And she’s done it all with a sense that—at any moment—it could all be over. Because with farm leases that only cover up to three years at a time, the threat of the landlord selling out to a pricey condo developer has hung over every kale and garlic harvest.

Unfortunately, the scenario is a common one.

Surveys of young farmers running operations like hers have consistently found that farmers rank access to stable, affordable land as a top challenge. For Black, Indigenous, and other farmers of color, it’s an even more formidable barrier. And access to capital is right up there alongside—and intimately tied to—land access.

For more than a decade, those challenges have plagued the movement to energize and equip a new generation of farmers inspired to contribute to climate resilience and healthy, equitable communities. Adding urgency to it all is the fact that the average age of the American farmer keeps creeping up toward 60.

“People told us that the average age of the farmer was getting higher, and we needed to go back to the land so that we could feed people. So, that’s what we did. We learned how to do our job. We got dirty. We fed our community. But as I was owning the business, I started to reach roadblocks,” Taylor said in September, during a tour of the new farm she is establishing with her partner, D’Real Graham.

Some of those roadblocks have finally been cleared from the path, and Spice Creek Farm, on 24 rolling acres about 25 miles southeast of D.C., is the realization of more than 15 years of work. Now, Taylor’s perspective is shifting toward a long, grounded future on land of their own, where she’ll expand her vegetable operation while Graham raises chickens for both eggs and meat.

Just down the street, the couple’s friends and collaborators run Deep Roots Farm, Juniper’s Garden, and Earth-Bound Building, which builds farm structures and was born out of the Black Dirt Farm Collective. “We call it the Black Agrarian Corridor because we’re trying to bring more Black farmers back to this area,” Taylor said. “We really want this to be a hub where people can come and we can support each other in all the ways that are necessary.”

Creative, Collaborative Financing

Hernández Reyes grew up subsistence farming with her parents in Oaxaca, and the garden spoke to her. She called a number posted nearby and reached Adam Kohl, the executive director of Outgrowing Hunger, an organization that rents unused land at accessible costs to help immigrants and refugees grow their own food. Hernández Reyes was able to secure a small plot in the community garden and started growing food for her family. This was just the beginning.

Over the next decade, gardening evolved from a hobby to a passion for Hernández Reyes, but it wasn’t how she earned her income. While she worked her way up at McDonald’s, eventually becoming a manager, she gardened on the side as a way to provide her family and neighbors with fresh produce. Eventually, she became a community leader through her work in the garden; her original plot is now an educational site where she teaches gardening to other Latinas.

Two years ago, Hernández Reyes had the opportunity to scale up her own growing operation and turn it into a source of income. She is now in her second season of managing a one-acre farm that Outgrowing Hunger leases in the nearby town of Boring, Oregon. While she named the operation MR. Farms after her initials, she has leaned into people misreading it as “Mister.” The business has been so successful that she was able to quit her job at McDonald’s last year and has transitioned from feeding her family to feeding—and mentoring—her whole community.

Hernández Reyes attributes her success at this food sovereignty endeavor to the support of a network called Rockwood Food Systems Collaborative (RFSC), part of a larger organization called Rockwood Community Development Corporation, which focuses on underserved areas of East Portland and Gresham. RFSC is comprised of nearly 30 organizations, including social services, food justice initiatives, and health and educational institutions.

Traditionally, food security organizations receive food from anywhere they can get it, and because donations are rarely from local growers, the system often results in processed foods and a reliance on the precarious global food system. The collaborative model, rather than providing one-way charity, is focused on mutualism and community care. Partnerships with local growers create a market that supports farmer entrepreneurship; community members receive fresh produce; and the system is more resilient to global food shortages.

At Rockwood, when someone shows a knack for farming, especially when it benefits their community, someone from the collaborative connects them with various member organizations that can help them access resources and connections to build a successful farm business. When Hernández Reyes got involved, Outgrowing Hunger provided her with land and put her in touch with the Oregon Food Bank, which buys her vegetables for their pantries, and Rockwood People’s Market, a BIPOC-led farmers market in Gresham, where she sells produce every Sunday. She and other growers are also able to sell produce to local community members, who pay with tokens provided by food systems partners, the local low-cost health clinic Wallace Medical Concern, and the youth services organization Play Grow Learn.

The Rockwood Food Systems Collaborative is one of hundreds of similar networks across the U.S. that are serving as a model for a more resilient food and health system. Others include Hawai’i Food Hub Hui, Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive, and the Mississippi Farm to School Network. Leveraging social capital between and among institutions, these networks, along with community members themselves, create an alternative local food system. This can be particularly powerful for immigrants and U.S. noncitizens, who are twice as likely to be among the 44 million people in the U.S. facing food insecurity.

Civil Eats recently spoke to Hernández Reyes about her journey toward this collaborative model, the organizations that supported her new business, and how growing food offers freedom to immigrant families.

What do you miss most about your home in Oaxaca?

What I miss are the simple things like traditions, family, and my culture. That was before. But now we’ve built the same community here and brought our traditions here. My vegetables are part of those traditions.

At first, they only grew a little bit because I only had one plant from the seeds I brought with me. But we saved the seeds and acclimatized them and now we have more of our traditional vegetables to share with my community: tomatillos and Roma tomatoes (but not like the ones you get from the grocery store; they’re better), green beans from my state, types of Mexican corn, and pipicha, pápalo, and epazote [herbs used in traditional dishes in central and southern Mexico]. When people see these vegetables in the farmers’ market, they get really excited. They say, “I haven’t seen these in many years!” or “I’ve been looking for these.”

What is your role in the Rockwood Food Systems Collaborative and how have these connections helped you?

I was volunteering during the pandemic with Outgrowing Hunger to distribute food boxes to families. Through that, I met people from Rockwood CDC, Play Grow Learn, Metropolitan Family Service, and a lot of other organizations. Then I got involved with Guerreras Latinas [an empowerment program for Spanish-speaking Latinas] where I taught gardening through a program called Sembradoras, which was supported by funding from the Oregon Food Bank.

The connections benefit my business. When the organizations have grant money, they can purchase some vegetables from me—that way, they help me, and then I help the community. There’s this cycle. I want to keep my vegetables in the community; I don’t want to send my vegetables to the huge stores.

How did you get your business off the ground?

I started my business when I saw that my community needed the kinds of vegetables that I grow. And I was thinking, how could I sell my vegetables? I talked to Lynn [Ketch, executive director] from Rockwood CDC, and she asked why didn’t I make it a business. And I said, ‘Yes! Why not?!’ I was a gardener before, but I wanted to get to the next level of farming. I’m motivated to work hard because I want to serve my community; I want to grow more food.

At first, we didn’t have enough money to pay the rent on the land at Outgrowing Hunger. So, Adam gave me some options where I could pay after three to four months of selling vegetables. He always had somebody to help when we needed it and connected me with other organizations.

Another support was the Oregon Food Bank. Because it was my first year of farming, they gave me support by buying my products to give out in the food pantry. They pay you upfront, so with that money, I started to buy the irrigation and everything. Another organization, the Metropolitan Family Service, bought a small amount of vegetables, which helped, too.

Does growing food and the connections to the Food Collaborative offer freedom to the immigrant families in your community?

Yes, it helps a lot. Here at Outgrowing Hunger, the price for rent is not that high. And Outgrowing Hunger helps us apply for grants. There isn’t a lot of space for people to grow their own food at home, so the land for gardening helps so much. But, we need to educate people about how and where to grow fresh vegetables.

The collaborative has helped bring more information to people. For the people who can’t grow their food, the organizations buy the food, and community members receive tokens for free and can get fresh food from the farmers’ market. There are a lot of benefits—people’s hearts are better, they’re healthier, and they have less stress. There’s a lot of freedom in that.

How has working in this kind of collaborative model been different from what you experienced when you first arrived in the U.S.?

There’s a big difference. At some food pantries, they asked for your address, social security information, and documentation. Immigrants were scared to go there, because they would have to share all their information. It was also hard to find out where those pantries were. Now the food pantries don’t ask for that. But also, because of this group of organizations, there’s a lot more information about where people can get more food.

I experienced challenges before I found the collaborative. Organizations didn’t have enough Spanish speakers, and there wasn’t a lot of information available. It was hard to make connections. I also didn’t know my neighbors very well. But now, with this group of organizations, it has changed. They all have Spanish speakers, and there is a lot more information about resources available.

What kinds of community members have you met through your work with farming and the food systems collaborative?

I’ve met a lot of people since I’ve started volunteering here, and I made all these connections around my neighborhood. I talk to people and tell them what I’m doing and how I grow vegetables, and I bring them in that way. I’m building community through food. With Outgrowing Hunger, when I got started, we had two Latinos, and now we have 30 Latinos. I talk to them: “You can apply for this; you can get this resource.” I have WhatsApp, and when I learn of opportunities, I share.

One of those families was telling me they didn’t have enough money to buy food. This one woman said she tried to go to the food pantry, but they asked for all these documents. I told her, “I have some vegetables in my garden,” and she was so happy. I asked her why she didn’t have any money, and she said her husband was sick and it was just [her] working, and their rent was so high, and they have three small children. I connected her to Outgrowing Hunger, and she applied for that space in the garden, and she started growing her own vegetables.

What are your hopes for the future?

Oh, my goodness. So much. My dream is to grow my farm, to implement jobs for immigrants or anyone who wants to work. To produce more. Right now, it’s a family farm: my husband, my kids, my brothers, people in the community. I really want to build a program to give jobs to moms in the summertime. They can bring their kids and come to work. I keep thinking and thinking—and I want to do everything!

This interview was conducted in English and Spanish and has been translated and edited for length and clarity.

The post How a Community Gardener Grew Food for Her Family, Quit Her Job at McDonald’s, and Started a Farm appeared first on Civil Eats.

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He had overheard Desmond discussing seeds with his neighbor. “People have hung on to seeds even when they aren’t actively planting and tending them,” says Desmond. “They hold memories and are cherished as story and timekeeping objects.”

