In this era when consumers want to know how many “food miles” their carrots traveled and restaurant menus list the distance from farm to fork, restaurant owners are increasingly putting in their own farms on rooftops, abandoned lots and nearby agricultural plots.

The trend has caught on with high-end, Michelin-starred restaurants in California such as The French Laundry in Napa and Manresa in Los Gatos as well as more casual places, such as Pauline’s Pizzeria in San Francisco and the Fremont Diner in Sonoma.

The growing number of restaurant farms is welcome news to new farmers like Rose Robertson, 28, who, like many new farmers, is trained but without a plot of land to call her own. After interning for a year at a farm in Santa Barbara, Robertson knew she wanted to farm but also knew she did not want to be a cog in a large-scale farming operation. She worried that at a big farm, workers like her would end up, “spending your whole day picking beans,” she said.

She found a job managing the one and a half-acre garden at Ubuntu, a high-end vegetarian restaurant in Napa. The owners and staff of Ubuntu describe the garden as the heart of the restaurant, not just a side project. In the summer months up to 90 percent of the produce served comes from its garden.

“The chef says he’s not the chef,” said Robertson. “That the gardeners are growing the food that dictates the menu.”

Ubuntu’s owner, Sandy Lawrence, set out to create that dynamic, and says the importance of hyper-fresh produce is heightened because the restaurant is vegetarian. With the increasing number of young people flocking to agricultural training programs and farming internships, Lawrence never worried about finding eager farmers to employ.

“The reason we’ve been so confident is we’ve always had loads of young people who want to work,” she said. In addition to Robertson, another full time gardener and two part time workers, the garden has an internship program that attracts a constant stream of willing volunteers.

The trend represents a different kind of job opportunity for young people trying to break into agriculture in regions like the Bay Area, where land prices are prohibitively high. The average plot of cropland in California sold for about $9,000 an acre in 2010, according to USDA data, compared to about $4,000 an acre in Iowa, or $800 an acre in Montana, the cheapest state. Prices can go much higher in the Bay Area, though–a plot currently for sale in Sebastopol, Sonoma County is priced at about $21,000 per acre.

American farmers are getting old–in 2007, the average age of a farmer was 58, compared to 39 in 1945. Between 2002 and 2007, the number of farmers under 45 decreased by 21 percent. Still, in recent years, more young people have shown interest in farming and policy makers are working to recruit and incentivize new farmers. The latest version of the Farm Bill allocated $18 million for training new farmers.

Several Bay Area farms offer apprenticeships and internships for new farmers, mostly based around organic or biodynamic methods. But it is still difficult for many of the young people who complete the programs to get a paid job farming when they finish, which makes restaurant farms an appealing option to some.

Misja Nuyttens, 30, was an intern at Green String Farm in Petaluma and recently took a job starting a farm for the restaurant Central Market, also in Petaluma.

She says the experience of starting a farm from scratch has been invaluable. It’s not uncommon for beginning farmers such as Nuyttens to hold multiple jobs or look for non-traditional ways to use their farming skills. Samantha Langevin runs the internship program at Hidden Villa farm and education center in the Los Altos hills. She says she encourages interns to think about taking a diversified approach to their careers.

“The trend we’re seeing is young farmers, in addition to farmers markets, they might be selling to restaurants, they might be offering a CSA program, they might be working with a local school, whether that’s elementary to university, to offer programming on-site, they might be working with other community organizations that are looking to purchase food,” says Langevin.

Managing a restaurant garden lets farmers try out running a farm without having to take on debt or over-commit. And for restaurants, being ultra-local and having control over access to produce gives the chef flexibility. Robertson, the manager of Ubuntu’s garden, says the chef likes being able to harvest vegetables at any stage of growth. He also sometimes uses parts of the plant which are edible but often aren’t traditionally sold, such as carrot tops and beet stems. And he has Robertson grow plants that are difficult or impossible to find in the marketplace, including an edible ice plant with a lemony taste called ficoide glaciale.

Misja Nuyttens says part of the motivation for the chef and owner at Central Market restaurant to start his own garden was to be able to serve produce at its absolute freshest. Even when he purchased from farms only a few miles away, the produce would often go through a distributer that trucked items all over the Bay Area before getting to his kitchen.

Starting a dedicated garden might not always be profitable for restaurants. Lawrence says Ubuntu’s garden is sustaining itself by providing produce to the restaurant, but it helps that most of the land is on the owner’s property. Similarly, the owners of the Farmhouse Inn in Forestville, Sonoma use their own land for their garden, and have set up a share-cropping arrangement with a farmer to make it affordable. Co-owner Catherine Bartolomei says the garden could probably be more profitable if she wanted it to be, but that the larger goal is to adhere to the business’s eating philosophy.

