Civil Eats

One of the most logical ways to eliminate food deserts – those places that don’t have adequate access to fresh fruits and vegetables – is through urban agriculture. In Brooklyn, New York, residents of Bedford-Stuyvesant are fighting to keep their urban farm – which produces 7,000 lbs of fresh produce per year – alive in the face of development.

Kerry Trueman covered the issues facing the Bed-Stuy Farm thoroughly back in her post for the Green Fork last August:

It takes visionaries like Reverend DeVanie Jackson and her husband, Reverend Robert Jackson, to convert a garbage-filled Brooklyn lot into a productive urban farm that provides 3,000 people a month with fresh, healthy food. The Reverends Jackson, who run an emergency food pantry in Bedford Stuyvesant, the Brooklyn Rescue Mission, became urban farmers out of sheer necessity back in 2004, challenging the ‘charity’ of serving poor people even poorer food.

Now, the city wants to take back the land in order to build affordable housing. Trueman continued:

Yes, we need affordable housing, but affordable healthy food is often even harder to come by, and it’s tragic to pit these two equally worthy causes against each other. Our famed free market has mysteriously failed to meet the demand for either one.

More than ever before, we need to support and grow urban farming projects to feed millions of city dwellers across the nation living in neighborhoods without access to fresh food.

Sign the petition to save this neighborhood farm from destruction.

Then, watch this video, a GRACE project directed by Dulce Fernandes, via the Green Fork:

Paula Crossfield is the managing editor of Civil Eats. She is also a regular contributor to the Huffington Post's Green Page and is a contributing producer at The Leonard Lopate Show on New York Public Radio where she focuses on food issues. She is currently tending a vegetable garden on her roof in the Lower East Side. You can follow her on Twitter.