members were forced out of their home at gunpoint, sent from Haifa to Nablus, which is a city in the West Bank. That's actually my last name, is El-Naboulsi, "Of the city of Nablus."

And then he, again emigrated to Beirut, Lebanon, which my father then grew up in the Lebanese Civil War, which was escalated — massacres perpetuated — by that same Israeli government kicking my grandfather out of his homeland in Palestine. That my father then grew up displaced countless times, so then he had to flee, immigrated to the United States, where he met my mom, and here we are. 

It's deep-rooted in me that the Israeli government uses — they weaponize agriculture. They uproot olive trees, they cut off water access to Palestinian villages. Basic — what I see, a basic human right: vegetables, fresh, nutritious produce, especially ones that are from your homeland, that make you connect to your land. They use this as a tool to separate communities.

And I see how interconnected food and agriculture is towards community empowerment.

Elodie Reed / Vermont Public

Village Hydroponics Vice President and The People's Farmstand Community and Outreach Coordinator Zeinab Bulle stands for a portrait on Nov. 15. Bulle, who is part of the Somali Bantu community in Burlington, said she benefits from and also contributes to these two efforts. She communicates which veggies New American families want, for example, and also appreciates free, fresh produce that might be too expensive to buy. "It's very empowering, how we're a team and trying to help — help the community, be part of the community," Bulle said.

[Sound of voice saying "All right, step right up for the last farmstand of the season!" and then chatter in different languages]

So all of these community members that we work with week in and week out — South Meadow, as you'll see, is a beautiful neighborhood. I hope that every child gets to grow up in a neighborhood like it — it's diverse and walkable and close-knit. But it's a subsidized housing neighborhood, small apartments, lot of quote-unquote "handout programs" to keep these people going.

If you asked any single one of them, they — as much as they might love their new home, and feel it's special — they want to be in their home.

If you go back further enough, the U.S. has played a hand in why these refugees are here. We are trying to be less afraid to, like, have those hard conversations and say, like, "Why," you know, "Why is The People's Farmstand" — or — "Why are farmers speaking up about the genocide in Palestine?" We have billions of dollars going to foreign wars, going to foreign genocides. 

And on the surface, it looks like we're just giving away free veggies. But we are bringing our community members into a solidarity fold, that we're trying to take down this system that we're working in.

Elodie Reed / Vermont Public

Suk Gurung, center, makes sure everyone gets a good helping of homemade food that she prepared for the team running The People's Farmstand. "They work so hard," Gurung said. "We can give some time for them too." Gurung arrived in Vermont from Bhutan nearly two decades ago and now lives in the South Meadow neighborhood. She said she can't grow her own garden, and that the free vegetable distributions are a great help. Gurung has also provided Village Hydroponics with some seeds, including for Nepali mustard greens and palangi.