An award!

In November, Flip was contacted by NNY Business with the news that she was recognized in their annual 20 Under 40 Awards for emerging leaders in the North Country for her activities at both littleGrasse and Cornell Cooperative Extension. It’s exciting news when folks working in food system resiliency can be respected on equal footing as other economic and community efforts. While it’s interesting to get the spotlight for a moment, it takes a village to build food resiliency, and ALL our efforts are essential.

Profile by Ellis Giacomelli of the Watertown Daily Times
See all 20 profiles at NNY Business here.

On a cloudy October morning, Maria “Flip” Filippi pulled carrots from the rich soil at littleGrasse Foodworks in St. Lawrence County. 

    The 39-year-old DeKalb native walked the rows of root vegetables and hearty greens, basket in hand, collecting a local lunch. 

    “People assume I’m ‘all health food’ because of the farm,” she said. “But that’s not true. I’m a sucker for Sour Patch Kids.” 

    Leaving DeKalb in 1999, Flip worked on farms and food pantries in Mexico, Maine and Massachusetts, and graduated from Smith College with a bachelor’s degree in psychology. She took with her a love for learning, animal care and canning skills from her north country upbringing. And returning to “affordable land and waters plenty” in 2009, she brought back a new understanding of food systems and security. 

    In other places she’s lived, like Maine and western Massachusetts, she recalled, agricultural communities and markets are well established and have been historically supported. 

    “Those aren’t necessarily the places, to me, with the most need,” Flip said. “I wanted to be feeding my neighbors, I wanted to reach people I grew up with. I wanted to be part of people putting their best foot forward for the place they care about most — and this is where I care about most.” 

    Co-farmers at littleGrasse Foodworks, a small-scale Community Supported Agriculture farm a mile outside the village of Canton, Flip and her partner Bob Washo have managed the zero-pesticide gardens for the last 10 years. The CSA farm exchanges hands-on weekly harvesting for a seasonal shareholder fee, with flexible plans and produce that supports local land stewardship, the Canton and county economies and food education. 

    In addition to her littleGrasse work, Flip earned her Master of Education from St. Lawrence University, Canton, and became the Local Foods Program Leader and Harvest Kitchen Manager at the Cornell Cooperative Extension of St. Lawrence County about three years ago. 

    In both capacities, at littleGrasse and with the CCE, Flip shares her love for and knowledge of locally-sourced, naturally-produced food. With work changing daily, weekly and seasonally, “diverse challenges” keep her focused. 

    Flip has secured several state grants for CCE programming, developed a Farm-to-School Program with St. Lawrence-Lewis BOCES and Potsdam’s Big Spoon Kitchen and launched a virtual series of cooking classes during the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic. She teaches classes at the CCE’s Harvest Kitchen — a shared commercial kitchen for multipurpose teaching — leads lessons at CCE’s Learning Farm, plans programming for producers and their growing businesses and helps littleGrasse shareholders new to the 3-acre farm. 

    When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in New York this spring, a “tsunami of interest” in littleGrasse came with it, Flip said. 

    “Whether people were seeing empty shelves or now just have more time on their hands, interest has grown,” she said. 

     New health and safety protocols have accompanied that growth, with the indoor shareholder space moved into open air and additional hand sanitizing stations set up. 

       “Sometimes it’s been the only thing they did all week — harvesting a bouquet of flowers, taking a deep breath and leaving some of that anxiety at home,” Flip said of littleGrasse visitors who stopped by the farm during peaks of the ongoing pandemic. 

    As a local foods leader, Flip sees herself as an Earth advocate, for healthy natural surroundings, healthy communities and an “equitable playing field for future generations.” Food sits at the center of that advocacy, linking people to the planet, to each other, to the past and to the future. 

    Flip recalled a family she met the first year of the littleGrasse operation — she was cross-country skiing in Canton when she met a now “cornerstone” member of the farm. What started as a conversation with a mother who was “just curious” about CSAs has continued with a shared love for food and community. 

    “What’s so cool about food is how transformative it is,” Flip said. “There’s no superhero that shape shifts more than food — whether utilitarian, nostalgic, skill-building or celebratory. Every meal and throughout our lives, people can have a different relationship to food and the folks around them through food.”