This article is a great overview of the impact and history of urban farming. The mention about the project in Philadelphia is in reference to Weavers Way Farm where I worked last year. I’m putting this up on my blog just to have a record of it for myself and also to provide info to any of the other staff and students at Longwood that may not know that much about urban agriculture.
Urban Farmers’ Crops Go From Vacant Lot to Market
By TRACIE McMILLAN
New York Times, May 7, 2008IN the shadows of the elevated tracks toward the end of the No. 3 line
in East New York, Brooklyn, with an April chill still in the air,
Denniston and Marlene Wilks gently pulled clusters of slender green
shoots from the earth, revealing a blush of tiny red shallots at the
base.“Dennis used to keep them big, and people didn’t buy them,” Mrs. Wilks
said. “They love to buy scallions.”Growing up in rural Jamaica, the Wilkses helped their families raise
crops like sugar cane, coffee and yams, and take them to market. Now,
in Brooklyn, they are farmers once again, catering to their neighbors’
tastes: for scallions, for bitter melons like those from the West
Indies and East Asia and for cilantro for Latin-American dinner
tables.“We never dreamed of it,” said Mr. Wilks, nor did his relatives in
Jamaica. “They are totally astonished when you tell them that you farm
and go to the market.”For years, New Yorkers have grown basil, tomatoes and greens in window
boxes, backyard plots and community gardens. But more and more New
Yorkers like the Wilkses are raising fruits and vegetables, and not
just to feed their families but to sell to people on their block.This urban agriculture movement has grown even more vigorously
elsewhere. Hundreds of farmers are at work in Detroit, Milwaukee,
Oakland and other areas that, like East New York, have low-income
residents, high rates of obesity and diabetes, limited sources of
fresh produce and available, undeveloped land.Local officials and nonprofit groups have been providing land,
training and financial encouragement. But the impetus, in almost every
case, has come from the farmers, who often till when their day jobs
are done, overcoming peculiarly urban obstacles.The Wilkses’ return to farming began in 1990 when their daughter
planted a watermelon in their backyard. Before long, Mrs. Wilks, an
administrator in the city’s Department of Education, was digging in
the yard after work. Once their ambition outgrew their yard, she and
Mr. Wilks, a city surveyor, along with other gardening neighbors,
received permission to use a vacant lot across from a garment factory
at the end of their block.
They cleared it of trash and tested its soil with help from
GreenThumb, a Parks Department gardening program. They found traces of
lead, so to ensure their food’s safety, they built raised beds of
compost. (Heavy metals are common contaminants in city soil because of
vehicle exhaust and remnants of old construction. Some studies have
found that such ground can be cultivated as long as the pH is kept
neutral.)They wanted their crops to be organic, a commitment they shared with
many other farmers in this grimy landscape. They planted some
marigolds to deter squirrels; they have not had rat problems, which
can plague urban gardens; and they abandoned crops, like corn, that
could attract rodents. They put up fences to thwart other pests —
thieves and vandals — and posted signs to let people know that this
was a garden and no longer a dump.There were also benefits to farming in the city. The Wilkses took
advantage of city composting programs, trucking home decomposed leaves
from the Starrett City development in Brooklyn and ZooDoo from the
Bronx Zoo’s manure composting program. They got free seedlings from
GreenThumb and took courses on growing and selling food from the City
Farms project at the local nonprofit Just Food.“The city really has been good to us,” Mrs. Wilks said. “All of the
property we work on, it’s city property.”The Wilkses now cultivate plots at four sites in East New York, paying
as little as $2 a bed (usually 4 feet by 8 feet) in addition to modest
membership fees. Last year the couple sold $3,116 in produce at a
market run by the community group East New York Farms, more than any
of their neighbors.Florence Russell is looking forward to this year’s offerings. On a
recent Saturday she watched from the end of Alabama Avenue as
gardeners worked compost into beds at Hands and Hearts Garden, one of
the sites where the Wilkses keep beds, along with 24 other growers.
Fresh greens, she said, would be a welcome alternative to tough
collards from the local grocery.“This is something good happening here,” Ms. Russell said.
The city’s cultivators are a varied lot. The high school students at
the Added Value community farm in Red Hook, Brooklyn, last year
supplied Italian arugula, Asian greens and heirloom tomatoes to three
restaurants, a community-supported agriculture buying club and two
farmers’ markets.In the South Bronx a group of gardens called La Familia Verde started
a farmers’ market in 2003 to sell surpluses of herbs like papalo and
the Caribbean green callaloo.At a less established operation, the Brooklyn Rescue Mission’s
Bed-Stuy Farm, mission staff members began growing produce in the
vacant lot behind their food pantry in 2004, and ended up with a
surplus last year. So they enlisted their teenage volunteers to run a
sidewalk farm stand selling collards, tomatoes and figs; this year
they plan to open a full farmers’ market.The city’s success with urban farming will receive international
attention on Saturday when, during an 11-day conference in New York,
60 delegates from the United Nations Commission on Sustainable
Development are scheduled to visit Hands and Hearts, the Bed-Stuy Farm
and two traditional community gardens in Brooklyn.There was not always so much enthusiasm for city farming, though.
