Organizers dissolve Smart Farm plans

LAKEWOOD RANCH — Celebrity chef and food columnist Jaden Hair grabs a pair of rubber boots and heads outside where her two boys, Andrew and Nathan, already have raced to the chicken coop and are watching the young chickens’ every move.

Here, in their backyard, the Hair family is fulfilling Jaden’s vision for creating a sustainable farm/children’s garden — one where they can raise their own chickens, grow and sustain their own fruits and vegetables and catch fish out of their own lake.

“This is just the start of our farm,” Hair says, pointing toward several raised garden beds, where corn, sunflowers, beans, lettuce and other crops are growing.

And while Hair is fulfilling a gardening vision she birthed after seeing a sustainable community farm in Mexico in early 2010, her vision for a Lakewood Ranch-based sustainable community farm is on hold.

The Smart Farm at Lakewood Ranch, a non-profit organization that formed in the summer of 2010 to construct and maintain a community garden in the East County, is being dissolved.

Organizers had hoped for the Smart Farm to provide resources for supporting homegrown food, teaching sustainable gardening practices and eating well through the public use of a community garden, educational programs, cooking demonstrations and more, on a five-acre site off 44th Avenue.

“It was such a big project; it became too complex,” Hair said. “Within six months of announcing (the garden, we had) no project manager. With a project that big, you need to have a really strong leader.”

Fellow organizers Ngan Gilkison and Tara Raven, as well asvolunteers who later committed to carrying the project forward, were unable to do so for personal and other reasons, Hair said. Paperwork to dissolve the entity is under way now.

Hair, who initially came up with the concept, said she would not make a good project manager and always has envisioned herself as the person to help bring awareness to the farm, not run its day-to-day operations. Therefore, organizers felt it best to shelve the concept at this time.

Funds raised for the Smart Farm during a Charity Bartending Night and other efforts will be donated to local charities, Hair said.

In the meantime, however, Hair has opted to move forward with a sustainable garden of her own, having moved from Lakewood Ranch to a larger property farther east. In the next year, she plans to build a studio kitchen at her home and hopes to host cooking demonstrations and children’s programs there, as envisioned for the Smart Farm.

“I’ve always had a vision; I’ve always had a goal,” Hair said.

Schroeder-Manatee Ranch had donated the five-acre parcel for the Smart Farm project. SMR’s Public Relations and Marketing Director Candice McEylea said the company had no comment on the dissolution at this time.

Contact Pam Eubanks at [email protected].