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Companies have devalued poor communities—all over the country, major grocery stores have pulled out from low-income areas. What’s left behind, often, are corner stores that aren’t exactly selling healthy food. The USDA says that you must live within a mile of a retail grocery store, otherwise you’re in a “food desert.” And Growing Power is located in a primarily African-American community, and it’s three and a half miles away from the closest grocery store. So it’s really important that we recognize the issue of racism around food. One of Growing Power’s core goals is to dismantle racism and inequality in the food system. This work is really about social and environmental justice, so it takes more than just growing healthy food and dropping it off in communities that need it. It has to be a combination of other things: educating folks on how to prepare the food, educating folks on how to access the food on a regular basis, and educating them on the need to break down bigger structures. One of our goals is to lower the cost of food production. Will Allen – In These Times
I’ve just read the article above in “In These Times” and I just want to be sure everybody at FDL is aware of urban farming. It seems to me one of the most practical and attractive fuel saving, ecological ideas around. Not only physically, politically and socially healthful, but culturally healthful as well.
Here is another good video about Will Allen’s project: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7417666n
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Urban farming can be year round and given that many slum real estate properties are already empty it could be implemented on a large scale fast.
If they had capital and expertise.
Mushrooms don’t require light just heat in winter so they can be grown cheaper and depending on what kind of mushrooms you grow a high cash crop.
Strawberries can be grown on trays that can be stacked and save space.
Corporate Food lobbyist however will not like this idea.
Urban farming is one thing that’s revitalizing Rust Belt cities like Youngstown, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and even Detroit, to an extent. These are cities with lots of empty areas that are being turned back into arable land.
True that. There’s at least three community gardens within 10 miles of where we live that I can think of. One of them is right next to a farmers market and they sell some of their fresh produce there for far less than what one will pay at a chain grocery store.
That’s one thing about fresh produce: Unlike grain products and other items, it can’t be stored for months or years at a time, even when refrigerated — and freezing it ruins it. So it’s one area where the small growers and retail sellers have a chance to out-compete the big chains.
Will Allen’s concepts have spread elsewhere:
http://www.thelinemedia.com/devnews/urbanorganics041812.aspx
Here’s another site http://www.resilientcommunities.com/
Robb passes own some great ideas that other have come with. I know the summer I’m going to build a solar heater they had on the sight for my Greenhouse.
There’s one I pass on Lee Road on the way to Shaker etc.
On and there’s one at Settlers Landing and another just off of W25 by Detroit. The Detroit one is huge.
(blast from my past – my cousins lived in Solon and my Grammie in Shaker – Lee Road was always a marker on the trip between the two)
Oops. Make that at least seven, not five.
My better half pointed out another two, hence the five and seven.
GREAT ray of hope story, thanks so much David for sharing this one. Highly rcc’d.
Wow, once again great comments and shared links from the FirePups. I love this town. *G*
Here’s another you might find interesting: Guerilla gardener in South Central Los Angeles.
Also, the website of today’s Book Salon host
Truly Living Well
This is in urban Atlanta, I believe.
On edit: thank you, David. Recommended.
Saturday 3/9/13 was the first Urban Farming Conference in Boston, MA. Mel King, a former state representative from the South End, was honored for his lifetime of work on agriculture, not just urban agriculture, for which he was a pioneer, but agriculture throughout the state. Mel’s been working at this since the 1970s and the present Commissioner of the Department of Agricultural Resources, Greg Watson, made that clear, calling him the person most responsible for the resurrection of agriculture in the Commonwealth (G*d preserve it).
There were about 350 registered for the conference and another 140 on the waiting list. The teenagers at the youth session were incredible, amazingly mature and focused.
The model of local agricultural revitalization over the last 40 years is the model for the transition to a renewably powered society. And there is still a lot more work to do in rebuilding and expanding our local and regional agricultural sectors.
Everybody eats!
PS: Mel King was wearing a “Boycott Prisons” t shirt.
I’m currently designing an urban agriculture farm for my senior design project. I’m specifically working on stormwater management. I’m able to get the farm 70% reduction from using public water. I can probably get it to be 100% self sufficient in a couple weeks. Urban farming is definitely the way forward. I think though that it will take more money than usual.
Check this out: http://www.ted.com/talks/ron_finley_a_guerilla_gardener_in_south_central_la.html
Lots of stuff happening here in Toronto, both planning and action. Mariko Uda’s charming little video shows some of the things going on here. Her film was the 2011 winner in a contest to visualize Toronto in 2030, but the people in her film have already been trail-blazing for years.
David, great post.
Another factor that’s driving this is the rising price of U.S. farmland.
Here’s a 2007 audit from Pennsylvania, their Department of Community and Economic Development. According to it, farming organic vegetables, on only 1/2 acre, returned revenues of $38,000 (2004) $52,000 (2005) and $68,000 (2006) using SPIN (small plot intensive) farming .
