Urban Agriculture and Community Values 3030392422, 9783030392420

Table of contents :
Introduction
The Plan of This Book
Contents
Part I: A Tale of Three Cities
Chapter 1: Havana, Cuba
Chapter 2: Detroit, Michigan
Milwaukee’s “Growing Power”
A Future for Rustbelt Farms
Chapter 3: Burlington, Vermont
Background: Lyman Wood
The Last Days of Garden Way
Will Raap and the Intervale
Public Schools and Refugees
The Creation of a Food Center
Periurban Experiments
More Visions for the Future
Burlington Agriculture
Chapter 4: A Tale of Many Values: What Can We Learn from the Cities?
The Urban Farm: A Preliminary Sketch
The Moral Universe of the American Farm
The Point of the Enterprise
The Critique of the Industrialized Food System
Narratives of Resistance
The Fate of the Beasts
Justice
Good Food: Organic Agriculture as an Alternative
Community Autonomy as an Emergent Value
Extensions and Conclusions
Part II: Building the Urban Farm
Chapter 5: Growing the City as a Community
The Overview: The Search for Utopia
Raising the Children
Bringing Everyone Else into the Garden
Creating Jobs
Health Care for the Community
Saving the Broken City: Sole Food Street Farms
Fundamentals
Chapter 6: Commercial Farming In (and Around) the City
Green City Acres
The Brooklyn Grange
Periurban Farming
AgriBurbia? The Spread to the Suburbs
Chapter 7: The Farm in the Sky
The Future of the Agricultural Skyscraper
Questions and Conclusions
Chapter 8: Reflections: Retrieving the Values
Constraints
Values
Strategies
Hybrid Vigor: Hope for the Farms
Appendices
Appendix 1: A Strategy for the Future of the Urban Farm
Appendix 2: The Direction of Urban Agriculture
Chapter 9: Postscript: An Urban Farm in Process
Review and Reflection
Partridge Creek Farm
Conclusion Going Forward
Bibliography
Focused on the Three Cities: Havana, Detroit, Burlington

Citation preview

Lisa Newton

Urban Agriculture and Community Values The Green Transformation of Cities

Urban Agriculture and Community Values

Partridge Creek Farm: Dan Perkins builds a raised bed

Lisa Newton

Urban Agriculture and Community Values The Green Transformation of Cities

Lisa Newton University of Vermont Shelburne, VT, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-39242-0    ISBN 978-3-030-39244-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39244-4 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Introduction

No longer a contradiction in terms, urban agriculture, farming in the cities, is a surprisingly successful political and economic movement in the United States and elsewhere; it may be the key to the success of cities of the future. It turns out to be a multivalued enterprise, initiated for different reasons on different sites and drawing its practitioners together in slightly different associations. The academic field of urban agriculture displays a growth curve that would bring tears of joy to the eyes of any economist: In 1994, Jac Smit, one of the first scholars in the field, could find no extant literature at all on the subject; in 1996, he and a colleague (Joe Nasr) brought out a book about it, funded by the United Nations; then, from 1996 to 2009, 3350 articles came out, more than 250 annually; then in 2010 alone, more than 800.1 (The number by now is beyond counting.) During this period (and no doubt earlier), city dwellers had launched experimental rooftop gardens and planted vacant lots and tiny backyards, quite without regard to any system or programmatic belief. Much of the field remains unsettled. We still have no widely accepted definition of a “city” for these purposes—and each state’s legal designation of “city” does not help toward uniformity of discourse. We know that urban agriculture means growing living things, plants and animals, for a wide range of purposes, in the city, by the city, and for the city. Beyond that, exploration is wide open. The literature is increasingly hopeful. From Michael Ableman’s Street Farm: Growing Food, Jobs, and Hope on the Urban Frontier: Urban farming is increasingly capturing the public imagination. Fruits, vegetables, even grains, dairy products, and meats are being produced on derelict land, parking lots, street corners, and rooftops—spaces that have slipped through the cracks of the high-value real estate markets of many cities. Though too often city dwellers still view farming as something that someone else, somewhere else, does for them, they now have opportunities to

1  Figures from Thomas J. Fox, Urban Farming: Sustainable City Living in Your Backyard, in Your Community, and in the World; Irvine, CA: Hobby Farm Press (BowTie Press), 2011, pp. 8–9; citing Jac Smit and Joe Nasr, Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs and Sustainable Cities, UNDP 1996.)

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Introduction participate in the amazing and dynamic world of agriculture. In some regions these ideas have even captured the imagination of mayors, councilmen, and county supervisors.2

The bibliography appended to this volume contains a partial record of the literature’s exploration. It encompasses studies of the history of urban farming, many case studies from cities around the world, and a delightful collection of how-to books, ranging from detailed, hands-on instructions for community gardens on vacant lots to backyard chickens to skyscrapers of hydroponics.3 The task undertaken in this book fits into a fourth category—an analysis of the human values embedded in these efforts and a limited prescription for future efforts along these lines. Why would the growing of tomatoes in the city be of interest to ethics, specifically to political philosophy (this author’s home field)? One of political philosophy’s abiding interests is the formation of community, especially outside the bounds of the purely commercial (the workplace and its stakeholders) and purely legal (the state and its jurisdictions), and consequently the ability of that community to act autonomously within and in relation to the larger entities of its world and to defend its autonomy against them. The formation of city gardens seems to have the power to create such community at several levels. At the most basic level of interpersonal relationships, the farm workers can become a family, or “farmily,” possibly the only one the workers have ever known; others recreate the now-defunct “small town” or village of previous centuries. In the United States, a history of intentional communities, based around farms, for purposes of the promotion of health and moral purity, calls attention to the enduring value that the village holds on the American imagination. But it is the unintentional community that interests us more: one grown from continuous regular association, with the healthy stress of a job that has to get done by many, or there will be rewards for none to encourage it to come into being and endure. But there is more to the farm’s political existence. The community garden, or urban farm, can be an act of political resistance. The food system that directs the agricultural product of the United States is fundamentally unjust in a way that no political philosopher could ignore. That judgment requires a probe beneath the surface. Hunger—not just between-meals or on-a-diet-again hunger but real, chronic, ongoing, energy-sapping, economy-crippling hunger—is not obviously an injustice or material for the political philosopher. The prevalence of hunger in the world means only that for many people, in many places, there is not enough food available to them to carry on a normal active life. We should be able to do something about

2  Michael Ableman, Street Farm: Growing Food, Jobs and Hope on the Urban Frontier, White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2016, p. 43. But see also some critical reflections in Christina Rosan and Hamil Pearsall, Growing a Sustainable City? The Question of Urban Agriculture, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017, especially Chapter 1 and Chapter 7. 3  To farm in the city, we may have to tear up some pavement. See Lynn Freehill-Maire, “The Softening of Cities,” YES! Magazine, Spring 2019, pp. 28–31.

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that, yet after a century of increasing food production, nearly one-third of the world’s population remains subject to hunger and malnutrition.4 The ruling paradigm is one of scarcity: we have too many people on this Earth and will have many more by the end of the century; many people are hungry now, so we need to produce much more food—maybe twice as much as we produce now. To this day, development agencies continue to call for significant increases in food production to meet projected need.5 Two observations create problems for the paradigm: First, we already produce enough food to provide 2700 calories a day to every living person on Earth—by some estimates, twice as much as is needed. Second, the Earth on which we would rely for this new production will not survive the effort. Our food system’s ecological footprint is already alarming. The loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services costs over 10 percent of the world’s annual gross product. More than 75 billion tons of fertile soil are lost yearly due to desertification, soil erosion and soil degradation. Industrial agriculture uses up 75 percent of the world’s fresh water and has led to a loss of over 90 percent of the world’s agrobiodiversity. Agricultural runoff has created vast eutrophic “dead zones” from the Gulf of Mexico to the Baltic Sea.6

Increasing production to meet a present or future need for more food will probably not be possible on this planet. But why would we want to do it? We already produce enough food to feed everyone in the world, plus half again as many. There is no need to increase production. Then how can up to a third of the population of the world not be getting enough to eat? Where is the rest of the food going? Nowhere good, it turns out: some of our surplus in corn (maize) is processed into high-fructose corn oil, which adds nutrition-­ free calories to a vast number of processed foods, contributing to obesity and the diseases that follow in its train, diabetes, heart disease, and some forms of cancer; what’s left is channeled into feeding animals raised for meat and ultimately into biofuels (like ethanol). Some of the surplus is exported to developing nations, under free trade agreements like NAFTA; justified as an attempt to “feed the hungry” in the developing world, these exports succeed only in putting indigenous farmers out of business (their maize cannot compete in price with the heavily subsidized product of the United States), which drives them off the land and in search of livelihood elsewhere—like across our southern border. How is it that billions of people are hungry and malnourished even though there is too much food? If we are already overproducing food, how will producing more food end hunger? We never seem to have enough food—even when we produce too much of it. Like the brooms of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, hunger seems to increase every time it is eradicated.7

4  Eric Holt-Giménez, Can We Feed the World without Destroying It? Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2019, p. 2. 5  Ibid. p. 20. 6  Ibid. p. 3. 7  Ibid. p. 7.

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Why are the hungry people not getting the food they need? The short answer is they are too poor to buy it. Food is now a commodity, to be bought and sold on the open market, without regard for human need or public good. The cause of hunger is poverty. Poverty comes in large part because traditional avenues to adequate living—traditional employment equal to the needs of the people—are being wiped out by the new economic regimes, especially agricultural regimes. Smallholder farmers are among the poorest and hungriest of the victims of the spread of industrial agriculture; undersold by the product of large monocultures, they lose their land as monopolies consolidate control of farmland in larger and larger parcels, they find no industrial jobs in their sprawling cities, and they are forced to accept marginal existence—or engage in desperate attempts to establish themselves in more prosperous lands, creating “immigration crises” wherever they go. In developed nations as well as developing ones, it turns out that the middlemen in the agricultural transactions, the huge agribusiness corporations that supply the inputs (machinery, seeds) for industrial agriculture and then purchase the crop to process and sell to the consumer, are taking all the value out of the passage of food from farmer to consumer. The farmers cannot stay in business, and the consumers cannot get nutritious food to eat. With a surplus of food, many starve. Yet if there is a right to life, there has to be a right to food: not just a right that someone should feed you (food security) but a community right to control the necessary means to produce food (food sovereignty). Community rights sit uneasily in our usual schemes of (individual) human rights, but food sovereignty is just that kind of right (more on this in Chap. 4).8 Surely, the result of the expansion of industrial agriculture through the developing world—driving the traditional farmers off their land; depriving families of livelihood and subsistence, if not prosperity; and creating hunger wherever it goes—is unjust, and that is why the political philosophers and other observers get exercised (A discussion of this literature in part is found in Chap. 4.). It is equally unjust when the same forces displace the American farmer, hollowing out the American heartland’s countryside. But it is not the product of any individual tyrant’s injustice, not even the deliberate oppression of the oligarchs whose activities in self-enrichment have brought it about. It is the system itself that creates these results and does it in entirely legitimate ways. We are a capitalist nation, and our agriculture follows the laws of capitalism. If a traditional business, or way of doing business, cannot compete successfully for the consumer’s dollar, it will fail. Its assets (like land) will be absorbed by the more successful businesses, and its practitioners must find a new way of living. In small town free enterprise, the failed businessman might go to work for the successful. That recourse will not work for agriculture; industrial agriculture requires a much smaller pool of farmers than traditional methods, so the displaced farmers, now landless, have no choice but to leave, and no individual (or government) is responsible for their fate thereafter. Capitalism requires mobility of capital and labor; there is no “right” to

 Priscilla Claeys, Human Rights and the Food Sovereignty Movement: Reclaiming Control, New York: Routledge, 2015, esp. pp. 128–130.