Agriculture has been a way of life and a source of meaning and pride for Black and Indigenous people for centuries, shaping rituals, beliefs, and traditions. Slavery and colonialism exploited their agricultural knowledge and shattered their lives. The heirloom gardens project, a collaboration between Princeton University, Spelman College’s Food Studies program, and Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance, aims to memorialize their long-held expertise and culturally meaningful foods.

For two years, students and faculty are collecting the oral histories of community members in the southeastern United States and Appalachia who are preserving their agricultural, culinary, and medicinal traditions. Oral history is a natural vehicle for these stories. For centuries, most Black Americans were denied learning to read or write, and passed information through the spoken word instead.

The HGP is not a traditional research project, says Hanna Garth, an assistant professor of anthropology at Princeton and a principal investigator with the group. It publishes the memories as raw transcripts rather than presenting them through an academic lens. “It’s how [the subjects] see their own lives,” she explains, “rather than someone from the outside reflecting on how we might see their lives.”

The transcripts are housed in an easily accessible public archive. Researchers hope the knowledge they contain will be used in various ways—for example, to create a community garden with culturally significant plants, to further explore people’s experiences, or to dig deeper into issues related to land access, gardening, farming, and food access and sovereignty.

The HGP grew out of the pandemic’s early days, when Ujamaa, a collective of heirloom seed growers, held a Zoom series with grandmothers discussing their culinary memories—including what their own grandmothers ate and grew in their gardens.

Garth and Desmond, a research scholar at Princeton and an Ujamaa board member, and HGP’s other principal investigator, then won a two-year grant from Princeton to develop the project. Once 150 interviews have been completed, Ujamaa members will be trained to continue the work and to expand its geographic reach.

Ujamaa is also tracking down the seeds mentioned in the interviews so it can provide them to farmers for growing more seeds. Seed farming offers farmers an additional revenue stream with a lighter lift than market farming, with less field time, lower seed costs, if any, and a ready market as demand for seeds outstrips supply.

If a farmer can become established as a grower of certain types of seeds, larger seed companies are more likely to contract with them to provide those seeds to a wider market. Ujamaa’s mission is to cultivate and create agency for BIPOC farmers and give their communities easy access to the foods important to them.

Civil Eats recently spoke to two of HGP’s key figures, Ujamaa  co-founder Bonnetta Adeeb and Desmond, about how HGP democratizes seed collection and knowledge-sharing while supporting diversity in the seed industry. We’ve included audio samples of oral histories from the project.

How do you decide what is a culturally meaningful food?

Adeeb: During COVID, when we lost so many seniors, we were hustling to interview elders about what was culturally meaningful. They would talk about what was in their grandmothers’, their ancestors’ gardens, what was important. What did they eat? What was medicinal? What exactly was being grown there? For about nine months, we [asked these questions] across the diaspora. We gathered this data. It was grandma approved, so our authority comes from the elders. This work is central to who we are and to having the authority to answer the question, What is culturally meaningful.

What does it mean when culturally important plants are lost?

Adeeb: African American history is being outlawed in Florida’s public schools. That knowledge is power. It’s super important [to others] to take that power, that knowledge, away, because without it, you don’t realize the strength on whose shoulders you stand.

Recently in Baltimore, there was a USDA person telling Black farmers that cowpeas were not safe for human consumption. We’re talking about black-eyed peas, one of the most important foods. It’s incumbent on us to reclaim that.

Civilization is built on the back of successful agriculture. We’re reclaiming that tradition, honoring our ancestors. Agriculture is culture. And how could you not feel better about yourself when you realize the genius of your ancestors? It was their I     ndigenous knowledge that created the benefits we have. As we celebrate them, we celebrate ourselves. It builds pride, strength, and courage, and enables us to fight another day because we ate a good meal.

Ujamaa, a Swahili word which means cooperative economics, wants to increase diversity in the seed industry and bridge the gap between prospective growers and seed companies. How will the oral history project support that? 

Adeeb: There was a loss of farmland, farm traditions, knowledge, and skills being passed from one generation to the other due to migration. A lot of our work is restoring the basic knowledge and traditions. We’d like to take that further and look at the Indigenous seed-keeping skills and technologies that develop the ‘crops’ we have today. That’s an important part of our work.

The industry is consolidating. We need to develop seed companies like ours that focus on the foods that are important to [our] communities. Who better than the farmers themselves to grow what’s culturally meaningful for them?

A lot of Black and Indigenous farmers are working full-time jobs and farming on weekends and at night. Growing heirloom varieties—seeds that reproduce like their grandparents, otherwise, we’re not eating the food of our ancestors—will create revenue and give our growers a way to hold on to their farms and increase their control.

Desmond: People have known that knowledge is valuable for a very long time, but it has been systematically diminished. Some of the most exciting stuff happening in the urban local regional food system is led by people of color. Ancestral knowledge is with the people who stayed in the rural areas who are aging out.

We want [other growers] to know how Miss Birdie May from Farmville, North Carolina, developed this really awesome system when her collards go to seed. That’s how the oral history project is growing BIPOC growers, acting as a bridge across this huge geographical divide that is the product of the Great Migration and aggravated by that history.

It sounds like the stories themselves are like seeds, germinating new information and understanding.

Adeeb: We’ve found seeds bred by incarcerated people. How could you not want to follow that story? Boleiti collard is one. I recently heard about the boleiti being important to the Lumbee [Tribe of North Carolina], who have made these delicious collard greens sandwiches out of it. That got me really excited. Even the industrial prison complex recognizes skills within the community. They knew these foods were important.

Desmond: Some might think, “Oh, this was bred in a jail. How horrible.” Then you meet the teacher of the horticulture class, and he had incredible pride. The way he tells it, folks are excited to work and be on the farm and out of their cells. They’re expressing a real creativity in plant selection are proud of the variety that they’ve developed over time. They sent collard greens to the governor’s mansion, [which] were served at a meal. …the seeds offer opportunities to find these stories, get really deep into the details, and humanize everybody involved.

Voices From the Gardens

Excerpts and audio snippets from the Heirloom Gardens Oral History Project. Text transcripts have been lightly edited for clarity.

Eulalia Williams, Farmville, North Carolina
Founder of the Farmville Community Garden. Raised in Farmville and Compton, California.

I would follow Granddaddy out to the garden that was plowed by the mule. We plant corn, plant fish heads under the corn. My mother would go out with the saltshaker in the morning and we’d pick tomatoes and eat those. We would harvest things in the morning, prepare them, and they’d be on the table for 3 o’clock. It was comforting to me. I wanted it and fresh vegetables again. That’s what got me into community gardening. It wasn’t community gardening—it was backyard gardening. Everyone had one.

But when I came back [to Farmville] in 2014, there were none. It’s like, “Wait a minute. We used to grow our own food here. We didn’t have to go to the grocery store.”

I hope the [community] garden encourages people to realize that you are what you eat. They have control over that. They don’t have to just settle for what can be found in the grocery store. Take that control and use it to grow up bigger, stronger, and help other people. We can do a revolution here. We can make a difference.

Vivian Fields, Farmville, North Carolina
Lifetime resident and longtime gardener.

It wasn’t integrated at the time, so we grew up hard in Farmville. We couldn’t hardly come across Main Street without being with the white. We fought all the time.

We always had to come to the north side to get groceries and everything. We didn’t have much money, so we all were raised on garden food and stuff. Whatever we didn’t have, we had to go to the white man and ask for it. If he didn’t OK it, we didn’t get it. I thought that was very wrong because we all were supposed to be equal.

On my side, we had chicken, hogs, turkey, and the hogs had barbecued pork and all of that. Collards and cabbages, potatoes, white potatoes, squash, and black-eyed peas was coming from the garden, so we had plenty of that.

That’s the only thing we ate was garden food. We very seldom [went] to the store and bought anything unless it was milk and bread.

Jennifer Kanyamibwa, Atlanta, Georgia
Co-founder of Plant Lady Juice Co. Born in Rwanda.

I think whether directly or indirectly, especially if you’re a Black farmer, you’re coming from a tradition where this is something that has been passed on. Growing things is the most human thing you can do. If you go throughout Africa, you see how people use herbs and food as medicine and as celebration. It is something that’s so intrinsically African and Black and Indigenous about growing your own vegetables and plants.

A lot of the farmers we work with are very, very committed to growing things that are natural to the surrounding environment and have a lineage and a thread to things you can trace back to Africa.

Folami Harris, Covington, Georgia
Woman farmer who grows vegetables and fruits that complement African cuisines. Raised in Kingston, Jamaica.

How do I grow things that bring us back to our roots? Because it’s more than just the taste. It’s also the memories and the possibilities for intercultural connections.

Everywhere I’ve gone, I’ve been a kidnapper of seeds. There were always seeds in my luggage that I hoped Immigration would never uncover. I was always intrigued by how we took food from one place to another and how we use them differently. We never ate sweet potato leaves, but in Africa, they were interested in the sweet potato leaves. Food, its history, and the diverse ways in which we use it are very intriguing to me.

It’s my hope that as we are able to boost production, we are able to create a more vibrant impact on what everybody eats, because it will be of interest to everyone, but first and foremost to us, and maybe it will revive interest in African diaspora cuisines. When we started, there was no “High on the Hog,” no “Searching for Soul Food.” When I watch that stuff, I’m so happy.

Emmanuel Fields, Frankfort, Kentucky
His grandmother’s sharecropping experience made him turn away from a connection to agriculture and community. Creating a Master’s thesis documentary about the Kentucky’s Black farmers transformed him into a seeker of stories and steward of the land.

Once I started the documentary, everything changed for me. It was not just to show and shed light on stories of inequalities, but to show essentially an amazing triumph. I learned [that] our history here, especially with growing things, is not completely wrapped up in slavery, in negative mindsets, or ways that are meant to attack and push you down.

Instead, those same things are used for triumph . . . and to show you exactly how strong you are and what you’re capable of doing.It rewrote a lot of things that I had solidified in my own head about my own history, my people’s histories. A new narrative has changed a lot of the way I see and move through the world.

These are things I can attribute to being completely centered around food and farming. If I can have a positive impact on one person who could be struggling like I was at one point with a lot of deep generational racial trauma and things that are passed down, I feel I would have helped.

