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.

Willow Rosenthal

Why did you write this book?

Carpenter: We were both trial-and-error urban farmers. We would’ve loved to have had a guidebook that showed us best practices. So this is the book that we wished we’d had when we were starting out.

In the intro, you write that the average urban backyard can grow all the fruit and veggies for one person in 25 x 40 feet, and that it makes economic sense to garden if you have more time than money. Is this book geared, in part, towards low-income readers?  

Carpenter: Yeah, definitely. I’m low-income, Willow is probably low-income, too. People are like, “You should eat organic food,” but when you go to Whole Foods or the farmers’ market, it’s so expensive. So this was our DIY way to eat organic, healthy food. If you do it right, it can be cost effective.

Rosenthal: I wouldn’t say that it’s only geared towards low-income people, but toward people who are interested in making their own solutions. It’s not going to be as useful for people who want to purchase everything at the garden store or hire other people to do work in the garden. To make an impact on the way that the food system is structured for environmental good, it’s necessary for people of all walks of life to grow food in the city.

What mistakes did each of you make early on in your respective urban farms that you hope to prevent others from making with this book?

Carpenter: Well, I remember that Willow and I had built a chicken shed and we were raising pullets (adolescent chickens) and we didn’t realize that raccoons are really smart. They can use their little fingers to pry off staples (which we’d used to staple the chicken wire to the chicken shed). Over the course of four days, the raccoon would slowly pry off more. And then one night, it came in and killed every single pullet–I think there were 25 in there. It was massive carnage. The lesson here was don’t put the staples on the outside.

In terms of the garden, I would say my problem is not harvesting stuff. You can plant all these really beautiful vegetables and there’s a tendency to not want to harvest them because they look so beautiful. You need to have a harvest day, like Fridays or Thursdays, where you go out into the garden and harvest everything that’s ready and put it in your fridge. I can’t emphasize how genius this is.

Rosenthal: What mistakes didn’t I make?  (Laughter.) Farming is a process of trial and error. Each farm is its own unique entity. You do need to find your own way. Plants are always gonna die and you’re going to have to figure that out.

Rosenthal: Many landlords have an altruistic streak. When presented with something to do for the community that’s no skin off their back–they’re happy to do it. I think we tend to make a lot of assumptions about who people are. But it’s important to have an open mind. Maybe two out of 10 landlords don’t care at all about the community. But there are eight who do, so let’s get those people involved. You’re politicizing them in a way–you’re bringing them into this activist movement.

[Another] real perk is your thanks! I know that sounds cheesy, but you should focus on informing the landlord of what’s going on and thanking them. The mistake some people make is, “I got permission and now I can forget about it.” It’s a relationship you need to cultivate and not take for granted.

Starting an urban farm demands a lot of work–not to mention money. You need to pay for water, buy liability insurance, equipment, wood and nails for raised beds, maybe even hoop houses. Are there funds would-be gardeners can apply for if they don’t have enough of their own money?

Carpenter: If you’re doing a community garden, you can approach your city government. Pretty much every city has a community garden association. I know in Seattle it’s the P-Patch.

Rosenthal:  There are a couple of important resources. Master Gardener programs exist in every county in the United States–they are a subset of the agriculture extension services run by local universities. The USDA spends money through these agencies to support farmers. They were intended to support primarily commercial farmers. But this is changing as people in urban areas are actually using those services more. I always tell people, this is your tax dollars at work and you have every right to utilize them!

If you have a pest, you can take a sample of the plant and put them in a baggie and send them to a specialist and they will ID that for you–for free.

In some states, like California, you can now get services through the [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)] program to help you start a home garden. You can use food stamps for all sorts of special vouchers for gardening supplies.

Regional and citywide organizations can often provide a lot of technical assistance. Some of them may provide materials free of charge–City Slicker Farms does. The other way that home gardeners can make it affordable is by producing their own vegetable seedlings. When you go to the store to buy a cauliflower seedling and it’s $3 for a six-pack, you’re hardly saving money on your food bill. But if you’re buying a packet of seeds–100 seeds for two bucks. In our book we give an outline of a simple setup for using fluorescent lighting to start seedlings indoors.

Novella Carpenter with her goats.

The book does contain many tricks for saving money on construction: getting softwood pallets for free to use as compost bins or boxed beds, using old bathtubs as containers. What are some other tricks the two of you have used over time to save money on construction supplies?

Carpenter: One of the greatest fencing materials is really cheap: concrete reinforcement mesh.  But you can buy this mesh at any Home Depot or local lumber yard and it’s $12 for a giant sheet of it. You can use it for making quick and easy fences. It’ll even keep goats in!

Also for me, one of the great parts of living in a city is there is so much waste that you can feed to animals. You [also] never have to buy pots. You can usually find those at garden stores–they’re trying to get rid of the black plastic pots.