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live and work where you grew up nor any right to demand investment from the sources of capital if your enterprise cannot promise a return on investment. As for the land, agricultural capitalism requires “land mobility”: no one has any “right” to traditional land if economics dictates its surrender to moneyed interests. No remedy for this injustice will be found within the present system. So our food philosophers tend to take on capitalism directly.9 But the small farm, especially the urban farm, may show the way to a remedy. The farm as resistance is seen most clearly in Cuba, where Havana’s ability to feed itself when Soviet oil stopped coming was a clear act of defiance against the United States and its (ultimately futile) blockade. In the United States, it is as often an act of resistance against the industrial agriculture system that litters our supermarkets with sugary (and salty and fatty) processed foods, made inexpensive by substantial agricultural subsidies to the largest producers. Industrial agriculture is widely condemned for its effects on public health (especially in the prevalence of obesity and diabetes in the United States, particularly among the poor) and on the natural environment (especially in its contributions to climate change and the destruction of the topsoil). The urban farms say that there is an alternative. They exist not to funnel commodities into the market but to feed the farm and the community on principles known as agroecology; we can take back the soil for human purposes.10 We may even, at the end, redefine “private property” and its attendant rights.11 The ultimate objective of the polis, the body politic, is human flourishing, life lived to the fullest, productive and enjoyable. In the creation of sustainable agricultural enterprises, which promote health on several levels while preserving the foundational levels of human association, the city fulfills its purpose. The history of cities contains the major driver of the urban farming movement: historically, the great cities have not, eventually, been able to feed themselves, and as they outran (or out-ate) their agricultural base, they declined, until their population, driven by starvation, abandoned the beautiful buildings, and looked for food far from their origins. We are able to infer this process, from the founding of the city to its ultimate abandonment, from the prehistoric ruins in the Middle East, where agriculture originated; we can track it in historical time in the story of the Decline and Fall of Rome; and we are still digging it up in the jungles of Latin America. The explanation is simple: cities, once founded, provide an easier and more certain living than farming ever did for its inhabitants; for that reason, they attract more

9  See Eric Holt-Giménez, A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism, New  York: Monthly Review Press/ FoodFirst, 2017. 10  Peter M.  Rosset and Miguel A.  Altieri, Agroecology: Science and Politics, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing 2017. See also John Ikerd, “Agroecology: Science, Farming System, or Social Movement?” The Natural Farmer, special supplement on Food Sovereignty, Spring 2019, B 23–24. 11  Michelle Glowa, “Urban Agriculture, Food Justice, and Neoliberal Urbanization: Rebuilding the Institution of Property,” in Alison Hope Alkon and Julie Guthman, eds., The New Food Activism: Opposition, Cooperation, and Collective Action, Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017.

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p­ eople, especially whenever the regional agriculture suffers its inevitable setbacks; soon enough, the region, its soil exhausted, will no longer support the city’s swollen population; attempts to transport food from more distant regions, initially successful, suffer diminishing returns from loss and spoilage as the distance increases; eventually, the enterprise collapses in on itself. Survival was not helped by the tendency of city-based kings to surround themselves with well-fed idlers. Warfare, often undertaken in an effort to gain control of more agricultural land and produce, tended to speed up the process.12

The Plan of This Book This study begins in Part I with three stories, case studies, as points of reference for the discussion. Chapter 1 takes us to Havana, Cuba. During the “special period in a time of peace” after the implosion of the Soviet Union (beginning in 1989–1990), Cuba was unable to get the oil it needed to carry on its advanced industrial level agriculture—sugarcane to the horizon, magnificent air-conditioned dairies, distant fields, all helped with chemical (oil-based) fertilizer, herbicides, and pesticides, worked with enormous fuel-devouring tractors, and transported to the cities in a fleet of trucks. If it was to survive the blockade, Cubans had to develop organic gardens in the city itself, and they did so successfully. The compelling need to make the gardens work created in each neighborhood a sense of community and introduced the value of local autonomy. As the economy recovered, it found itself faced with complex questions of policy for the future in a socialist country. Chapter 2 focuses on Detroit, with help from other US cities. Automobiles treated Detroit rather the way the Soviet Union treated Cuba: made it rich, got it used to easy living, and then disappeared. Suddenly, jobs were gone, and the city developed vast patches of abandonment: abandoned people, in the left-behind workforce; abandoned houses, which often had to be demolished; and then acres of abandoned lots. A Community Gardens initiative was undertaken by a mix of public offices, private parties, and NGOs, in order first, to make the city more attractive to business and, only secondarily, to feed the city. Yet some amazing community-­ driven farms emerged in the city, and community gardens became a powerful inner-­ city movement, especially in the African American community. With Malik Yakini’s D-Town Farm as exemplar, it has sparked a fundamental rethinking of agriculture in the African American community. A recent example of this development is found in Leah Penniman’s Soul Fire Farm, near Albany, NY.13 As the Detroit initiative

 See Clive Ponting, A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations, New York: Penguin Books, 1991, Chapter 5, pp. 68 ff. 13  See Leah Penniman, Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land, White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018. See also her “Reconnecting with the soil . . .” YES! Magazine, Spring 2019, pp.18–22; Jack Kittredge, “Soul Fire Farm: Working Toward Food Justice,” The Natural Farmer, Special Supplement on Food Sovereignty, B 16–17. 12

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g­ athered steam, it settled on most of the same complex of community values that Havana manifested. Detroit continues to struggle with the capitalist system as Havana struggles with central control. (The success of private initiatives in Milwaukee, especially “Growing Power” under the direction of Will Allen, provides an interesting commentary on the Detroit situation.) A journey to traditional New England brings us to Chap. 3, Burlington, Vermont. Vermont has a strong history of agriculture but was unable to follow the course of industrialized agriculture that came to typify the Midwest because of its mountainous topography. After the sheep went West at the end of the nineteenth century and the woolen mills followed by the middle of the twentieth, Burlington turned to innovative ways of supplying food to its people, through multipronged community garden initiatives. There is an independent communitarian streak in Vermont’s conception of itself, which helped, and Burlington enjoyed strong community leadership in the 1980s, enabling state and private support for these gardens. Of the thousands of cities in the world, why pick these three, by no means the largest or most important? Havana, because after centuries of urbanization and abandonment of city farming, suddenly, in unexpected circumstances, Cuba had to feed itself in entirely new ways. It succeeded and survived progressive blockades engineered by the United States, in large part because of intelligent support from a central government oriented more toward pragmatic measures than to ideological politics, a rarity in our world; here, we can see the thinking that went into the revival of urban agriculture for this brief period and learn something of its structure and limitations. Detroit, because it follows nicely from Havana, suffering tremendous economic woes in radically changed circumstances, in which the creation of new community farms provides one road to the solution of its economic and racial problems. Detroit and similar cities provide an opportunity to examine a city in distress and evaluate the role of urban agriculture in providing solutions, however partial. And Burlington, providing a contrast to the experiences of Havana and Detroit, with an agriculture-friendly state and (at least some of the time) an enlightened city government; this city might provide some insights into the way agriculture might continue to flourish as stricken cities recover. For purposes of accurate comparison of institutions, governments, and NGOs, I have restricted the compass of the work to the northern (and western) hemispheres. Part I ends in Chap. 4 with a statement of several values of farming in the city, from basic food supply through food hubs and processing through innovative waste recycling to education, especially but not only for the children, employment, beauty, and above all resistance to the dominance of agricultural industrialization and capitalism, in the formation of a community. Chapter 4 sets out the values discovered in the tales of the three cities and provides the matrix for the analysis that follows in Part II. Part II examines three models of urban agriculture, briefly presented, mirroring the multivalued activity of urban agriculture in its complexity. Chapter 5, a community orientation, takes on local institutional planning centered on farms, expanding into education, health, and the arts as well as food production. Chapter 6, a commercial orientation, explores the farm as a profit-making enterprise (circling

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back into community values at the end). Chapter 7 considers the possibility of farming the skyscrapers in a revision of the urban vision promoted by Dickson Despommier. Chapter 8 is a summary and conclusion, insofar as such an exploratory study may have one, with strategies to removing some of the obstacles to urban agriculture and concluding reflections on the worth of the enterprise. Chapter 9 is a postscript in a narrative of an actual urban farm in the course of its development, with an unsparing look at the problems it faces and the hope it inspires across the social sphere of its urban setting. This final chapter will conclude the discussion of the book—and, hopefully, begin the discussion in the towns and cities in which we live.

Contents

Part I A Tale of Three Cities 1 Havana, Cuba ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    3 2 Detroit, Michigan ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   15 3 Burlington, Vermont����������������������������������������������������������������������������������   31 4 A Tale of Many Values: What Can We Learn from the Cities? ������������   47 Part II Building the Urban Farm 5 Growing the City as a Community����������������������������������������������������������   69 6 Commercial Farming In (and Around) the City ������������������������������������   89 7 The Farm in the Sky����������������������������������������������������������������������������������  105 8 Reflections: Retrieving the Values������������������������������������������������������������  119 9 Postscript: An Urban Farm in Process����������������������������������������������������  137 Bibliography ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  145

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Part I

A Tale of Three Cities

Chapter 1

Havana, Cuba

Cuba was most definitely an underdeveloped country when the transformation began. In 1959, when Fidel Castro, the revolutionary leader who had overthrown the Batista regime, assumed power in Cuba, fewer than 10% of rural dwellings had electricity, fewer than 3% had indoor plumbing, 40% of the people were illiterate, and there were three hospitals in the entire country.1 They had a lot of work to do. Castro turned the country away from the capitalist system espoused by its powerful neighbor, the United States, expropriating most US-owned property and triggering a massive U.S. blockade, cutting off all trade to Cuba except food and medicines. After the botched invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, led by ex-Cubans and backed by the United States, Castro joined Cuba’s economy to COMECON, the Soviet bloc’s economic union. In that alliance Cuba prospered: it devoted most of its agricultural acreage to sugar cane, which it exported to the Soviet bloc at somewhat more than market price, importing in exchange most of the food the Cubans ate; by 1986 Cuba imported 54% of the calories and 61% of the protein that the people consumed, and all the oil for its sugar-based industrial agriculture—for the tractors, the trucks to take the cane to the ports, and as the base feedstock for all its fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. Then in 1990 COMECON collapsed as the Soviet Union imploded in a sea of corruption, and Cuba found itself without a market for its sugar, without oil for its trucks and tractors, and without food. The Cuban government reacted immediately, declaring a Special Period in Time of Peace (that is, strict rationing as in wartime, to be continued until the crisis was over). The government of the United States reacted, too, passing the Torricelli Act in 1992, ending almost all shipments of food and medicine; and, as other nations moved to fill the needs of Cuba, the Helms-­ Burton Act in 1996, declaring an embargo on all countries that continued their trade with Cuba. We figured that since the Cubans were in serious trouble, this was a good

 Koont, p. 14.