Tiffany Bellfield El-Amin, Madison County, Kentucky
A third-generation farmer who stewards her grandparents’ land at Ballew Estates, where she was raised.

Grandma would have napkins—pawpaw tubes just full of seeds—from where we had brought stuff off our farm to eat, slices of tomatoes or cucumber. They would save the seeds in a napkin, come home, dry them out. That’s what you’re supposed to do after you eat the fruit: Take the seed and do it again. There would be a countertop full of seeds, cantaloupe, melons, watermelon. They were efficient people. I was born in ‘84, but I grew up with this lifestyle of, “You want watermelon, you better grow it.”

I feel like [my grandma] was like a botanist. She would make these tomatoes. They were juicy. Sometimes they’d get so big they’re mushy, but they were good. She would save those seeds and keep growing those.

This is the first time in a while where I’ve sat and thought, “You really ain’t got no seeds of your grandma’s.” They had all dried out. I have to cultivate something that produces seeds, so my grandchildren, godchildren, and kids can keep that going, because it’s so important.

The post Oral History Project Preserves Black and Indigenous Food Traditions appeared first on Civil Eats.

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On Instagram, urban farmers and gardeners began to express anger and frustration. Some commented on media company posts; others posted their own critiques. In February, students at the University of Michigan, where the study was conducted, organized a letter to the researchers pointing out issues with the study.

The issue most cited across critiques was simple: When urban farms were separated from community gardens in the study, the higher rate of greenhouse gas emissions reported essentially disappeared.

Now, two months later, national advocates for the multi-faceted benefits of growing food and green spaces in cities are working to counter what they see as harmful narratives created by a study they say had design flaws to begin with and was then poorly communicated to the public. Of special concern is funding for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) fledgling Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production, which Congress has been shorting since it was established. A coalition of groups have been pushing to change that in the upcoming farm bill.

“We hope the damage isn’t already done, but we fear that publicity around this paper will minimize the advocacy of urban farmers and partners over the past many years and possibly undermine the continued and necessary investment in urban agricultural communities,” reads a letter sent to the study authors by Michigan Food and Farming Systems, the Organic Farming Research Foundation, Pasa Sustainable Agriculture, and the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association.

Their overall critiques of the study start with the sample set of “urban farms.”

In a conversation with Civil Eats, lead author Jason Hawes, a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan, said this his team compiled “the largest data set that we know of” on urban farming. It included 73 urban farms, community gardens, and individual garden sites in Europe and the United States. At each of those sites, the research team worked with farmers and gardeners to collect data on the infrastructure, daily supplies used, irrigation, harvest amounts, and social goods.

That data was then used to calculate the carbon emissions embodied in the production of food at each site and those emissions were compared to carbon emissions of the same foods produced at “conventional” farms. Overall, they found greenhouse gas emissions were six times higher at the urban sites—and that’s the conclusion the study led with.

But not only is 73 a tiny number compared to the data that exists on conventional production agriculture, said Omanjana Goswami, an interdisciplinary scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), but lumping community gardens in with urban farms set up for commercial production and then comparing that to a rural system that has been highly tuned and financed for commercial production for centuries doesn’t make sense.

“It’s almost like comparing apples to oranges,” she said. “The community garden is not set up to maximize production.”

In fact, the sample set was heavily tilted toward community and individual gardens and away from urban farms. In New York City, for example, the only U.S. city represented, seven community gardens run by AmeriCorps were included. Brooklyn Grange’s massive rooftop farms—which on a few acres produce more than 100,000 pounds of produce for markets, wholesale buyers, CSAs, and the city’s largest convention center each year—were not.

And what the study found was that when the small group of urban farms were disaggregated from the gardens, those farms were “statistically indistinguishable from conventional farms” on emissions. Aside from one high-emission outlier, the urban farms were carbon-competitive.

“They call out the fact that that tiny sample of seven urban farms that are actually production-focused, competitive with conventional agriculture, but that one line just got buried,” said Hannah Quigley, a policy specialist at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC). This aspect was especially frustrating to urban farming advocates because, as the groups who sent the letter point out, one of their biggest challenges in working with policymakers in D.C. is to get them to “regard urban farming as farming.”

Hawes said he found the critiques around lumping community gardens and urban farms together “reasonable” but that he stood by the method. He hadn’t considered including backyard gardens in rural areas in the sample, he said, even though city gardens were. “We were not necessarily attempting to compare urban and rural food production,” he said. “In fact, we chose to use the word conventional specifically because it pointed to the sort of ‘conventional food supply chain,’ which is often what urban agriculture producers are attempting to intervene in.”

Not only did taking the community gardens out of the picture change the emissions results, the researchers also found that 63 percent of carbon emissions at all of the sites came not from daily inputs or lack of crop efficiency but from infrastructure, such as building raised beds and trucking in soil. But using recycled materials for infrastructure cut those emissions so much, that if all the sites had done so, that would have been enough for them to close the gap and be competitive with conventional agriculture on greenhouse gas emissions.

“That problem can of course be solved by upfront funding,” said Goswami. “Then, bingo, according to the authors, you have systems with very comparable climate metrics.”

Overall, Hawes said he did regret some of the ways media coverage framed the study’s results but that he didn’t feel the framing of the study itself was problematic. “In my opinion, the most important sustainability challenge of our time is climate change, and if we’re gonna talk about sustainability in the context of urban agriculture, we have to talk about carbon emissions,” he said.

However, while climate scientists and sustainable agriculture advocates agree that addressing the food system’s 22 percent contribution to global greenhouse emissions is critical to meeting climate goals, whether carrots are grown in gardens in Detroit and Atlanta or only on huge commercial farms in the Salinas Valley (or both) won’t likely be a deciding factor.

At an event to kick off a new focus on food and agriculture last week, Project Drawdown launched a new series that will focus on food system solutions to climate change. There, Executive Director Jonathan Foley pointed out that the vast majority of food system emissions come from a few big sources: meat and dairy production, deforestation and other land use change (a large portion of which is linked to animal agriculture), and food waste.

As Goswami at UCS noted, that broader context is essential. “The authors . . . don’t at all zoom out to compare this to agriculture’s broader footprint,” she said, so even if there weren’t clear climate benefits to urban farming—which many say the study didn’t clearly conclude—prioritizing other benefits of growing things in cities might still make more sense. Especially given the climate resilience built into decentralizing and diversifying the food system.

Land use is particularly interesting, Quigley at NSAC said, because city farmers and gardeners often reclaim spaces that might otherwise be paved over and developed, adding carbon-holding trees and plants. “Folks who are maintaining community gardens and green spaces in cities to help with water run-off and urban heat island effect providing safe places for community gatherings . . . these are probably people that would be very concerned with their climate impact,” she said. “Can you imagine if they’re gonna be like, ‘Oh my god, should I not be gardening?’”

While NSAC did not sign on to the initial letter sent by the coalition of groups, Quigley is working with those farm groups and the members have since talked to Hawes. Disagreements on the study framing still abound, but they’re now working together on policy briefs that will be available to lawmakers if the farm bill process ever picks up again and conversations around funding urban farms are once again on the (picnic) table.

“Ultimately, one of the motivations behind this study was the fact that urban agriculture is largely discussed as a really useful sustainability intervention, and this study does not take away from that conclusion,” Hawes said. “I also think that to the degree that this starts conversations about the availability of resources for urban agriculture and the support that is available to urban farmers and gardeners for creating low-carbon solutions—I’m happy with that.”

Read More:
Congress Puts Federal Support for Urban Farming on the Chopping Block
Urban Farms Are Stepping Up Their Roles in Communities Nationwide
The IPCC’s Latest Climate Report Is a Final Alarm for Food Systems, Too

Supply Chain Impacts of the Key Bridge Collapse. One of the most iconic elements of Baltimore’s harbor is the illuminated Domino Sugar sign, below which the sweet stuff can often be seen piled high on massive ships. Now, the sugar refinery is one of many food and agriculture companies that will likely be impacted by last week’s collapse of the Key Bridge, which shut down the shipping channel that leads to the city’s busy port. The port also handles imports and exports of commodity grains, coffee, and farm equipment. On Friday, representatives from the White House and USDA met with more than a dozen farm and food stakeholders including the American Farm Bureau Federation, the American Sugar Alliance, and Perdue Farms to discuss impacts on the industry. On Sunday, officials announced they are working on opening a temporary alternate shipping channel to get the port back open while the clean-up of the bridge and the stranded ship continues.

Read More:
Walmart’s Pandemic Port Squeeze
The Last Front to Save the ‘Most Important Fish’ in the Atlantic

Climate-Friendly Rice. “My dad taught me to continuously flood a rice field. If you saw dry ground in a rice field, you were in trouble,” said fifth-generation Arkansas farmer Jim Whittaker at a USDA event last week. Now, Whittaker practices a technique that alternates his rice fields between wet and dry, a system he said has cut water use and methane emissions in those fields by 50 percent. Whittaker is one of 30 farmers whose rice is now available in a two-pound bag sold by Great River Milling. It’s the first product to officially hit the market as a result of funding from the USDA’s $3 billion Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities project, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said at the end, holding up one of those bags. And the debut comes at a time when some lawmakers and environmental groups are lobbing criticism at the agency over its broadening definition of “climate-smart.”

Read More:
Could Changing the Way We Farm Rice Be a Climate Solution?
The USDA Plan to Better Measure Agriculture’s Impact on the Climate Crisis

Slaughterhouse Rulemaking. More than 800 comments were submitted before the comment period on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) contentious proposal to increase the regulation of water pollution from meat processing facilities closed last week. On one side of the issue, 45 environmental, community, and animal welfare organizations joined together to make a case for the most restrictive set of regulations proposed, arguing that the weakest option, which EPA has said it prefers, is “inconsistent with federal law.” “We call on the EPA to rise above Big Ag’s push to weaken this plan to reduce harms from the millions of gallons of pollution slaughterhouses and animal-rendering plants are spewing into our waterways,” said Hannah Connor, deputy director of environmental health at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a press release. Meanwhile, farm and meat industry groups including the Iowa Farm Bureau and the Meat Institute filed multiple sets of comments asking for an extension of the comment period and arguing for additional flexibilities to even the least restrictive regulatory framework proposed.

