The Urban Farm

A while back on Grist, Claire Thompson covered the rise of an urban farm in New Orlean's Lower Ninth Ward, one of the neighborhoods of NoLa hardest hit during Hurricane Katrina several years ago. The article covers the history of the project, called Our School at Blair Grocery, the difficulties of operating in a community with many of the traditional problems associated with poverty-stricken neighborhoods -- in this case one with low density, and little oversight from the city. The project, which receives funding and operates as a regional branch of Will Allen's Growing Power in Wisconsin, shares much with food justice-oriented urban agriculture practices in that it seeks to deal with structural issues such as unemployment & knowledge economies, food access and supply chain redundancies, and culturally-appropriate food supply.

As the 2012 Farm Bill discussion continues apace, courses here at NYU's Food Studies program have largely focused on, recently, the ways in which city governments are beginning to both lobby for and proactively engage in urban agricultural projects. Presently, nothing in the Farm Bill, short of a few USDA programs amounting to only several million dollars a year, even examine the issue of urban agriculture. A couple of new books have recently been passed along covering the topic: Breaking Through Concrete did an awesome cross country tour (and decidedly awesome website) detailing a number of distinct operations. Meanwhile, Urban Farms (no website, but Sarah Rich, the author, has many articles and essays abounding on the web) does a similar series of case studies, pointing to the myriad reasons people have engaged in urban agriculture schemes, and provides an excellent glossary of terms and evaluations of certain policy traps that have arisen with the speedy rise of urban farms, both not and for-profit. 

I'll write about this topic more in-depth in the near future but a point: there are many critics of urban agriculture as a trend, citing no evidence but making grand claims to the inefficiencies of urban agriculture to feed whole geographies. I'll take this point to offer this sideways glance: urban farms are not about feeding whole cities, at least not on the individual level. Most are not even businesses, per se. What they do accomplish is feeding communities, both in terms of providing supplemental nutrition as well as creating spaces of community interaction. Enough research has found the impacts that urban farms have on job creation, localized tax revenues, and even the creation of positive public health shifts that serious consideration needs to be given to how to better facilitate it; New York City already has with the modifications made to rooftop height requirements being exempted for urban agriculture projects. Rather than focusing on the narrow red-herring of "feeding the world", it is important to realize the value that these projects produce, both material and otherwise, when we consider the possibility of funding such projects.