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1  Havana, Cuba

time to starve them out. We firmly expected the Cubans to collapse, sue for peace, and expel their Communist government. The Cubans did not collapse, but recognized that they had serious problems to solve. The first problem was food production. The government rapidly decentralized agriculture from the centrally run state farms to UBPCs—Basic Units of Cooperative Production, local units authorized to put all available land to the task of growing food for their areas. These units were given broad autonomy, and allotted state aid based on their productivity.2 In the absence of oil-based resources, Cuba had to adopt a program of agroecology, the application of ecological theory to “agro-ecosystems, that is, plant-animal communities constructed and managed by humans to produce food, fuel, and fiber.” According to Sinan Koont, in agroecology, “these systems are studied in a holistic manner and managed in a way that pays attention to environmental concerns and to the human participants in their political, economic, social and cultural settings.”3 (Note that that combination of goals is a very tall order.) The move to organic farming had a short but significant history in Cuba, as in other developed nations; an NGO, the Cuban Association of Agricultural and Forestry Technicians, had started experimenting with, and advocating for, organic farming in 1987.4 It had started the first “organoponico”—an intensively farmed collection of raised beds on several acres—at a military base, to raise vegetables for the soldiers based there. It worked, so as the special Period began, Cuba’s Internal Security agency (INRE) called for more of them. In effect, the military, led by General Sio Wong (a descendant of Chinese indentured servants) led the way to Cuba’s agricultural revolution.5 The Cubans, especially the urban ones, had no history of small-plot farming, nor, for the most part, did they enjoy gardening. But at that time, motivation was not a problem: The United States was trying to starve them, and they mustered all the country’s energy to resist this pressure. “Resistance,” in fact, became the descriptive rallying cry for the whole new effort in agriculture; the first book out on the subject, edited by those who had founded the movement, was titled “Sustainable Agriculture and Resistance,” pairing the two drivers of the transformation of Cuba’s food production.6 In Sowing Change, Adriana Premat continues the story. Illustrating the contrasts between the large-scale agriculture in partnership with the Soviet Union and the new agriculture in the Special Period, she quotes from an interview (January, 2001) with Leon Vega, the director of international relations at the MINAG (ministry of agriculture):

 For a summary of this history, see Sinan Koont, pp. 15–20.  Koont, p. 4. 4  Koont p. 23. 5  Koont, pp.25–26. 6  Fernando Funes, Luis Garcia, Martin Bourque, Nilda Perez, and Peter Rosset, eds, Sustainable Agriculture and Resistance: Transforming Food Production in Cuba, Oakland, CA: Food First Books, 2001, 2002. 2 3

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5

From the socialist bloc we would buy a million tons of fertilizers; two million tons of animal feed; 30,000 tons of pesticides a year; all the tractors that were needed; and the most important thing: oil. All of this was to disappear in a year and a half…. In 1989, we used to expend 274 kilograms of fertilizer for a ton of output; now we obtain the same with 29 kilograms. We used to produce a ton with 4.2 kilograms of pesticides and now we do it with 1.1 with the help of biological products, combined with holistic pest management.7

“I think we must be the only country nowadays that has a school for ox drivers,” Vega commented further, “We used to have 90,000 tractors in the country….” Technological downsizing was accompanied by spatial downsizing as well; huge agricultural tracts, mechanically tended, were replaced by small-scale gardens, the most efficient way to organize food production under the new conditions. (By 2014, the ox driver schools had been discontinued; the knowledge was widespread, and new farmers learned their skills on the farms to which they were apprenticed.) None of this went over well with a large part of the Cuban people. They had been very proud of their huge beautiful fields of sugar cane, corn and beans, their thriving dairy industry (one of their dairy herd, a large cow named Ubre Blanca, “White Udder,” was internationally famous for producing massive amounts of milk in four milkings a day), and the banks of modern machinery that had made agricultural success possible. They had also taken comfort from the fact that every aspect of agriculture was centrally directed, in accordance with their mission of revolutionary solidarity with the socialist nations of the world. Now, materially, they were reduced to gardens, the family patios in the backyards and the neighborhood parcelas on reclaimed public land, all small, all dedicated to production of vegetables for a very limited region, and most disturbingly, created and run by spontaneous groups or individuals quite independent of their traditional central planning. It didn’t help that Cubans, like many Latin American peoples, were not fond of vegetables, any more than they liked riding the bicycles that now provided the major form of transportation, and they tended at first to find garden work dirty and disagreeable.8 Because they needed the food, the state lined up behind the gardens while economic need was harshest, providing badly needed public support, encouragement, and materials. One garden that Premat became very familiar with was run by a friendly gardener named Jorge; she became attached to his family, even stayed with them for a time. The parcela that he gardened was large enough to accommodate tourists, and was a

7  Adriana Premat, Sowing Change: The Making of Havana’s Urban Agriculture, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 2012. 8  An interesting parallel in Nicaragua is documented in the Summer 2014 Newsletter of the New Haven/León Sister City Project. One of their representatives, Laurel Cohen, went to León to “improve childhood nutrition in the community of Goyena,” a low-income neighborhood of León. She rapidly discovered that the major nutrition problem was an almost complete absence of vegetables in the diet, and moved immediately to help the neighborhood create community gardens. When she could find no one in Goyena interested in a community garden, she introduced the Cuban idea of patios for individuals and families. At the time of writing, Summer 2014, she had not been able to interest anyone in growing such patio gardens, either; she was considering starting out with low-key nutrition classes. If nothing else, the story underscores the magnitude of the Cuban achievement.)

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favorite stop on the tours; Jorge had made it very beautiful, with thriving rows of green and climbing vines. He was very proud of it, and enjoyed admiring it from his terrace above the garden. But in 2001, there was a threat to repurpose that parcela; food was no longer as scarce, the tourist business was thriving, and the head of the tourist activity in his area (Habana Vieja, or Old Havana) thought he could make better use of that public space. But community initiative (as opposed to central planning) was now valued, so the neighborhood was consulted on the use for the parcela. Many thought it would make a good place for playing dominos. Before making a decision, the historian in charge of the district hired a young sociologist for input; the sociologist pointed out that as a garden, the space was ideal for teaching schoolchildren the value of healthy eating and the skills of gardening. That won the day, and thereafter Jorge had a lot more company, in the form of schoolchildren as well as tourists. The forces at work in this little parcela are familiar. In the 1990s, Cuba needed food, and Jorge’s offer to cultivate that area was accepted; the state contributed a truckload of topsoil. Later, when Cuba’s food was more secure, the interest in tourist dollars trumped the interest in food. Meanwhile, some neighbors resented Jorge’s command of space, which he had essentially made private—even though he liberally shared the produce with the neighborhood. The sociologist’s observation that the space could assume additional valuable functions repurposed it once again. Significantly, the contest was accompanied by bureaucratic clash: the old district leader (a political leader who reported to a larger region), who had assigned the land to Jorge, was rivaled now by a new cultural structure, tourist-oriented, that reported directly to the Council of State. Note that even in Havana, with no tradition of “community” activity, the movement toward small local gardens developed and defended itself on grounds in addition to the simple provision of food. By the end of a dozen years, the values of neighborhood action, locals taking responsibility for locals, had taken a central place in the arguments for local gardens. This value too, often clashed with others espoused by parties to the gardens. We will see similar rivalries in all forays into urban agriculture. We believe that they are healthy. Was it, all told, a success? In a 2012 article in the Monthly Review, Altieri and Funes-Monzote sum it up: Cuba’s achievements in urban agriculture are truly remarkable—there are 383,000 urban farms, covering 50,000 hectares of otherwise unused land and producing more than 1.5 million tons of vegetables with top urban farms reaching a yield of 20 kg/m2 per year of edible plant material using no synthetic chemicals—equivalent to a hundred tons per hectare. Urban farms supply 70 percent or more of all the fresh vegetables consumed in cities such as Havana and Villa Clara.9

An accompanying chart10 shows a steep decline in vegetable production at the time of the collapse, in the early 1990s, when farmers suddenly had to do without their  Miguel A.  Altieri and Fernando R.  Funes-Monzote, “The Paradox of Cuban Agriculture,” Monthly Review, 63(8), January, 2012, p. 2. 10  From Peter Rosset, Braulio Machín-Sosa, Adilén M. Roque-Jaime, and Dana R. Avila-Lozano, “The Campesino-to-Campesino Agroecology Movement of ANAP in Cuba,” Journal of Peasant Studies 38 (2011): 161–91. 9

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fertilizers and standard pest control; then a surge in production, between 1988 and 2007, to 150% of pre-1990 production, as Cubans discovered, developed, and applied organic fertilization and pest-control methods. Possibly more important, given that Cuba is in the direct path of every hurricane that troubles the Atlantic Coast, the agroecologically managed farms, characterized by diversity in crops, recovered more quickly from natural disasters. Observations of agricultural performance after extreme climatic events in the last two decades have revealed the resiliency of peasant farms to climate disasters. Forty days after Hurricane Ike hit Cuba in 2008, researchers conducted a farm survey in the provinces of Holguin and Las Tunas and found that diversified farms exhibited losses of 50 percent compared to 90 to 100 percent in neighboring farms growing monocultures. Likewise agroecologically managed farms showed a faster productive recovery (80 to 90 percent forty days after the hurricane) than monoculture farms. These evaluations emphasize the importance of enhancing plant diversity and complexity in farming systems to reduce vulnerability to extreme climatic events, a strategy entrenched among Cuban peasants.11