While more and more restaurants are finding ways to make it work, putting in a garden is not a business move that would make sense for every eatery.

Providing boutique vegetables for high-end diners also might not be the philosophical goal for many of the area’s young farmers, although Nuyttens does find connection to a greater cause in her work with the Central Market garden.

“It is a bridge to increasing awareness about the benefits of food grown this way,” said Nuyttens. Restaurant farms, she says, provide, “a springboard for this movement, allowing a new generation of natural process farmers to get established.”

Above, Oxheart carrots grown in Ubuntu’s garden. Photo: Rose Robertson. Below, Ubuntu restaurant’s chefs standing in the garden. Photo: Karen Mann.

This post is part of an ongoing partnership between Civil Eats and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism News21 course on food reporting.

Recently, Tree and I discussed the recently-passed legislation which officially legalized urban agriculture in the San Francisco. His project is primarily concerned with food access for low-income communities and creating collaborative, non-commercial projects. Tree does not see a benefit in gaining the legal right to sell city-grown food because he wants food to be free. How, Tree asked, is the San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance (SFUAA–the main civic group pushing for the passage of the legislation) going to work for those who want to see volunteer-based, collective, and non-commodified forms of urban agriculture?

As mentioned in my previous post, the SFUAA worked on this new legislation out of a need expressed by one of our members, Little City Gardens, and an opportunity presented by members of city government. But my conversation with Tree has brought to my attention a rift forming in the San Francisco urban farming scene.

The other side of the rift is expressed by Iso Rabins, Founder of ForageSF and the Underground Farmers Market, who said in a recent review of his market:

“The feeling in the food community is that if you’re making money, it’s not something you’re passionate about,” Mr. Rabins said. “But if we actually want to change anything—dedicate our lives to it—we need to make money doing it.”

I have two reactions to this. My skeptical response is to ask what sort of “change” Rabins is talking about making here. The Underground Farmers Market, in my experience, is a bacchanalian celebration of homescale food preparation, not food system change. To be sure, eating homemade pickles might be a stepping away from the corporate food world. But, as a student of international food systems issues, I’ve never seen the political economy of food shift due to slightly expanded networks of boutique prepared foods. That the Underground Farmers Market has also been skirting the law by allowing producers to circumvent health and safety rules (In fact, the market was recently issued a cease-and-desist notice by the California Department of Public Health) does not mean that it is challenging, or “changing” the food system in a substantive way.

My less skeptical response is that, yes, Rabins is right about something. No matter how anti-capitalist your values might be, we still live in a capitalist society, with capitalist realities like rent (which here is San Francisco is a brutal reality indeed). Some people can choose to live a low-income lifestyle, and spend their free time volunteering to grow and give away organic food. But many people cannot.

Many marginalized communities are not as focused on creating a world free of capitalism as they are creating a way to survive and thrive within capitalism. A model that promotes what some call “social entrepreneurship” then, is more appropriate than one that asks that we all volunteer our time, in service of grander values and long-term goals. With the exception of Little City Gardens, no San Francisco farm has people who are paid to farm via sales of produce. Most rely on volunteers, plus grants, philanthropies, and government funds to pay any staffers who do exist.

When one considers one’s actions as activism, done for the purpose of creating social, political, or economic change, and not just personal fulfillment, it behooves one to have a “theory of change.” The “anti-capitalist” theory of change holds that solutions to market failures can’t come from the market (recalling Einstein, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them”), and this is hard to square with a “green economy” theory of change, which believes that a capitalist economy can be reformed, through business, into one that is less destructive to people and the environment.

Though the anti-capitalist perspective can be seen as elitist (how can many people afford to live from this perspective?), a similar critique could be leveled against green economy proponents. After all, most of the current pathways sought to create a local economy from sustainably produced food lead to high-end restaurants and products (like those sold at the Underground Farmers Market). While there have been efforts to expand access to “good food”, like the Eat Real Market or Peoples Grocery sliding-scale “Grub Box”, these efforts are limited by two main problems: good food costs more to produce, and low income people must often prioritize other necessary expenses over food. Our options are thus framed between cheap foods accessible to all or small scale food products serving only the elite.

A social movement must have a vision of the world it wants to create. Anti-capitalists have this vision in spades, seeing a future economy based in developing and re-creating commons and not just markets, but have a rather unverified and (to many) an unconvincing path to get there. Green economy enthusiasts have a vision which seems more “realistic,” but strikes me as toothless in addressing longstanding legacies of economic inequality and the structural hurdles to sustainability engendered by endless-growth capitalism. With waves of greenwashing and the watering down of organic standards, green seems easily compromised.

Also, competition from cheap foods grown by still-existent industrial farming operations continually skew a green food economy, causing good food sources to seem expensive, even as good food farmers struggle to survive. So “opting out” of this global, corporate-controlled food system is not tantamount to challenging it.