I found this guy who makes redwood sculptures of giant grizzly bears. And he has all these scrap pieces of redwood that he throws aside. I actually built a little chicken coop from those once. So you have to look at your resources and think how you can repurpose [them into] building materials.

Rosenthal: Get your building materials for free or cheap, but invest money in hardware. If the bolts that hold your boxes together are rated for outdoor use your boxes will last a long time.

In terms of getting free building materials: I was blessed because here in the East Bay we have a wonderful company called the ReUse People. They salvage whole houses–including a lot of the framing lumber–and they sell it for a very affordable price, already cleaned of nails and screws. So check your salvage yard.

Extremely valuable materials go into the garbage, such as hardwood pallets. Softwood pallets, unless you line them with something, can degrade pretty quickly. Hardwood pallets are an amazingly valuable resource.

My other favorite free material is old burlap sacks. They’re great containers for planting. They’ll degrade over time but they’re free and have structure to them. You can get them at coffee roasters or chocolate companies. A lot of times you can find them on Freecycle.org.

I was surprised to learn that you can farm on heavy-metal contaminated soil.  Have either of you done that? And if so, which precautions did you take?   

Rosenthal: There’s a lot of gray area when it comes to health, toxicity, and safety. Rather than saying “do this or just do that,” our hope is to educate people so they can make their own decisions.

With our backyard garden program at City Slicker Farms, the first thing we do is go into a resident’s garden and test their soil for lead and heavy metals. There were some situations where we said, “No, we don’t think you should have vegetable gardens unless we cap the soil and put in raised beds.” We follow stringent guidelines with people.

First we cover the soil with mulch–or put down layers of cardboard and mulch. Dilution has an effect. If you bring in an equal volume of compost and mix that in with your soil, you’ve already cut the level of lead in half.

You say that native soil is better than potting soil, but what if your soil has chemicals or toxins in it?  Where do you go about getting healthy native soil to amend your own?   

Rosenthal: That’s a good question. We live in such an “I can just buy whatever I need” culture. And a lot of the potting soil is actually toxic to plants.

It’s possible to get topsoil. You can sometimes go on Craigslist and find people who are doing construction projects and need to get rid of some dirt. But often they’re like, “We need to dump it today.” And you should take a sample to the lab and test it before you buy it.

You can buy topsoil, potting mix, and compost. But you want to be sure they’re testing these products. Talk to the employees at locally-owned gardening centers. They often know a lot about what different potting mix companies are doing. Not all materials are equal. Making your own compost is a great way to get a high quality product.

What about theft? A friend of mine in Portland recently had all of her (perfectly ripe) persimmons stolen from their backyard. Any tips on how to deal with this? 

Rosenthal: It does happen. My strategy has always been to try to communicate with these unknown people. It’s easy to victimize a faceless person, but if you put a sign on the front of your fence saying, “Hey, I know you might be tempted by these beautiful tomatoes, but if you want some, why don’t you just come knock on my door and I’d be happy to share.”

We are living in desperate times. It’s up to all of us to do what we can to help and not to take it personally. What we did at City Slicker Farms, we did have to lock our gardens at night so they wouldn’t get vandalized. So we just set up planter boxes outside of them and put up signs saying “Help yourself.”

Novella, you emphasize how important it is to check your city’s ordinances to see whether it’s legal to keep bees, chickens, goats, rabbits, etc. Can you say more about that?

Carpenter: Oakland has kind of lax laws and the ordinances were ambiguous. For instance, I can have goats but I can’t have a male goat. I think actually you can’t have pigs, it’s buried into some weird law. I think it’s legal in Portland to have goats. It is in Seattle as well. In the book, we’re talking about super ground-level things like, it’s illegal to keep chickens in some cities. But then it becomes a question of who is watching those laws. If you had a neighbor that doesn’t like you, who is calling the city every day to report you, that’s when you’re gonna run into a problem. In that case, you  want to cover your ass and make sure that you’re legal.

You say that bees are the “gateway urban farm animal.” Yet it sounds like it’s a fairly expensive operation. What’s the ballpark amount you spent buying hives, supplies, extractors, etc.? 

Carpenter: To get a beehive with bees and the queen and all that, you’re looking at $250. So, it is definitely a fairly nice Christmas present or birthday present. Or for some people, it’s a really nice pair of shoes. There are ways to do it more cheaply. If you’re handy, you can make your own frames. You can build your own boxes. But I’ve found that usually anything that I build is shit. I spend more money being frustrated.

To me, $250 seems expensive, but when you harvest your honey, you get six gallons, and you can sell it for $15 for half a quart or pint. And those boxes will last forever.

