In December, the Atlantic published “The 10 Biggest Food Stories of 2010,” a list that ranged from restaurant trends to food truck and butchery trends, with a smattering of food policy in between. In response, the Daily Yonder (motto: “Keep It Rural.”) ran The (Real) Important Food Stories of 2010, pointing out that the Atlantic’s list included “no mention of either the people or the places that produce food,” and that it was “heavy on New York City.” (Both true.)

It has been said that black people are not interested in issues of sustainability, ag policy, and good food in general. But in late November, over 500 black-identified people, representing urban and rural farming networks, food justice organizations, government officials, policy makers, and good foodies traveling from Oakland, Denver, Philly, Detroit, Durham, D.C., and points elsewhere, attended the First Annual Black Farmers & Urban Gardeners Conference in Brooklyn. People of color are in the fields, the co-packing facilities, and the commercial and restaurant kitchens of the good food movement, but they’re conspicuously and consistently absent from the dialogue that is transforming Americans’ relationship with food and farming.

We appear to be suffering from an historical amnesia about the relationship between agriculture and people of color in the U.S., when we assume that black people are not into good food and farming. Long before The Greenhorns, Farmer Jane, Alice Waters, Radical Homemakers, Joel Salatin, Agchat, Homegrown, Michael Pollan, Punk Domestics, and Brooklyn Homesteader identified and gave voice to the thousands of (mostly white and/or middle class) people across the country by reclaiming American food and farming cultures, black people were in the fields and the kitchens, growing and nourishing generations, fusing European, Native American, and African farming and culinary traditions into distinct, regional American subcultures.

Black farmers and gardeners have been growing and raising food before it was cool, when it was what one did for survival. They were organic before organic–few could afford fertilizers and modern farm equipment; biodynamic before biodynamic–the earth-cosmos-animal-human connection has always been a major tenet of pre-Christianity African-centered spirituality and farming; sustainable before sustainable–can’t misuse what you ain’t got; local before local–black farmers’ had limited local selling power because of few profitable wholesale and retail opportunities and institutionalized racism; and, they are all small family farms.

So why do black farmers and urban gardeners need their own conference? Here’s why: at every good food and sustainable ag event I attend in NYC, I am one of less than three nonwhite attendees, and chances are, I know the other two. This is the case so often that I and a good friend and colleague of mine keep tallies via text when we are unable to attend the same events. At these events, while the information is sometimes new, the food usually good, and the networking opportunities abundant, they are irrelevant when it comes to the real work involved in creating just and sustainable food systems.

These events might appeal to my middle class upbringing, but they do nothing to address the lack of sociocultural relevance to black people and their agricultural legacy in this country. I am aware of my various earned and unearned privileges, but try bringing this up in a room full of well-meaning white folk–why aren’t there any black people in your documentary, book, panel?–and you’ll quickly discover just how largely unaware white good food advocates are of how their covert and normative whiteness shapes conversations about food, privilege, race, access, and even geography–and renders the rest of us invisible.

I can name at least 10 nonwhite good food fighters and organizations in NYC without trying, but events focused on food and farming in the region only manage to secure one (usually the same one, now token) person of color, or, more often than not, none at all as speakers, panelists, and case studies.  I’m not (necessarily) asking that POCs be included in these largely white spaces, but, just sayin’.

While the Black Farmers & Urban Gardeners Conference is not the first event of its kind to focus on the agricultural, social, and economic issues specific to black farmers, both rural and urban, it is the first to realize the importance of the two coming together in the same space, as rural and urban communities share similar needs in terms of food access, food security, land, and economic development. The socio-historical significance of creating a North-South black agricultural alliance was itself not lost on the attendees. While many Northern blacks turned their backs on their sometimes painful Southern agricultural legacies in favor of what they thought would be a more economically viable Northern future, they kept much of their traditional foodways, maintaining kitchen garden plots and food preservation techniques in their new urban spaces. What makes this particular conference even more significant was the event’s capacity to grab the attention of social media’s most prolific good food communicators, where so much of the conversation about sustainable food is going on, that it left one to question if anyone is actually still farming, buying and eating food, or even participating in traditional media. The speakers and panelists offered an open and sometimes unapologetic look at the way racism and industrialization has prevented black farmers from acquiring resources and recognition of their role in rural America.