There is another point that vexes both sides of this debate: How do social movements succeed? Is it more imperative that they are massive, unpaid, volunteer, collectively-organized, and values-driven? Or that they are organized (into hierarchical bureaucracies), paid, and supported financially by their work? Looking to the past, we see that both sides are at least part of the equation. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a piece about the inadequacies of social technologies like Twitter to create social change, pointing to the effectiveness of the Civil Rights movement, which was built by organizations with paid staff, but also through deep connections built between individual activists acting together, for free and for no other compensation than the hope for success.

A scary truth is that creating social change almost certainly requires sacrifice, if not of life and limb, then at least of time. To expect to get paid to create change is to deny that change has its own value that deserves effort outside of remuneration.

I hope that we can find “both/and” solutions to this potential rift among food and farming activists, but once again I feel like I find myself with more questions than answers. We who do consider ourselves as “activists” or part of a “movement” need to do a better job of defining what and who that movement is for. And we can’t allow ourselves to settle with self-satisfaction of “a job well done” without considering the true nature of the problem and the efficacy of our actions to solve them.

Whatever you call him, Steve Ritz is an extraordinary example of how one person can make a difference.

He has two missions: The first is to get his Discovery High School students to grow and eat vegetables. The second is to ignite the Green Bronx Machine and get all of the borough residents to grow and eat healthy food. (Watch out for the soon-to-come Web site and meanwhile follow Green Bronx Machine on Facebook and Twitter.)

Ritz is fueled by the irony that although the Bronx is the distribution point for produce to all five boroughs, its residents have very little access to high quality, fresh vegetables.

“If my kids can’t buy good produce at the local supermarket, we’ll get them to grow it,” Ritz decides. And grow they do! Hundreds of pounds of it a year. Where? On the classroom walls.

Given a boost by the largesse of Boston-based Green Living Technologies, the students began growing vegetables on vertical shelves packed with earth. I saw the result last Friday when I attended a farmer’s market at the school.

Students, teachers, parents, and neighbors of the school were all shopping: bins were loaded with collards, peas, potatoes, tomatoes, scallions, and onions–and everyone was filling up their bags and heading to the front of the classroom to pay.

Have you ever seen a chalk board in front of a classroom listing vegetables and their prices? The sight gave me goosebumps. Can you imagine holding a weekly farmer’s market in classrooms all over the country?

The Discovery High School farmer’s market was a fantastic success. Steve Ritz wrote to me a few days after the event:

“We were very profitable, had over 500 visitors and folks from across NYC and NJ including State Senator Rivera and several other elected officials! Had we been able to have an EBT machine–we would have sold even more…

“All the kids went home with bags of produce and after school we went to a local soup kitchen to donate the rest. All the edible plants and seedlings also went to local high-need communities and gardens and the Green Bronx Machine helped plant thru the weekend.

“…Watch the ABC TV Special on June 18, 7 PM–Above and Beyond–which features our program and of course, I hope you can join us in Manhattan on June 22; 6-9 PM at Cafe Iguana for the formal launch of Green Bronx Machine.”

In case you aren’t already convinced that there’s a Pied Piper in the Bronx, here’s Steve telling us about his passion for greening the Bronx and providing math skills, community, and career alternatives for Bronx youths at the same time:

Now listen to one of Steve’s students, Netali Soriano, telling us how much he loves growing vegetables and how tomatoes and avocados have become a personal favorites. Take note of his Green Bronx Machine T-shirt!

Originally published on Lorna Sass At Large

Recently a Detroit public high school that focuses on farming and second chances for young mothers was added to a list of schools that would be closed this summer. Catherine Ferguson Academy is on that list thanks to a new law that allows Michigan governor Rick Snyder to dismiss locally elected officials and put in place new ones. (I’ll let Rachel Maddow give the details in the video, below).

You might have heard that Detroit lost 25 percent of its population in the last decade. What has resulted is a lot of abandoned land and a lot of blight. And yet, Detroit is also home to an urban agriculture Renaissance, with projects like the Greening of Detroit and D-Town Farm, among others. Catherine Ferguson Academy is just one such place that offers opportunities in growing food to those who need it most.

Principal Asenath Andrews recognized that opportunity and created a vision that helped propel her students to success. “I need to figure out how kids can make around $20,000 a year minimum farming,” she said in a film that features the school, Grown in Detroit. Her graduation rate is 90 percent, and all of her students are being taught and tested with the expectation that they will go on to college. She even helps them find the money to make that happen. Meanwhile, they grow vegetables, raise animals, and are given childcare and health services at the school. Their school and work were even featured by Oprah’s magazine.

The students aren’t taking this threat to close their school lightly. Last week, some were even arrested as they protested the move.

