A Growing Trend: Farming Moves to the Big City

By Lauren Wilcox 
Photos by Darcy Kiefel

Tevon McNair, 19, of New York, works on a farm. The farm is in his neighborhood, Red Hook, in New York’s Brooklyn Borough in a fenced lot that was used mostly for pickup softball games until an organization called Added Value filled it with dirt and began planting vegetables.

McNair is lanky and broad-shouldered, like an Olympic swimmer, and he presides over the farm with a soft-spoken gravity. Along with a few dozen other teenagers from the neighborhood, he participates in a year-round program run by Added Value, with help from Heifer International, which was developed to give teenagers job skills and an understanding of sustainable agriculture. McNair works on the farm part time, tending crops, giving tours to elementary school students and building a greenhouse.

“It’s relaxing to be working on a farm,” McNair says, “to be giving people fresh, healthy food—there ain’t really much of that around here.” When asked what he likes best about the work, he says, “I like shoveling.” The soil he shovels is trucked down from the Bronx Zoo and spread over the parking lot in a technique called raised-bed farming. With a high manure content, it has a tonic effect on plants, and it has turned the parking lot into a vigorous tangle of outsized specimens: velvety basil the size of hounds’ ears; heavy heads of sunflowers; glossy, cover-girl heads of lettuce.

Red Hook is an unlikely place for a farm. Historically one of New York City’s major industrial districts, it is now one of the city’s most depressed areas. But the neighborhood feels more exhausted than hostile, and the acres of warehouses and vacant lots have a stillness that borders on pastoral. In the midst of all the asphalt and chain-link fencing, the little farm shimmers in the sun like an oasis. And slowly, it is becoming just that: a spot of color and growth at the center of a burgeoning community—students in its programs, shoppers at its market, even an industrious corps of urban bees, making the most of the opportunity.

Such transformations are taking place in many major urban centers across the country, which face similar challenges in the revitalization of their downtowns. As the job landscape has changed, and residential populations have shifted to suburban neighborhoods, many once-thriving downtowns have become echoing shells of their former selves, with few businesses, decent grocery stores or community endeavors.

In many ways, small-scale farming in these areas makes a great deal of sense. By some estimates, there are tens of thousands of acres of farmable land in the biggest city centers: unused parking lots, abandoned industrial complexes, old building sites that have been reclaimed by weeds—and when city-owned, this land is often free or very cheap to use. There are also small plots on city peripheries that can be rented and farmed by individuals or families.

And in depressed urban areas there are often few places to buy fresh produce. Many inner-city residents buy most of their food at convenience stores and fast-food restaurants. The best grocery chains do not operate in the poorest areas; neither do the bustling street markets that appear in other parts of the city.

There is also a great need for the kind of positive working experience that a community farm can provide an area short on jobs and economic growth. Often the most striking product of urban agriculture projects is not the income or the fresh food, but the arrival of industry and revitalization in a blighted area. Farms not only can provide areas with markets and with thriving crops in formerly vacant lots, but also with a place for hard work and personal growth.

“Farming Is a Beautiful Thing”
In Chicago, a program called Growing Home runs an urban farm—“Don’t call it a garden,” one of its workers tells a visitor—next to a church in the old stockyards district, a neighborhood that was the setting for the book The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. The program, from April to October, is a job training program for formerly homeless people that pays a small stipend, and is based around managing the program’s farm.

The program is designed, says Avram Golden-Trist, urban site coordinator on the farm, to help people with the basics of getting a job, as well as with nutrition and health, and specific skills in botany and agriculture. For folks who are good at that kind of work, he says, there is the possibility of getting hired at the farm or at local botanical gardens.

The farm sells its produce to restaurants and at two farmers markets, and has a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program, in which members pay a fee at the beginning of the season and reap the benefits throughout the harvest. Sometimes, Golden-Trist says, the produce is given to people who can use it, like “earlier this year, when we had a ridiculous amount of cucumbers.”

The people who work on the farm, though, say more about the intangible benefits than any profits, and for many the program seems to have been a way to turn a corner in their lives. Larry O’Toole, the farm manager, agrees. “Food,” he says “is something people latch onto.”

“I think this farming is a beautiful thing,” says Michael Courtney, a former train conductor who joined the program last year after getting out of prison. “It helps me eat healthier. I’d like to get old, but healthy-old, not, ‘Can you come change the channel on the TV? Lift my leg up on the ottoman?’ ”

Linda Petty, a tall woman with elaborately painted nails who is pulling weeds out of a row of lettuce heads, says, “I love what I do here. There’s nothing hard about it. ... We leave on Friday and come back Tuesday and everything’s just exploded. To see these beds bloom out of nothing, and to know my hands did that?” she asks reflectively. “It’s just like that compost we flip. The more you put into it, the more you get out of it.”

Perhaps most importantly, Growing Home has helped create a sense of ownership for people who have not had much to call their own. At the market, Courtney says, “People want to know where things are grown, when they were harvested. They want to know how I know. I tell them, because I’m the one that put the seed in the ground, watered it, cut it and brought it to the market.”