Read More:
Should a Plan to Curb Meat Industry Pollution Consider the Business Costs?
EPA to Revise Outdated Water Pollution Standards for Slaughterhouses

The post Despite Recent Headlines, Urban Farming Is Not a Climate Villain appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/04/03/despite-recent-headlines-urban-farming-is-not-a-climate-villain/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2024/01/09/a-ted-talk-put-ron-finley-on-the-map-10-years-later-the-gangsta-gardener-is-going-strong/ https://civileats.com/2024/01/09/a-ted-talk-put-ron-finley-on-the-map-10-years-later-the-gangsta-gardener-is-going-strong/#comments Tue, 09 Jan 2024 09:00:34 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=54937 Finley has become famous for planting avocados, bananas, mangoes, and sugar cane in and behind his house in a spot where there was once an Olympic-sized swimming pool and making it available to community members in exchange for small donations. He organized against regulation that prevented Angelenos from curbside gardening, and went on to launch […]

The post A TED Talk Put Ron Finley on the Map. 10 Years Later, the ‘Gangsta Gardener’ Is Going Strong. appeared first on Civil Eats.

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It has been 10 years since Ron Finley, the “Gangsta Gardener,” changed the trajectory of his life with a TED Talk about food apartheid in his community, South Central Los Angeles. The talk has been viewed nearly 5 million times since then, and one of its most memorable lines—“Growing your own food is like printing your own money”—has since become the seed of Finley’s burgeoning philanthropic work.

Finley has become famous for planting avocados, bananas, mangoes, and sugar cane in and behind his house in a spot where there was once an Olympic-sized swimming pool and making it available to community members in exchange for small donations.

“This all started because I needed some healthy food.”

He organized against regulation that prevented Angelenos from curbside gardening, and went on to launch a nonprofit, the Ron Finley Project. And yet he says he’s still amazed by the impact of the TED Talk and the number of doors it has opened for him and his work.

In recent years, Finley has become one of the most popular teachers in the online education series MasterClass, and he has been invited to speak in a wide range of far-flung places including Greece, Sweden, and Denmark. And in 2024, Finley and his staff will curate an art show called “Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice” at The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

“Who could plan it? Because I planted some food, I get to speak at Sheffield University in London,” Finley told Civil Eats. “The audience is not comprised of academics, so I bring this down so that everybody will understand. [People] don’t understand how big a compliment it is to me when I get told that me being real is what resonates.”

A Campaign to ‘Plant Some Money’

In late 2022, Finley collaborated with the national advertising company BBDO on a short promotional film, “Plant Some Money,” about gardening as a solution to food apartheid. The film, which was awarded a Bronze Lion award at the 2023 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, captured a day when Finley and dozens of advocates marched three miles from the Anacostia Park to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The distance marks the average stretch that those living in economically marginalized U.S. communities must travel to access fresh produce.

Following the march, Finley planting seeds attached to paper “money” printed especially for the event outside of the Federal Reserve. The bills had the Gangsta Gardener’s face on them and included the total value of the produce that could be grown with the seeds: $20 worth of rainbow carrots, $25 of arugula, $100 of collard greens, and $150 of cherry tomatoes.

In addition to the march and the short film, the Ron Finley Project has been offering folks who live in food deserts a chance to sign up for a free starter gardener kit that includes the bills with seeds attached and instructions on how to plant them. Since March 2023, the campaign has distributed more than 2,000 bills around the U.S. and beyond. And while it’s hard to say how many of those seeds were planted, the Ron Finley Project estimates the produce that they yielded could add up to $290,000 saved on produce.

“We hope that the people struggling to have access to fresh produce across the country can get inspired by Ron and start growing their own food not only as a means of sustenance but also as a form of protest against a system that perpetuates food inequality,” added Rafael Gonzaga, BBDO LA’s executive creative director.

A Web of Projects and Impacts

While seated on a bench inside his Los Angeles farm, Finley reflected recently on his journey with a combination of swagger and humility.

Finley, a father of three, grew up in South Central and has worked as a fashion designer on and off for years. According to Vogue, he designed clothes for Will Smith, among other L.A. celebrities and launched a brand of his own in the early 2000s. But he turned to gardening when his career hit a rocky period. “This all started because I needed some healthy food,” he said.

Now, educators often turn to Finley for inspiration. Take Hailey Wolfe, a kindergarten teacher at Vollentine Optional Elementary School, in North Memphis, Tennessee. The school is the alma mater of rapper Juicy J and not known for its test scores or affluence. In the last year, however, Wolfe and her class have garnered statewide attention for an urban gardening-focused curriculum that she developed based on Finley’s work and introduced to her class during Black History Month.

“The goal was to teach a lesson on plants and animals—super redundant and boring,” Wolfe said. “I wanted to find a newer, relevant person who was changing the world of gardening. Our art teacher told me about Ron, and I reached out [on social media]. He was ready to help.”

Wolfe began learning about Finley’s gospel on gardening over the phone. Then he made appearances in her classroom virtually and his team sent seeds to her classroom.

“If you’re living in a food desert, you just have the corner store,” Wolfe said. “I would have to tell them [to eat] just one bag of Takis, not two. But once they started learning about Ron, they were excited about growing arugula, tomatoes, and kale. The parents even started wanting their own plants and my fruit salad recipe. . . . The main thing we’ve learned from Ron is that you don’t have to be a gardener. You can just [focus on accessing nutritious food] for your community and for yourself.”

Self-reliance is a key part of what Finley seeks to impart. He has often set his own rules and brings a sense of optimism to everything he does. Training children to see themselves and the world differently is an essential part of that work.

“We’re able to be adaptive and react to the crisis and individual needs,” said Margee Green, a fruit tree farmer and the nonprofit’s executive director. “Everybody pulls together whatever resources.”

Historically, the crises they’ve responded to have almost always been hurricanes. But this year, Louisiana experienced overlapping climate disasters: the largest wildfire in the state’s history, record-breaking temperatures, and a developing crisis of saltwater intrusion moving from the Gulf of Mexico up the Mississippi River due to historically low water levels. While most of New Orleans will likely be spared, the salt water intrusion issue is not going away.

“It has been a really rude awakening of our understanding of our capacity, and we are stepping up,” said Green.

She has seen nearly half of her orchard wither in this year’s heat, but she’s most concerned about other farmers—who operate on thin margins and depend on growing crops to make a living. It has been so hot that seeds have failed to germinate, and farmers have had to dig wells for the first time.

Sprout NOLA fills in a critical gap, mainly working with the farmers who tend to be left out of government-level disaster support services. They range from small-scale farmers in New Orleans to LGBTQ and BIPOC farmers throughout the state and most lack crop insurance.

Civil Eats spoke with Sprout NOLA’s Mina Seck and Green about establishing new protocols, helping farmers navigate the new normal, and how the organization is preparing the region’s farms for an increasingly volatile climate future.

How has this season been different for you with the wildfires and heat? How has it affected farmers that you work with? 

Mina Seck: This summer, the heat broke records and was just absolutely abnormal. But I’m really feeling the effects of the lack of rain. Usually summers are really hot, but we get a lot of rain. We’d get those afternoon rains and the clouds would roll out—clouds really matter. Your soils were not being directly pounded by the sun. The drought really, really was rough.

In the community garden where we grow our food, we plant cover crops every July and August anyway. It’s a standard thing we do [because] it’s too hot to grow food in the summer. The heat has affected being able to start production in September though, and that’s what’s scary. We do food systems work. We want to be able to grow food for people. The soils were just so dry, even with the cover cropping. It was hard to keep them slightly moist, even covering them with banana leaves.

Being able to get seeds to germinate with the heat and lack of water has been an issue that I’ve seen farmers come up against. The soil in New Orleans, and in other parts of Louisiana, doesn’t retain much water.

We’re figuring out how to move through heat and drought as a [new form of] disaster this year and in coming years. We reached out to some funders to see if it would be possible to offer farmers help mitigating this part of the climate disaster, whether through digging wells or [buying] shade cloth. We were able to offer micogrants.

And we’re in the planning stages of hosting a climate gathering in January. I’m really excited about that. It’s going to be a space where we offer technical assistance to farmers, growers, and community members about what to do in the heat.

How could saltwater intrusion potentially impact farmers in Louisiana?

Seck: We’re still waiting to see what happens. We’re working in partnership with Louisiana State University’s AgCenter and other organizations to keep up to date. When salinity reaches a high level, it can affect farmers and urban growers as plants may not survive, but it’s still a developing situation. Mulching, reverse osmosis, and injecting water with sulfur or sulfuric acid are some ways farmers can try to deal with it. We can offer folks tips and tricks on how to handle high levels of salinity as it pertains to growing. We’re planning a saltwater townhall meeting with LSU ag experts.

McDurly and other volunteers in this primarily African American community have spent many weekends planting seeds and tending crops in the park’s community garden, established in 2020 by Black Star Farmers, a local activist group fighting for land and food sovereignty.

But in July 2021, McDurly stumbled upon an unexpected scene during her routine walk: the garden had been bulldozed. Together with its police and parks departments, the City of Seattle had violently leveled the vibrant and inclusive garden that had nourished food- and nutrition-insecure residents.

For McDurly, the loss was part of the larger pattern of gentrification and displacement of Black residents she has witnessed in recent years. She also felt frustrated by the city’s sabotage of residents’ efforts at food sovereignty.

“Every time our community tries to foster opportunities to feed ourselves and communities like ours across the city, the city take [opportunities] away from us,” McDurly said.

Funded by a diverse range of city funds and donations from local organizations, Jimi Hendrix Park was built in December 2011 to be an inclusive green gathering place, as well as a “primary focal point for multicultural events, gatherings, and activities for the community.”

Before the farm’s destruction, it was healthy and thriving, yielding lettuce, cucumbers, squash, zucchini, and other foods. Black Star founder Marcus Henderson noted that the purpose of the farm (like the other Black Star-run farms across Seattle) was to help create self-sufficient communities and address the food insecurity experienced by communities of color in the Seattle area.