You write that overfeeding is one of the biggest problems with backyard chickens–people give them scraps and kitchen waste but then forget to reduce the amount of pelleted feed. And as you mention, overweight chickens not only have trouble laying eggs, they can die prematurely. What’s a general rule of thumb for how much chicken feed to give a full-grown chicken per day?

Carpenter: Some people think of their chickens as their pets. That’s fine if you can afford to—you can buy scratch and hydrated mealworms. You can really go crazy with snacks for the chickens!  But each chicken needs about a handful of feed a day. So it’s not a huge amount.  You supplement with greens, weeds, grass, and they’ll be totally healthy and fine.

You say rabbits are the new chickens. Is that really true? I’m not a vegetarian, but I just can’t get past the notion of slaughtering a bunny.

Carpenter: There is a pretty big trend of people who are new meat eaters and they want to raise their own turkeys and chickens and now rabbits. They can save money and have this great source of low-fat, hormone-free meat. Some people just use their manure, though. It’s so good and they poop so much!  It’s really balanced–not super high in nitrogen. I know a guy who grows a bucket of rabbit poop and sells it for $10 to people who grow marijuana.

Which animal was the most rewarding for you to raise/keep?

Carpenter: You love them all for different reasons. But the animals I will have forever are bees. Bees are so giving. And I bought all that expensive equipment, so I better keep at it! There’s also just something so amazing about bees. They are such hard workers and you have this connection to the seasons that is really intense.

Originally published on Grist

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.

Pitched as the natural progression of programs like Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard (New Orleans is home to the first Edible Schoolyard affiliate outside of the Bay Area, and its founding director, Donna Cavato, sits on Grow Dat’s board), Grow Dat will welcome its second round of student workers in February. The project was founded in 2010 with the Tulane City Center, a community design and architecture initiative, and the Urban Innovator Challenge Fellowship, also at Tulane. The backing let Gilligan, a founding staffer for the New Orleans Food and Farm Network and a driving force behind Rethink‘s New Orleans School Food Report Card, bring in a small staff to work out kinks for the program’s first year. In its inaugural year, Grow Dat employed 13 student workers who grew a total of 2,200 pounds of food, donating nearly two-thirds of it to food banks, and selling the rest at a farmers market.

The effort, says Denise Richter, who coordinates gardens at five elementary and middle schools for Edible Schoolyard New Orleans (ESY-NOLA), solves a riddle that’s confounded ESY-NOLA since it was founded: how to keep students engaged with food after eighth grade.

“There was always this moment where it was like, ‘Great, we’ve been able to establish a culture and an understanding of how important it is to know where your food comes from and cook it,’” says Richter, who says ESY-NOLA works with more than 500 students each year. “And there’s always this regret, because what do they do [after ESY]? Go to a place where their cafeteria food looks like it did five years ago, eating slop. Grow Dat is such an asset, because our students can apply their skills and go even further.”

With an older–if much smaller–pool of students, Grow Dat is aiming to expand teenagers’ food knowledge while teaching even broader lessons about work and collaboration. “A key concept of Grow Dat is that you cannot do social change only in one neighborhood,” says Gilligan. She sees the program’s site at City Park as neutral ground for students, who this year will come from a mix of public and private schools, to learn “to communicate across race and class lines.”

That’s a heady goal, but if Aston Shields, 17, is any indication, Grow Dat may have some luck in meeting it. One of last year’s students–he’s angling to return as a crew leader this year–Shields didn’t start out interested in food. “I was just reading posters on the wall, and stumbled onto [the job listing],” says Shields in an urban drawl, adding that he mostly applied because it was a paid job. For a modest stipend, he learned how to plan and maintain food gardens, wash and prepare vegetables for market and track their sales, and even attended a handful of lectures on food systems at Tulane. “I came here and I was like, ‘Wow, I never even really thought about how people produced our food,’” says Shields. “It was just a whole new world.”

But in addition to being paid for his work, Shields was able to take home fruits and vegetables from plots he was helping tend at the Hollygrove Market and Farm–a special boon to a family living in the Hollygrove neighborhood where, says Shields, the closest thing to a supermarket is a Walgreen’s. “Once Grow Dat gave me fruits and vegetables, [my family] embraced it,” says Shields–even if the end results weren’t exactly what most slow food acolytes might have had in mind. “We had some shiitake mushrooms,” says Shields. “And my momma made sloppy joes with it.”

Photo: Top, Johanna Gilligan packs fava beans with a student from the Grow Dat program in New Orleans, by David Schalliol. Bottom, A young Grow Dat participant, by Andy Cook.

Originally published on Grist

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.