In short, yes, it is a success. “By capitalizing on the potential of agroecology, Cuba has been able to reach high levels of production using low amounts of energy and external inputs, with returns to investment on research several times higher than those derived from industrial and biotechnological approaches that require major equipment, fuel, and sophisticated laboratories.”12 But the discussion so far suggests that the agricultural initiative also meets other criteria for success. Toward the end of Sustainable Urban Agriculture in Cuba, Sinan Koont brings the observable results of the urban farming initiative under four heads: Food production (the initiative’s ability to produce and distribute enough food for everyone), Employment (countering the massive unemployment at the beginning of the Special Period), Environment (preservation of the natural environment and its services), and Community (forging of the residents of an area into a viable cooperative for many purposes). Let’s look at these. Havana’s food production became significant about 1997; the goal of providing food for the whole city was clearly within reach. By 2006, it was producing about 275,000 tons total, mostly fruit and vegetables. The organoponicos, relatively small intensive farms at the edge of the city, were most efficient at growing food, followed by the smaller gardens (huertas intensivas), then the parcelas (repurposed small lots in the city), then the patios (individual gardens in back yards, or in containers on porches). Distribution, after the growers had taken their share, was primarily through direct sales to the public, in farmers’ markets. Second to these were the state markets, which took surpluses not needed in the immediate region and sold them at central points. Next came large gardens at places of employment, where the workers took their share of the produce they had grown. An unknown amount of produce was grown on family parcels for family use, but it is assumed that the quantity is   Altieri and Funes-Monzote, op.cit. p.  9, citing Braulio Machin-Sosa, et  al., Revolución Agroecológica: el Movimiento de Campesino a Campesino de la ANAP en Cuba (ANAP: La Habana, 2010). 12  Altieri and Funes-Monzote, op. cit. p. 10. 11

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large. There is also a “free” market, where merchants purchase produce of the city and resell it at a profit. Koont found these markets higher priced, but more attractive. A significant percentage is grown for, and sometimes by, institutions—schools, day care centers, homes for the elderly and the like. Employment benefited enormously from the establishment of the new form of agriculture. Workers were needed immediately to work on the gardens, large and small; the farms took up the slack left by the serious recession of the Special Period. There were new and untraditional forms of employment; for one thing, many more women could be employed on the small intensive farms than on the industrial machine-oriented plantations that preceded them. Most importantly, agriculture without pesticides and herbicides, let alone tractors, is much more labor intensive; near Havana, a 25-acre farm employs 150 workers, which would not be conceivable on the industrial farm. (By the time this author visited the same farm, in January 2014, the functions of the farm had expanded, and 168 workers were employed.) And they’re all making a good living. “One in 14 of all Cuban workers, and 1 in 3 workers in the agricultural sector, now labors in urban agriculture.”13 By the middle of the decade, agriculture had basically ended urban unemployment. The benefits to the natural environment of organic farming are well known, and the major reason for the organic agriculture movements all over the developed world. Cuba was forced into organic farming by the loss of access to oil, and the petroleum-derived fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides; its soil, water and air have prospered. The government also initiated a tree-planting initiative, for several purposes: fruit trees were planted for food, coffee plantations were encouraged, forest trees for wood and forest habitat, and throughout the city, ornamental trees for beautification. A series of government programs encouraged the planting of trees in all available urban spaces.14 The old plantation system had reduced Cuba’s forest cover to about 14% in 1959; it now stands at about 25%. Community is created by the most basic needs of urban agriculture. The residents of the neighborhood of an urban garden are not only the consumers, but also the planners and producers of its products. They have to recruit workers locally, and work together. Community education is also part of the growing of the garden; Cubans are no more in love with fresh vegetables than Americans, and significant education in health and nutrition have to be worked into the labor of raising the vegetables. “In fact, both by design and intention and in consequence, community organizing and community building have been at the very core of urban agriculture.” When urban agriculture supplies vegetables to day-care centers and schools, it is contributing to community health by introducing and advocating nutritional changes associated with healthier diets. When an urban agricultural unit sponsors one of the 3000-plus circles of interest in the primary and secondary schools of urban Cuba, it is promoting the formation of future workers knowledgeable in urban agricultural technologies and ensuring the local community’s continuing attachment to the urban agriculture project. When a unit takes 13 14

 Koont, p. 174, citing Oficina Nacional de Estadisticas 2009, table 3.4  Ibid, p. 175.

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under its wing a youngster who has gotten into trouble at school and provides work- and nature-based therapy, it is contributing to community healing.15

But can the strong communitarian ethic survive in Cuba (or elsewhere)? Premat demonstrates the tensions in the project with the progressive justifications of her friend Jorge’s garden. It rested on three foundations, three legs, as it were, of a stool. As the political climate shifted, the weight of the garden shifted among the three legs. When food was scarce, the fact that Jorge was growing food that he shared with the neighborhood was justification enough. When food became more plentiful, a new communitarian ethic—focused on the barrio, the neighborhood—supplied the justification, the media became interested, tourists and schoolchildren came to visit, and Jorge disappeared from the picture; no matter what the individual contribution, the individual could not receive credit (Premat, an American, was very annoyed at this anti-individual development). When tourists could not justify the continuation of the garden, the environment/health justification, from educating the schoolchildren, took over. After Jorge’s death, the parcela reverted to the state, and a state-salaried worker took over care of the garden—leaving Jorge’s wife with no access to the garden at all. (She suspected that the state worker was corrupt, and took some of the food to sell for his own benefit.) During his lifetime, Jorge was able to keep some control over his garden, by walking a public/private tightrope: at no point did he have any “right,” save that established by current authorities, to continue his work in it. He was small, and poor, so able to fly under the state radar. Dealing with another city farmer, Rafael, who grew food on his own patio, Premat became acquainted with the typical range of urban agriculture activity in a socialist land. She attended the promotional meetings for agriculture and watched the government grants practices—amused at the farmers’ eager adoption of the latest ministry buzzwords to promote their own activities, and the not-so-subtle competition for government grants. She notes that the publicly professed enthusiasm for government programs, aimed at securing public resources for their personal projects, may not have been completely sincere, but that did not seem to matter: … the overall effect of such a public show of acquiescence, particularly when known to involve even those citizens least aligned with the government only reasserted the authority of the MINAG in this field and, through it, the power of the state. How the enactment of state power here went hand in hand with producers’ desires to legitimate their own production sites was particularly illustrated in the voluntary public display of movement-related signs and diplomas on garden gates, home doors, and house walls.16

Rafael eventually got recognition for his exemplary patio, expanded to his rooftop, and went on to lead a variety of neighborhood enterprises, mostly on health education. He had attracted enough international attention to get grants not only from Cuba, with which he created a Community Information Exchange Center in his garage, but from international organizations, which allowed him to purchase a computer, televi15 16

 Ibid., p. 176.  Premat, p. 124.

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sion, and a VCR for educational sessions. There was also a library, with books and pamphlets on permaculture, nutrition and the environment. His Center became a regular stop for foreigners interested in learning about Cuba’s urban gardening experience, and from some of their organizations he was able to secure additional funds. Resources create envy, especially among local bureaucrats who’d like them for themselves, and Rafael eventually had to fight off accusations of “counterrevolutionary” activities in his Center. Eventually the charges were dropped, but Rafael lost all the educational equipment from his center, which went to the offices of the municipality. The major source of annoyance with his projects was simply the perception that he was publicly (and visibly) encouraging modes of citizen participation that were independent of state institutions, forming organizations that did not report to the key district structures—or so Andrea Premat interpreted these developments. Can these small-scale agricultural enterprises persist as the Cuban economy, and Cuba’s position in international politics, continue to change? In 1995, a Danish Cities study estimated that “there were 26,600 popular garden parcels (parcelas) throughout the 43 urban districts that make up Havana’s 15 municipalities.” This author observed, however, in 2014, that gardens in small urban parcels, individual or neighborhood, were seen very infrequently. A very few patios are still there, developed and organized under the heading of “permaculture,” an international movement to create whole ecosystems out of gardens, planting and tending beds to complement each other and create diversified production. The owners of the three patios that we visited had several things in common: they were retirees, devoting much of each day to the garden; they had attended permaculture classes, with government support; they were engaged in research as much as gardening, testing organic methods to repel pests and enrich the soil, also with government encouragement and support; they spoke very good English; and they were on every agricultural tour that came through. (On returning from the tour, I attended a seminar on Cuban agriculture at the University of Vermont’s Gund Institute for Natural Resources; the power point presentation had the same patios that I had seen, in living color.) So the patio movement has continued, for purposes of tourism and education, but with nowhere near the numbers that they had when Premat was writing. No one seemed to know anything about parcelas, and none were observed. One organoponico, the UBCP Alamar, was on the tour (and also featured prominently in the Gund Institute presentation); it at least was thriving on the edge of Havana, and working on finding a refrigerated truck to take fresh vegetables into the city for sale. The major immediate challenge to urban agriculture in Cuba is familiar throughout the developed world: small parcels of farmland, growing food organically, while much more productive (in terms of yield/acre) than larger farms, cannot produce the sheer quantity of food that can be obtained with industrial agriculture. While all the benefits of organic farming are acknowledged, ultimately the decision will have to lie with that method that can feed all the people; the agroecologists are committed to spreading organic agriculture as widely as possible, but at bottom, they are pragmatists, and are prepared to accept a balanced structure of organic and conventional farming.

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A deeper, long-range challenge is found in the slow evolution of the culture in present-day Cuba. With the advent of tourist dollars, that brought with them economic relief during the Special Period and continue to energize the economy, came economic stratification. So different was the lush tourist economy from the barebones Cuban economy of the Special Period, that Cuba now maintains two currencies, one (the CUC, or convertible peso) based on a convertible unit much like the dollar, the other, much less valuable, based on the traditional peso. Our hosts pointed out the oddities that result from the difference: if the father of the family is a practicing physician, the mother a teacher, and the daughter holds a job cleaning motel rooms for the tourist trade, her tips will often equal or exceed her parents’ combined income. Participation in the “capitalist” tourist economy is a matter of necessity for most Cubans. Where Andrea Premat was writing, as far as she could tell, Cubans still strongly believed, as unquestionable truth, in the revolutionary promise of non-­Western agriculture, and defended it as part of their commitment to socialism. That commitment may not be as fervent at present; writing for The New York Times in March, 2014, Damien Cave describes the emerging economic orientations: nightclubs (harking back to the pre-revolutionary Mafia social life), exuberant fads and youthful enjoyment, and an overwhelming desire to “catch up” with the rest of the (developed) world. The article, titled “The Cuban Evolution,” does not mention agriculture, let alone urban communitarian farms.17 Cave’s article (subtitled “Cuba slowly begins to catch up with the rest of the world,”) may be an omen of the future, or simply be the latest note in the U.S. theme, playing since 1960, of the impossibility of Cuban revolutionary success—they can’t really be happy with socialism, right? For agroecologists, after all, Cuba is not only “up with” the rest of the world, it’s leading. Inquiries conducted in my second visit to Cuba, 2015, suggested that the Cuban people really are happy with socialism, especially the guaranteed free education and medical care, but never really caught the enthusiasm for organic agriculture. While the rest of the world saw the Cubans’ success in feeding themselves, through the labor-intensive agroecological methods introduced in the Special Period, as a model for the world, proving the worth of alternative agriculture, the Cubans saw the whole endeavor as scraping through a very bad time—a model of community resilience rather than of agricultural success. Consider Valley Forge: George Washington’s success in maintaining his army in the thin tents and the biting cold of Valley Forge during the Revolution is taken as proof that Americans can brave any hardship for a compelling cause. It is not taken as a model for winter housing of the military. The Cubans are justly proud of their ability to weather the natural difficulties and the absurd cruelties of the U. S. blockade during the Special Period, but see no reason why they should continue Emergency Measures when the emergency is past. The organiponicos are economically feasible and worth continuing, especially as research stations for agriculture; parcelas seem to be no more, as housing demands

 Damien Cave, “The Cuban Evolution: The island nation is slowly starting to catch up with the rest of the world,” The New York Times, Sunday, March 2, 2014, SR p. 1.