Henderson had hoped that the farm would be able to provide consistent yields of food to donate to local organizations for further dissemination to members of the community. “We really need to create more opportunities for folks to be able to grow food on the land,” Henderson said in a July 2021 Seattle Emerald article.

As egregious and disheartening as the upending of Jimi Hendrix Park may seem, the removal and/or threatening of Black-run or owned community gardens by local city agencies is unfortunately not new.

Up until 2013, many Black residents in Detroit were not able to cultivate food for their communities due to urban agriculture ordinances and zoning laws that prevented residents from operating urban farms on public city-owned land.

In Baltimore, urban agriculture is permitted on city-leased land. But that land is also in demand. Cherry Hill Urban Community Garden, a 1.5-acre urban farm managed by the Black Yield Institute (BYI) on city-leased land, received an eviction notice in spring 2021. Baltimore City, which had proposed building affordable housing units on the land that houses the community garden, notified BYI of its imminent removal by the end of 2021.

Many community members and researchers believe, however, that affordable housing units and community gardens can co-exist as they do in other sites throughout the U.S. They see the recent events as yet another example of African American communities bearing the burden of inequitable urban policy that has historically and disproportionately robbed Black people of opportunities to thrive.

Indeed, incidences like those in Seattle, Detroit, and Baltimore are a part of a larger pattern, one that is rooted in racist and inequitable systems that have prevented African Americans from fair participation in our country’s economic system and from accessing healthy, affordable foods.

Since Union Army Major General Gordon Granger announced the freedom of enslaved African Americans in Galveston, Texas, in 1865, our country has not made enough progress on the disproportionate obstacles facing Black people related to food security, access, and sovereignty.

And while African Americans in our country have in many instances been released from the physical shackles and bondage that our ancestors once endured (aside from mass incarceration), we still all to some extent endure the social, economic, and mental shackles that the Atlantic slave trade imprinted on generations of our families.

Although what is required to right the wrongs of the past and prevent future inequities can feel daunting, there are some things we can do now to make strides in ensuring equitable food systems for all.

First, deviating from the recent Supreme Court case rejecting affirmative action in college admissions, we must make sure that we include race as an indicator in data tools that assist all levels of government in the allocation of money to communities. There has been a wealth of concern from the public and government advisory councils that current models will continue to perpetuate the inequities and injustices that have caused communities to live with food insecurity.

Secondly, we must revisit “40 acres and a mule”—the land promised to formerly enslaved African Americans, which many experts have evaluated at $6.4 trillion. Many scholars and members of the community agree that land is wealth, and the historical withholding and stealing of land from African Americans has contributed to the disproportionate lack of land we have today on which to grow food, both at local and industrial scales. It has also hindered Black people’s ability to fairly participate in the food supply chain, as well as real estate and trade.

To help address these historical injustices, the federal government and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) should develop a community and research task force to analyze and report on how much land was taken from African Americans due to unjust land ownership policies. The USDA should then call on Congress to pass legislation that will give the USDA, partner federal agencies, local governments, and communities the authority to develop programs that offer reparations to historically burdened communities in the form of land, to be used for agriculture and other wealth-generating activities like real estate.

Third, in many cases, community gardens that are operated by Black-led organizations, like BYI in Baltimore, should be allowed to purchase publicly owned land by way of local “lease-to-own” programs , which would increase the sustainability and fostering of long-term gardens. It would also improve communities’ ability to create food sources and hubs they can rely on to obtain fresh, nutritious, and affordable foods—foods that have become inaccessible because of inadequate public transit systems and rising supermarket prices.

Lastly, the 2023 Farm Bill must be focused on advancing racial equity, especially for Black farmers, who have historically been excluded from participating in the industry via inequitable government policies. USDA must include provisions in the bill that ensure improved funding access for Black farmers, as well as increased opportunities for training and development programs to help develop the next generation.

In addition, the farm bill must require the reporting of data that sheds light on the demographics of funding recipients. This will allow for more transparency in the loan allocation process and help ensure that Black farmers are able to obtain a fair chance at federal funding opportunities. It will also highlight inequities in the lending process that need to be addressed.

We must ensure that communities—like those near Jimi Hendrix Park in Central Seattle—are driving programs aimed at increasing the accessibility and affordability of fresh and nutritious foods. We must create laws and policies that amplify community voices, that are responsive to community needs, that are transparent in their reporting of data, loan, and award allocation, and that ensure equitable access to training and development programs.

While our country has made great strides to ensure the “freedom” for all people, regardless of race and socioeconomic status, there is still a wealth of progress to be made. But I believe that land access and health disparities disproportionately experienced by those in Black communities can be addressed with deep and genuine systemic change.

I am convinced that we can work together, across the aisle, to find new and innovative ways to ensure that everyone—in every American city and town—has a fair chance at life, and at eating well. And I’m hopeful we can dream big and work together toward a future that is more equitable and inclusive, and that ensures food sovereignty for all.

The post Op-ed: 4 Solutions to Make Urban Ag Policies More Equitable appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2023/09/05/the-organic-urban-farm-growing-healthy-food-for-one-of-chicagos-most-underserved-neighborhoods/ Tue, 05 Sep 2023 08:00:20 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=53255 A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox. But when Janelle St. John accepted a development role at the farm four years ago, her insight, combined with the need to respond to food insecurity during the […]

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]]> A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox.

But when Janelle St. John accepted a development role at the farm four years ago, her insight, combined with the need to respond to food insecurity during the pandemic, led to a dramatic shift in the distribution of the farm’s harvest.

Today, as much as three-quarters of Growing Home’s 150 varieties of vegetables and herbs is delivered to its neighbors. Despite the new distribution strategy, St. John, now the farm’s executive director, says Growing Home has increased its revenue and is eager to pursue development designed to deepen its engagement with the community and the city.

In the midst of a $19 million fundraising campaign, Growing Home is seeking to raise capital to build on an empty lot across the street from its seven hoop houses. To support both the farm’s bottom line and its mission, the project includes building a bigger space for preparing its harvest for distribution and delivery.

“Being the only USDA-certified organic farm [in the city], we are in a unique space where we can provide our community access to goods that they otherwise would have been priced out of,” St. John said.

But that’s not all: St. John wants more space for Growing Home’s workforce development and computer training programs, which currently are housed in two trailers. She also envisions a farm store, café, and kitchen to provide more learning opportunities for trainees, as well as space to host activities to engage the community. “That’s the future of Growing Home,” she says.

The Deep Roots of Growing Home

After conversations with city officials, Growing Home’s farming and training operations moved in 2006 to Englewood, a residential community on the city’s South side. Raised concrete beds laid with 2 feet of compost successfully transformed the vacant lot into farmland.

Four times a year, about 20 trainees learn the tools and techniques of production-scale urban farming. They also gain job readiness skills and get opportunities to earn professional certifications that have led to careers in the city’s food production and hospitality industries.

LaQuandra Fair is one of Growing Home’s success stories. After six years in the Marine Corps and a few jobs in retail and hospitality, Fair still was searching for the right opportunity when her daughter brought home from school a flyer advertising an event at Growing Home. It reminded Fair of her family’s history of gardening. “My grandmother always grew her own greens in her backyard,” Fair recalls.

That visit led to Fair participating in Growing Home’s workforce development program in 2016 and later joining the Growing Home team as community engagement coordinator. Using the experience she gained transforming radishes, kale, and eggplant into healthful meals that can be recreated at home by Growing Home shoppers, Fair launched LaFairs Fresh Bites, a farm-to-table catering business, this summer.

“It’s very fulfilling to share my love for cooking and recipes with the community,” Fair says. “I use vegetables that I grew up eating and cooking, but now I have several healthier ways to prepare them.”

Making Fresh Food Work for All People

“It was perceived as, ‘Oh, [fresh produce is] for those foodie people, or those earthy people, or those vegan people,’ and not as a necessity for communities, or a source of revenue for communities, or an option for grocery shopping,” St. John says.

Upon the resignation of Growing Home’s founding executive director in 2019, the board selected as replacement Danielle K. Perry, a special advisor in the U.S. Department of Agriculture Office of Civil Rights under the Obama administration, who had led a community and school garden initiative in food-insecure communities around the country, including Englewood.

Two months later, Growing Home brought in St. John as chief fund development and communications officer. For these new leaders, stability and sustainability started with developing a food access plan that included serving the community.

“In 2019, 80 percent of our food was leaving Englewood, and Danielle was like, ‘How is that possible?’” St. John said. “So we made a strategic decision together that we were going to commit to no less than 50 percent of the food we grow [remaining] in Englewood. When COVID happened, we were able to distribute almost 100 percent of it in Englewood.”

Through a CSA program launched during COVID lockdowns, the farm now delivers produce boxes to more than 200 families in the community.

Janice Gintzler, a retired teacher and community activist who had been coming to Growing Home for years, became one of the recipients of the farm’s local distribution strategy.

“During the pandemic, they came to my house and delivered what I asked for,” Gintzler recalls.

Under its new strategy, Growing Home still distributes some produce to markets in other communities, but the farm now has a partnership with the Greater Chicago Food Depository to provide produce for its food banks. It also serves several food pantries in Englewood. Additionally, the farm has partnered with medical researchers at the University of Illinois and a private health insurer to test an initiative that prescribes vegetables for patients as part of their treatment plans.

The farm has also created a learning garden to teach residents the science of gardening. And at its own onsite farmers’ market on Thursdays, residents can shop for produce, get recipe cards, and sample dishes created and prepared by Fair, who is also Growing Home’s resident chef.

Even as the most popular items include collard greens and traditional varieties of cabbage, the weekly food demonstrations encourage its shoppers to experiment. “Showing people how to take the food that is growing here and make it work for them and have a healthier option to eat [is part of our mission],” says T’Nerra Butler, Growing Home’s marketing and events coordinator.

During the pandemic, St. John also expanded the number of trainees from 50 to 80 production assistants each year by adding a fourth cohort just before the official planting season.

“The [production assistants in the February cohort] get a season ready with seedlings and planning what goes in the ground,” she says. “They are a unique group that gets to see another side of the business.”