If you feel moved to support the school, you can sign a petition here, and there is a fundraiser going to pay the legal fees of those fighting the closure here.

Here is Rachel Maddow’s coverage of the story from last Friday:

Photo: via Grown in Detroit

Good News for SF Farmers

San Francisco urban agriculture advocates are rejoicing after the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted last week to amend the zoning code to allow small-scale commercial farming in areas previously deemed residential.

The shift will allow farming enterprises under an acre in size to grow and sell produce within city limits without an expensive conditional use permit (CUP) (previously around $3,000) or a lengthy bureaucratic process. Little City Gardens, the only for-profit farm in San Francisco, has been engaged in a year-long process with the San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance (SFUAA) and the Mayor’s office to draft new legislation for urban agriculture and shepherd it through the approval process. The cost of a permit is now only $300 and urban farmers will also be allowed to sell value-added products such as jams, salsa, and herb salts along with produce they grow.

Little City Gardens—whose farm near in the Mission Terrace neighborhood has earned a great deal of community support—has already announced plans for a CSA subscription program on their website. “Each week the box will include a bag of salad greens, cooking greens, roots, and herbs, as well as some form of communication (newsletter, artwork, recipe, etc) related to either the produce or the farm in general,” the site reads.

Although no one else appears ready to take advantage of the ruling just yet, Dana Perls, co-coordinator of the SFUAA, told the SF Weekly she thinks “this will have a trickle-down impact on people who work at Alemany [Farm] or Hayes Valley [Farm] who’ll be much more likely to farm their own land.”

Nonprofit urban farming groups also have the potential to have a larger impact on their communities, thanks to the new legislation. As SFUAA co-coordinator Antonio Roman-Alcalá wrote in a recent article here on Civil Eats, “Should for-benefit (i.e., non-profit) farm projects seek to raise some of their operating funds through sales, including of value-added products, this will now be allowed. This could also open the door for social justice-minded urban farms to create truly green jobs without requiring so much grant funding.”

It’s All About the Conditional Use Permit

In Oakland, the spotlight is on Novella Carpenter, the author of Farm City and an urban farmer known for her boundary-pushing experiments in backyard livestock. Until a few weeks ago, Carpenter had been selling her homegrown produce at a farm stand in her neighborhood; she stopped, however, after she was approached by a city official and told she was in violation for not having a permit.

Carpenter has blogged at length about her experience over the last three weeks as she’s struggled to untangle a knot of rules and regulations. She learned that growing vegetables on an empty lot in Oakland was in fact illegal without a permit (regardless of whether she was selling them). However, starting on April 14, when phase one of Oakland’s new urban agriculture laws took effect, that is not longer the case. Now, she’s been told, all she needs is a business license to grow and sell produce. But Carpenter’s goats, ducks, chickens, and rabbits are another case all together. Phase two of the urban agriculture laws will relate to animals, but it won’t take effect until next year. Although she raises the animals for home consumption alone, Carpenter is playing it safe. “I don’t know what kind of rules they’ll come up with and I’d rather have my CUP grandfathered in,” she says.

In the meantime, Carpenter has also been told that she may need a second permit for the farming she’s doing on property surrounding the apartment she rents, which is adjacent to the empty lot (the latter of which she owns). So, last week, she set out to raise the necessary $2,500 through her website, and on Wednesday announced that her goal had been met.

Meanwhile, thanks in part to a general petition supporting improved zoning for urban agriculture from the Oakland Food Policy Council and an outpouring of personal responses by Carpenter’s fans and supporters, Oakland mayor Jean Quan’s office has been inundated with phone calls and letters.

“I don’t want special treatment,” says Carpenter, who has been openly reluctant to ask for support. On the other hand, no one else has come forward to say they’ve been similarly fined. And, indeed, it may be Carpenter’s near-celebrity status (and a possible complaint by animal rights activists) that called attention to her farm.

The recent zoning changes in San Francisco happened in large part because of the existence of the SFUAA, which boasts nearly 50 member organizations and gained early support from Mayor Ed Lee and Supervisor David Chiu. Carpenter has some hope that the nascent East Bay Urban Agriculture Alliance, which was initiated by Esperanza Pallana from Pluck and Feather Farm, could take some of the pressure off Ghost Town Farm and initiate more of a community approach.

“It’s hard to be out on the front lines,” says the author/farmer. “I’m not made for politics.” But, as reluctant as she is, Carpenter is a powerful spokesperson for the right to farm in the city. When she learned that her home was in a zone of Oakland where farming was deemed illegal, she saw the problem as much bigger than her own. “This is a food sovereignty issue, especially in West Oakland,” she says, a traditionally under-resourced area, where grocery stores are scarce. She adds, “Folks around here have enough to deal with—and they’re not even allowed to grow chard?!”