I had a difficult time in deciding which two of the 20 breakout sessions to attend, from one identifying resources for rural and urban farmers, to others on forging rural-urban relationships, understanding the farm bill and the role of farm cooperatives in creating sustainable food systems, and recognizing how black food culture has been co-opted by Big Food. One day is never enough to work through all of these issues.

Nearly two weeks later, I am still hyped over being part of such a momentous occasion. Maybe it was because I have never been in the same room with so many black, brown, and yellow faces talking about food and farming. Maybe it was because it validated my opinion that people (black and white) have misguided assumptions about what black people think, feel, and know about agriculture. Whatever it is, it is clear that black people have and will always be a part of the conversation, whether they are visible or not.

When Chez Panisse board members met to talk about expanding its Edible Schoolyard organic garden and kitchen program, board member John Lyons immediately volunteered: “I know just the place!” Lyons began volunteering at Brooklyn’s Arturo Toscanini Elementary School (PS 216) five years ago as a Pencil Principal For A Day, where he became acquainted with the principal, students, and the school’s quarter acre-sized parking lot–perfect for a school garden.

On a blustery but sunny Friday morning last week, Lyons joined PS 216 Principal Celia Kaplinsky, Edible Schoolyard founder Alice Waters, City Council Member Domenic Recchia Jr., Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, and several PS 216 4th-graders in inaugurating Edible Schoolyard NYC’s first model garden and kitchen program. The pilot site will include an organic farm plus a moveable greenhouse, and a kitchen classroom in a self-sustaining building, all designed by WORK Architecture Company. On Friday the farm’s soil was ready for its first day of planting.

Clad in colorful rain boots, students planted a few tidy rows of kale and other hearty winter greens, and the garden’s first tree–a Macoun. They will soon add more apple trees, Asian pear, garlic, and cover crops. The program will run year-round, with an expected two lessons each month, per grade, for all kindergarten through fifth grade students. In addition to gardening, students will learn about the origins of food and will learn to cook seasonal dishes using their own produce. Principal Kaplinsky enthused, “When we give anything to children I see magic… From the time they enter PS 216 every child learns to appreciate healthy living, healthy food.”

Edible Schoolyard NYC is partnering with Columbia Teachers College, which will help develop the New York State standards-based curriculum and also measure the program’s effect on students’ health. “Nearly half of all New York City public school children from kindergarten to eight grade are either overweight or obese, which is often associated with poorer levels of academic achievement,” says Executive Director Christiane Baker. “Thanks to the support and commitment of the NYC Department of Education, the Edible Schoolyard NYC program aims to offer a solution to improving the way our children eat, by learning where food comes from and how healthy food can be delicious as well as nutritious.”

The program will not directly measure academic achievement. However, Baker points out that Edible Schoolyard is intended to enhance the classroom experience, not replace it, by providing another way for teachers to help struggling students make connections through hands-on experiences. Baker adds, “It’s a lot to ask a teacher to support a garden and to teach.” So Edible Schoolyard further supports teachers by providing two garden managers/teachers, Vera Fabien and Mirem Villamil, to maintain the gardens and related instruction.

PS 261 is just the first of 25 elementary schools in Brooklyn that will eventually grow edible schoolyards with the help of a mobile kitchen bus that will travel between schools. There are also plans for an Edible Academy operating throughout the five boroughs, which will offer training and technical assistance for yet more public school teachers and principals who want to bring an “edible education” to their students.