The 12-week workforce development program came just in time for Andre Morgan, a production assistant during the farm’s February 2023 class.

“I literally lost my job three days prior to coming here and my girlfriend said, ‘Hey, you should check it out. It’s kind of like landscaping,’” Morgan recalls. “It’s pretty nice. . . . It kind of branches off from what I’m used to doing. I didn’t have the science, but I had the skills and the labor. They taught me a bunch of things that I didn’t know. Now when I put things in the ground, they don’t die.”

Three months after graduating, Morgan can be seen navigating a half-dozen storage coolers while engaging in lively conversations with shoppers as he manages Growing Home sales a few times a week at community farmers’ markets.

Engaging the Community—and Policymakers—with Urban Agriculture

“I’m a vegetable eater, but I don’t look like it,” Bunkley joked as she navigated her selections of green and cherry tomatoes, chard, kale, collard greens, and yellow squash. Bunkley says that she knew about the farm for about a year, but it was a postcard she received in the mail that finally brought her to the market.

It’s this type of engagement that will help Growing Home develop its connection to the community and its sustainability, says Illinois State Representative Sonya Harper. After working for a dozen years in broadcast journalism, Harper returned to Chicago and her home neighborhood in search of a new beginning.

She took on a series of roles at the intersection of community activism and politics, including serving as Growing Home’s marketing and outreach director. It was that role that gave Harper insights about engaging Englewood residents, which today drive her work in the Illinois legislature.

“When brand-new things come to the community, we’re used to them not being for us,” Harper recalls. She leveraged her communications skills to create a series of campaigns and community events to bring more neighbors to the farm and gain visibility with city leaders.

“When I came, I turned it up,” Harper recalls. “I don’t think they [had] ever put out a press release for any of their events.”

When residents elected Harper in 2015 to represent the community in the state legislature, Growing Home gained an advocate with the ability to sell the concept of urban agriculture to lawmakers accustomed only to representing the interests of large farming communities in southern Illinois.

“When I first got to the General Assembly, folks didn’t know what a food desert was,” Harper says. “They literally laughed at me. The concept of urban agriculture was such a joke to some people—especially the downstate legislators. They would say, ‘You mean backyard gardening?’”

Instead of laughing, Harper’s colleagues are now listening. In 2023, Harper was appointed chairperson of the Illinois House of Representatives’ Agriculture and Conservation Committee. In addition to the passage of several bills that have improved the landscape for local food production, Harper brought minority farmers to the Illinois capital in April for the state’s first Black Farmers and Growers Lobby Day.

St. John says that the farm needs more advocates like Harper in the legislature to achieve sustainability.

“Urban farming isn’t supported by the government. If we lose crops, there’s not a program that reimburses us to make sure that our farmers continue to get paid,” St. John says. “We are highly supported by our funders, foundations, and people who support our workforce development program.”

But the farm’s response to the immediate needs of the pandemic seems to have solidified its place in the city and in the future of agriculture in Chicago.

“COVID taught all of us that any community can become food insecure when your food has to travel [long distances],” St. John says, “I think that the city and the state, who have reached out to us many times, are in conversation about putting urban ag on the agenda seriously. Not as a, ‘Oh, let’s just do something for these people,’ I think they see the necessity of it.”

The post The Organic Urban Farm Growing Healthy Food for One of Chicago’s Most Underserved Neighborhoods appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2023/08/21/re-envisioning-new-york-citys-green-spaces-with-qiana-mickie/ Mon, 21 Aug 2023 08:00:55 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=52854 A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our award-winning members newsletter. To get the next issue in your inbox—and support our work—become a member today. She came across an opening for pruning and weeding school gardens and other green spaces across New York City’s five boroughs. She got the job. “I just […]

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]]> A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our award-winning members newsletter. To get the next issue in your inbox—and support our work—become a member today.

She came across an opening for pruning and weeding school gardens and other green spaces across New York City’s five boroughs. She got the job. “I just fell into it. That was really my first foray,” she said. This twist of luck soon grew into Mickie’s life work and passion. She went on to become a sought-after food systems practitioner and worked as executive director of Just Food, a nonprofit dedicated to shifting power by building community-driven food systems in the New York City region, from 2017 to 2020.

Mickie didn’t need to flip through a phone book for her latest job. Last September, Mayor Eric Adams appointed her to be the first director of New York City’s Office of Urban Agriculture. As she put it, she’s charged with “the unique challenge and privilege to try to build a bold, equitable, and innovative urban agriculture plan for New York City.” Mickie is excited about fostering more urban food systems that address the city’s sharp disparities by building living-wage jobs, sequestering carbon in the soil, and increasing access to healthy food.

And while Adams has pledged to make New York City a hub for “indoor ag tech,” Mickie is quick to emphasize the value of all forms of urban agriculture, from community gardens to growing food on rooftops. “People are starting to equate innovation in urban agriculture solely around one emerging sector, which is really not the case,” she said. “Innovation can be high-tech or low-tech.” She points to food forests—diverse, edible gardens that mirror natural ecosystems, free to harvest—as an example of innovation in soil-based urban farming that she’d like to further explore.

While the plan is due out in October, Mickie gave us a glimpse of what we can expect and described her broader vision for the future of growing food in New York City.

When did it crystallize for you that you wanted to focus on urban agriculture? 

When I was getting into work around food justice and getting community advocacy training from Just Food. I started to understand the history of urban agriculture in New York City and connecting that to thriving and social justice and community-based work. The idea of neighborhoods growing food where other folks had left, or creating spaces of respite, healing, and food very much inspired me. I realized it had to be part of the conversation about our food system and agriculture, but also [it shows] what we’re able to do when we get the resources and assets we deserve.

You’ve done a lot of work around food justice and environmental justice. How can urban agriculture bring justice to the food system?

I believe that urban agriculture can be a driver of equity—racial equity, economic equity, and environmental equity. In particular, I think it can effectively help us address critical climate health and food disparities. It also can help folks connect to a very localized source of food and their own community power.

Similar to other cities, in New York City our historic land stewards have been folks of color. Of course, we can go all the way back to the Lenape people and how they were growing for their communities, but even in our more contemporary history, it has been folks of color and low-income folks who have been growing in their neighborhoods. Whether it was guerilla-style or advocacy around acquiring land cooperatively, folks identified that they were going to live in their neighborhoods and feed themselves. Most of the time, they’re giving food to folks who need it the most, at its freshest peak, which is not necessarily what we see in food security models, where food is donated or dumped at the end of its lifecycle.

New York City has a long, vibrant history of neighborhoods and community folks sharing and growing with each other fresh, seasonal, culturally appropriate food. That work has happened in community gardens and in urban farms. And it’s continuing to happen even indoors and on rooftops. We’re continuing to see innovations in the landscape, not just different ways to grow food but also urban ag models that focus on carbon sequestration, flood mitigation, and other climate-resilient models.

What is your vision for the future of urban agriculture in New York City?

I’m looking at: How can the city increase its efforts to support access to and the production of local, fresh food? How do we minimize our contributions to the climate crisis? How do we spur economic activities through agriculture? I don’t have a capital budget, but how can I collaborate and ideate with lead agencies to move the needle on more capital-intensive initiatives where we are weaving in urban agriculture and equity?

We continue to see the increase in desire to expand native plants and seed production in our rain gardens. Folks continue to explore how to bring food forests or other forms of native, seasonal, regenerative practices into food production. We’re seeing an upsurge of folks growing food in controlled environments, including herbs, hearty vegetables, leafy greens, and mushrooms. We continue to see folks tending to the land to help work on soil remediation and reducing [atmospheric] carbon.

I want to see continued opportunities around urban agriculture, whether for free or for profit. For-profit doesn’t mean it has to be problematic profit. I want to find ways to continue to build pathways to economic opportunities for folks who have been historically disadvantaged, from policy to creating businesses to being able to buy land.

An immediate way that I’ve been working on that is by identifying local procurement opportunities within the city. For [food] the city purchases, how can some of that funding go to local growers? Are there pathways that can encourage folks to get their minority- and women-owned business certifications or other certifications to help them be more eligible for [procurement] contracts? We’re going to need new business license agreements that allow folks to tap into the city’s resources or start a business, whether cooperatively or their own structure.

The reality is we need funders, whether federal or private, that value historically disadvantaged folks getting into [urban agriculture]. I don’t believe in setting people up to fail. And I definitely don’t believe in setting people up in a pipeline that doesn’t go anywhere.

I’m also exploring how we can create learning gardens. School gardens tend to be insular, within school property, so there’s not a lot of community access. The learning garden approach is really about taking that concept into the community. One great example is the learning garden in Bergen Beach in District 22, under Superintendent [Julia] Bove. I’ve been learning from her process. It took her years to go from turning an underutilized lot into what will be in the next few years a 2-acre learning garden for the community and plethora of schools in her district. I will continue to look forward to learning how to replicate that in a way that’s relevant for other boroughs.

Could you explain further the changes in the business license agreements that you’re working on?

While the city has an estimated 550 to 1,000 community gardens, most urban agriculture in New York City has license agreements that regulate the operations of sweat-equity work. For some gardens, it’s an appropriate agreement that makes sense for them. The city is essentially taking on the burden of liability, while offering resources, soil, and equipment for [the gardeners]. All of their revenue goes back into the garden because those are common lands.

However, we see some folks who have a history of growing and would love to scale food to production. They want to scale beyond just feeding their immediate neighborhood community. I’m continuing to explore how the city can create new license agreements that would eliminate or at least minimize the barriers to building a business and growing to scale, if that’s your interest and you want to start a for-profit entity.

We need to do this in a way that feels viable and equitable. I want to make sure it’s an opportunity for historically disadvantaged folks to have an entry point to licensing agreements.

Are you envisioning more spaces like the food forest in the Bronx?

Yes. It’s going to take data and additional research to think about how we can increase food forests in the cityscape, but I’m encouraged by other cities that have done so like Seattle and Philadelphia. Are we identifying underutilized [land] that could be used for food forests or other climate-resilient models, which couldn’t be used for another mandate like housing?

You’ll prioritize land that can’t be used for other essential purposes?