Of course, not everyone looking to produce their own food in Oakland will take it to the level that Carpenter has. “I understand I might be an extreme example,” she says. “But I think I might be the future. More and more people are going to look for ways to grow their own food. So we have to find a way to make it legal.”

A version of this article was originally published by CUESA

Highland Hills is one of those down-and-out communities that’s allowed a glimpse of prosperity but never gets to taste it. The Dallas skyline looms large across the hazy north Texas horizon and is linked to this poverty-plagued neighborhood by a seven-mile ribbon of light-rail steel. Ledbetter Avenue crosses the train line passing vacant buildings, empty parking lots, and a dizzying array of “For Sale” and “For Jesus” signs. Named for the renowned guitar picker Lead Belly who did time in these parts–both in and out of prison–the Avenue speaks little in the way of promise, but wails the blues of poverty loud and clear.

Like cockroaches in a post-nuclear winter, the only commercial survivors appear to be pawn shops, Dollar stores, and fast-food joints. One supermarket, a Minyard whose cinder-blocked and windowless façade is about as inviting as the entrance to Stalag 13, is the only retail food source in the surrounding miles of food desert. But a lifeline from an unlikely source has arrived via a group of innovative academics. Paul Quinn College, a historically black college that sits at the neighborhood’s eastern edge is committed to lifting the Highland Hills’ physical and economic health with a combination of food, farming, and servant leadership.

To drive by the campus is to, well, keep on driving. There are no signature ivy-clad buildings or tree-shaded quads, in fact the first roadside buildings you see are in various states of demolition. Student enrollment plunged from 600 to 200 and the school has experienced on-going accreditation problems. At first glance anyway, and like the adjoining neighborhood it wants to help, Paul Quinn appears to be hanging on by no more than a pea tendril.

But first glances are deceiving, and pea tendrils are stronger than they look. And when your back’s to the wall and nobody, even your own government, will help you, you fight like hell, you do the unexpected. You take risks.

In this case not only did the college take risks, it committed a grievous sin, at least by Texas standards–they terminated their football program and turned their field into an organic farm. Yes, in the shadow of the Super Bowl, with the specter of Tom Landry looking down, and the holy glare of Friday night lights forever dimmed, they ripped up sacred turf and planted–goalpost to goalpost–peas, lettuce, carrots, strawberries, and more, lots more.

While the roar from the stands may have subsided, the field has not fallen silent. When farm manager Andrea Bithell announced to student and staff volunteers that the kohlrabi had gone in last week, everyone cheered. Showing a group of farm visitors where the corn would be planted later this spring evoked a round of applause from students who proclaimed their love of its sweet kernels. The competitive spirit and enthusiasm so much a part of college athletics is hardly lacking at “Food for Good Farm,” the name chosen to denote it’s larger mission of education, community service, and healthy food for all. Sounding more like a coach than a farmer, Bithell uses words like hustle to describe her student crew’s effort to plant and seed the two-acre field. When the volunteers complained about working in the cold and the rain, she reminded them that football games are played in all kinds of weather. Even the plants are forced to compete in a set of 12 trial beds located in the south end zone. Here students test different growing methods and evaluate their potential financial rate of return.

Elizabeth Wattley, Director of Service Learning, said with pride that the farm’s tomatoes were better than anything she’d ever bought in a grocery store. Biology major Symphonie Dawson giggled when she described the farm’s mascot that they temporarily borrowed from Delta State University. “It’s the ‘Fighting Okra,’ an image of the vegetable wearing boxing gloves. We borrowed it because last year’s okra crop seemed to go on forever.” The “Rah-rah, Go Team, Go!” energy previously reserved for football games is now channeled into the planting of 1500 strawberry plants, 6600 onions, a new asparagus bed, and dozens of vegetable varieties. “The farm is the light of the college,” said Wattley.

Once on the ropes, Paul Quinn has gained a reprieve by discovering the multiple benefits of farming while also turning attention outward to the community. One major need the farm addresses is healthy living and eating, no small concern on today’s college campuses, especially one surrounded by a food desert. “Before their work on the farm, students wouldn’t eat carrots unless they were smothered in ranch dressing,” said Bithell. But by getting their hands in the dirt–a task that usually took two or three visits to get past the “yuck” declaration–students started eating carrots right out of the ground, dirt and all. “They actually taste,” said Wattley, pausing for a moment to find the right adjective, “carrot-tee.”

By engaging students in the school’s biology and social entrepreneurship courses, the farm gives young people a chance to get hands-on laboratory experience while getting their hands in the dirt. Even the students who don’t care to venture into the world of bugs and compost get a taste of the farm’s output. The cafeteria now offers a monthly dish to showcase the farm’s harvest and introduce students to food that is healthy, tasty, and very local. Jasmine Wynn, a freshman legal studies major, summed up the farm’s health benefits best. “I’m a city girl from Dallas, and for me the farm was something new. I liked being out there. I also started getting serious about my diet and decided that organic food is better for you. It’s just part of a healthier lifestyle, and I want to stick around for a long time.”

