Features > August 24, 2007

Farming the Concrete Jungle (cont’d)

Two years ago, City Slicker helped Shirley Chunn start a garden. What started as two boxes has now taken over her yard. “It’s really nice to just go out and relax in the morning and see all my vegetables,” says Chunn. Four of her neighbors now have City Slicker gardens.

According to City Slicker, 40 percent of the 2006 participants were able to grow half or more of their household’s produce, 30 percent experienced a positive change in their health, and 50 percent added more fresh vegetables to their diet. City Slicker also buys excess produce from these backyard gardens at a premium organic rate, which it then sells at a lower price at its community farm stand.

The economics—whether through production or backyard programs—are not insignificant. In its primer on urban agriculture the CFSC writes, “Maintaining regional and local farm-to-consumer enterprises helps keep the entire industry accountable for the food system, increasing the likelihood that food is produced and consumed in sustainable ways.” The CFSC cites the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association which estimates that if every family in Maine spent $10 a week on local food, $104 million would be kept in the local economy.

Cultivating leaders

Four years ago, Geralina Fortier, then 17, got involved with People’s Grocery to fulfill a high school community service requirement. Today, Fortier coordinates People’s youth nutrition programs. “We believe that youth are the best agents for change, especially to one another, so we create workshops and presentations about eating healthy, ” says Fortier, as she shovels compost onto a new bed at People’s 55th Street garden in West Oakland.

Now a college student majoring in community and health education, Fortier says her work with People’s Grocery has changed her life. Asked what she would be doing if she hadn’t gotten involved with People’s Grocery, she replies, “I’d be fat.”

“I’m pretty radical about my diet,” says Fortier, “A lot of my friends thought I was crazy and still do.” After three years as a strict vegan, she recently switched to a raw food diet because “that’s how we should be eating anyway.”

At Brooklyn’s Added Value, the conversation about nutrition starts in grade school. Almost every child in the local school district has visited the farm at least once through its “Farm to School” program. Added Value also runs a youth program that teaches high school kids food production and sales, media literacy, sustainable business development and community education and organizing.

“We’re not growing farmers, we’re trying to grow young people who are inspired by the world around them and who care and see themselves as empowered to take action in fixing things,” says Caroline Loomis, Added Value’s community education coordinator.

Greening the concrete jungle

Loomis sees urban agriculture as a way to transform the meaning of urban green space. “Can you imagine what our cities would like if every park had a farm built into it?” she asks.

Three years ago, the Boston Area Health Education Center asked the Food Project to farm raised flowerbeds on the roof of Boston Medical Center’s parking garage. The Food Project hauled 50 crates of compost to the roof in shopping carts and started with a crop of tomatoes, summer squash and eggplant. Andrews says that neighborhood people have “come over really excited about this lot. The roof is pretty ugly. Even with the vegetables, it’s still pretty ugly. But it’s a great improvement from what was here.”

Increased green space also has a measurable effect on crime. University of Illinois researchers found that housing projects with trees have a 7 percent lower crime rate than their treeless counterparts. They also found that the greener the environment the lower the level of domestic violence.

The recognition that the urban landscape needs green space has opened doors to city partnerships. The asphalt lot that Added Value farms is owned by New York City, and the Brooklyn Zoo supplies compost. In Chicago, Growing Power has partnered with the Chicago Park District to operate two quarter-acre model urban farms, one next to Michigan Avenue in downtown Grant Park and the other in Jackson Park on the South Side.

But Rosenthal says that expanding these relationships is not enough. “What we really need to do is to start working with the city governments and the county governments and the state, and hopefully with the federal level, to create programs that actually support doing productive urban agriculture on a scale that would be meaningful,” she says. “And that really means addressing the farm bill.”

A food, not farm bill

Andy Fisher is one of the founders of the CFSC, which formed in 1994 to lobby for changes in the 1996 bill. For Fisher and others wanting to transform food access and production in the United States, changing what the government funds in the farm bill is crucial. “You’ve got a structure of commodity programs subsidizing—corn, dairy and meat—to the exclusion of other crops,” says Fisher. “Take the food pyramid: The farm bill subsidizes the exact opposite of that: 72 percent of all farm subsidies are going into dairy and meat production and smaller amounts into grains for human consumption. The only fruits or vegetables subsidized are apples. So there is a real impact on people’s diets. In a very broad sense the farm bill is a food bill, and should be thought of that way.”

In addition to subsidizing Big Ag, the farm bill allocates funds for the food stamp program, which, as the nation’s largest nutrition program, has a significant impact on consumption patterns. In 2006, 26.7 million Americans received food stamps.

The version of the farm bill passed in the House this summer has expanded funding to encourage food stamp recipients to shop at farmers’ markets: $32 million is allocated to the renamed Farmers’ Market Promotion Program; also the bill expands both who is eligible to sell at markets, and the availability of Electronic Benefit Transfer technology to process food stamps as payment. A 2004 UCLA study by researchers at the School of Public Health found that offering those receiving government food assistance (in this case, the Women, Infants and Children program) access to farmers’ markets resulted in increased fruit and vegetable consumption that continued beyond the offered incentive.

The House version of the farm bill also allocates $30 million over the next five years to the Community Food Projects Competitive Grants Program, which, since its inception in 1996, has funded 240 programs to help low-income communities meet their nutritional needs. (The Food Project and Growing Power have received three grants each.) Stephanie Larsen, policy organizer with the CFSC cautions however that in the 2007 bill CFP funds were changed from mandatory (that is, guaranteed at that level each year) to discretionary (subject to the annual budget approval). “Due to the nature of the appropriations process, there is always a significant possibility that CFP will get much less than $30 million a year and we would have to fight for it annually against all other programs.”