Yes, exactly. I don’t want to set people up for land that might be contested or meet another city need. I’m hoping that within that inventory, we can also [explore] land tenure. For instance, if there is a parcel of land in a floodplain, or it has capital interests that have been earmarked for in 15 years, can we have agreements where folks steward that land [for short-term tenure]? Which models would make sense? I want us to be as open and creative as possible.

On a fun note, can you share one of your more meaningful memories at an urban farm or community garden.

One that really struck home for me was in the Bronx. A few blocks away from where I grew up, there is now an elder community garden [at the Castle Hill Houses, public housing for low-income seniors]. What had historically been an empty, grassy lot was now filled with multiple raised beds, herbs, and other fruit and veggies.

It made me think of all the years where I walked by this property and never thought anything of it in terms of a green space. But to see the elders having fun and talking about what they were planning to plant gave me inspiration about not just my current projects, but also how we can get more elders engaging in urban agriculture. How do we get more elders that may be homebound or nervous to come out?

We all deserve to have a piece of beautiful real estate and green space. Having the community build it, with many living in this high-rise looking down and seeing this growing from spring to summer, summer to fall, is really exciting. It’s helped me think through programs and opportunities that I’m hoping to kickstart. 

This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity. 

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]]> https://civileats.com/2023/08/07/congress-puts-federal-support-for-urban-farming-on-the-chopping-block/ Mon, 07 Aug 2023 08:00:49 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=52852 A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our award-winning members newsletter. To get the next issue in your inbox—and support our work—become a member today. At the top of a gradual slope, Falani Spivey leaned on a shovel as she pointed to several rows of malagueta and Carolina reaper peppers and […]

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]]> A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our award-winning members newsletter. To get the next issue in your inbox—and support our work—become a member today.

At the top of a gradual slope, Falani Spivey leaned on a shovel as she pointed to several rows of malagueta and Carolina reaper peppers and described the salad greens she planned to plant for fall harvesting. As a former “nomadic gardener” growing food on tiny plots in multiple locations, Spivey was most excited about the five varieties of watermelon plants already in the ground. “Last year, I wasn’t able to grow much because I didn’t have the space,” she said. “And watermelons need so much space!”

Spivey, Zama, and Flores operate three of 10 different farm businesses at the Urban Farm Incubator at Watkins Regional Park in Prince George’s County, Maryland, located just outside of Washington, D.C. and home to nearly 1 million people. Created by Eco City Farms and several partner organizations, the incubator is meant to provide a stepping stone for early career farmers who want to grow more food in densely populated areas but struggle to access land and other resources.

It’s one of dozens of diverse projects funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production (OUAIP). Although the larger agency has historically focused on serving large-scale farmers in rural areas, it has granted more than $50 million since 2020 to build school and community gardens in Hawaii, expand residential composting in Fort Worth, Texas, and add hydroponic production to an urban farm in Dubuque, Iowa, among dozens of other projects. The office also oversees a federal advisory committee and is working to improve technical assistance and resources for urban farmers, with the establishment of 17 urban service centers announced just last week.

However, the USDA’s work has been stymied by a lack of funding, and now the urban agriculture office could disappear entirely. While lawmakers authorized $25 million annually in the 2018 Farm Bill, Congress must reallocate the money each year. Despite high demand for grant funding, the latest appropriations bills in the House and Senate would eliminate the funding entirely. National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) just sent policymakers a letter signed by 140 organizations, farms, and businesses, urging them to change their minds. At the same time, they’re pushing Congress to use the upcoming farm bill to raise the office’s annual budget to $50 million in mandatory funding, which would secure the program’s future.

The OUAIP is a rare example of a new set of programs created in the last farm bill in response to advocacy by NSAC and other groups. Those groups pointed to urban farming’s unique potential to improve food security for the increasing number of Americans who reside in cities while also benefiting community health and well-being in multifaceted ways.

And under the leadership of Secretary Tom Vilsack, the agency has leaned into its new role. “Our office is really helping employees at all levels . . . to understand that USDA supports agriculture regardless of the size of the operation, where it’s located, or how the products are produced,” said Brian Guse, who leads the OAIUP and its team of six.

Now, as the office faces an existential threat, advocates are concerned about losing momentum on a wide array of important projects. “The office has done great work in a very short amount of time,” said Hannah Quigley, a policy specialist at NSAC. “And there’s just so much demand.”

The Need for On-the-Ground Infrastructure

“This is a program that is heavily oversubscribed,” said Guse, who explained that the applications have also gotten better as his team has conducted outreach with farmers around the country. On July 18, the USDA announced it had awarded $7.4 million to 25 projects out of more than 300 applications for 2023—just over 8 percent.

Projects that do get support can focus on planning or direct implementation. The Urban Farm Incubator is an example of the latter, and the farm bought two new hoop houses, an irrigation system, and four shipping containers with its $300,000 grant.

Land access is consistently cited as the biggest barrier to success faced by young, beginning, and under-resourced farmers, especially in urban and suburban areas where real estate is more expensive. But Jon Berger, the incubator’s farm manager, said the challenge can be more complicated than finding a patch of ground. Eco City Farms partnered with the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, which owned the land and was eager to support the project, but infrastructure was the key missing piece.

“A lot of times, somebody will offer you their backyard or a church property,” he said. “But you’re not going to have water, electrical, or a place for a dump truck to back into.”

Infrastructure is one area in which the OUAIP money has made a real impact, Quigley said. “It’s one of the few grants that actually allows [farms] to buy production equipment.”

To that end, Berger will soon oversee the installation of additional shipping containers with the sides cut out for ventilation. Inside, food waste from the nearby town of Edmonton will be transformed into compost the farmers will use to add fertility to their fields. That project is being funded by a second award through the OAIUP’s composting grant program.

Planning and Policies That Support Urban Farming

But Latha Swamy and Kimberly Acosta have much broader goals, and they’ve been supported by the OUAIP. With a $500,000 planning grant, the pair initiated a three-year, community-rooted process to create an urban agriculture master plan. The hope, says Swamy, the division’s director, was to address their small city’s “deep and enduring economic and social disparities.”

The grant paid for Acosta to run the process and 33 members of a community advisory board to meet once a month. During the meetings, Acosta provides research on urban agriculture and the board talks through how to apply it to policies, resources, and programs that will work for their city. Swamy and Acosta also hold public meetings for the broader community.

“We have a lot of very diverse growers, but those who make the decisions or have conversations around policy are not reflective of New Haven and all its diversity. That prevents policymaking that really meets all community needs,” Acosta said. In September, when the process concludes, they’ll present a plan that remedies that, with recommendations on new zoning, for example, and resources that the city should make available.

OUAIP grants are supporting other urban agriculture planning processes focused on community input and equity in Newburgh, New York, Tempe, Arizona, and Washington County, Oregon.

At the national level, the new advisory committee on urban agriculture is developing its own recommendations. The USDA selected the first 12 members from among more than 300 applicants, and they include small-scale urban farmers, representatives of indoor agricultural businesses, and researchers. Since the committee’s first public meeting in March 2022, 4,400 people have registered to attend, with more than 250 in-person or written comments provided. During the meetings, members propose recommendations on how the agency might better support farming and food systems in urban areas and vote on each one. After the fifth meeting in August, a summary report of their recommendations will be delivered to Secretary Vilsack.

The Future of Federal Support for Urban Farms

The 2023 Farm Bill could also alter the course of the USDA’s support for urban farming. The biggest ask from NSAC and other advocacy groups is to boost the office’s funding to $50 million and make it mandatory, which would take it out of the annual appropriations process and guarantee its existence long term. To that end, Senators John Fetterman (D-Pennsylvania) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) introduced a marker bill dubbed the “Supporting Urban and Innovative Farming Act of 2023” on July 28.

The bill also expands eligibility for grants, investments in research on systems such as hydroponics and aquaponics, and reforms intended to improve technical assistance offered to urban farmers, so that farmers growing vegetables on rooftops begin to have access to the same kinds of USDA resources farmers growing wheat on thousands of acres are used to.

“We are still hearing that when the [urban ag] office was created, farmers flocked to their local [USDA] service centers to ask for help, and not every office was able to answer questions for those growers,” Quigley said. “We’re looking for the farm bill to be a bit more directive about the type of technical assistance that needs to be available and incorporated across state and local USDA agencies.”

In the meantime, Guse said, OUAIP is working with the USDA’s boots on the ground, such as employees in local Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) offices, to better equip them with tools to serve urban growers. They’re also prioritizing building networks of people growing food in cities so that those individuals can share knowledge and resources. On July 21, Vilsack traveled to Philadelphia to announce the establishment of 17 urban service centers for city growers. In each city, the USDA chose a partner organization with local expertise. For example, in Philadelphia, Pasa Sustainable Agriculture will offer trainings and support for urban farmers.

At the Urban Farm Incubator, research and practices that could be used to inform that kind of future assistance and collaboration are already underway. Two researchers from the University of Maryland stopped by to take soil and leafy green samples for a project evaluating urban farm microbes and their impacts on health and food safety. Farmer Isaac Zama talked at length with Berger, the farm manager, about ways he might control the beetles eating his callaloo plants without harsh chemicals.

At the same time, as it often does in dense areas, the farm work was already spilling out into the surrounding community, offering food and connection. Zama was eager to point out collections of peppers, potatoes, and basil that he had planted into buckets instead of the ground to use as a teaching opportunity for children and adults. “We want to show people that you don’t have to have a farm to have something to eat or to have something green,” he said.

Meanwhile, Spivey was planning to host “pick your own pepper” days in August and sell her watermelons and watermelon juice on-site, timed to when churchgoers across the street would be leaving services. As the day continued to heat up, it was hard to imagine who wouldn’t be grateful for that kind of neighbor.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2023/07/18/an-indigenous-led-team-is-transforming-a-minneapolis-superfund-site-into-a-new-urban-farm/ https://civileats.com/2023/07/18/an-indigenous-led-team-is-transforming-a-minneapolis-superfund-site-into-a-new-urban-farm/#comments Tue, 18 Jul 2023 08:00:00 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=52616 Cassandra Holmes got involved in environmental justice organizing after her 16-year-old son, Trinidad Flores, died in 2013 upon suddenly developing dilated cardiomyopathy, a heart condition that scientists have found to be associated with exposure to air pollution. A member of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, Holmes was born and raised […]

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]]> Cassandra Holmes got involved in environmental justice organizing after her 16-year-old son, Trinidad Flores, died in 2013 upon suddenly developing dilated cardiomyopathy, a heart condition that scientists have found to be associated with exposure to air pollution.