A World of His Own Making
If one measures by linear inches of worms or tonnage of compost, perhaps the greatest practitioner of urban agriculture in this country today is Will Allen, the larger-than-life former professional basketball player whose demonstration farm in Milwaukee hosts 5,000 visitors and uses 400 tons of the city’s food waste in a single year. Allen’s farm is less like a farm than like the laboratory of a mad agriculturist choreographing the beginning of the world: a dense complex of PVC piping, bubbling tubs of hydroponic plants and fish, bins of rotting bananas and worms—humid, pungent and teeming with life.

Used partly for training and partly for the production of worms and produce, this complex, which Allen calls Growing Power, is much more than an overblown science project. It is the hub of a nationwide community of people who first came to Allen’s farm for any number of reasons—to learn about compost, to buy from the market stand, as part of an after-school program for at-risk kids—and left as part of a movement.

For Allen, the work that Growing Power does is as much about a holistic, self-sustaining way of life as it is simply about growing and eating healthy foods. It is about the connectedness of all life, and people’s role in that cycle. Farming, for him, is a way to nurture those connections.

“I like diversity,” he says, “many kinds of food, many kinds of people. I get a thrill out of putting the whole system together. Give me a handful of worms and send me anywhere in the world, and I can set up this system.”

Indeed, Allen’s energy seems boundless. In addition to running Growing Power, Allen works on a farm of his own. In 1993, he began a coalition of local farmers, called the Rainbow Farmers Cooperative, to give them more leverage in the marketplace. He founded his youth program, Youth Corps, in 1994. And to all of these people—the farmers, the formerly homeless (Growing Home learned some of its techniques from a visit to Growing Power), the teenagers, children and community groups he works with—he is a powerful example and mentor with an encouraging word for everyone, a giant in a healthy, thriving world of his own making.

In September 2005, Growing Power, whose relationship with Heifer began in 1997, established a 19,000-square-foot community garden in the center of downtown Chicago, from which all produce will go to shelters and soup kitchens in Chicago. It is a sort of flagship garden for urban agriculture, and for the organization’s goals of using sustainable agriculture to make communities everywhere successful, independent and self-sufficient. For Allen, who shows no signs of slowing down, it is just the beginning. “I work 18 hours a day,” he says, “seven days a week. One day I might just drop dead in the worm bin, but I’ll be happy.”

Reaching the Next Generation
What Growing Power has done in a big way, farms like Added Value’s at Red Hook are doing in smaller ways, but the basic challenges remain the same for both. One of these challenges is the availability of clean land. Many urban agriculture sites are paved, or contaminated by years of industrial use. To clean the area or remove the pavement would be prohibitively expensive, so the farming is done in raised beds, as at the farm at Red Hook—a workable solution, but not necessarily a permanent one.

The biggest challenge for many of these projects, though, is connecting the farm to a market. This is partly a matter of simple logistics, of linking small farmers in and around urban areas with opportunities to sell their goods. But in a post-agricultural society, where most people are not directly connected to their food sources, it is also a matter of reaching people and changing their habits, of convincing a population raised on ready-made food that meals prepared from scratch are not only healthier and cheaper, but taste better too. It is a matter of connecting them—or re-connecting them—to a way of life that is otherwise fast disappearing.

This is why so many urban agriculture programs have a youth component: “converting” the youngest generation to sustainable living and healthy eating is the most effective way to make an impact in a community. At the farm at Red Hook, its small farmers market is staffed each Saturday morning by youth from its summer program. On a warm morning last fall, Dania Cuello, 17, tends the produce stand while teaching herself to knit. In between customers she makes sudden, forceful passes around the needles with a length of pink yarn, as if netting a fish.

The market’s best sellers are collard greens and papalo, a flat, fragrant herb used in Mexican cooking, and a steady stream of customers makes its way across the asphalt to the tables of fruit and vegetables. Still, it has taken time to build a customer base, and staff members have learned to proselytize freely on the benefits of fresh vegetables to their sometimes reluctant clientele.

“I used to go to McDonald’s everyday,” says Cuello, “but it don’t call my attention no more. I found out how nasty was McDonald’s.”

By noon, the rush has dwindled to three little girls picking cilantro from the edge of the lot; the proprietors of a local restaurant, buying greens; and a group of young women lingering noncommittally at a distance while one of their number, a woman in a denim jumpsuit, pokes at the contents of the table.

Suddenly the woman in the jumpsuit gives a shout. She holds up a box of green grapes, from a farm in upstate New York.

“My grandma used to grow these in her yard!” she exclaims. “Except hers were purple.” Swiftly, Cuello extracts a box of purple grapes from the bottom of the stack and hands it to her.
“Try one,” she suggests. The woman puts a grape in her mouth. She closes her eyes briefly and holds very still, then opens her eyes and claps the box shut.

“OK,” she says. “I’m getting these.”

Lauren Wilcox, a former associate editor of World Ark, is a freelance writer living in New Jersey.