Edible Schoolyard NYC will receive $1 million in funding from the city–a nice sum considering the city’s current financial crisis. As it happens, the City Council Member with jurisdiction over PS 216, Domenic M. Recchia, Jr., was recently appointed Chairman of the New York City Council Finance Committee, and was therefore in a prime position to advocate for funding for Edible Schoolyard at PS 261. An additional $1 million was donated by Brooklyn Borough President Markowitz, who crowed that this was “one of the few things that I’m involved in that no one’s against!” Another surprise benefactor was actor Jake Gyllenhaal, who with Lyons (president of production at Focus Features), co-hosted a fundraiser earlier this month and who quietly attended the opening ceremony Friday.

“We all know a tree grows in Brooklyn, but increasingly, kale grows in Brooklyn, too,” Borough President Markowitz said. Brooklyn may seem like the white-hot epicenter of the East Coast food revolution, but it’s worth noting that the pilot is not centered in one of the borough’s trendier neighborhoods, but rather in Gravesend, a neighborhood with a mixture of Russian, Pakistani, Chinese, and Mexican immigrants, and where 82 percent of students are eligible for free lunch.

The Edible Schoolyard, a program of the Chez Panisse Foundation, began at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, California in 1995. There are also plans to expand the program in Los Angeles.

When Brooklyn homeowner and Hunter College urban studies professor Tom Angotti thought about how he could make a difference in his community, he decided to start with his overgrown corner plot. Little did he know he’d be at the helm of a volunteer movement that’s working to make a difference in the way we think about food, community, and what it takes to democratically run a major project comprised of individuals holding various opinions on urban agriculture.

How does one go about growing a farm? How can a seed of an idea that a rocky overgrown junk pile corner patch in Brooklyn transform into a viable Community Supported Agriculture farm? Perhaps it helps to be an experienced community planner like Tom.

It all started on the local Windsor Terrace/Kensington list-serve, announcing on March 28, 2010 that Tom and his wife Emma would like to invite the community to convert his plot of land into a community farm. Word reached as far as Manhattan, and a regular crop mob of more than a hundred people showed up from neighborhoods near and far.

Urban foodies, farmers, and ecological communities are cropping up more and more, with rising passion and idealism about food—and all the issues that surround it. Concerns about food safety and costs are not new, and the farm project has attracted numerous people who care about addressing these issues, including members of organizations such as the Park Slope Food Coop, Just Food, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and New York University.

Since the inaugural groundbreaking, Prospect Farm has rooted into a community project, with a mission of producing local food as an alternative to industrial food—with diversity in both food production and membership. But even before future crop growers (and eaters) could think about what kinds of things to grow and where and how there was the issue of taking a hard look at what was underneath all that land and cleaning up what had long been buried there.

The soil was tested and found to have high levels of lead and other heavy metals—typical of most Brooklyn soil near streets and highways. So improving the soil began. First, we dug out concrete rubble, rocks, floor tiles, furniture frames, and 1970s-era cans with peel-off pull tabs. Then we started to make new soil. From there, the community composting project got underway, collecting neighbors’ food scraps to create enough compost to turn over into the soil, plot by plot. Not unlike an archeological dig, volunteers carved out huge holes in the land, sifted the soil, and filled the cavities with layers of food compost, horse manure from the local stables, newspaper, brown compost (leaves), and sifted dirt.

Meanwhile planting plans continued. As some volunteers worked plots for planting in 2011, others prepared several smaller plots for immediate planting for harvest this summer and fall. Peter Kelman, experienced urban gardener, guided the farm’s first plot managers in the square foot gardening method for maximizing production in limited urban spaces as well as best practices for plot management and planning. The results (that didn’t get eaten) have been sent to a science lab at Brooklyn College to teach us more about the soil and what is making its way into what we grow in it. Some products known to take up minimal amounts of heavy metals were eaten by some of the growers, but with precautions not to feed them to children. Many, including those known to absorb heavy metals, were disposed of.