The Naval Air Station at Alameda was founded in 1927 when wetlands were filled on the tip of this island in the San Francisco Bay to build runways for military planes. As a naval port, the base was most active during World War II and later during the Cold War. In 1997 the station was closed, as part of the fourth round of closures under the Base Realignment and Closure Act. But the closing of a military installation is often seen as a development opportunity in urban areas, as it opens up land for growth and expansion within city limits.

In the case of the Alameda Station, 1,734 acres became available for other uses. At least three other former military lands are slated for redevelopment in the San Francisco Bay Area, including Mare Island, the Presidio, and Treasure Island–most in some form of combined mixed-use, housing, and open space plans. Typically, some portion of the land is also set aside for use by government agencies and non-profits as a “public benefit conveyance.” One such public benefit, a portion of the former Alameda base is used by the Alameda Point Collaborative (APC), a “supportive housing community” that provides homes, job training, and other services to formerly homeless families.

The APC Farm grew out of a food community assessment that found widespread difficulty in obtaining nutritious and fresh food due to availability and cost. The community was stranded in a food desert. In 2008, following these findings, the farm was created to provide produce for the residents and to educate youth and community members on the benefits of healthy eating. The APC Farm now offers a CSA-style weekly produce delivery service and sells at a farm stand and to local restaurants, and produce from the farm also serves the community kitchen. The farm’s focus on education was nationally recognized in late August, as members of the Growing Youth program traveled to Philadelphia to help draft the Youth Food Bill of Rights at the Rooted in Community Conference.

The APC Farm is an example of the public benefit communities can reap from former military lands, one that addresses multiple levels of the urban food system, including food security and food deserts. In urban areas, lack of available land restricts potential for growing food. But base closings free up large swaths of land which can be used for farming. In fact, the very scale of lands available in these former bases indicate the possibility for much larger, more ambitious farming projects.

Areas around a former base are often economically depressed, having weathered a sudden loss of population and jobs. They are also poorly served by grocery stores and public transportation. By bringing productive landscapes to the base (and setting up market stands and CSAs, too), the neighborhood is served with a fresh, nutritious food source.

So why don’t we see more proposals for farms on former bases? One major constraint is contamination issues: Military bases are often highly polluted from former operations at the base, and many are Superfund sites.

In the case of the APC Farm, the farm is located on a former playground, which means the risks of contamination are low (soil was tested to confirm lack of contamination before the farm was cultivated). Depending on the past uses of a base, there can be many low-risk areas suitable for agricultural uses, including buffer areas at the base edges, former housing and administration areas, or undeveloped areas. In most cases, soil health has to be rebuilt and soil testing must be performed.

Communities will emerge around land that can support a population. If we consider the option of repurposing natural landscapes, integrating agriculture as a core element, then we can grow new types of neighborhoods and marketplaces which are strong enough to provide for local populations and the city beyond their borders.

Farm programs on abandoned military land are opportunities to strengthen food deserts. We shouldn’t ignore their potential.

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.

Some of the things I saw there included: the discarded front grill to an old electric fan used as a hanging planter with just three chains and some burlap lining; liquid humus packaged in old Havana rum bottles and sold at a farm supply and consultation site; soda cans at an educational farm center cut to be planters for small succulents; an old cooking oil tin at a community garden turned sideways, sliced open, and planted with herbs; raised beds created with upturned spent liquor bottles; and a chicken coop on a family tobacco farm cobbled together from scrap wood and metal.

Everywhere we turned we saw materials whose natural life was being maximized, extended. I joked to my fellow travelers to watch their water bottles–if it ain’t nailed down, it might become a planter. An image flashed through my mind: the corner deli in New York City (my hometown) where with a sandwich order one is given a stack of 30 napkins and a set of plastic cutlery she’ll never use. What would a resident of Havana think?

This Cuban thrift is sometimes taken to an extreme, reminding me this practice is not done because it’s beautiful or quaint, but because it’s a necessity. Examples include: Styrofoam seedling planter trays are reused and reused, brown with age and crumbling at the edges; a farm carved out of a former trash dump; and earth that was a rainbow of glass and plastic shards, unidentifiable debris, the old shell of a bus—and who knows what else–nestled next to the pig barn.

After the fall of the Eastern Bloc, Cuba was left to figure out how to survive without the influx of food, fuel and other supplies that they had purchased affordably from the Soviet Union until then. The answer turned out to include the practice of a more local and organic agricultural system (fewer inputs, less fuel, more oxen), as well as an overall practice of thrift. In doing this so successfully they made survival possible. As an engineer at the Institute for Research in Tropical Agriculture (INIFAT) told us: “the best thing that could have happened to Cuba was to be forced to use sustainable and organic methods of agriculture.”