The lack of farming experience or a farm background has not been a deterrent to anyone’s participation, including school President Michael J. Sorrell. With public policy and law degrees from Duke University, his stellar resume shows he has represented American Airlines and Morgan Stanley, served on numerous commissions including an assignment at the White House, and was selected in 2009 as one of the 10 Best Historically Black College and University presidents. However, lacking from Dr. Sorrell’s career synopsis, which also includes representing top-flight athletes like Utah Jazz’s Deron Williams, are any agricultural credentials. So why did he eliminate the football program and have the audacity to make the field into a farm?

A big part of the answer lies in his commitment to servant leadership, which, like the farm, is a concept he brought to Paul Quinn. With such simple but difficult to live by ideas like putting others before self, leaving the world a better place than you found it, and maintaining spiritual faithfulness, Dr. Sorrell not only preaches what he practices (he teaches a freshman course in servant leadership), he practices what he preaches. The farm is the center of that practice.

Isaiah 58: 9-12 gets prominent mention on the College’s website which also touts the school’s Christian underpinnings. The scripture admonishes us “to pour yourself out for the hungry…then shall your light rise in the darkness…and you shall be like a watered garden.” The Food for Good Farm is set on serving the hardscrabble community that surrounds it and though a share of the harvest goes to the cafeteria, 10 percent is donated to a local food pantry, a sizeable share is sold on a weekly basis to the community from the field’s former hot dog stand, and just to preserve some historical symmetry, the Dallas Cowboys buy a small share of the farm’s organic veggies.

The “adaptive re-use” of the field has been impressive under Bithell and Wattley’s leadership. The hash stripes are gone as well as the top four inches of sod and dirt that they replaced by dump truck loads of pure organic matter. Reflecting the program’s absolute commitment to organic farming, there was simply too much distrust of the chemical residues from years of a perfectly green gridiron. The goalposts remain as do the blocking sled, scoreboard and the bleachers running the length of both sides of the field. The former press box will be turned into a chicken coop and Wattley retains some hope that the bleachers can be repurposed as a greenhouse. Acres of adjoining land are being eyed for farm expansion, especially if a federal grant comes through.

None of this extraordinary progress has come cheaply. The school has made significant capital expenditures to accomplish this conversion and the on-going operating costs, which are only marginally offset by farm sales. An April fundraiser featuring Will Allen hopes to swell the coffers to enable the farm to buy its own tractor.

The rapid development of the farm, and the rising fortunes of Paul Quinn College have come with a price, however. The Food for Good Farm is the result of a 50/50 partnership with PepsiCo’s Food for Good Initiative. The college makes it clear that this is an equal partnership and that PepsiCo has not placed any strings on their giving. Other than cleaning up its tarnished image, one cannot detect any sinister covert or overt motives in the cola giant’s support. Yet the contradictions can’t be ignored. After all, Pepsi and other soda makers have contributed more than their fair share of calories to America’s obesity crisis.

In the meantime, it’s hard to argue with the outcome of the partnership. Texas has one less football field and one more organic farm, clearly a net gain for humanity.

On February 17, 2011, the San Francisco Planning Commission passed a resolution approving a new urban agriculture planning code that would allow a range of urban gardens and farms to be located throughout the city. The new code creates an agricultural use category with two sub-uses (Neighborhood Agriculture and Urban Industrial Agriculture) that represent different scales and intensity of food production.

The Planning Commission’s action is an important step toward integrating various scales of food production into San Francisco’s landscape, creating certainty about where and to what extent urban land can be used to grow food. San Francisco residents are environmentally conscious and the Bay Area is where the word “locavore” was coined, yet even the most fervent sustainable food supporters can have NIMBY tendencies when urban farms sprout near their homes. The code change will hopefully create consistent expectations and ensure that gardens and farms can locate throughout the city and improve–not detract from–the quality of life for which San Francisco is famous.

If enacted by the city’s Board of Supervisors and signed by the Mayor, as anticipated, the city’s planning code would for the first time clearly define the status of urban agriculture in San Francisco by identifying where small and large scale farms can be located, letting property owners, urban farmers, and ordinary people know exactly what kinds of agricultural uses are allowed in any given place.