Thus Prospect Farm is working to both remediate the soil and grow food; because this will take some time it will be “slow food” in more ways than one. The intent is to make Prospect Farm a living public model and teaching tool; to make public the Soup to Nuts of it all. This includes periodic testing of the soil—as well as what grows in it—and posting results; working with expert composters and involving the community in soil reclamation; reaching out to master gardeners and local scientists who’ve had great success with square foot gardening methods for urban settings; connecting with local residents, businesses, schools, and organizations such as the Brooklyn Food Coalition and other groups involved with food sustainability and food justice initiatives.

Ultimately, as much as Prospect Farm can and does grow in Brooklyn, a farm needs hands—and regular care. As it grows, the farm faces the reality of labor needs, organization, outreach, plot maintenance, expenses, materials, and seeds. The hope is that by digging into the issues that we care about and getting our hands dirty, even if we don’t solve all the food problems as we see them, at the very least we can change what we know and how we think about food.

Participation is open to all and welcome. Got food scraps? Bring them for composting Wednesday and Sundays 6 to 7 p.m. Come see what’s shaping up at the farm, located at 1194 Prospect Avenue, between Seeley and Vanderbilt Streets. You can find out more about the farm and how to get involved at www.prospectfarm.org. And save the date: October 30 beginning at 11 a.m. the farm is kicking off its first annual Harvest Fest and Soup Cook-Off, with games, music, and food-a-plenty.

Just in time for the harvest, Derek Denckla, an eco-preneur and champion of urban ag, has addressed this void by collaborating with Crossing the Line, multi-disciplinary arts festival of the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF), to launch the Farm City Fair, which takes place this Sunday, September 12th from 11am to 5pm at The Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn, NY.

The Farm City Fair kicks off a series of events over the next three weekends devoted to celebrating urban agriculture. The series, entitled Where are You Growing?, will explore “a new agrarian future within the current urban reality.” Derek kindly took time out from gearing up for Sunday’s extravaganza to answer my questions about the Farm City Fair via email:

KT: What inspired you to create the Farm City Fair?

DD: I started my blog, TheGreenest.Net, looking for best practices in urban agriculture in an effort to find projects that could grow a more sustainable food system. For me, urban agriculture provides a catalyst for fixing environmental damage caused by industrial agriculture–perpetuated by the consumers most disconnected from the source of their food: urbanites! I am a green entrepreneur, so I began my research looking to select a few model projects for potential investment.

The results of my research for TheGreenest.Net, however, really startled me. Urban agriculture is a field that is literally being created as we speak–in different ways, in different places all over the world. There is tremendous diversity, intense energy and amazing creativity being pumped into urban agricultural experiments right now. And Brooklyn, NY seems to nurture the highest concentration of different approaches to urban agriculture.

Urban agriculture is not any one thing right now. Urban agriculture is a mass of inspirational notions and innovative projects swirling into an energetic cloud, the shape of which no one person can see or understand completely. I felt that there was no way that I could write about it all on my blog or in a book. Every day, a new urban agriculture project cropped up that seemed worthy of note and investigation.

However, I felt strongly that people who cared to move urban agriculture beyond dabbling and dalliance needed a place to gather and share knowledge, network and celebrate their multitudinous imaginations. I work in the arts, so I also couldn’t help noticing that a lot of artists were engaged in urban agriculture–either directly through their work or indirectly as something of great personal interest. Artists provide a vision that transforms our understanding of our world. That is why artists are crucial to shaping the future of urban agriculture at a point when new ideas are the lifeblood of its meaningful evolution.

FarmCity.US was born slowly and organically from the idea that this budding moment in the development of urban agriculture requires a shared future. FarmCity.US seeks to connect urban agrarians and artists where they are working now. The diversity of our approach to programming FarmCity.US reflects our evolving to enhance urban agriculture in its current state: excited, spirited and forging forward but not quite certain of where it will lead.

