Feeding the Community: The Original & Potential Value of the Urban Farm

various images from, and courtesy of, DBCFSN.

"Detroiters recognize that the value of the vacant land in the city goes beyond the construction of a structure. Residents have turned "abandoned" lots into productive agricultural resources. Mini farmers markets are springing up citywide providing Detroiters with fresh, organic food grown right in the neighborhood. Urban agriculture should be recognized as an essential contributor to the local food system. It ensures a ready supply of nutritious, high quality vegetables and fruits. The entry costs associated with intensive food production on small urban farms in a cooperative environment is much lower and accessible than the current trend of mega farms. Urban growers stand to benefit from increased opportunities to market local products. The potential market for local value-added products makes urban agriculture even more attractive as a local economic development tool.." -- The Detroit Black Community Food Security Network

As mentioned the other day, urban farming has come to some mention in the press lately. As discussion on Farm Bill-related matters keeps to the downlow, much of the conversation in advocacy circles (both at the Edible Institute in Santa Barbara and to a more limited degree at Cooking for Solutions 2012, for example) have moved into direct ways institutions, consumers, and localized policy solutions may be able to rectify shortcomings in food security and access issues. Urban Agriculture represents one such venue: as the foreclosure crisis hit across the country, large swathes of property in various urban, suburban, and peri-urban counties have been abandoned or lost population density. Cities bleed cash having to still cover utilities to these areas, geographies that no longer pay into city coffers in any significant way. And not all of these areas are peripheral; some areas are right in the urban core, thanks to a planning notion called "contagion effect", where a single property devaluation and improper handling by mediating institutions (such as banks) can lead to a cascading devaluation effect at nearby properties, even if there was no mishandling on the part of the tenant/owners. 

Nowhere has this been clearer than in Detroit, a city who has been defined by decreasing population, high poverty rates, low investment, and a high degree of food insecurity across all demographics. It is a city of 1000 liquor stores and not a single grocery. Within its large African American population, a large portion of the population was, in the 80's as today, largely locked out from federal and state assistance programs and food stamps due to ineligibility issues derived from housing, employment, and criminal record qualifications.  And it is from these conditions -- lacking institutional and financial access to food sources, little to no recourse through political means to rectify these conditions, and a high degree of unemployment -- led to the start of what can be considered the present understanding of urban agriculture (1).

Detroits urban farms were largely abandoned lots or yards within abandoned lots, taken over by neighbors and with either implicit or passing allowances from the city. They were largely intended for individual households, occasionally for resale to other families. They were representative of a cultural resilience and self-sufficiency; rooted in some thinking from the Black Power movement, the idea was to be able to feed yourself and curtail the dependency one had on the state for basic needs. As documented in the film "Urbanized", this was as much a movement of basic need as it was a way to build sense of community in a city with little of both. Over time, these farms came together to create the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, an organization that supports these farms, as well as fostering an urban farm incubator, a green jobs program, and lobbying the city of Detroit for permanent policy promotion and protections for urban agriculture in the city.

This still remains the core of the this more recent evolution of urban farming nation-wide; many of the projects in the books I mentioned in the previous post -- Breaking Through Concrete and Urban Farms (2) -- cover projects, both non- and for-profit, community organized and individually run, that see community building as a core value in their orientation, their brand, whatever you wish to call it. It measures out -- urban farming projects have been shown to increase communication and interactivity between neighbors, have a strong multiplier effect on economic transactions, and pay dividends to local tax bases. And in centering around these notions, the ability to create context-specific solutions is improved considerably. There are still many things in the way of expanding urban agriculture efforts -- zoning laws and blight definitions, as well as urban convenants all have restrictive tendencies on what individuals can and cannot do, and most business zoning exempts agricultural work from occurring on them. Cities are beginning to overcome those restrictions, and with the rise in entrepreneurial urban agriculture, they would be best in starting to work on them as extensively as allows. 

(1) Urban agriculture and urban gardening have been a part of the American cityscape since the inception of the nation. Truck farms and large-scale operations within city limits were common in places like Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City; allotments and community gardens abounded, especially during the Garden Cities movement, let alone the proportion of participation in the Victory Gardens program in World War 2. There is a difference between the two

(2) Review of these two books to come up later this week. I have a lot of good to say about them, but there are also a few points to consider -- especially where the location and demographics of their subjects is involved. 

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.