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in the city have eliminated vacant lots; patios continue in large part because of the tourists who descend on Cuba in increasing numbers looking for the famed examples of urban agriculture. Consider the irony. Meanwhile, Cuba needs to feed itself. It will never grow enough rice for its people; it has settled into a solid trade relationship with Vietnam that should bring sufficient rice into the country (supplemented, perhaps, by rice from the U.S.). It should be able, eventually, to grow enough corn and beans, and can soon grow enough hogs to meet its demand. It will have to adopt radically new production methods to meet its needs in chickens; Cubans eat a lot of chicken, and right now, most of it is imported as parts from the U.S. For enough milk, it may have to accept that it will have to import milk solids from nations that can support dairy herds without extensive air conditioning. But can agroecology be maintained to any significant extent? The threat to Cuba’s agricultural achievements was recognized as early as 2010: an article by Jack Fairweather and Christina Asquith was titled “How Can Cuba’s Sustainable Agriculture Survive the Peace?” pointing out that “opening up trade will flood the country with cheap oil and with it a return to an industrialized food supply,” and with that a return to centralized control.18 One question that haunted our agriculture tour was the possible future role of the “agribusinesses,” the Monsantos and Cargills that (at that time) dominated all functions of American agriculture and its global extensions: will they take over agriculture in Cuba? For the moment, the answer seems to be a flat No. It is hoped that with the normalization of relations with Cuba established by President Obama, we shall end the blockade that has made it so difficult for Cuba to import what it cannot grow. Under the present (Trump) Administration, the future of Cuban-American relations is not predictable. And other consequences of normalization may be more problematic. One immediate problem posed by the increase in the tourist trade, for example, is that the sudden expansion of the market for good meat and vegetables, occasioned by the establishment of tourist-oriented restaurants, drains the food supply, leaving Cubans to survive on the high-priced remainders.19 The conflict between the agroecologists and the conventional agriculturalists will probably end in a both-and rather than an either-or: small scale agriculture, sensitive to tourist expectations, will co-exist with agriculture adapted to larger-scale production. This is one of the sources of tension surrounding the urban gardens, and it turns on the evaluation of agricultural productivity: we noted on our visit that there was a widespread belief, public and highly placed, that urban gardens might be very nice, but they could never seriously feed the country, so large-scale industrial agriculture should be resumed as soon as possible for the survival of the people. While it could not be resumed, Cuba had had to rely on the urban patios and parcelas, later expanded to the organoponicos. The state, in its several ministries, strongly backed the gardens through the worst of the Special Period, but began to wander back  Jack Fairweather and Christina Asquith, “How Can Cuba’s Sustainable Agriculture Survive the Peace?” Solutions 11(2) pp. 56–58 (quote at 56), March 2010. 19  Azam Ahmed, “Cuba’s Surge in Tourism Is Keeping Food Off Its Residents’ Plates,” The New York Times 12/9/16 pp. A1, A8. 18

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toward resuming industrial agriculture as soon as resources became available, still convinced it was more productive. The agroecologists remain convinced that the community gardens, more productive, on the small scale, can be extended to cover most large-scale needs as well. A second conflict at the heart of the Cuban experience is the tension between central and local control: Cuba was committed, at many levels, to governance by the central state, in solidarity with other socialist nations. What we know as “free enterprise” was strongly morally disapproved, often illegal. Tension between central control and local (or individual) control is universal; Cuba leaned much more to the central. But the gardens could not be centrally administered—there weren’t enough officials to go around, and besides, when the emphasis was on getting food on the table, gardens started everywhere, often without “permission.” So individual, neighborhood, local control took root, and flourished, and unsurprisingly, many people found the experience fulfilling and enjoyable. Again, the state backed the gardens when times were hard, but all this spontaneous creation of semi-commercial enterprises tended to drive the officials crazy, and they would do their best to rein it in, often against the resistance of small groups that wanted to keep what they’d managed to build. A third area of conflict, which may intensify during the process of normalization, is the degree to which international participation will be welcomed: At the start of the Special Period, Cuba needed foreign currency quickly, so welcomed back exiles who had left, from the time of the revolution to 1990, bringing cash (gusanos metamorphosed into mariposas). It also encouraged remittances, much liberalized, and international NGOs that set up headquarters in Havana and could draw on international resources. On the other hand, it resented the dependence on foreign sources beyond Cuban control, and worried about the hostile ideas, not to mention the foreign control, they might engender. This tension (like the others, really) drew strength from pre-existing ideological tension in Cuba, which had remained almost invisible until the Special Period. Cuba at this writing (mid-2018) is in a time of turmoil and transition, much of it good. The food shortage noted this season will be resolved as more acreage is rushed into profitable production; research farms like the Alamar organiponico have laid a solid foundation for the creation and preservation of healthy soil. With only slightly more investment, more animals will be raised for meat, also profitably. And the distribution systems will quickly catch up; the period of hardship after the Soviet collapse has left the Cubans resilient, resourceful, and very inventive. The fate of the urban gardens, with the exception of the tourist trail patios, is very much in doubt. But the lessons for urban agriculture have been learned—now we know that farms in the city are possible and worth creating, not just for the amusement of the crunchy granolas, but for basic subsistence of the whole people. In 10 years, Cuba may no longer be the exemplar of farms in the city, only because its lessons have been learned. We now turn to a few of its nord-americano followers.

Chapter 2

Detroit, Michigan

What Godless Communism did to Havana, Godless Capitalism’s automobile industry did to Detroit—created a center of prosperity entirely dependent on one industry controlled from outside its borders, got everyone used to a solid middle-class standard of living which seemed to be eternal, then collapsed of its own incompetence and disappeared, leaving its dependants wondering how next they would live.1 In the bountiful 1940s through the 1960s, Detroit was Motor City, center of America’s most successful industry, maker of the cars that created the suburbs and defined American prosperity, founding home of the labor unions that brought the “working class” up to middle class standards, center of its own brand of pop music (Motown), icon of America. Then, in a process described with excruciating clarity by David Halberstam in his 1986 book, The Reckoning, the automobile industry went into a decline, at first troubling, in competition with the new Japanese automobile companies, then catastrophic, as the U. S. companies floundered and collapsed,2 ending by pleading for government bailouts in the ultimate implosion of the American economy in 2009. As far as Detroit was concerned, the battle had been fought and lost by the 1970s: as Detroit’s suburbs expanded and grew in the convenience and accessibility created by the very cars Detroit was making, they took Detroit’s industrial base with them, and left Detroit a hollow shell, with plant facilities and housing for the 1.86 million souls (its 1950 population) that had gathered to make the automobiles, but many fewer people to live in the houses and no jobs in the plants. Between 1950 and 1960, Detroit’s population shrank by 10%, more than 100,000 residents; by 2014, it was down to 700,000. There were few jobs for the people; between 1947 and 1963, Detroit lost more than a third of its manufacturing 1  The story of Detroit’s urban agriculture is not yet collected; our best resources are scattered websites, one of them “Model D,” part of Issues Media; much of this chapter relies on these sites. Of first importance, as more recent, is the article “Looking Back on a Decade of Growth in Detroit’s Urban Ag Movement,” by David Sands, posted September 14, 2015. http://www.modeldmedia. com/features/10-years-urban-ag-091415.aspx. Accessed 01/11/2016. 2  Halberstam, David, The Reckoning, New York: William Morrow, 1986.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. Newton, Urban Agriculture and Community Values, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39244-4_2

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jobs. (At first the jobs went to the suburbs; then down South, where there were no unions; then to Mexico and points East. They never caught up with the Japanese.) Nor are those jobs coming back, despite the promises made by President Donald Trump while he was campaigning in Michigan; as of May (2018) Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV announced it was keeping its production in Mexico.3 In frustration, Trump is proposing a 25% tariff on all imported automobiles.4 That was on May 23, 2018; 2 days later, Mexico’s Economy Minister, Ildefonso Guajardo, dismissed the threat as “bombast.”5 So it may be, but it illustrates the lasting nature of Detroit’s problems, even in administrations perceived as friendly. The automobile industry’s flight from Detroit was a classic study of Capitalism in action. Let’s reflect on that for a minute. After World War II, the U.S. had the only manufacturing plant left standing, and had no trouble dominating world trade. Engineers with a touch of genius had invented the American car, and Americans soon discovered that in the post-War conditions, the car gave them everything they wanted in work (they could now live in homes surrounded by greenery, like farms, but get to work in the city with ease and convenience), in recreation (touring the fascinating parks they had only read about), and keeping in touch with all the relatives. The industry was highly profitable. Profits continued through the 1960s, but in the early 1970s affairs in the Middle East took an ugly turn, and an Arab oil embargo sent the price of oil soaring. Gasoline suddenly was hard to get, prices were high, and the large American car became much less affordable. But the doctrine of free enterprise is to keep costs down to keep profits up, and redesigning the American car to be lighter and more economical would be very costly (huge plants would have to be redesigned and retrofitted). By the late 1960s the engineers had given way to the Marketing Department; on the hypothesis that Americans would buy anything Detroit manufactured, the automobile industry turned its focus away from improving the performance of the American car toward changing the styles frequently, to encourage more purchases. It was known that an American car could go for about 50,000 miles and then had to be replaced; this struck the rulers of the industry as about right. Oil shocks continued, but that policy did not change. Then the style creators of the 1960s gave way to the “bean counters,” the money men, who ran the industry until the end of the century and beyond. In capitalism, the purpose of the automotive corporation is to make money, not cars. Redesigning those automobiles, and then retooling all their factories to produce the new models, would be enormously expensive. If the automobile companies could continue to make money by continuing those models that had been seriously outpaced by the Japanese competition, the executives of the companies would not be able to justify such reinvestment to their shareholders. In 1971 Ford put the sporty Pinto on the market, much smaller and lighter than most of their line; but it was hastily engineered, turned out

 https://www.bloomberg.com, May 11, 2018.  www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-trump-auto-import-tariff-20180523-story.html 5  www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-05/26/c_137207121.htm 3 4