Neighborhood Agriculture is any use for food or horticultural production that occupies less than one acre. It includes but is not limited to home, kitchen, and roof gardens. The use of a site for food production may either be “principal” or “accessory” to other uses, such as a private home. These smaller growing spaces must also comply with the following standards:

·      Sales and donation of fresh food or horticultural products grown on site may occur between 6:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m.  People are allowed to sell produce from their garden/farm but cannot create a storefront in or make commercial improvements to their home that turn it into a defacto grocery store.  They cannot sell value added foods like jams or baked goods.
·      Compost areas must be set back at least three feet from structures on adjacent properties.
·      If fencing encloses the farmed area, it must be wood or ornamental and comply with a section of the planning code that regulates fences.
·      Mechanized farm equipment is prohibited in residential districts except during the initial preparation of the land, when heavy equipment may be used to prepare the soil. Landscaping equipment designed for household use is permitted in residential districts. All farm equipment must be screened from sight.

Urban Industrial Agriculture uses describe farms that are one acre or larger, or smaller farms that cannot meet the physical and operational standards for Neighborhood Agriculture. This more intense use is principally permitted as-of-right only in industrial districts. In all other districts, creating a farm one acre or larger requires conditional use authorization, which is granted only if the project is deemed necessary, desirable, and compatible with the district.

The proposed zoning changes were widely supported, though urban agriculture practitioners and supporters raised a few concerns: (1) that the fencing requirement was onerous and unnecessary; (2) that the fee for obtaining a change of use (currently $300) was prohibitively high for smaller growers; (3) that selling value added food is an important source of revenue and an appropriate activity on an urban farm; and (4) that urban soils may not be safe. In approving the code changes last week, the Planning Commission called for further consideration of these issues.

Another concern was raised by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC), which supplies the city with drinking water. Staff at the commission noted that large-scale urban agriculture would increase water use, despite the fact that a programmatic Environmental Impact Report for SFPUC in 2008 limited the amount of water consumption through 2018 and required that any increases in water use be met through conservation, recycling, graywater, rainwater harvesting, and city groundwater. Given that the expansion of urban agriculture in San Francisco will require that more alternative water sources be developed to meet the increased demand for irrigation water, SFPUC recommended adding requirements that urban farms use water-efficient practices.

Stay tuned for any fine-tuning that may happen at the Board of Supervisors.

Originally published on Urban Food Policy

Pam, who I was grateful to meet on an urban agriculture tour in New Orleans this past October, is the founder and Executive Director of the Women and Agriculture (WandA) Network, one of a group of organizations strategically thinking about food justice and women farmers in urban areas. She is the former Deputy Director of the New Orleans Food and Farm Network and currently tends a small, but vibrant urban farm called Sun Harvest Kitchen Garden located in the severely distressed Central City neighborhood of New Orleans.

Currently, she’s got an abundance of Asian greens, red leaf mustards, collards, spinach, onions, herbs that carried over from the summer like fennel, curry, basil, all kinds of mint, stevia, tarragon, rosemary. In the spring she hopes to make cucumbers, tomatoes, and parsley and green onions available to a neighboring senior center residence complex because they really want access to fresh seasonings. She also has a market garden portion that will grow for Café Reconcile, a nonprofit restaurant that serves as the primary training ground for “at-risk” students seeking to acquire skills in the food service industry. (They also make a sweet tea that made me cry and a crawfish bisque that’ll get you crawling back for more!)

What issues have you been focused on?

I have primarily been working across the city with interesting people and groups about the notion of creating a viable infrastructure for urban ag in NOLA. What does that mean?What’s the best approach to get us some concrete results? We have serious food security issues here post-storm. They were big before but even more now. So, I’ve zeroed in on working with others to utilize urban agriculture as a revitalization tool.

And, now as a part of the WandA Network, it’s about how to enlist more women across ethnicities and social and economic spheres to start farming and involve them in becoming successful growers. I think we have great opportunities with the amount of restaurants we have in New Orleans More and more of them are wanting to source as much locally grown produce as possible. We have a year-round growing season in our local area but we need to create the knowledge base and the skills to better utilize it.

What inspires you to do this work?

I was inspired from spending time in the country, the rural areas of Louisiana where my parents are from in Lafourche Parish. It was a strong agrarian community, growing cane and some produce. Both my parents are from farming families. As a little girl I was always attracted to what life was like in the country, maybe in a more romantic way and I spent summers there. When I was eight, my dad gave me my own little garden spot in front of our house. So, I have been gardening most of my life.

Now with the food movement I see how I can bring that passion to some every day work.

What’s your overall vision?

I often tell people I’m helping to sow the seeds of a local food tapestry here in NOLA. I have this vision of being able to fly into the city and see the topography of our marsh lands and our waterways and tributaries, and really being able to see our landscape integrated with food producing gardens. I think we have an opportunity to create a model in our rebuilding and recovery to make wiser, more efficient use of our vacant and blighted land.

“Feeding communities. Cultivating beauty. Nurturing lives” is the WandA tag line and my vision.

What books and/or blogs are you reading right now?

I just bought a book, the latest from Muhammad Yunus on changing the landscape of poverty in the world called Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism and Half the Sky about the transformation of women from oppression to opportunity across the world.

My favorite quarterly magazine is Urban Agriculture produced by the RUAF Foundation. It focuses on the global nature of the food security and urban agriculture movement. I just get so excited when it arrives in the mail. And, I can’t wait to read Farmer Jane.

Who’s in your community?

Oh my goodness. I interact with so many people across so many lines and culture groups. Mainly the people I interact with are what I call the Sisterhood of my House. It’s the women who live in my house, from my 10-year old granddaughter to my mother who is 96. My sister comes over and shares in the care of our mother. I can also count on her and my daughters to help me in the garden. I also have two close “sister friends” that are founding executive directors of young organizations. We have formed what we are calling exciting strategic partnerships to see where our work intersects so that we can lend each other development and fund raising support.

I’m finding that my day-to-day associations are strengthened by my “community of women.”

What are your commitments?

My main commitment right now is making sure I’m taking care of myself and really, really devoting some quality time and attention to that. I realize in order to continue being strong in this work that I have to do that.

Beyond that I’m committed to really honestly figuring out, not just by myself, but with a circle of colleagues and friends and partners how to best do this work. How to do my small part, whatever that part is. If it’s a small piece I really want to do it well; if it grows, all the better. I really want to go from idea to impact. It’s great to have ideas. But if they aren’t developed in a way that’s impactful, even if it’s something small then we’re really missing the mark.

What are your goals?

I know some people have a three year plan, but right now I have a goal of successfully working through an incubation period for WandA that began July 2010 and is projected will go through Spring 2011. I’m devoting careful attention and planning to that public launch of WandA by nurturing current partnerships and seeking potential opportunities.

What does change look like to you?

Change is a constant thing. When I think about developing my garden, over the course of a little more than a year and a half, I’ve seen a vacant property go from no fertility to increasing fertility and that really took some consistent, careful and thoughtful input. I guess change looks like taking careful and thoughtful action applied to whatever the situation is. That lot went from compacted clay and urban decay to fertile ground but it didn’t just happen because I brought in loads of soil, it happened because I brought together all sorts of inputs that had to work together in a complex system.

Regarding the practicalities of enacting change, what planning is involved? What kind of outreach?

In partnership with one of my development colleagues, Gia Hamilton of Gris Gris Lab, we’ve initiated an “action outreach” plan to engage participants in our work that are usually deemed undeserved or vulnerable. I know of people that fall into these groupings who don’t have a lot of resources but are extremely creative and entrepreneurial.

What projects are affiliated with yours?

A major signature project is developing Sun Harvest Kitchen Garden as a demonstration social enterprise growing operation to teach youth and women how to grow for the marketplace.

WandA is developing The Beautiful Blocks Project that will conduct action outreach along 11 blocks of Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard, a national historic Main Street. The project is being launched during the 10th anniversary of Café Reconcile to pay tribute to the efforts of all of the groups that have been part of the neighborhood’s revival. We plan to engage the residents, organizations and businesses in transforming the corridor by creating beautiful streetscapes, edible landscapes and yard gardens.

What projects and people have you got your eye on or are you impressed by?

Recent research into women’s collectives led me to SEWA in India. They are well-established women driven entrepreneurial organization that supports women from the lower castes of India and have been around for some time. I was so inspired.

I’m also inspired by Village Heath Works in Burundi where my cousin is its executive director. I’ve been so moved that she, as a young woman has been able to connect significantly to the profound needs of the people there. We both use this term “mighty work to describe our work.

Where do you see the state of agriculture/food policy in the next 5-10 years? Is real policy change a real possibility?

Nationally I’m really pleased that one of the best things to come out of Washington is the First Lady’s focus and commitment to food security, better health, and quality of life for children and families. I’m encouraged by a series of recent meetings and conferences I’ve attended focused on food security that indicate increasing interest in food policy on local, state and national levels.

In five to 10 years our food and agriculture situation, as well as the health of the nation, might possibly be improved by better educating women and youth about these issues. Accounts say that the world is more urban than ever. Better, more innovative training and practices at home, in schools and throughout our communities about our connection to food can influence policy and thus change.

What does the food movement need to do, be or have to be more effective?

We have to be more open and realistic about including people of color, women and youth to add to the diversity of leadership and participation in the food movement. My experience conducting food systems and agriculture related research and work in West Indian and African American communities led to accounts of youth, in particular, associating farming with slave labor. So, in our 21st century, information and technologically interactive world, we have to devise creative ways to change that image.

What would you want to be your last meal on earth?

I would want my last meal on earth to be some really good barbecued tofu with a combination of tender young mustards and collards, and buttery corn bread. And, a tall glass of sweet tea with lemon.

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