It remains to be seen what will happen in the Senate, but legislators are starting to realize the importance of urban agriculture funding. “I rise today to express my support for the [farm bill] … but also to express my concern about the lack of funding for community food projects,” said Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) on the House floor.

Owning what you till

The 2007 farm bill may help urban agriculture, but larger questions about sustainability remain. “No one is against gardening,” says UIC’s Lawson, “but not everyone wants to fund it.”

The massive federal subsidies received by Big Ag companies help keep food prices artificially low. That means small-scale, sustainable agriculture must self-subsidize its prices to compete in the marketplace. And as the profile of urban agriculture rises, urban farms are also confronting questions about whether to participate in the high-priced, organic farmers’ markets cropping up around the country.

“It’s important to us that the food we grow here is available to people in the community,” says the Food Project’s Andrews. “That means it’s not sold at the prices it would be if it was sold downtown.” Selling at high-end markets is an issue that the Food Project grapples with because it has the potential to allow the organization to sustain itself. Right now, the group makes around $20,000 off the produce grown on its Dorchester land. If the Food Project sold it at the Copley Square farmers’ market, opposite the Neiman Marcus, Andrews estimates they could get twice as much. “I think there is a sense at the organization that it could lend something to the urban agriculture movement if we were economically sustainable.”

So far, however, the Food Project is opting out. “Our community is patient with what goes along with urban agriculture. Sometimes our compost smells, or we’ll have a little rat infestation,” Andrews says. “If we were selling downtown, it could become uncomfortable. I don’t think it would make a whole lot of sense.”

Because of funding difficulties, over the years many community food projects have died, which hurts those communities that have come to rely on their resources.

“Everyone keeps reinventing this thing over and over again, which tells me it has a really important function, and it should be supported,” says Lawson. “But we shouldn’t have to keep finding new land and new leaders.”

For this reason, Lawson stresses land ownership as one path to sustainability. “The exact audience will change over time—but the hardest thing is transforming that space, that earth,” she says. “Once you have that tillable soil, it’s there for whatever programs want to come along and claim it. The gardeners need to look at land use and ownership of sites, and work with the city to keep them permanent.”

Many hold up Philadelphia as the gold standard of land stewardship. Founded in 1986, the Neighborhood Gardens Association (NGA) is a community land trust that holds land reclaimed by gardeners in order to save it from development when property values rise. (One of the quandaries urban agriculture programs face is that when they transform previous “worthless” land, they simultaneously raise its property value and that of the surrounding area.) The NGA currently holds 24 plots in trust. In Chicago, a similar program called NeighborSpace has been around since 1996. Both programs focus on community gardens, but the overall aim of creating community land is one that resonates with everyone working in urban agriculture. “If you have control over the land and the water, if you can feed yourself, you can really transform society,” says Erika Allen. “But these communities don’t have any of those things, so how can you have a just society?”

For urban agriculturists it all comes back to empowering and investing in community. “[W]e expect to see more people of all ages and backgrounds first becoming educated food consumers, and then becoming engaged food citizens,” concludes the Community Food Projects Competitive Grants Program 10 year progress report. “As healthful food and healthy eating become the norm, we anticipate that more people will look for broader regional and policy-based answers to the problems that continue to beset their communities.”

But for Allen and her colleagues, food is not only an end, it’s the means. “We’re working towards a just world where everyone has full bellies and land and water,” she says. “We’re using food as a tool to get there. And it’s completely doable.”

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• Reader Comments

  I think this program is amazing.  It is a good way to socialize the big urban neighborhoods.  A lot of the residents in these large urban neighborhoods are minorities that have agricultural backgrounds in their families past, so this idea could catch on...I would maybe take it a step further, not to sound too socialist, and have the produce sold in the markets around the neighborhood and the profits go to keeping the rents down, neighborhood revitalization, after-school programs and eventually to the schools (buying books, computers, renovations).  Make it as transparent as possible and see how it does.

  Posted by C. LyOns on Aug 25, 2007 at 11:05 AM

  I have no argument with the substance of this article, except to say that it makes more sense to me for urban gardening projects to rent land than to buy acreage at market prices.  I think that most cities have an “agricultural use” category that results in a substantial reduction in property taxes for the land owner.  Most owners would be willing to rent out property at very little cost in order to secure this tax classification.  Of course, the gardening project would need to move to other lands when and if the land owner decided to develop the property.

  I do have an argument with the section re the farm program.  The writers repeat inaccuracies that seem to have become common in progressive reporting.  What is usually called a “subsidy” in this day and time is what the Republican Congress of the 90’s created as a “direct payment”.  This is for the farmers of corn, wheat, soybeans, rice, and cotten.  There is no “direct payment”, or any other subsidy for “meat”, as this writer states more than once. Dairy does have a milk price support, but since in recent years milk prices have been above the target price, there have been no deficiency payments.

  Also, when they make a reference to subsidies going to “Big Ag”, many readers will assume that Conagra, Monsanto, et al are receiving farm subsidies, which is not correct.  Farm subsidies go to farmers......... both small and large.  If one’s farm is a relatively large one, it is a “large farm”, not “Big Ag”.  The tone of this presentation re the farm program really seems to reflect some sort of resentment of farmers and ranchers, for reasons unknown.

  My own disappointment with the farm program is that it keeps the “direct payment”, scheme instead of returning to price supports coupled with production limitations when prices fall below a target price.  Farmers will accept and cash checks for this direct payment, but farmers really see no good reason for this type of payment to exist.

  Posted by JPetersmith on Sep 8, 2007 at 5:17 PM

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Also by Phoebe Connelly and Chelsea Ross

• Farming the Concrete Jungle
  In cities across the country urban farmers are growing communities, greening the landscape and revolutionizing food politics.