John Ameroso, a Cornell Cooperative Extension agent who has worked
with local farmers and gardeners for 32 years, said that when he first
suggested urban farm stands in the early 1990s, city environmental
officials dismissed the idea. ” ‘Oh, you could never grow enough stuff
with the urban markets,’ ” he said he was told. ‘ “That can’t be done.
You have to have farmers.’ “But local officials have come around.
Holly Leicht, an associate assistant commissioner at the city’s
Department of Housing Preservation and Development, helped provide two
half-acre parcels of city land last year. One became Hands and Hearts
and the other is in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, Brooklyn.The Red Hook farm began in 2003 when the Parks Department gave the
youth group Added Value permission to use an abandoned three-acre
asphalt ball field. The group started with two raised beds, built a
hoop house where it could start seeds, then laid down an acre of
compost two feet deep on top of the asphalt. Last year the young
farmers sold more than $25,000 in goods.Urban agriculture has been an even larger undertaking in other cities,
particularly those with weaker real estate markets and a declining
population.In Detroit, where locals refer to stretches of the city as urban
prairie, food gardens are scattered through backyards, schoolyards and
even more unlikely spots, including the floor of an abandoned roofless
furniture factory and a vacant lot owned by a local order of Catholic
friars. The number of gardens has grown to nearly 450 since the Garden
Resource Program Collaborative began coordinating them in 2003.The gardeners grow much of the food for themselves, but they have also
organized a co-op, Grown in Detroit, to sell their surplus peas,
onions, yams and greens. From farm stands in health center parking
lots and at a prime booth in Eastern Market, the city’s chaotic maze
of wholesalers and local farmers, gardeners lure customers to take
their first bite of a garlic scape, or compare their young spinach
with that in a Del Monte box down the aisle. Next year two and a half
acres that were waist high with weeds last summer will be set aside
for market-bound produce.City Slicker Farms in West Oakland, Calif., started in 2001 with a
quarter-acre garden and a farm stand selling neighborhood favorites
like collards and mustard greens. It has since persuaded local
elementary students to volunteer and gotten owners of five additional
vacant lots to let it grow food on their land.Some operations have figured out how to make real money.
On a fringe of Philadelphia, a nonprofit demonstration project used
densely planted rows in a half-acre plot and generated $67,000 from
high-value crops like lettuces, carrots and radishes.In Milwaukee, the nonprofit Growing Power operates a one-acre farm
crammed with plastic greenhouses, compost piles, do-it-yourself
contraptions, tilapia tanks and pens full of hens, ducks and goats —
and grossed over $220,000 last year from the sale of lettuces, winter
greens, sprouts and fish to local restaurants and consumers.One key to financial success is having customers with the wherewithal
to buy your goods. In New York, Bob Lewis, the head of the city office
for the state Department of Agriculture and Markets, helped make this
happen by getting 21 farmers at 16 sites approved to accept checks
from the Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program, a supplement to the Women,
Infants and Children (WIC) and senior nutrition programs.Sarita Daftary, the program director for East New York Farms,
estimates that about 60 percent of the market’s gross revenue came
from the farmers’ market checks. And by the end of this year, changes
to WIC will give city residents another $14 million specifically for
fresh fruits and vegetables.But land and demand are not all that successful farmers need. They
have to know how to run a business or a farm.So Growing Power, the Milwaukee group, offers several training
sessions each year, and Just Food’s City Farms project holds an annual
series of workshops on running farm stands.For more formal training there is the Center for Agroecology and
Sustainable Food Systems at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Founded in 1967, the center runs a six-month course for 39 students
each year on its two farms.Patricia Allen, the center’s executive director, said roughly
three-fourths of her students today were interested in urban growing.“We’re not looking at a back-to-the-land movement in any sense,” she said.
Just ask Karen Washington. She began growing food in 1985, after a
city program offering a house with a yard lured her, then a single
mother of two, to the South Bronx from Harlem.Though she works as a physical therapist, Ms. Washington always knew
she had another calling. “When I was a little kid I used to watch the
farm report,” she said. “I always wanted to grow and be a farmer.”Wary of chemicals and their effect on her health, Ms. Washington was
determined to farm organically. She learned how to deter pests with
mild soapy sprays and marigolds, encourage natural pest killers like
ladybugs, and turn food scraps into fertile compost. As her skills
grew, so did her ambitions. First she helped turn a vacant lot on her
block into the Garden of Happiness. Then she helped defend local
gardens from developers, and later persuaded the resulting coalition,
La Familia Verde, to run a farm stand and test the waters for a
farmers’ market.“It’s not about making money,” Ms. Washington said. “We’re selling so
that people in our neighborhood have good quality. There’s no Whole
Foods in my neighborhood.”Like many markets that sell neighborhood produce, La Familia Verde’s
has attracted upstate farmers who did not venture into these areas
until the locals showed them there was a market. The professionals do
not compete with the amateurs though; they sell crops like corn and
apples.All this has not quenched Ms. Washington’s agricultural ambitions. In
April she took a six-month leave from her job and headed to the Center
for Agroecology with two other city growers. She said she hoped to
take notes and start an urban farm school in New York.With that in place, Ms. Washington said, the possibilities could be endless.
“So that the next time we ask a kid where a tomato comes from,” she
said, “he won’t have to say a supermarket. He can say, Here’s an urban
farm, and here is where I’m growing that tomato that you’re talking
about. How great is that?”