As part of this transformation, the government now runs programs that support small farmers and encourage local—and often urban—production. When we met with the PR representative from the Ministry of Agriculture, we had lots of questions about how their theory played out in practice. One person in our group asked “do you encourage people to practice seed saving?”  He responded with a chuckle: “the main concept we teach here in Cuba is saving. I’m not just talking about seeds, I am talking about everything.”

Farmers in general—whether they be in Cuba, the U.S. or elsewhere—are experienced practitioners in reducing and re-using. Financial necessity and deep understanding of the natural environment means that small-scale sustainable farmers must be magicians of a sort, from seed saving to all manner of cost saving and resource saving practices. They, like the character in “The Fisher King,” know how to make something beautiful (and delicious) out of almost nothing.

After all, isn’t the transformation of soil, seed and water into something that feeds and nourishes us—nothing into something—the ultimate expression of this?

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.

On an uncharacteristically warm June day, several hundred people, including many families with young children, turned out to tour the farm, meet chickens, bake pizzas, pickle cucumbers, make ice cream, and whip up bicycle smoothies—as well as learn a little about the philosophy behind the farm, currently boasting greens, squashes, tomatoes, and other summer crops.

Local urban farming icon Novella Carpenter welcomed the newbies to the neighborhood, along with Assemblymember Nancy Skinner and Councilmember Darryl Moore.  Fellow West Berkeley urban farmer Jim Montgomery, who walked his goats over to say hello, was a big hit with the younger set.

“The more urban farms we have in this area to help fill a gap in accessibility and availability to fresh, healthy produce the better,” said Skinner, who grows her own backyard bounty in walking distance of Urban Adamah. Skinner has done so since the 1970s when she lived in The Integral Urban House, a pioneering collective residing in a converted Victorian home that grew its own food and recycled gray water long before the current batch of urban homesteaders took up city farming.” We need to demonstrate to people that we can grow food anywhere and people need to see where there food comes from.”

Urban Adamah is the brainchild of UC Berkeley graduate Adam Berman, who explained the name thus: “Adamahmeans earth in Hebrew and also shares the same root word as the word adam which means human. The word connotes the connection between the earth and earthlings. We like that.”

The farm marries Berman’s interest in social justice issues like hunger and food security, with environmental stewardship and spirituality. His own religious practice combines progressive Judaism with Buddhist teachings.

Berman spent seven years as the head of the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in Connecticut, where the seeds for the farm’s fellowship program, known as the Jewish Sustainability Corps., were first sewn. But the 40-year-old, who now lives in North Berkeley with his wife, said he always knew he’d bring the idea back to the Bay Area, where the interest in sustainable food and social justice made it the right fit for the pilot project. “Berkeley feels like home for me,” he said.

Urban Adamah offers a three-month in-house leadership training program  three times a year for young adults that integrates urban organic farming, social justice community service, and progressive Jewish practice.

Currently, a dozen fellows, who represent a range of Jewish beliefs, live in a rented house near the farm. The intensive curriculum, in a kibbutz-like setting, is designed to equip fellows with tools to become agents of positive change in their communities, said Berman. As part of the program each intern volunteers at food security organizations in the area, including The Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice, Cooking Matters (formerly Operation Frontline), City Slicker Farms, and People’s Grocery.

Berman said that the Jewish tradition’s core values of ahava (love), chessed (compassion) and tzedek (justice) inform all the activities on the farm, which, he added, seek to strengthen young people’s bodies, minds, hearts, and souls. Urban Adamah also practices age-old Jewish customs such as Bal Taschit (do not waste), Shmita (letting the land rest), Peah (leaving the corners of the field for the poor), and Tzaar Baalei Chayim (preventing cruelty to animals), all carried out amid the environmental and social realities of a 21st Century urban farm.

Most of the farm’s harvest is intended for local food banks and homeless kitchens; Berman hopes the plots produce about 8,000 pounds of edibles this year. In the near future he plans to approach restaurants in the immediate area for food scraps to feed the farm’s chickens and add to the soil.

The annual budget for the farm is around $360,000. Public programs are slated to bring in about $15,000 a year and fellows pay $1,200 each to attend the leadership training, but Berman still needs to raise significant funds to keep the nonprofit farm afloat. To date, core support has come from The Dorot Foundation, Walter and Elise Haas Fund, Nathan Cummings Foundation, Repair the World, Saal Family Foundation and UpStart Bay Area.

Berman got one lucky break: land owner Wareham Development agreed to host the farm rent-free for two years on the previously vacant lot. Hence the mobile feel to the farm: all crops are grown in above-ground pallet boxes, the chicken coops are on wheels, classes are held in tents and the greenhouses can be moved too, should a relocation prove necessary when the current lease is up.

Despite its transitory nature, Berman sees his program putting down roots. “I hope that Urban Adamah becomes a national model for engaging Jewish young adults in environmental sustainability and urban community renewal,” he said. “The program is highly replicable. There could be an Urban Adamah site in a half dozen cities across the country within the next 10 years.”