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to have some fatal design flaws, and hardly inspired others to do the same. So the very companies that had made Detroit the center of the Free World, following the logic of their success, damned Detroit to the status of a ghost town. Meanwhile, Detroit had become a predominantly African American city, which did not help the situation, nor Detroit’s ability to maneuver. The suburbs had eagerly received the fleeing white residents, a move that became a flood after the race riots of 1967, while resisting the large number of black families that had arrived in Detroit in the 1930s and 1940s to work at the automobile factories, and now attempted to get out. (The racial conflicts that accompanied the decline of the industry are chronicled in Thomas Sugrue’s 1998 book, Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit.)6 The unemployment caused by the desertion of the automotive industry looms as a major problem to this day. There are many ways to count the jobless, but there seems to be a consensus that the unemployment rate in Detroit has been, and remains, about double that of the nation as a whole. In 2010 it officially stood at 15.5%. At present (June 2018), it stands at 8.7%, down from 9.9% in January.7 In 2010, its unemployment and home foreclosure rates were the highest in the country. Crime is seen by the residents as a worse threat to the city, which has the one of the highest murder rates in America. Much of the crime is fueled by an outsize drug problem, fueled in turn by unemployment. Corruption that was rooted out of most of America’s urban areas continued in Detroit; the last mayor but one had to be removed from office for his misdeeds. Nor was capitalism through with Detroit. On the thesis that the best remedy for a hangover is the hair of the dog that bit you, in 1990 Detroit threw its miserable educational system open for free enterprise. The result was millions of much-needed public dollars funneled into many charter school start-ups, unseemly competition for enrollments to secure those dollars, and a much worse education for Detroit’s beleaguered schoolchildren.8 Even where small legitimate enterprises did spring up in the private sector, like the watchmaker Shinola (“Shy-nola”) the companies are not themselves local (Shinola is a Texas company), and workers and residents alike fully expect that as soon as the attraction of the Detroit “Renaissance” has worn off, the enterprises will relocate.9 To remove refuges for the criminals, not to mention the rats, successive mayors have demolished unused, and unusable, buildings. The resulting acres of vacant lots, forlorn reminders of Detroit’s glory days, have been enthusiastically adopted by the urban gardening movement. Detroit did not tolerate the gardens primarily in their role to provide food, but in the secondary objective, to make the city more pleasant, beautiful, and livable, in hopes of attracting people, businesses and jobs back to  Sugrue, Thomas, Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1996, 2005. 7  michiganradio.org/post/detroits-true-unemployment-rate 8  Zernike, Kate, “Heralded Choice Fails to Fix Detroit’s Schools,” The New York Times, Wednesday, June 29, 2016, pp. A1, A14. 9  From a Public Broadcasting System special aired June 30, 2016. 6

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town. To the extent that the gardens made the neighborhoods nicer places to live, and thereby raised the value of the land, they created problems for themselves; more on this below. Spontaneous groups of urban pioneers, some of them moderately successful, undertook to form community gardens to provide food for the neighborhoods. In a Detroit Free Press report (May 20, 2013) Megha Satyanarayana described the transformation of Brightmoor, a Detroit neighborhood. In an area so blighted in 2006 that the remaining families did not dare go outside, the NGO “Neighbors Building Brightmoor” has organized its residents into an urban farm belt. “Students tend two youth gardens and sell the food at local farmers markets. Adults grow everything from food to flowers in gardens called Ladybug Lane and Rabbit Run. Houses begging to be torn down are painted brightly, with inspiring prose. And young adults from elsewhere have moved in to start small commercial farms, gardens and parks on two-and three-lot stretches where the houses are long gone and the land was left barren.” (Barren, but not poisoned; since these areas were almost exclusively residential, the soil is not polluted by industrial waste nor over-cultivated from traditional agriculture.) In 7 years, the neighborhood has been transformed by farming; its efforts helped push through an initial ordinance legalizing some urban farming. City Councilman Brian Tate cited the success of the gardens as creating in the neighborhood “a sense of accomplishment in a community that has seen so much divestment.” This effort was typical, driven by inspired youngsters, turning gardening into educational fun. But inspired children cannot address the heavy Detroit history of racial discrimination and tensions often leading to violence. Among the struggles was a parallel history of African American activism, especially as inspired by rogue Black Muslim Malcolm X and the Black Power movement. Jimmy and Grace Lee Boggs, leaders in the campaign for racial equality in the early 1960s, became pioneers in the Community Garden movement that provided a foundation for urban agriculture in the black communities. This leadership was essential to the black community’s participation in the urban gardens movement. For Detroit’s African American community did not always react positively to the arrival of the well-meaning young garden pioneers; somehow, the arrival of the white “hippies,” even the sincere ones that shared their crops with the neighbors, struck the black community as one more racist insult, and inspired by Grace Lee Boggs, they undertook to make their own gardens. The most impressive success of this endeavor is found in the D-Town Farm, a project of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. Its mission, according to its website, is to “build self-reliance, food security and food justice in Detroit’s Black community by influencing public policy, engaging in urban agriculture, promoting healthy eating, encouraging co-operative buying, and directing youth towards careers in food-related fields.” The parallels with Cuba are striking: inner-city African Americans, forced to buy their food at convenience stores (“party stores,” in Detroit), had inherited the worst of the corporate-driven provision of high-priced junk food. Like the Cubans, they were faced with virtual starvation. As the Cubans defied the economic power of the U.S. by turning city lots into farms, Detroit’s African Americans defy the w ­ hite-­owned agri-

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business domination of the food supply through the same initiatives. But in Detroit, racial self-respect drove the enterprise. D-Town planted itself about half an hour from the “food desert” that downtown Detroit had become. (The 2008 Farm Bill defines a “food desert” as “an area in the United States with limited access to affordable and nutritious food, particularly such an area composed of low-income communities and neighborhoods.”10 After the last of the supermarkets left Detroit, that definition fit its center city rather well.) The farm itself is seven acres of organic vegetable plots, with mushroom beds, beehives, hoop houses to extend the growing season, and a large compost operation. The farm expects to expand; Detroit is still tearing down old buildings, creating new vacant lots waiting for planting. Part of the farm operates within Rouge Park, largest in the city of Detroit, on a 10-year license agreement with the city to develop a model organic farm. The Black Community Food Security Network, sponsor of D-Town, has been successful, and articulate, enough to attract a $750,000 grant from the Kellogg Foundation, with which they support a lecture series on nutrition, classes in gardening, an internship program, a buying club, and a new retail food store. Whatever the city of Detroit may think of the organization’s political agenda, these gardens fulfill civic objectives: to use the underutilized vacant land and to beautify the city in order to raise land values and restore the city’s prosperity. For Malik Yakini, chair of the coalition that runs the Security Network and its farm, the first priority is food security: “Community food security is a concept that basically means that a community has adequate amounts of culturally appropriate food … grown by sustainable means.” When nutritious food, accepted by the people, is readily available, the community is food secure. The extreme of food insecurity is a “food desert,” defined above; Detroit was so designated by social scientist Mari Gallagher, who studied Detroit in 2007. The effect of a food desert is readily seen in the health statistics: Detroit has major problems with childhood and adult obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes and other diet-related diseases. But “food security,” so understood, does not address the real problem. Yakini commented on the central purposes of the D-Town Farm in an interview for “Democracy Now” in June of 2010. … Detroit is an at least 85 or perhaps 90 percent African American city, so any plan being proposed in relationship to urban agriculture in Detroit must benefit the majority population. We’re not interested in plans that come in where the corporate sector comes in and only uses the majority population as workers. We’re concerned about control and ownership. …this is an example of an agricultural project which is controlled by African Americans and where we’re able to control the revenue generated from this farm, and we want to model not only the growing techniques, but model the kind of social and political and economic dynamics that we think are appropriate for a city like Detroit. [emphasis supplied]

We are talking here not just about food security, but food sovereignty—control not only of the food that is produced but of the resources needed to produce it—land, water, and seeds. Yakini recognizes the historical difficulties in the type of organizing he is doing: 10

 http://apps.ams.usda.gov/fooddeserts/faqlocatortool2-pgr.pdf

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2  Detroit, Michigan …Part of the challenge we have with organizing African Americans for this work is that many of our people associate this work with enriching somebody else, associate it with slavery or sharecropping, both of which enriched whites through our labor. And part of what we’re doing is reframing agriculture for African Americans, so that we can again see it as an act of self-determination and self-empowerment, as opposed to an act where our labor is exploited to enrich someone else…. I hope to see more understanding of the value of this movement by the political leadership within the city. But most importantly, we think, is not so much even the political leadership, but … the people being mobilized and the people’s consciousness being raised, so that they see this as being a way to work on their own behalf.

Yakini, and the Farm, continue, slowly gaining recognition. In an edibleWOW interview in December 2017, he had just returned from keynoting a food conference at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, underscoring the academic acceptance of urban agriculture and D-Town’s racial mission.11 The Farm was planning a major Farm-to-Table event for July 2018; tickets were available online. The Detroit gardening initiative is determinedly cooperative, anchored by a few non-profits; “Greening of Detroit” is the largest NGO on the task, providing hoes, encouragement and an organizational umbrella for any who want to join the action. “Keep Growing Detroit” coordinates education and seed distribution programs across the city and its environs, through its Garden Resource Program serving (according to its website) more than 1400 gardens and farms.12 “Keep Growing Detroit” is highlighted in the Fall 2014 issue of World Wildlife Magazine; Ashley Atkinson, its codirector, recounts the role of their community gardens in providing food for what had become a food desert, and goes on to note the same effect found in Havana: “Along the way, I learned that growing food together could not only sustain us, it could rebuild community.”13 There are several hundred farm/garden projects underway right now in the city, generally under Greening of Detroit as an umbrella. The movement seems to be growing. In July of 2013, the Michigan Chronicle announced its “annual tour” of the community gardens, scheduled for August 7, with a choice of themes for the bikers or bus tours. “With each passing season,” the Chronicle enthused, “Detroitʼs urban agriculture community is growing stronger, with more gardens dotting the landscape, more farmers selling their products locally, more schools providing fresh perspectives of food for their students, and more communities utilizing gardens as a tool for neighborhood change.” The invitation continues: In addition to growing in number, the Detroit urban agriculture community is flourishing because of the connections that weave through and strengthen the growing community. On August 7th, Keep Growing Detroit invites you to travel by bus or bike to see a sampling of the over 1,400 gardens in the city and to learn about and celebrate how gardeners, entrepreneurs, and food focused organizations are working together to grow a beautiful and thriving food system.