A member of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, Holmes was born and raised in Little Earth of United Tribes, a 9.4-acre, 212-unit Housing and Urban Development subsidized housing complex in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the country’s only Native American preference Section 8 community.

“We are going to right generations of wrong. We know it isn’t going to happen overnight, but it’s a good start.”

Founded in 1973, Little Earth provides support services for its nearly 1,000 residents—who represent 38 different tribal affiliations—designed to help eliminate systemic barriers and address challenges many Indigenous communities face. It’s located in East Phillips, a neighborhood that has long been home to many heavy industry tenants and the so-called “arsenic triangle,” an area resulting from ongoing ground contamination by a chemical manufacturer over a 25-year period. Today, East Phillips residents—70 percent of whom identify as people of color—have some of the highest levels of asthma, heart disease, and other pollution-related ailments in the state of Minnesota.

Holmes is a board member of the East Phillips Improvement Coalition (EPIC) and a previous board member of the East Phillips Neighborhood Institute (EPNI), two organizations fighting environmental racism in the area. Now, she’s also at the center of a high-profile effort to bring fresh, local food to the neighborhood.

In May, East Phillips residents struck a historic deal with the city to purchase a 7.6-acre site to develop a community-owned indoor urban farm, affordable housing complex, and gathering space. After nearly a decade of activism, they blocked the city’s highly contested plan to develop a former Roof Depot warehouse into a public works campus.

Now, they’ve been given the opportunity to transform the site into a thriving community hub. The activists have raised $3.7 million and have been promised funds from the state to complete the sale in 2024. But hurdles still remain. EPNI will oversee the renovation and buildout process, which will cost an estimated $22 million to $25 million with the first phase expected to be completed by summer 2025. In addition to a solar-powered high-tech indoor urban farm, the vision includes housing units, cultural markets, community gathering spaces, job training sites, and more.

Civil Eats spoke with Holmes recently about the long fight that led to this historic deal, the impact the urban farm will have on the Little Earth community, and EPNI’s vision for a healthier, more equitable future.

What does this historic deal mean for the East Phillips neighborhood?

For East Phillips, we’ve been fighting a lot of things that aren’t good for us and winning. Although this one took longer, I knew the right thing was going to happen eventually. But I think for all of Minneapolis, the United States, and even the world—because we have a lot of people from other countries supporting us—it’s such a big deal because it shows that good things can happen when a community stands up together for their right to very basic human needs, like less pollution.

We are going to right generations of wrong. We know it isn’t going to happen overnight, but it’s a good start. Down the line, the hope is that it really changes the dynamic of the community, especially for Little Earth residents. This is a big deal because, as Native people, we just don’t have equal access to things like home ownership and business ownership. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that will change the dynamic for generations to come.

Why is this particularly important for the Little Earth community?

Growing up in Little Earth, I didn’t realize I lived in this environment where people were dying. We just thought, “That’s what happens; that’s the way of life.” But losing a child to a heart condition he wasn’t born with, having a best friend lose a child to a heart condition she wasn’t born with, and having some of the younger kids pass away from asthma and diabetes was a big eye-opener.

Even though we consider ourselves elders at 55 years old because of our shorter life expectancy, I didn’t realize just how detrimental our environment was until I got into this fight. Now that our eyes are wide open, we’re realizing as a community that we need to fight for our kids and our future.

Can you say more about how the pain of losing your son acted as a catalyst?

When my son first got sick, nobody knew what it was. It took a long time for the doctors to diagnose him, and when they did, they couldn’t believe he was walking and talking. His heart function was at 12 percent, and he needed a heart transplant. We just didn’t understand, because nobody else in our family had been that sick. My kid—who didn’t drink, who didn’t do drugs, who was very active in sports and in his community—just got sick one day. Two years later, he died.

It was just a really hard time. I don’t use drugs, but I remember thinking that I could just drink the pain away. It was our community and our traditions that kept me sober, because I still had to be his mom and help him on his journey. But I kept asking questions, like, “Where did his heart condition come from?” The doctors told me, “He could have touched something that got into his system and attacked his heart. It could be the environment he grew up in. It could be hereditary.” They just didn’t have the answers.

Then, when my best friend’s daughter died, that opened up my eyes. She thought she had congestion, so she went to the emergency room. She stayed overnight because they wanted to run some tests, but she never came back. The doctors said she had a heart condition, but we were like, “From what?” and they couldn’t answer our questions. It made me wonder, “What the hell is going on?” They both grew up in Little Earth. That’s when I start noticing all the sick people in our community and started asking questions.

Then a young boy got run over right up the block from Little Earth and died. Finally, we said, “We’re fed up. We don’t want [the city of Minneapolis] to have a sandbox where they bring in more vehicles and train their employees on diesel-run equipment, and that gets filtered out into our community. We have to do something.”

We don’t want anyone else to know the pain of burying a child. We always have to bury our loved ones, but a child is something else. For Indigenous folks, you don’t live for yourself—you live for your family and your community. As a people, that’s what’s engrained in us. The next generation isn’t going to have a perfect life, but we can still do something to make it better.

What was it like fighting the city’s development plans for the Roof Depot site?

It wasn’t a fight at first; it was the city holding a meeting about the Roof Depot site, which they had bought unbeknownst to us. We had a few community members who saw the building was not in use and had ideas for doing something positive with it. But the city didn’t let Little Earth residents know they bought it—none of our 212 units received a flyer or anything in the mail. My aunt Jolene was the interim director for the Little Earth Residents Association at the time, and she demanded the city host a meeting at Little Earth.

The city had this idea that they would take two people from each community—two Natives, two Blacks, two Hispanics, and so on—to put together this Guidelines Advisory Committee. I signed up for the committee and was chosen. As we were sitting in those meetings, we realized that the city already had their agenda set and it was just putting on a show so they could say they invited the community to provide ideas. But really, it was just dotmocracy; they gave us stickers and asked us to mark which of their ideas we liked.

During one of those meetings, former state representative Karen Clark, who is a resident of East Phillips, was in the peanut gallery. The facilitator was talking about the Clark-Berglund Environmental Justice Law, because we kept bringing it up. Karen interjected and said, “What you’re saying is not right; I know because I wrote that law with [former state senator] Linda Berglin.”

I don’t know if he got embarrassed, but the facilitator went charging after her. Everyone was in shock. Karen said she didn’t feel welcome or safe, so she left. I remember thinking, “If my representative and the elders in this community don’t feel welcome or safe, I’m leaving, too. But I’m not giving up my seat.” So, everybody decided to walk out except for two people.

That’s when the East Phillips Neighborhood Institute was born. It wasn’t easy. Even though I knew it was going to work out, there were times where it was lonely and scary. There were times when dealing with the city and politicians was so negative it made me throw up afterward. But I realized that I’ve felt worse—like I did after losing my son—and survived, so I could survive that, too.

Can you talk more about the Little Earth Urban Farm?

In 2017, in the process of all these meetings, Karen Clark secured $319,000 in funding from the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) to be split up among the community. Little Earth got a portion of that, and we were trying to figure out how to use it. I was on the Little Earth board at the time and reminded people that the whole point of our fight was to stop the city from creating more pollution in our neighborhood.

At the same time, Aunt Jolene was having issues with some of our youth skipping school. She hosted a meeting to learn why, and they said, “We don’t have nice clothes or nice shoes. We’re tired of being made fun of all the time.”

So, we decided to hire the kids to work on the Little Earth Farm for the summer. We also hired elders to work with the kids and tell them stories about the plants and the foods—just connecting them with our youth. Their parents would help out sometimes, too. The deal was that the kids’ money would go into a savings account, then volunteers would take them shopping to buy clothes before the school year started. We were also teaching them budgeting at the same time.

The first summer, we had about 25 kids who worked on the farm and learned a lot. For example, there were kids who at first didn’t know what a radish was, but by the end of the summer, radishes were their favorite thing to eat because they had grown them. And on the first day of school, here were these kids bright and early waiting for the school bus. [The farming program] has been so successful and has gotten bigger and better every year. I think we have 60 to 75 kids working now, and the farm is really beautiful.

And that right there is what we need. Instead of these kids skipping school or selling weed or stealing money to buy nice clothes, they worked on something that actually helps the community. They’re proud of making their own money and buying their own clothes. Green jobs, green education, food for cheap or free year-round—why would anybody fight that? That’s the small version of what we want to see happen.

What is the vision for the indoor urban farm, housing complex, and community hub?

The vision is to create a bigger version of what we’ve done in our smaller communities. We also envision a coffee shop, a bike shop since we’re just off a biking greenway, a commercial kitchen, a space for people to sell their crafts, and more. There will also be housing, because we have a lot of relatives who are unsheltered.

But just having this community space where we can build generational wealth—an opportunity we haven’t had before—will totally change the dynamic because we will actually have ownership in something. We will actually have a say in something. We will have a safe place to go. Above all, the most important thing is that we stopped an entity from continuing to hurt us; we stopped that pollution. Now, starting to work on our community is step two.

What meaningful impact do you hope this development has on future generations?

My hope is that East Phillips and Little Earth residents know that they have a voice and that they can have more than just what they’re given. I hope future generations will be better to themselves and their neighbors. They’ll have this opportunity to work with food and with the soil and to provide for their community. They’ll have power, faith, and ownership in something.

When you hear about Little Earth, it’s only when there’s a shooting or an overdose. We’re not always seen in the best light, but we have a lot of really great community members. I’m hoping there will be a different storyline in the future—talking about how successful this has been, how we have won awards, how this ownership has really paid off, maybe resulting in more homeowners than renters. There will still be negatives, but we won’t only have stories of violence and people dying. I see it as a real positive.

 

 

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