Today, Urban Adamah will kick off a series of movie nights with the funny and informative food documentary Food Stamped, shot locally by a couple who attempted to eat healthily on food stamps alone. Read a review on Lettuce Eat Kale. An optional farm tour starts at 6:30 p.m.; the screening begins at 7:00 p.m.

Adam Berman Photo: Christina Diaz

Originally published on Berkeleyside

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.

The work of re-writing the zoning code came up early in SFUAA meetings, but became more pressing when one of our members, Little City Gardens, came up against the code in attempting to expand to a new, larger plot of land. Told that converting the empty lot into a garden would cost $3,000 in conditional use permit fees, LCG opted to petition not for a personal exemption, but for a rewriting of the code.

With support from key individuals in the department, as well as in the mayor’s office, the planning department immediately went to work on crafting a new code. In that process, they consulted a zoning working group of the SFUAA, which proposed certain zoning priorities and tried to limit potential negative impacts of new zoning legislation.

For the most part, our advocacy campaign worked. For example, the original drafts contained provisions (supposedly at the express behest of former mayor Gavin Newsom) that gardens be required to have fencing, and further, fencing that is qualified as “ornamental.” Seeing as ornamental specifies made of wood or wrought-iron, this would have meant any new garden project would have had hundreds, if not thousands, of extra dollars of start-up costs. The SFUAA pushed for the the fencing requirement to be removed for new gardens, and for gardens to be given more choices. Which means that, not only will less-expensive fencing be a possibility, but we have encouraged new spaces to use their fencing to grow something (kiwi? grapes? passionfruit?).

Sadly, another of the SFUAA’s proposed amendments was not adopted. We recommended that the “change of use” fees paid to the planning department for new gardens be waived. We argued that if the city truly intends to support the flourishing of many new food-producing sites, it would behoove them to remove potential barriers to entry. In the context of an economic recession where all governments are having a hard time making ends meet, it was argued that agencies cannot make such blanket fee exceptions, even for something acknowledged as beneficial like urban agriculture. But comparing $3,000 to the $300 it will cost to get a permit with the new code, this is obviously an improvement.

One issue that the code brings up is the question of sales-focused versus community-oriented production. Many of the urban farming projects that currently exist in San Francisco (Alemany Farm, Free Farm, and Hayes Valley Farm being the three largest examples) are all focused on growing food and giving it away; none sell any produce. So how will this legislation help these projects? While a large portion of the legislation regards legalizing production for local markets, by virtue of setting up designations for urban agriculture the legislation legitimizes agriculture’s place in the urban landscape. Food that is grown for personal use is not regulated in the code; if someone has a backyard garden, this legislation won’t effect them. 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.

Impacts on neighborhoods were also taken into account by planners in writing the code. As a result, the regulatory parameters of the legislation are based on size (less than an acre is designated “neighborhood” vs “large-scale” for more than an acre) and not whether or not the food is grown for sale or not. Any new project (for profit or not) that occurs on a large site would be legally allowable, following the permitting process (including a vetting of water-wise irrigation practices by the Public Utilities Commission). This means that, once neighbors have been notified and a permit has been secured, no neighbor will be able to complain and get a project shut down. Before this code, non-residential gardens on private property had an unknowable legal status, and could theoretically be fought by neighbors.

All told, this legislation is proof that “the system,” as ossified and change-resistant as it may seem, can occasionally work, with the combined efforts of the right people in positions of power and aware, active community members. The SFUAA’s mission and work is ongoing and constantly being developed, and we welcome input and participation (see our website for details on our mission and other non-policy-related work). Our next steps will be up to our members to formulate. Having worked to allow fruit and vegetable production and sales in the city, what steps will we take to support our other members’ work? Will we agitate for “food sovereignty” like Sedgwick, Maine? Will we create pop-up resource centers for urban farmers to access compost, mulch, and plants? Will we petition the Recreation and Parks Department to replace purely ornamental landscaping with productive alternatives? These are just some ideas, since we know that there’s plenty to do to craft the urban landscape we know to be necessary for a sustainable and equitable future.

Alliances have a long tradition within U.S. civil society, and urban agriculture alliances can be at the forefront of new movements towards food system sustainability. With the 2012 Farm Bill fast approaching, my personal hope is to see urban agriculture alliances serve as platforms for advocacy and organizing; getting urban folks working together to reorient some of the huge levers of subsidy which so distort our food system.

If you’re interested in starting an alliance in your area, or would like more information on our work, feel free to write us at info@sfuaa.org, or to me at antidogmatist@gmail.com

Photo: Little City Gardens, by Caitlyn Galloway

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.)