From that vantage point, FarmCity.US does not seek to lead or to follow but to arrange multiple modes of connectivity that will allow urban agriculture and its ardent supporters to become more visible, vocal and thus viable as a network building pathways to a greener tomorrow.

KT: Has Brooklyn ever held its own county fair before?

DD: Well, there was an event this year in May that called itself “Kings County Fair.” Poignantly, the event had nothing to do with agriculture and, more importantly, it had no relation to anything particular about the County of Kings, providing only some generic rides from Coney Island at Floyd Bennett Field.

According to the New York Times, the first Kings County Fair was held on October 11, 1870 at Prospect Park “Fair Ground.” At that time, Brooklyn was the “nation’s biggest producer of vegetables after neighboring Queens County” according to the info-rich tome “Of Cabbages and Kings County” by Marc Linder and Lawrence Zacharias.

I would guess that the last true Kings County Fair was held sometime in the 1920s. Brooklyn’s farm land basically disappeared after a sustained 20-year housing boom from 1890 to 1910 that urbanized the borough into the familiar form we know today. By the 1950s, there were no more active farms in Kings County, even in hold-out areas like East New York. Ironically, East New York is now home to a large number of thriving urban farms again.

KT: How did the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) become a partner?

DD: I was involved in creating art spaces that hosted Crossing the Line in its first years getting off the ground as a festival. I met Crossing the Line curators, Lili Chopra and Simon Dove, to discuss future potential space collaborations. While we were hanging out, we discussed my new work on urban agriculture and TheGreenest.Net.

A few weeks later, they both contacted me out-of-the-blue and asked me if I would be interested in working with them to conceptualize an event that would celebrate and explore urban agriculture. Little did we all know then that this seed of interest would grow into FarmCity.US with four different events in Crossing the Line! FIAF provided myself, Lili and Simon with tremendous latitude to imagine the most impactful and meaningful way to develop FarmCity.US, both artisitically and politically. The resulting support has launched an aspect of my urban agriculture project that I would not have been able to realize otherwise.

KT: GreenThumb is sponsoring the Farm City Fair’s Harvest Competition to award blue ribbons to locally grown produce by community gardeners and rooftop farmers. Any chance that future Farm City Fairs might extend the competition to pies, livestock judging, crafts, and other county fair staples?

DD: Go-olly! I am glad that you asked that. Well, we got some of what you asked about covered already. If you look at the Greenthumb guidelines, you’ll see that we’ve got pies, some crafts, flowers, and baskets and such. Initially, we wanted the Premium Blue Ribbon Competition to have all the categories that you would see at a county fair, including livestock. We even made some good contacts with the Farm Bureau upstate to discuss how to do it. I think we’ll try it next year, it was just a bit too complex this time around.

We also want to add other categories that honor the unique practices available to urban farming, like honey, eggs and mushrooms! So there is a lot to look forward to next time around. All you potential volunteers out there, listen up!

KT: What are you hoping folks will take away from this day-long celebration of urban agriculture, aside from the sure-to-be tasty memories of lovingly prepared, locally produced foods and the visual feasts our local artists are creating?

DD: We devised all of these different entry points for FarmCity.US so that we can connect with people based on their interests. There is something for everyone at the Fair: the Films, the Tours and Forum. We created FarmCity.US as a way to enhance the urban farming community and provide a plethora of interventions for a highly interested public.

We hope to engage the public in a deeper understanding and a greater appreciation of urban agriculture and help move them to see their role in changing the food system. For instance, we conceived of Farm City Fair to present a broad range of activities that encourage participants to move toward being active producers rather than passive consumers. Obviously, the most active producer would be the farmer, growing food. When you see that the farmer is a guy or a gal–like you–working down the street from you, growing food does not seem so remote or impossible and you might try something new yourself. Now, you may not be a farmer-type. But, you could eat more seasonally by canning and pickling–we will host a workshop on that topic. You could learn to cook something new, like Callaloo, that you may have never heard of before. You can show off your home-cooked talents in a Cook-Off. You can bring your home-grown harvest to see if it’s up to snuff.

