Students from the school next door spend a morning harvesting at the Butte Community Farm as a part of the farm’s push to connect kids with where their food comes from.
50 Years of Practical Assistance, Growing in Butte’s Backyard
It’s late July, and even for mid-summer it is unseasonably hot in Butte. The radishes are barely hanging on. Mateja Lund, president of the Butte Community Farm Board of Directors, walks the rows behind an old brick hospital building, past potatoes and carrots, fat green onions, and the last of the season’s lettuce before it goes to seed. The hoop houses, where it’s even warmer, are full of parsley, peas, and scallions.
This is the first season for the Butte Community Farm, which is planted on two field plots with two hoop houses tucked behind the headquarters for the National Center for Appropriate Technology (NCAT). In just the month of July, the farm produced 225 pounds of food, all of which has been donated to the homeless shelter, a health clinic’s pantry, and a retirement home down the street.
The Butte Community Farm, as it’s run now, is barely a season old but the land has a long history. Crops were once grown to support residents of the Silver Bow County Poor Farm Hospital, which was built in 1902 and today stands as NCAT’s headquarters.
NCAT ran its own demonstration farm on the land for over a decade through the organization’s Small-Scale Intensive Farm Training program that highlighted ongoing cover-crop experiments, cool-season crop production, and high-tunnel demonstration. This was one aspect of the nonprofit’s national reach to provide practical assistance to farmers and ranchers. On this patch of ground, the throughline is quite literal: More than a century after the hospital first opened, and after NCAT’s own stint farming the land, food is being grown here again, by and for the local community.
This year, NCAT turns 50. Founded in 1976 as a clearinghouse to help people access basic energy conservation resources during the energy crisis, the organization’s work has since expanded to help ranchers, farmers, and land stewards with everything from solar panels and energy conservation to water scarcity, regenerative grazing, and adapting to a changing climate.
Expansion into agriculture happened in response to the farm crisis of the 1980s. As commodity prices collapsed leaving growers with few viable options, NCAT’s clearinghouse moved toward supporting farmers and ranchers. That work became known as ATTRA (Appropriate Technology Transfer for Rural Areas), NCAT’s flagship technical assistance and sustainable agriculture information service, which launched in the mid-1980s and is still running nearly 40 years later with funding through a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). ATTRA provides farmer- friendly technical assistance, publications, and multimedia resources to producers in all 50 states and U.S. territories.
According to Agriculture Specialist Tammy Howard, who has worked at NCAT for 20 years, ATTRA leverages most of NCAT’s sustainable agriculture work.
“When ATTRA was founded, ‘sustainable agriculture’ was a fringe idea,” she says. “It was very alternative … we were kind of renegades. Today, sustainable and regenerative practices are becoming the norm, but we continue to provide farmer-friendly information to producers nationwide through our 1-800 [call] line, web chat, workshops, and loads of interactive resources online.”
Andrew Coggins is also an agriculture specialist for NCAT. He works with farmers and ranchers across 10 states spanning two USDA-designated regions. He points to Montana’s Hi- Line, where some counties are now in their 10th consecutive year of drought. It’s a stretch long enough that it has shaped crop insurance.
“As county-level yields drop, the insurance formulas meant to protect farmers during bad years start failing even producers with legitimately poor harvests, because the baseline yield has fallen too,” he says.
The same pressure shows up farther west. On a recent training trip to Redmond, Oregon, Howard says water was “the dominant conversation” at nearly every stop. One potato producer had stopped growing potatoes altogether and shifted to livestock, and was cutting his herd size, too, as available water kept shrinking.
In response, NCAT has leaned into programs built around resilience as well as production, including regenerative grazing systems designed to hold water in the soil longer, and a national project called Soil for Water aimed directly at helping producers adapt their operations to a drier future. Regenerative grazing, once a niche idea, has moved into the mainstream over the past several years. It’s as much a shift in mindset, Coggins says, as a change in practice.
That same concept of practical, close to the ground, and built around what a community actually needs is exactly what’s growing behind NCAT’s own headquarters. The idea for the community farm came together through a series of conversations that began in 2019 and led to the formation of the Butte Food System Work Group. And Lund, who arrived in Butte in 2023 prior to serving as an AmeriCorps member, joined the discussion.
“I saw AmeriCorps/AgCorps as a chance to combine my love of gardening and cooking, my passion to build lasting positive change in my new community, and my education in community health systems,” Lund says. Through that work, she found herself in ongoing discussions around town about gaps in the local food system. Fresh produce felt hard to come by. At the same time, NCAT’s own demonstration farm on the property was winding down.
The Butte Community Farm’s founding members weighed the creation of a nonprofit against starting a private business before settling on something community owned. Before finalizing anything, they ran a public survey and got back 400 responses, a strong showing for a grassroots effort. The results confirmed what they’d suspected: Local food still felt unaffordable and inaccessible to a lot of residents. The survey also revealed a problem more specific to Butte: Much of the soil in residents’ own backyards isn’t safe to plant into without testing first, a legacy of the town’s mining history.
The farm that grew out of that process leases land from NCAT and runs on a donation model, with a goal of giving away at least 51 percent of what it produces to partners already serving lower-income residents. It’s still entirely volunteer-run, with community work nights standing in for paid staff for now. The location itself is an asset. NCAT and the community garden sit on a bus line, next to an elementary school, a park, and the retirement home, visible from the highway. “We would have to work for probably a decade to get something like this,” Lund says. “So we’re just super grateful for the opportunity.”
Lund says the goal for the next five years is to increase production and donate more food to a range of partners. “We’d like to offer on- and off-farm programs to develop community knowledge of our local food system and develop partnerships with local and state ag organizations,” she says. “We hope to secure sufficient funds to onboard our first executive director in the next five years to help us accomplish our goals.”
The transition from an all-volunteer organization to a staffed operation would be a significant milestone, and one that would allow the farm to grow more food for community partners and offer a wider range of programming, with particular focus on Butte’s youth and underserved populations.
Outside the red brick headquarters, Howard jokes about the building’s old fire-escape slides, installed decades ago for the hospital’s patients and, she half-admits, tempting to use for NCAT’s 50th anniversary celebration this year. She’s joking, but the jest speaks to the fact that the organization has spent half a century reinventing what “appropriate technology” means, from solar panels in the 1970s to drought-adapted grazing systems today. The property began as a place to grow food for people who needed it. The organization continues to do so today, adapting to what farmers, ranchers, and the community need most. The community garden is simply the latest version of that idea. It’s appropriate technology, reduced to its most basic form of dirt, water, and people willing to grow something for their neighbors.
For more information about NCAT or to access producer resources, visit ncat.org.