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.

She came to the Bay Area in 1997 knowing she wanted to do social-justice work; an internship with Food First and volunteering with the Organic Consumers Association followed.

When she moved to West Oakland, Rosenthal was immediately struck by the absence of greenery, how much vacant, unused land there was, and the lack of grocery stores. She had landed in a community bounded by three major freeways that is also home to a busy port and extensive industrial pollution. People in this predominantly low-income, African American and Latino neighborhood had nowhere close by to buy healthy, affordable food. The area had plenty of corner liquor stores and fast-food joints, but not a single full-service supermarket.

An idea took root. Rosenthal decided to put her farming skills to good use and began gathering community support for a produce plot. In 2000, Rosenthal founded the non-profit food security project City Slicker Farms, after scraping together enough funds to purchase what would come to be called Center Street Farm.

Today, City Slicker Farms has seven urban farm gardens, produces more than 7,000 pounds of produce a year, and has built over 100 backyard gardens for residents of this neighborhood, which has struggled for decades. City Slicker also operates a weekly farm stand where people pay on a sliding scale under the inspired categories “free spirit,” “just getting by” and “sugar mama/daddy.”

After eight years running City Slicker on a shoe-string, Rosenthal, who suffered serious injury from police at a 2003 anti-war demonstration, stepped aside as the director of the group, though she remains on the organization’s board. In November, City Slicker was awarded $4 million in state bond funds for a community market farm and park at a 1.4 acre vacant lot in West Oakland, greatly increasing the group’s ability to grow and distribute food in the community; plans call for a large edible garden and orchard, a chicken coop, beehive, dog run, tot lot, and open space.

A pioneer of the urban farming movement, Rosenthal is featured in the recent Farm Together Now, which last December Michael Pollan called “his favorite book of the season”.

The 39-year-old has joined forces with her friend and fellow urban gardener Novella Carpenter to write a how-to guide, The Essential Urban Farmer, due out next year. Rosenthal works one day a week in the backyard produce garden she built for North Berkeley resident Sophie Hahn, a former City Council candidate active in community affairs, who is working on an edible garden initiative.

When not tending gardens, Rosenthal works as a teaching assistant at the Berkeley Rose School and is earning a teaching credential from the Bay Area Center for Waldorf Teacher Training.

We spoke this week at Hahn’s garden, which features root vegetables, leafy greens, herbs, and chickens, and is in walking distance from Rosenthal’s own Berkeley home.

Was it hard to give up the reigns at City Slicker Farms?

I never thought about it in those terms. It wasn’t “mine,” it has always been a collaborative effort. City Slicker belongs to the community and I’m glad I was able to shepherd it through to its next phase and knew when to leave with grace. The day-to-day management of running a non-profit is exhausting. I’m grateful that we’ve accomplished what we set out to do and that the work continues.

In the past you’ve said you didn’t want to just grow food for wealthy people, and now you are. How do you feel about that?

Well, we all end up doing things we say we’ll never do, right? My point really is that everybody should have access to healthy organic food. I  needed a job while I’m back in school. And I know how to farm. So I put up a flyer near where I live and Sophie saw it and hired me. The beauty of what she’s doing is she gets it, she really walks the talk. And while it’s not cost-effective for her, she’s doing this garden and paying fair wages to farmers because she believes it’s the right thing to do from a health and environmental point of view.

What do you like about living in Berkeley?

I like that I can walk into Berkeley Natural Grocery and I don’t even have to ask, I know all the produce there is organic. Same thing at the Thursday Farmers’ Market. And what an innovator and trailblazer The Ecology Center is; the place acts out of the highest good. Its programs and people are impeccable.

I love the natural beauty here. When I lived in West Oakland I would come to Live Oak Park just to see trees. I find being in a beautiful tree-filled place is good for my health, energy, and mood.

And I love the food at Saul’s — I used to come to Berkeley just to eat there — I’m Jewish, so it’s familiar comfort food for me.

Who are your local heroes?

Daniel Miller at Spiral Gardens was really my first inspiration for farming in an urban setting. I reached out to him early on. Joy Moore is another person I’ve crossed paths with and her energy and integrity is something else. She’s sheer, well, joy. And selfless. And, of course, my good friend Novella Carpenter: She’s just out there showing people what can be done — growing food and raising farm animals in an urban setting, which isn’t easy.

What’s next?

I want to inspire the younger generation through farming and garden education.

Originally published on Berkeleyside

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.

One of the council’s projects: Farm Fresh Choice, which provides local, sustainable fruits and vegetables to residents in West and South Berkeley neighborhoods who may have economic, transportation, or cultural obstacles that prevent them from, say, shopping at Berkeley Bowl or frequenting the regular Berkeley Farmers’ Markets. The Ecology Center serves as fiscal sponsor for both farmers’ market options.