And, at the very least, you can eat food that has been made or grown in the borough and meet the growers and makers and chefs face-to-face. As Wendell Berry says, “Eating is an Agricultural Act”. So it’s not just the farming we wanted to promote. FarmCity.US provides a continuum of interventions that could help alter the imbalances and flaws in our current industrial food system.

More info on the Farm City Fair and the rest of the Where Are You Growing? series of events can be found here.

Originally published on Huffington Post

Last Sunday, I had the pleasure of lending a hand as a volunteer at Rooftop Farms in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The name says it all: it is a 6000 square foot urban vegetable farm on the roof of an industrial building, growing rows inter-cropped with lettuces, tomatoes, eggplants, cucumbers, kale and much more, which they sell directly to restaurants and at a farm stand inside the building every Sunday from 9am – 4pm.

Annie Novak and Ben Flanner are the farming minds behind the project. Both are passionate about how food gets to our table (Novak works with farmer with Kira Kenney of Evolutionary Organics at the Greenmarket, and works as the Children’s Gardening Program Coordinator at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx. Flanner is new to farming but seems to get a kick out of hawking produce). Chris and Lisa Goode of Goode Green, a green roofing company, found the roof and funded Rooftop Farms as a test. With this project, the team hopes to determine what is possible in terms of scale for growing on rooftops in the city.

Flanner was managing the farm stand while I was there, encouraging everyone to try a tomato, or a leaf of the alternative sweetener stevia. Most of the people who came by were neighbors. The stand quickly sold out of red and green kale, and I joined Flanner in the field selecting the largest leaves for new bunches.

Novak, meanwhile, handled coordinating the fifteen or so volunteers. On Sunday we removed sweet peas plants (the season had ended), harvesting the beans and breaking down the rest into compost. We also harvested lettuces growing in between the tomato plants, planted radish seeds (the Rooftop Farms radishes have been quite a hit with local restaurants like Marlow and Sons and Anella, and they get quickly bought out by the neighbors at the farm stand, too), applied fertilizing compost tea and did pest management, among other tasks. As a new grower myself, I found it all to be quite educational; Annie showed me some pests to look out for in my own garden, and she gave me some information on how organically minded growers are dealing with the tomato blight. (Luckily Rooftop Farms grew almost everything from seed, and are not as worried as they would be with transplants, but she is still taking precautions like spraying copper in some areas.)

This is part of the point for her: She wants others to jump in and learn and hopefully create their own version of what Rooftop Farms is doing in other parts of the city. One rooftop is enough for Novak for the time being, as what needs to be done there is at times keeping her up at night. But what they are doing is replicable, and she is willing to teach all who come to help out about her methods.

One of the first questions she often gets asked is about the soil: they had to lift all 200,000 lbs to the roof with a crane. And yes, an engineer was brought in to get clearance on the weight. The soil is a mix containing shale, a light material made specifically for rooftop applications. But as Novak tells it, they are experimenting with growing vegetables instead of sedum, the succulents considered the standard green roof plant species. The experiment seems to be working, as they’ve harvested 600 pounds of produce since early June, and the tomatoes and cucumbers are just getting started.

Novak wants even beginners, or New Yorkers without much growing room to get in on the act. One row on her farm even showcases what can be done in a small plot. “The square foot bed is an example of the amount of space a renter might have,” she said. “We’re using that space to show that you don’t have to be confined to one tomato plant.” (In photo, vegetables growing together include swiss chard, cabbage, tomatoes, lettuces, peppers, beans, onions and more)

The roof is exposed from all directions, overlooking the East River and a glorius view of the city. Novak said that it can get windy, but that the plants compensate when grown from seed by growing denser, deeper root systems and heartier stems. Standing on the rooftop soaking in the lush rows and the abundance of food growing there (not to mention the view) was enough to make an urban farmer out of almost anyone.