 Cara Catallo, “D-Town Farm Soldiers On,” edibleWOW December 7, 2017.  http://detroitagriculture.net/urban-garden-programs/garden-resource-program; accessed 8/19/13; also http://www.greeningofdetroit.com/what-we-do/urban-farming. Accessed 4/3/2016. 13  Ashley Atkinson, “Urban Agriculture: Fertile Ground for Community Growth,” World Wildlife Magazine, Fall 2014, p. 32. 11 12

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This year’s Annual Tour of Detroit Urban Gardens and Farms will feature themed bus tour routes: “Fresh Perspectives,” featuring youth gardens; “Fertile Ground,” exploring the cooperative efforts of garden communities; “Farm to Fork,” highlighting production focused gardens and the pathways our local food travels; and “Apples Beets Carrots,” a glimpse of how school gardens are re-framing nutrition education. Bike enthusiasts will wind their way through the streets of Detroit on three riding tour routes: “Growing Entrepreneurs,” featuring how businesses are connecting to good food; “Changing Landscapes,” examining Detroitʼs open space and the policies that govern them; and “Hidden City Gems,” displaying diverse gardens spread throughout Detroit neighborhoods.14

Refreshments were to be served afterward. According to the financial journal Barron’s, in March of 2014 there were over 1000 community gardens in Detroit.15 One of the more hopeful projects was the garden of the Catherine Ferguson Academy, a school founded for unwed mothers and their children, serving as a prime example of the many functions that urban gardens perform simultaneously. Catherine Ferguson, which dealt with girls who by all societal accounts have failed miserably to meet expectations and have forfeited their future into the bargain, dealt with their anger, depression and low self-esteem by teaching them to drive tractors and milk goats. As their competence at handling unfamiliar animals and large machines grew, so did their competence at mastering the tasks of their lives, managing children and careers. (There’s nothing like a large tractor to deliver self-­ confidence.)16 The school, just as a school, was remarkably successful, boasting a 97% attendance rate and a 90% graduation rate in 2010, the last year of its operation, with most students headed off to some sort of higher education. But it was financed by Detroit public school district, and in 2011 it was shut down (as a cost-­ cutting measure) by the state appointed emergency manager. When national protests erupted at the closure (Catherine Ferguson had received national media attention on account of its academic success), Detroit invented a school district for new for-profit charter schools, the Blanche Kelso Bruce Academy, and now funnels education money to the proprietors of those schools.17 Capitalism has not been kind to Detroit, and it tends, like most faithless ideas, to take its failures out on its weakest citizens. Despite setbacks, the community farm/garden movement continues in Detroit. The Detroit Market Garden, part of the Greening of Detroit initiative, serves as a food hub and training facility for youngsters and adult apprentices alike. With extensive greenhouses, they are able to grow food year-round; in 2015, ­approximately 15,000 pounds of produce was harvested, about 7300 pounds donated to community organizations. Greening of Detroit claims over 1500 community gardens created since 2003, and several hundred adults trained in food service industry. Their central farm is 2.5 acres, in the middle of the city, in the neighborhood of the Eastern  www.michronicleonline.com, accessed August 18, 2013.  Barron’s, March 17, 2014, p. 31. 16  Hanson and Marty 2012, Breaking Through Concrete, 129–136. 17  “DPS announces new operator for Catherine Ferguson Academy, the Gladys Barsamian Preparatory Center and the Hancock Center”, Detroit Public Schools announcement, June 16, 2011. 14 15

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Market food hub, and makes itself useful to the neighborhood by giving tours, running activities for children, and offering produce for sale in a farmers’ market.18 Can the community gardens feed Detroit? Michigan State University (the C.S. Mott Group) did a survey a few years ago and concluded that the city’s agricultural capacity was very large: there are about 5000 acres vacant and theoretically available for gardens, and even amateur gardeners should be able to produce twice as much fresh vegetables as the city can eat. Their figures assume that the gardens will have plastic hoop houses, inexpensive greenhouses; “high tunnels,” in some areas, to extend the growing season. It’s hard to tell precisely what economic contribution the scattered gardens might make, but it is possible that the collective production might add $63 million per year to the local economy. The gardens could be a mighty engine for sustainable growth, if their enterprise was multiplied in the usual ways—in the creation of distribution outlets and retail groceries to replace the supermarkets that fled the city as the economy declined and the crime rate rose (A&P, the last to leave, closed its last two Detroit stores in 2007.) There are already suggestions for a new manufacturing capacity to make the hoop houses and other supplies. The consumer culture of the organic food movement has also spread to Detroit; recently, the trendy organic outlet “Whole Foods” opened a store there.19 Until very recently, farming was illegal in Detroit. It had always been permitted to have a garden around your home in the city, since the house constitutes the principal use of the land, but you could not just buy a parcel for farming. There’s a reason for this restriction: Michigan has a “right-to-farm” law (the RTFA, passed in 1981 and since expanded) that protects its farmers. The backstory of the law is one of suburban sprawl: as farmers sold off their land for suburban development, they acquired a new set of neighbors, many neighbors, who had never lived near farms in their lives. The new people bought the land because of its bucolic attraction: they loved to look out of their windows across the mown fields where the sun was shining, the cows were grazing, the wheat fields waving, and all that good stuff. But they couldn’t stand the smell of the manure or the noise of the machinery, so they’d get town councils (which they soon dominated) to pass nuisance laws, backed up by lawsuits, to force the farmers to desist from noisy and smelly activities. Since the manure and the tractors were central to the agricultural enterprise, the farmers protested, and got the state to pass a law that said that any activities on the farmer’s land which were properly part of agriculture were protected from local ordinances and nuisance actions. So if any owner could designate his lot in Detroit as a “farm,” he could raise as many pigs and roosters on the plot as he wanted, and there would be nothing the neighbors could do about the odor or  http://www.greeningofdetroit.com/who-we-are/about-us/; see also Richard Jackson 2012, Designing Healthy Communities, Chapter 10, “The City That Won’t Give Up: Detroit, Michigan,” pp. 139–156, esp. pp. 148–149. The site invites and appreciates donations, but I was not able to find any indication of 501(c(3) status, nor any financial information. One Detroit News article, no longer available, refers to Greening as a “non-profit.” 19  Christian Science Monitor May 12, 2014, p. 8. 18

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the noise. Given that the primary purpose of these gardens, as far as the city was concerned, was beautification, to make the city more attractive to new residents, such “farms” seemed counterproductive. The Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law posted a note on February 8, 2013 titled “Room to Grow: Detroit Takes the First Steps to Legalize Urban Agriculture.” The author begins with a summary of the reasons for the agricultural turn in the city’s history: the city has more vacant land than any other American city, an estimated 25–40% of its 139 square miles; this is land we call “blighted” with abandoned buildings and a high crime rate; urban agriculture “can improve a neighborhood’s economic prosperity, health and safety, create a sense of community, and remove blight from the city’s vacant lots;” it also turns land on the city budget into productive use. But then there’s the RTFA.  To make urban agriculture possible, Michigan’s Department of Agriculture and Rural Development in 2012 declared cities of 100,000 residents or more to be exempt from the RTFA if they passed a zoning ordinance which permitted agriculture. Detroit drew up such an ordinance, permitting all kinds of vegetable gardens, private, commercial or non-profit, and the sale of the produce at vegetable stands or farmers’ markets. Unlike the RTFA, it permits nuisance suits if the odors, noise, smoke or lights emitted by the gardens are “excessive.” It does not yet permit the raising of rabbits, chickens, or honeybees, but the residents raise them anyway, so the Planning Commission foresees amending the ordinance to permit them. The author of the note observes that there are no current limits on size of plot (even as public, private and non-profit plans for projects 100 acres and up float in the sphere of possibility), nor is the ordinance keyed into any larger vision of the city’s future, so amendment will surely be necessary; but it is at least a start.20 Another major threat to the urban gardens of Detroit may come from the recovery of the capitalist possibilities that built Detroit in the first place. James Trimarco, writing in YES! Magazine21 recounts how John Hantz, a Detroit businessman, has been buying up land from the city, not to create vegetable gardens (which were, at the time, illegal) but to grow trees—to create large sectors of hardwoods, evergreens, and fruit trees, primarily to make the areas look better, and eventually to raise property values. Garden activists immediately opposed Hantz Farms, although the grounds of their protest are not clear from the article. They argue that Hantz’s idea will not create many jobs (it won’t, but then neither does anything else), it won’t make the city much money (again, neither do the gardens, at least not on the scale that the city needs), the groves being planted will indeed beautify the city, and they won’t hurt the gardeners—Hantz is careful not to buy up plots that are currently being (now entirely legally) farmed for produce. And who can be against planting trees? Hantz Farms President, Mike Score, says that the purpose of the company is to make Detroit a more beautiful place to live, nothing more; and that  Passage of farming ordinance: WDET: Detroit Council Legalizes Urban Farming, March 19, 2013. “No Stranger to Urban Agriculture, Detroit Makes it Official with a New Zoning Ordinance.” April 9, 2013 | Nina Ignaczak. 21  Trimarco, “Detroiters Question ‘World’s Largest Urban Farm’” December 2012 YES! Magazine. 20

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an increase in the vegetable gardens may not be a good idea anyway: neighbors have worried that the vegetable gardens next door might use toxic pesticides, and would attract rats. But the protests go on, to the point that the approval of the Hantz purchase had to be made over the (very public) shouts and disruptions of protesters from the gardens. For starters, the garden protesters argue that the “neighbors” objections, cited by Score, are not founded on any urban neighbors of their acquaintance; urban gardens are organic and use no toxic chemicals (from conviction in the US, not scarcity of chemicals), and in the city, rats are there whether or not there are gardens. At bottom, the major objection to the Hantz project seems to be a matter of control: who, exactly, is going to determine the future of Detroit? The white capitalists, now represented by Hantz, whose decisions resulted in Detroit’s present condition? Or the community movements, especially from the African American community, who are trying to establish food sovereignty, to carve out a piece of the governance for themselves, at least over their community farms, while feeding themselves and their children? There is no doubt that the beautification of the city, “cleaning up the neighborhood,” was one of the original and most effective organizing principles in getting the gardens started. But now, the gardeners argue, urban agriculture has “moved on”—focusing now on community participation in the gardens, on the growing and eating of healthy food, including many fresh vegetables, and on educating children (and adults) on the methods of raising their own food. More important than the healthy food is the matter of who’s in control. Where the gardens operate, the community is in control, and their organizers want to see that control extended to all green development in the blighted lots of Detroit, to make sure the gardens are organic and to make sure that the people who actually live there are the ones growing the food and making the decisions. This controversy exemplifies one of the transitions in the urban farm movement, along with its problems: on the one hand, if the new farmers would confine their activities to growing vegetables on uncontested land, they would have less trouble with the authorities; on the other, once the farm or garden has formed its workers into a self-conscious community, it is inevitable, and good, that they should take on matters of governance, which they must, or be shouldered out by the power of big money. An interesting parallel to Detroit, in problems, initiatives, and local reaction, is Flint, also in Michigan, also the child of the automobile. Flint was in the news in 2016 for its water problems: after the automobile industry left and the city started to go broke, the governor (Rick Snyder, a Republican) sent Flint a city manager to get the city’s finances in order; the first thing the manager did was to redirect the city’s water supply through some old lead pipes without chemical protections against shedding lead into the water, and next thing they knew, most of the children in Flint had lead poisoning. Most of Flint is Democratic, like most urban areas, and the politics was not pretty to watch. But it underscored the economic disaster of the ruins left behind by the automotive exodus. Meanwhile, a nascent urban gardening community put together a documentary on their Flint initiatives, “Urban Gardening”; it shows periodically on PBS. Two of the farming projects are profiled. First up is the Kings farm, owned by Jackie and Dora King, who teach karate to inner city youth