Even if those numbers are high, that’s pretty good. They’re harvesting about every sixty-days. This is full-time work and they claim it includes actually getting the food to market.
This is a 29-minute Joel Salatin video on pastured chickens.
Reasonable people can disagree, but imho, after the five-minute mark, “farming infrastructure becomes portable,” he’s making a pitch for the possibility of pasturing hens in urban areas.
John Hantz, a white person, wanted to buy many acres of now unused land in Detroit, pay taxes on it, clean it of all the old tires and other garbage, even tearing down some burned out houses — and the city of Detroit told him no. They agreed to let him buy only about 300 acres out of the I think it was 1,500 he wanted to buy. Why? Apparently, it’s because others in the past that wanted to buy land were told no, too. Two wrongs make a right, I guess. I think Hantz wanted to duplicate what’s been done in Milwaukee, but the Detroit leadership isn’t going to let him do it. They won’t let him do real agriculture, either. Apparently he’s sucked it up and accepted their stipulations and will do what he can in spite of the idiots, but I wouldn’t blame him if he just gave them the finger and used the money to buy himself a vacation property in the Caribbean or something.
Meanwhile, Detroit is on the verge of bankruptcy. I wish they would just do it and get it over with already.
Geoff Lawton’s Survival Food Forest with Chickens: Zero to 10 Years Tour!
This is a 4:30 second video, but I’d ask you to give it at least 90 seconds.
A lot of people use electric fencing. He doesn’t have protection from hawks and other airborne predators, but this is a way to “pasture” chickens that leads to planting fruit trees.
IMHO, the legalization of pot is necessary to really help urban agriculture take-off. And the state laws have to be such that Big Pharma isn’t just importing 100% of it.
Another important part might indoor farming and or aquaponics.
Indoor or vertical farming is largely dependent on the price of LED’s which provide the spectrum of light your plants need. That’s the plan, anyway.
If you integrate with tilapia, perch or ducks (duckaponics) you’ve got a nutrient rich source of food for pot and vegetables.
The theory behind aquaponics is that the certain plants clean the water, so along with filters, it’s pretty much a closed system.
My understanding is that most people who do it successfully get most of their revenue from vegetables. Even though the money’s in the protein, wrt the fish tank, the nitrogen cycle, ph, and all the other factors that have to be in sync to keep the fish alive are tough, especially on a big system.
Ducks need a lot of water, but some folks say their “tank” doesn’t have such tight parameters. Selling their waste laced water for fertilizer might help the process.
Another big challenge for aquaponics is the food source for the fish/ducks.
I think in the early stages, vertical farms will be in old warehouses and require a lot of manual labor.
Later, I think they’ll be highly automated.
Reasonable can disagree about whether they will actually be built in the Great Lakes.
A big factor in cities is the quality of the soil. If there’s mercury or other heavy metals in it, you don’t want stuff grown in it to be in the food chain.
Although it’s counter-intuitive, 350.org’s Bill McKibben, along with a lot other people has been pushing Biochar , the pyrolysis of biomass. I’m not equally sold on pyrolysis for all feed stocks, but a lot of people agree about the data for biomass. Done properly, if you want you can collect syngas/methane/hydrogen and sell it. Regardless, properly done the process sequestrates carbon and is an excellent fertilizer. A lot of people do it DIY, a lot of people are trying to industrialize it.
The problems/concerns I’ve read about come if your boiling heavy metals, other toxins, in an anaerobic environment and then releasing into the atmosphere. That’s why the feed stock’s so important.
Nice aquaponics in Laramie WY.
That’s not what the Detroit Free Press says happened back in December:
Now what was that you were trying so mightily to imply when you took great care to point out that Hantz is white and was somehow being thwarted by the eeeeevil black people running Detroit?
Race isn’t the only component, of course. I was only suggesting that race is probably a part of it. Actually, the head of the department in question is white. It’s not “evil” black people, it’s probably more like self-destructive more than anything. They let him buy a small portion of what he wanted. The article you cite makes it out to be positive, and I suppose it is as far as it goes. But the 1,500 lots are only a small portion of what he wanted to do. There’s a lot more to it than just what they’re suggesting. He wanted to buy up thousands more lots, and like I said, pay taxes on them, clean them up and try to do an urban farming thing there on a larger scale, but they won’t let him. And there doesn’t seem to be any real reason for it, so yes I think race is a part of it.
While urban farming may be a great Idea the reality shows some big problems. The soils in all urban areas are highly contaminated especially with Pb.
To safely use urban land for growing food you need to remove 12-18 inches of the top soil and replace it with uncontaminated soil from outside the urban area.
Thanks for the diary David.
BooRad, we are both in WI and I’d like to say hello sometime. Have a small farmland, won’t be moving it any time soon. Thanks for the links.
You are very welcome :^)