Nowadays, Moore can be found tending the school garden, talking up healthy eating, and serving fruit smoothies and sauteed greens at the other high school in town Berkeley Technology Academy (B-Tech), designed for students who struggle to succeed at Berkeley High. She also runs an after-school cooking program at the school her grandson attends, Claremont Middle School in Oakland.

In 2007 she earned a horticultural certificate from UC Santa Cruz and she currently takes classes at Berkeley City College, with the aim of getting a teaching credential. (In the 1970s Moore attended UC Berkeley and explored theater, womens’, and African American studies programs but did not graduate.)

A volunteer producer at KPFA radio and occasional guest host for programs such as About Health, she is also featured in the film-in-progress Edible City. You can view a clip of Joy Moore’s Edible City interview.

Moore lives in a downtown apartment and is board secretary for Affordable Housing Associates. We met near her home at the Royal Ground Coffee House and continued our conversation on a walk to B-Tech, where Moore checked on the garden.

This past weekend, Moore was a special guest at the Lunch Love Community big screen launch at the Pacific Film Archive at 2:30 p.m. Lunch Love Community, which features Moore, is a series of shareable short films (which will form the basis of a pending longer documentary) about the community effort to overhaul school food in Berkeley.

Why did you get involved in school food reform?

My daughter, who is now 36, was having dozens of seizures a day when she was younger, she also didn’t eat or sleep, and experienced behavioral problems at school.  Through a lot of trial and error I discovered that she had severe allergies to artificial colors, flavors, and preservatives. So I had to think very carefully about what she ate. When I cut out processed food her seizures subsided and her behavior improved.

But at the time, the medical establishment—which I’m wary of anyway—the school district, and MediCal tried to force me to put my daughter on Ritalin to address behavioral issues in school that they said were associated with Attention Deficit Disorder.

I never accepted that diagnosis and found a respected allergist, Ben Feingold, who supported my approach to deal with my daughter’s health concerns through dietary change.

When I saw what was available to eat at my daughter’s school–it was just terrible–I knew I had to do something to improve cafeteria food for all the public school kids in Berkeley.

How do you approach giving young people an edible education?

I’m trying to elevate the status of food and gardening in our culture. Good nutrition is associated with so much: I tell my kids it gives you muscles, strong nails, impacts mood, acne, energy—whatever it is they care about now—that’s how you reach them.

Everything we put into our mouth’s isn’t food. I want kids to know that and make smart choices for themselves. So I’m trying to raise the consciousness of all our children about food and health. My mission is really simple: it’s to get kids to value good food.

There’s nothing like biting into an organic peach and having that delicious juice dripping down your face and onto your neck. But many of our children, who only eat conventional produce–if they eat it at all–often haven’t had that experience. They’ve only known hard, tasteless produce. I try to change that.

What was your intent at the recent EcoFarm Conference panel you moderated on urban youth and food?

For people to see the positive things happening in all our communities around food and farming. When most people think of urban youth they think of crime, right? Violence, gangs, drugs. Here were examples of youth involved in food and gardening programs like Rooted in Community, Oakland Food Connection, and Urban Releaf all bringing about change in under-served neighborhoods. All young people of color. I did not have to look hard to find them.

What’s good about working on food access issues in Berkeley?

The collaboration of so many people in the community working together to bring about change and make a difference. Farm Fresh Choice has always been a group effort. It was inspiring working with other parents like Eric Weaver, Marcy Greenhut, Beebo Turman, and Yolanda Huang on the city’s Child Nutrition Advisory Committee to help get rid of soda machines in the Berkeley schools and bring in farmers’ market salad bars.

What’s challenging about trying to make change in this town?

I don’t see many brown people running the programs for our people. And when someone like Alice Waters serves up barbecue at Berkeley High, as she did, and she makes shredded, pulled-pork tacos with no sauce—what I think of as frou frou food—there’s a tremendous cultural disconnect, particular with the African American students.

Alice Waters has done many good things to change school food but if you look in her kitchen you won’t see many brown people, and you don’t see many brown people working in the garden at the Edible Schoolyard either. You know what I’m saying? We need to start our own Chez Panisse.

Some might decide to take it easy at your stage of life but you keep working hard. What motivates you?

The Berkeley Public Health Department did a study about 10 years ago that revealed huge racial disparities in life expectancy in this city. Fifty percent of brown people in this town die before age 75, compared with only 36 percent of European people, and many of those deaths are due to chronic diseases that could be avoided if people had access to nutritious food. I don’t want that for my grandsons. That’s what keeps me going.

Originally published on Berkeleyside

Photos: Top, Sarah Henry. Center and bottom, Sophie Constantinou.

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.