Nathan Brannon: #EatHealthySaveMoney

Nathan Brannon is the manager of the Farm to School Garden Education initiative of the Sustainable Living Center. He is also a nationally-recognized stand-up comedian. Nathan and I spoke over hot bowls of soup in Cleveland Commons on a cold day last week. As we were walking out, we bumped into Bon Appétit General Manager Shannon Null, and as I headed back to my office, the two of them were brainstorming how to utilize some of the campus food scraps.

Tell me about arriving in Walla Walla

My wife grew up in Dixie, and we moved here in 2016 with our 1½-year-old baby to get closer to family. At that time, I was still living and working in LA. We were making lots of trips back and forth. So once the remote work opened up, I was able to spend more time in town. With stand-up comedy you want to try to make a positive impact on the world through words and ideas, but here in Walla Walla that particular avenue is much less feasible, and a big part of what I was figuring out was how to help people in a different way. So I looked at my skill set and saw what I had to offer. Being a new father with a career up in the air, I thought about what I could contribute to my family immediately and also make the most of things in the long term. And it turns out a lot of people have trouble accessing food and eating healthy and I realized I had an answer to that! 

How did you make the switch from stand-up to gardening?

I originally started growing just for my family and surrounding community, and then the pandemic hit and stresses got exacerbated, so everything I was working on became a bigger issue because the seriousness of local hunger really increased. So I was realizing, I can’t just grow food and get food to people, but I actually need to address the underlying reasons why these folks aren’t accessing food in the first place. That’s when I started making the instructional videos so people could learn how to do this themselves. In 2021 someone who had been watching these connected me with the Farm to School program. I hadn’t heard of that and got to see they were doing what I was doing on a larger scale, so they hired me in summer 2021, and since then, every month we’re shooting to do something bigger than the previous month.

How does your role fit into larger issues in or aspects of our region?

The longer I do this work the more I realize how wide-ranging the urgency of this work is. My long-term goal is to be able to go anywhere around the country to do this. I envision a gardening project in every city and so how to do this at scale around the country is my priority. An eye-opening conversation I had when I started was with a friend who is a community activist in Oakland and how we were talking about how easy it is for mainstream America to write off poor and vulnerable communities because of a view of them as not having anything to offer society—which is wrong! For me, growing food opens up so many avenues for communities that have been forgotten to be able to offer something out to the world. I’m looking to create accessibility for growers—this is something where if you want to get into business, you have a product that builds itself. You can start with nothing and then develop your way to the table. I’ve been into hydroponics for a while but it’s now really a way for everyday people to take control of their health and be involved in agriculture and get around a lot of the limiting factors that exist in a lot of Big Agriculture. I grew up in a food desert and a lot of the space around us that could potentially be used for growing food had that soil that had been ruined or contaminated from previous use of that land and so you can’t grow and so you need to be able to grow without even putting seeds in the ground. And now with hydroponics you can do this anywhere. So, like the teens in the Juvenile Justice Center (JJC), their system is sitting in a classroom and they can see how you can do this in the corner of a room and we do this like we were a real hydroponics greenhouse business. 

That seems like it is a way to offer an understanding of independence and freedom.

Yes! One risk with hydroponics is that you can still become dependent on a large company to buy the nutrients you need. But at the JJC we got away from that by starting a worm bin from food scraps which lets us make compost tea and infuse that into our system and so we haven’t bought nutrients from a company in over four months! If you have to depend on a company constantly then you’re not really free. So the next step for me is to find those communities in other places who would find this useful and then get them a template for how they can do this.

What is something you’ve learned about Walla Walla since you moved here that surprised you or that you weren’t expecting?

Everyone is here looking for something to create—a program or an activity to put their energy into and collaborate. That was surprising to me! Maybe I was a little nave coming from a big city about what a rural area was like—“shucks, it’s really slow today. I think I’ll take a leisurely drive in the pickup …” But once you get here and identify your interests you start to see so many initiatives and social community projects that it blows you away. I never thought I’d be this busy when I got here—which I like—but it’s definitely not something you’d expect coming from a larger place that a small place could be fast paced.

How are the size and scale of Walla Walla an asset to social entrepreneurs?

With the work I’m doing, I feel like this is a huge blessing since I’m at ground zero of what I want to do. The size and reach of the valley allows me to be intimately involved with food insecurity and then experiences that are tied to that that you normally wouldn’t see if you weren’t immersed in it. Yet at the same time I have close relations with local farmers and I’m learning how they run their farms and the economic aspects of that and their challenges. So this broad exposure lets me understand and line up experiences and needs much more effectively than if I was in a big city. On the food insecurity side I’ve been able to learn a lot that I know people don’t think about when they contemplate the agricultural culture. Look, it’d be easy for me to be in Portland and say, “those people don’t have any food—those farmers are so greedy!” But when you’re in touch with all the parts of the system you can see the linkages much more expansively. When you see all the parts you can then get a better appreciation for realistic solutions. You also don’t misinterpret why one part of the system might be doing or not doing.

What do you think Walla Walla will be like in five years? In 10 years?

I used to think that we would be a destination hub that people focus on when they think about visiting the east side of the state. Here it’s so unique and innovative and we have such interesting tourism experiences and it’s also so comfortable for metropolitan residents—it’s easy for them to settle in. I used to think this. But now I’m starting to think that Walla Walla is going to become a place that can demonstrate best practices in so many areas, where things happen that can inspire and inform. For instance, Perca—it’s a company here in town that’s doing super-high-end worm processing. They get scraps from a local juice processor and after letting the worms do their thing the process prevents ammonia from going into the city water system, which is good! (This is sort of like when you can prevent commercial fertilizer from running into a water system.) Perca brings in the worms and converts the waste to nitrogen which is easy to get rid of and also creates a great organic resource that can be used by lots of entities. Even like with Angela Davis coming to Whitman a few years ago—I was at that event and it’s amazing to see a world leader who came to this little community—Walla Walla being recognized for being a place of ideas and creativity. I think this is going to continue.

Is there anything else Whitman students should know about our community that you haven’t discussed?

The biggest thing is if you have an idea or passion—regardless of whether it’s here or not—this is a really great place to explore having adventures trying to find those circles. The freedom and collaboration here is so strong that even if what you are thinking about doesn’t exist there are definitely people who can collaborate to make it happen. College students are perfect for this situation—you want to change the world and the pieces are already here somewhere for you to make it happen!

Beyond the interview:

Nathan Brannon will be available for questions and further conversations on Wednesday, Dec. 18, at noon in Reid Campus Center, Room 207. The Career and Community Engagement Center will provide lunch for the first 10 students in attendance. Please send your questions, ideas or requests for accommodation to Noah Leavitt at leavitns@whitman.edu.