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From
The Union-Tribune in San Diego:
A cool mist cloaked the ocher hills near Camp Pendleton on harvest morning. The rising sun burned behind the cypress trees, and two former Marines headed to the greenhouses.
Colin Archipley, the owner of Archi’s Acres, a small organic farm in Valley Center, and Cory Pollard (pictured), one of the veterans he trains in sustainable agriculture, walked through the dappled light of the avocado orchard. Their boots crunched leaves along the dirt path.
Both men left the military after serving three combat tours in Iraq with infantry units from Camp Pendleton. On the battlefield, they were responsible for the lives of their men in arms.
Now, still in their 20s, they have a new mission at this hilltop farm. They and other veterans — some in their golden years — have found a peaceful place to cultivate a fresh start in life or rekindle the camaraderie they still missed decades after leaving the service.
“Veterans are the most underused resource. In the military, we have great leaders, a great work ethic. It doesn’t make sense to me that the failure rate is so high after they leave the service,” Archipley said. This was the seed that germinated into the Veterans Sustainable Agriculture Training program, which Archipley and his wife, Karen, started in 2007.
The Archipleys use their farm to train former service members in organic agriculture, grove management and hydroponic techniques that are energy- and water-efficient. The San Diego VA Healthcare System refers veterans with physical or mental injuries to them and covers some of the employment-training costs through the agency’s Compensated Work Therapy programs.
Last year’s unemployment rate for Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans was 21.1 percent, the U.S. Department of Labor reported, well above the 16.6 percent for their civilian peers.
Joblessness among veterans has many causes, including the post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by as many as one in five of today’s generation of combat veterans. Another factor is the persistent stigma in some quarters against hiring troops returning from the war zone, workplace experts have found.
In addition, Colin Archipley said, “for veterans who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, it is hard to find employment that is meaningful to them. They had been part of a team, but in the civilian economic sector, the focus is making money. They don’t have that sense of a greater mission.”
Pollard didn’t say much when he joined the program a year ago. After serving during the 2003 invasion of Baghdad, Pollard returned to Iraq for combat duty in Fallujah and Ramadi. Then Pollard decided he had enough.
“The hardest part was dealing with everything at once. Trying to survive, worrying about family, worrying about bills,” he said.
Inside the humid confines of one greenhouse, Pollard hunted for the bushiest basil ready for market. He leaned over the racks of plastic pipes, where a thin film of water enriched with a slurry of bat guano and sea kelp nourishes plant roots.
“Too skinny,” he said, passing over one spindly specimen.
Then he tugged with one gloved hand on another plant, trying not to snap its stem, and gently placed a bunch of aromatic basil onto a plastic tray for bagging.
Pollard lives next door on land the Archipleys lease. Nights on the hilltop are quiet, and the days are punctuated by little more than the eerie keening of a peacock, the trickle of water through the hydroponic system and the whinnying of horses. Occasionally, the muted thump of helicopters or artillery training at Camp Pendleton provides a reminder of the war zone.
The training program has helped him adjust after his Iraq experiences, Pollard said. “It’s low-stress, a relaxing environment. Just the opposite of combat.”
Rod Krause, a disabled 60-year-old former Navy medic, had not worked in five years before he found Archi’s Acres.
“Nature is a healing thing; that’s a centuries-old idea,” he said.
It would be easier to hire experienced farmhands, but that would be missing the point, said Karen Archipley.
“My husband led a troop in Iraq. He came back here to create another troop,” she said. “That’s where they can get into trouble is in civilian life — not having their support system, not having people who truly understand or have been through the same experiences that they have.”
When 70-year-old retired Marine Col. Len Hayes heard about the program, he did a little reconnaissance. Hayes, executive director of Oceanside’s 1st Marine Division Association, visited the farm and found it to be a wonderful opportunity for veterans to decompress in a bucolic setting.
“When I came back from Vietnam, I was self-medicating with alcohol. If there had been a place like this where I could have gone, I probably would have had a lot less anger in my 20s and 30s than I did,” Hayes said.
The Department of Veterans Affairs in San Diego has 25 other veterans in Compensated Work Therapy programs, all striving to gain long-term employment skills.
“Work is therapeutic. It helps people value themselves,” said Dr. Robert Smith, chief of staff for the San Diego VA Healthcare System. “Our society typically expects that people work and be productive. If people have been out of the work force for a long time, it can be very devaluing to them, to their psyche and how they think of themselves.”
Despite widespread acclaim for the services at Archi’s Acres, it nearly became a casualty of its own success in February.
Local VA officials were paying some of the veterans’ wages through a pilot partnership. When they sought more funding to accommodate a waiting list of veterans interested in the program, a VA official in another state complained that the work therapy funds were being used improperly.
Eight veterans undergoing training at Archi’s Acres, including some who had been homeless, suddenly became jobless. Pollard pawned his laptop to buy food.
Rep. Bob Filner, D-Chula Vista, chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, opened an inquiry. A host of other prominent supporters from San Diego County lined up endorsements. The Archipleys spent $80,000 on the veterans’ wages and hustled for grants with the Annenberg and Issa foundations, they said.
But ultimately, efforts to restore the VA funding were unsuccessful.
The experience inspired the Archipleys to make their program self-sustaining. Under a contract signed last week, the VA will continue to refer veterans to their farm. But the wages will be paid through private grants — after the Archipleys finish their application for nonprofit status.
This fall, Archi’s Acres will host an agriculture class from MiraCosta College that is free to veterans. Eventually, the Archipleys hope to seed a larger crop of trainees, using their three remaining veterans as managers.
Robert Cogill, 67, paused amid his work one afternoon at Archi’s Acres, where he was using a small tool to drop Swiss chard seeds into vermiculite.
“Plants have the ultimate desire to live. No matter how gone or dead they look, you can bring them back,” he said. “It’s the same with people. We can learn a lot from plants.”
From The Union-Tribune in San Diego:
