Civil Eats

Mark MacInnis is a native-born Detroiter who returned in 2009 to document a burgeoning urban farming community that is converting abandoned lots and open spaces into local food production and a sustainable food system. His film, Urban Roots, takes a close look at what happens to a city after a post-industrial collapse and suggests a new type of American Dream – one founded on nourishing community through the creation of a local economy. In a place where 46.6 percent of children live below the poverty line, there is an urgent need for change. Read More

When I was in the Ukraine in 1992, I heard an interesting story about small and large-scale farming happening side by side in the countryside. Although most rural people worked on the massive state-controlled collective farms, each person was allowed a small garden plot next to his dacha for personal use. Predictably, folks ended up using these plots to produce a lot of fruits and vegetables and even, through barter and the black market, income for their families. Meanwhile, the collective farms did not usually live up to expectations. The way the Ukrainians told it it, they made more income off these sub-acre plots than they did off the huge collective farms. Read More

After Novella Carpenter’s critically acclaimed memoir Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer came out, she and friend Willow Rosenthal, the founder of West Oakland gardening nonprofit City Slicker Farms, started talking about compiling a manual on urban gardening. “We always got these random emails like, ‘My chickens aren’t laying anymore!’” says Carpenter. So she and Rosenthal joked that they should write a book so they could reply: “Buy the book!”

Three years later, they can. Their new book, The Essential Urban Farmer, is a 500-page nuts-and-bolts guide to farming in the city–complete with sample garden designs, detailed illustrations, and photos of rabbit genitalia. Rosenthal, who is also a Waldorf School teacher and runs a small CSA in Berkeley, wrote the first two sections of the book: “Designing Your Urban Farm” and “Raising City Vegetables and Fruits.” Carpenter wrote the section called “Raising City Animals.” With advice on how to fix a chicken’s prolapsed “vent,” and a detailed how-to on eviscerating a chicken, it’s not for the squeamish. But then, neither is raising livestock.

I talked to Carpenter and Rosenthal recently about the guide, and got some tips about  how to create a thriving urban farm. Read More

Smack in the middle of a half-dozen shipping containers and striding up a mound of gravel, Johanna Gilligan, 31, can’t contain her excitement. “This looks so awesome!” She nods her head at an alcove between two containers, painted the pale color of new celery, with dry sinks attached. “That’s going to be for processing.”

Gilligan, co-director of New Orleans’ Grow Dat Youth Farm, traipses up the mound, which terminates at a deck of sorts and more containers, crowded with architectural students from Tulane University and local urban farm experts. Beyond the deck sits a bayou, lined with trees weeping Spanish moss into the water; the I-610 freeway buzzes along in the background. “I can’t believe how much is done! My office is going to be in a treehouse!”

She has reason to be excited. At four acres, the buildings’ site is just a sliver of City Park, 1,300 acres of green space on New Orleans’ north side. But come February, the buildings will be done, the beds will be ready for planting, and the second class of Grow Dat farmers will commence their work. The goal: one acre planted, 10,000 pounds of food grown, 20 jobs for student workers. Read More

The Alameda Point Collaborative Urban Farm is a one-acre farm growing a variety of fruits, vegetables, herbs, eggs, honey, and–with the introduction of new aquaculture ponds–will soon offer fish as well. Neat rows of plants are surrounded by olive and stone fruit orchards, but beyond this farm, towering cranes are positioned on the horizon. This farm is in a unique location. Read More

There’s a scene in Terry Gilliam’s 1991 movie “The Fisher King” in which a man plucks the discarded wire cage from a champagne bottle off a pile of garbage bags as he walks down a New York City street with a woman he is trying to impress.  He fiddles with the wire in his hands as they walk, eventually holding up what looks like a delicate and beautiful little metal chair, fit for a dollhouse. “You can find some pretty amazing things in the trash,” he says to her.  She is smitten.

That transformation of a piece of trash into a thing of beauty transfixed me then, and still does.  When I traveled to Cuba a few weeks ago, on a food sovereignty study trip with Food First, I had the opportunity to be transfixed again and again. Read More

Sunday marked the grand opening of Urban Adamah, the first faith-based, modern urban farm in West Berkeley, at 1050 Parker Street near San Pablo Avenue, opposite Fantasy Studios. The one-acre farm with Jewish roots offers a residential fellowship program for young adults, summer camps for kids and teens, and plans to help feed the needy in the community. Read More

This week, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed one of the most progressive pieces of legislation for urban agriculture in the nation. The new legislation has amended the zoning code to allow agricultural activities in all parts of the city, as well as defining the parameters by which urban agriculturists can sell their products. It doesn’t address the touchier subjects of animal husbandry or marijuana cultivation, but has created opportunities for and the legitimacy of urban fruit and vegetable cultivation.

The legislation was the result of a rare combined and cooperative effort between city officials and urban agriculture practitioners and advocates. This was accomplished mainly through the work of the San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance (SFUAA), an organization of which I am a member, which formed nearly a year ago to coalesce the various efforts and projects focusing on local food and agriculture into a cohesive political voice. The coalition is made up of over 300 individual and 40 organizational members, and its formation turned out to be very well timed. Read More

A couple of weeks ago, Washington Post political blogger Ezra Klein and USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack had a debate in the Washington Post about rural subsidies; the substance of which was then analyzed and thoroughly skewered in a couple of excellent posts by Brian Depew of the Center for Rural Affairs and Tom Philpott at Grist. The whole affair got me thinking about another urban/rural discussion I read at the end of last year, this one focused on food—and about how counterproductive all of our country/city dividing lines are. Read More

The aptly named Willow Rosenthal grew up around trees in Sonoma County in a community that farmed its own food. Raised by hippies who didn’t have a lot of money, she nonetheless ate well. She also learned how to grow her own food by working on an organic farm and for a local nursery. Read More

Retired City of Berkeley health outreach worker Joy Moore, 59, is anything but retired.

A long-time local food activist, Moore has played a key role in community efforts to reform school lunch in the Berkeley Unified School District, co-founded Farm Fresh Choice, which brings quality, affordable produce to people of lesser means, and was a member of the Berkeley Food Policy Council, a coalition of community and city groups founded in 1999 to increase community food access and improve health for all the city’s residents. Read More

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. Read More

Last week, right in time for fall harvest, I found myself in the company of Will Allen, an urban farming pioneer, Annie Novak,  co-founder of the country’s first commercial rooftop farm, Fritz Haeg, an edible landscaper, and 1,500 others at the first international urban and small farm conference. The weekend was hosted by Will Allen and his organization Growing Power, an educational farm organization that he founded in a food-desert neighborhood of Milwaukee 18 years ago.

Retracing my steps to Milwaukee: a few months ago, in time for spring planting, I had seen the same three urban-agriculturalists speak in New York City. I had left that evening with the strongest desire to change the world that I had ever felt: All I had to do was plant something green. Read More

Manny Howard’s new book, My Empire of Dirt, is haunted by the living ghost of Wendell Berry.  First there’s the epigraph by Berry in which he instructs us on how to “use land well,” and it includes knowing and loving the land, and using the right tools. (To paraphrase a master, poorly.)

Then, early on in Howard’s recounting of a season spent trying to turn his south Brooklyn backyard into a homestead, the voice of Wendell Berry comes to him, offering further wisdom. Only problem is, Howard confesses in the epilogue that “On the Farm, Wendell Berry girded me.  Not that I had ever read a word he’d written until I was back at my desk, trying to make sense of the year.” Huh? Read More

Big news, folks, big news! We’re pregnant! With a goat! It is our extreme pleasure to announce that one of our Nigerian Dwarfs, Lucy, is due sometime around the end of August. We can’t decide which prospect is more seductive, the fresh goat’s milk or the scampering hooves of teeny, tiny goat babies, who will be no bigger than a bread box at birth.

Spring is the time of year when livestock are usually giving birth rather than getting preggers, but Nigerian Dwarfs have the uncanny ability to breed year round making them stellar continuous milk producers, as one goat can be freshened while another is drying up. For those non-farmers out there, “freshening” is the polite way of saying lactating and goats, like all mammals, must give birth in order to lactate. Read More

I made a decision in early April that has improved my quality of life immensely: I broadcasted hundreds of lettuce seeds throughout two, 2 ft. x 6 ft. raised beds on my rooftop. Read More

New York is about to become the home to a very big, very high farm. It’s called Brooklyn Grange, and it’s a one-acre rooftop soil farm that our Brooklyn-based team is installing next month on a six story factory building on Northern Boulevard in Long Island City, Queens. Read More

Among the adherents of the food security movement in the United States, many idolize Cuba’s experience in building a vibrant urban farming sector. This idealization is due to the lack of information available on the Cuban system, as caused by the travel embargo and media blackout there. Compounding this situation is the vast difference between the Cuban and American political and economic systems.

Cuba’s accomplishments are undeniably astounding, inspiring and a testament to the country’s flexibility and pragmatism: 350,000 new well paying jobs (out of a total workforce of 5 million) created in urban agriculture nationally; 4 million tons of fruits and vegetables produced annually in Havana, up ten-fold in a decade; and a city of 2.2 million people regionally self-sufficient in produce. These accomplishments have been supported by an extensive network of input suppliers, technical assistance providers, researchers, teachers and government agencies.

Yet, Cuban urban agriculture, no matter how inspiring, is largely irrelevant to Americans. Read More

All across the nation people are converting their front and backyards, vacant lots, and other spaces into thriving and productive food gardens. To help encourage new gardeners along this verdant path, The 350 Garden Challenge will bring thousands together over a a single weekend, May 15-16, to transform 350+ Sonoma County landscapes into bountiful gardens. The goal is to save water, link local food production and carbon savings, grow food and habitat, promote greywater, and encourage lawn to food transformations. The project is inspired in part by the 350.org international campaign to find and implement solutions to climate change. Read More

The dead of winter may seem to be an odd time to declare to be in full flush, but here we are sitting pretty with more eggs than a household of three can handle. After a harrowing seven months in which we lost the majority of our chickens, we have recovered in aces. Quiche anyone?

This past May, we began our urban chicken experiment with three birds purchased from a lady near Petaluma, the egg capital of the world. She had the best variety of rare, heritage breeds around and I wanted “pretty” chickens, not those run-of-the-mill feed store varieties. Hey, don’t judge! I live in a tragically hip city and need to keep up appearances. But seriously, once I was made aware of the splendid array of chicken breeds–the beautiful colors, the crazy assortment of combs, the mohawks, the feathery hats, ones with five toes, ones that laid green eggs, ones with feathers on their feet–I knew I had to get myself some of that backyard eye candy. Read More

Happy New Year and welcome back for more Kitchen Table Talks, the monthly conversation series about the American food system. Many thanks to all of you who participated in our discussions in 2009 and we look forward to a fruitful and inspiring year of exchanging knowledge and ideas and building community with you. We’re excited to kick off 2010 with a conversation on Urban Homesteading on Tuesday, January 19 from 6:30 to 8:30 pm at our new location in San Francisco’s Mission district at Viracocha, 998 Valencia St. at 21st St.

As the good food movement grows and urban farming heroes like Growing Power’s Will Allen and Oakland’s own Novella Carpenter pave the way, we will explore the surge towards City self-sufficiency, including growing and preserving your own food; raising chickens and goats; keeping bees and worms; composting, installing greywater and rainwater catchment systems; and a whole host of other DIY activities. Read More

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

I’ve always thought of myself as a farmer and I’m not really sure why. Technically speaking, I’ve never lived on a farm. Maybe it has to do with the fact that almost 50 percent of Americans lived on farms around the turn of the 20th century and that we are all a mere stone’s throw away from our agrarian forefathers. I suspect it probably has more to do with where I grew up: a small town in Nebraska. When you live in one of those Midwest plains states, everyone just assumes you are a farmer.

My childhood home did sit on a rural mail route, bordering the very edge of town where an alfalfa field separated my house from the high school I attended. And as a youth, I trespassed on many a farmers’ properties, leapt across giant rolled hay bales with great abandon, got liquored up in more than one cornfield, and went to work in those same fields at the tender age of 12 detasseling corn.

A further reinforcement of identifying with farm life comes from being a descendant of a long line of Swiss dairy folk. My mother spent her formative years on a Southern California dairy with her Swiss immigrant father who milked 40 cows, twice a day, by hand. Though my parents did not own acreage, farm lore was most definitely a part of our family consciousness. Consequently, my decision to actually “farm” wasn’t a huge conceptual shift for me. Read More

When my buddy Ian suggested we turn his ’86 Dodge half-ton into a planter, I thought the pickup had finally blown its engine.  When Ian said he intended to keep the old truck on the road in Brooklyn, I figured he’d blown his.

But now, four months later, we’ve got ripe tomatoes growing in the bed (a gas station attendant ate the first one last weekend), and the transmission is going strong.  Truck Farm, as we at Wicked Delicate call her now, is a mobile CSA, with twelve (increasingly skinny) paying subscribers. Read More

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. Read More

This post is part of a series called Roof Garden Rookies, which explores my attempt, as an amateur gardener, to grow a garden on the rooftop of my building in lower Manhattan. My roof garden was recently featured in the New York Times.

Last week I wrote about the process of building raised beds for my rooftop garden. The next step was clear: ready the soil and onto planting. Read More

One of the complex questions I have been living is the question of education. This is a question that has grown within me from my own education in the public school system and now ripens as I have the stewardship of nurturing my own four daughters. For their sakes, I have waded through the war-zone of educational philosophies with the cross-fire so thick that I could not clearly see who was wrong or who was right. At last I came upon a place of peace, where Dewey, Montessori, Steiner, Mason, Rousseau and Froebel all seem to call a truce. I have found a place where public schoolers, home-schoolers, and private-schoolers can amicably co-exist. This higher-ground is in the garden. Read More

On a sunny afternoon last week, the day before a winter rainstorm rolled into San Francisco, I hit the streets with a bagful of “seedballs”—little dry balls of compacted clay, compost and seeds (in this case, native wildflowers). Whenever I happened upon an abandoned lot or a scrubby patch of soil around a tree in the sidewalk, I tossed in a seedball and hoped the next day’s rains would be heavy enough to dissolve the clay, stir in the compost and effectively plant the seeds. Read More

Rain is pounding San Francisco when I visit Kate’s house. We connected online, through a neighborhood group, and I’m stopping by to check out her hens because perhaps foolishly I’m considering getting some of my own. I’ve been puzzling over whether urban hens are pets or part of a living pantry. I have no idea what to expect. But visiting real birds seems like a good enough start. Read More

The idea of community looms large in the current environmental debate. It offers a locus of action that complements both the national and international protocols and the individual behavioral changes that have, until recently, dominated the environmental agenda. Read More