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and put them to work on an urban farm, for food and wages; they also teach their students the virtues of hard work, self-confidence and hope, all of which are in short supply in that neglected community. The second is Flint River Farm, started by a couple of idealistic entrepreneurs; the documentary covers their numerous battles with the city of Flint, and the obstacles that a hostile community can put in the way (you can’t get a long-term lease on the land until you have insurance, but you can’t get the insurance until you have the long-term lease; that sort of thing). Not all such projects last, but Flint’s are settled in for the future.22 With thousands of foreclosed homes and hundreds of abandoned acres that these farms are able to improve, what’s the city’s problem? Interviewed, the mayor angrily denied that these “farming” enterprises would ever be able to supply more than 5% of the city’s income (the participants asked for any other 5% she might have in mind). The narrators gave the real reason for the opposition, same as for Detroit: the city wants industry back, real industry, with humming factories and machines, producing valuable metal objects for high prices, paying high wages to thousands of workers, not these hippies. Flint—and Detroit—want the automobile back. They won’t get it, but meanwhile, any who distrust the hippie gardeners can point out that each garden sits on land that might be needed by the next big industry, so we’d better keep it available. Dreams take a long time to die, and many of the rustbelt cities are not ready for a new dream. The farms were not the only, or major, locus of protests in Detroit. The end of the industrial age has left a flood of injury and disorder, from the riots of the 1970s to the failed attempt to reform the school system in 2008 to the enforced water shutoffs in 2015–2016, to the visit of Donald Trump in his attempt to “reach out” to African American voters during his 2016 Presidential Campaign. A typical, or paradigmatic, group calls itself simply “We the People of Detroit,” WPD; it was formed to protest the mayoral takeover of the schools in 2008, going on to protest the installation of the emergency city manager, continuing a protest against police brutality, and now protesting the water shutoffs and promoting the establishment of emergency water stations. All of these protests carry a strong current, sometimes very near the surface, of racial resentment. For when the African American population of a city is large, and poor, lacking a history of good health and good education, and justifiably incensed at the former city fathers, all of them white, for abandoning them in this situation, and at the present city fathers for failure to remedy, or exacerbating, the city’s ills, almost any measure the city takes to put its finances and development back on track will bear unequally on rich and poor, on black and white. After almost 50 years of decline, it’s hard to tell from the outside which austerity measures are directed at the people just because they are black, just because they are poor, or both at once. That fact of Detroit existence underlines the significance of the Detroit Black Food Security Network, the operator of the D-Town Farm. Urban farms founded by and among the poor have many justifications, ordinarily including the bolstering of self-esteem, self-confidence, and management skills among a population where

 Chris Hardman, “Edible Flint Sows Seeds for a Healthy Future,” edibleWOW, September 22, 2017.

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these are not historically given, along with the provision of food nutritionally superior to the products of the city convenience stores. But in Detroit, the farm sends a powerful political message as well, about the determination of a people historically ignored to feed themselves and assert political power in the process. Marching in the streets is a highly visible statement of belief, but achieving food sovereignty where there was none before, managing a successful business, especially a business dedicated to the good of the community, is a much more powerful message to the community and the world.

Milwaukee’s “Growing Power” An example of how Midwestern Revolutionary Agriculture can operate with somewhat fewer injuries and protests is (or was; more on that below) found in Will Allen’s Growing Power in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, not that far away from Michigan. Allen describes his founding and building of his organization in an unfailingly entertaining autobiographical account, The Good Food Revolution.23 After a career as a basketball player, and a very successful spell as corporate salesman and manager, Allen took a chance on some decrepit greenhouses in a poor section of Milwaukee, persuaded some locals (especially youngsters) to help him out, and built a magnificent urban farm, mostly in greenhouses (to extend the growing season). The original endeavor, “Will’s Roadside Stand,” operated out of the greenhouse nearest the road, and struggled to keep itself in existence, succeeding very largely because Allen’s personality—charisma, passion, firmness of vision and simple friendliness—attracted people who believed in him and in urban farming, and were willing to survive as volunteers, seeding, growing, and selling greens, until the enterprise made enough money to hire them. Two of these partners—Karen Carpenter, who with her two children became part of the fabric of Allen’s organization, and Hope Finkelstein, who wrote grants for Allen, played crucial parts in the enterprise. (Hope only stayed for a few years, accompanying her husband to Alaska—but her tiny NGO, the original “Growing Power,” introduced Allen to the Cuban accomplishment in urban agriculture.24) Allen started with a conviction that if farming were to be a satisfying human activity, from seed planting through harvest to eating, it had to be kept small, and keeping it small leads to freedom: “I feel fortunate that I have found a way to grow food on a human scale, and I have secured a certain kind of independence. I seed with my own hands. I participate in the harvest. I have always loved the process of trial and error in organic agriculture and the way the work engages both my body and mind.”25 This kind of farming is a lifelong education; the challenge faced by the

 Will Allen, The Good Food Revolution, New York: Penguin (Gotham), 2012.  Allen, op.cit, p. 133. 25  Ibid. pp. 184–185, citing E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful. 23 24

Milwaukee’s “Growing Power”

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cities is to structure their economies to make such small farming economically viable. His Roadside Stand had concentrated on seed starts, that other farmers could buy to grow in their gardens. But in time he and his tiny staff decided that they could do much more: they could take the intensive organic agriculture practiced on a field outside of town and adapt it to the small urban plot by the greenhouses. “I became an urban farmer. Growing food on two acres appealed to me at first as a challenge: I wondered how much I could produce in five greenhouses and in my back lot.”26 Quite a bit, it turned out. Allen integrated this new effort with his larger vision, partially economic, but also political—a matter of control. Big agriculture in the countryside and the fortunes of the urban poor are cruelly linked: when the price of grain is low, farmers cannot restore their exhausted soil; they give up and leave the land, and in startling numbers, commit suicide; when the prices, fueled by speculation, soar, the urban poor often cannot afford to eat good food. At the least, local production eliminates the problem of global speculation. And even in the best of times for both, increasing population is placing increasing burdens on the (crumbling) transportation infrastructure to bring food from the country to the city. Allen is ambitious: If we can bring the production of food, and control over its distribution, back inside the city, “…I believe we can play a part in remedying some of the problems that are troubling us as a country right now: the absence of jobs, the problems of waste, the crisis of rising energy costs, and the lack of access among low-income communities and people of color to healthy, affordable food. We need to create farmers who can produce $200,000 intensively on a single urban acre as well as those who can grow $500 on an acre in the countryside.”27 Addressing two problems at once, Allen made arrangements with local restaurants and markets (and coffee shops and most important, breweries) to pick up their food waste for his compost operations, and between the food waste, scrapped paper, and his worms, created beautiful fertile soil for his urban farms. He expanded the crops to meet newly available markets: pea sprouts and sunflower sprouts yielded delightful organic exotic greens for local high-end restaurants. (By this time in his career, Allen had a lot of credibility in his city.) The sprouts supplied a new income stream. Allen’s account of “Growing Power” is unusual in the literature of the back-to the-land movement in its continual return to the problem of financial viability. Probably no effort to grow food for human consumption, in the twenty-first century, will “make money” in the proportion of, say, a hedge fund, and probably the future of any agriculture that can feed all of us affordably will end up a partnership of for-­ profit and not-for-profit ventures; more on this problem in later chapters. But Allen insists on running his enterprises efficiently. He is continually seeking new sources of income and new ways to cut costs. (The cost of raising the sprouts, for example, was cut significantly by building shelves in the greenhouse that could stack three

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 Ibid. p. 186.  Ibid. page 187, emphasis supplied.

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2  Detroit, Michigan

rows of seed trays vertically.) To put some vitamins in the inner city school diet, he initiated a “farm to school” program, largely by negotiating prices for his vegetables with Sysco, the existing supplier. To use his greenhouse space even more efficiently, he started growing salad greens in pots hanging from the ceiling. He had been experimenting with growing fish in barrels since the 1990’s, but could never grow enough to be commercially viable. But Milwaukee had had a weekly “fish fry” every Friday night since its founding (originally in deference to Roman Catholic prohibitions of eating meat on Friday), which made fish production tempting. Research brought him into contact with an entrepreneur in aquaponics, growing fish and fresh greens in one linked system. So he bought a batch of tilapia, set up an ingenious system of pipes and planting beds, with one small pump to pipe the fishes’ waste water back up through the greens, adding nutrients to the plants and filtering the water for reuse. The system exemplified his approach to agriculture: “I particularly liked the idea of an aquaponics system in an urban setting because of its efficient use of space. It provided several marketable products at once. The system also was consistent with the spirit of my compost operation: It was a ‘closed-loop,’ where the fish’s waste was converted into life and energy and the water was recycled.”28 Allen and strong friends eventually dug a greenhouse-length trough for tilapia, expanded the operation to 4000 fish, and prospered; of particular pride to Allen was how inexpensive it was to build, with only volunteer labor and structural elements from waste lumber. “If we were going to create prototypes for growing food in inner-city neighborhoods, they had to be cost-effective.” At this point Allen is growing plants in the air and fish in the ground—all-natural cycles joined together by innovation. Continuing the search for cost savings, Allen turned his attention to the heating bill. Wisconsin’s climate is not pleasant in the wintertime, and in the severe cold, the heating bills are high. But he noticed that he had several sources of heat. He’d already figured out that compost piles are warm, and piled compost in the corners of the greenhouse. He noticed that in the greenhouse that housed the fish, the temperature was much more moderate, from the water, heated to the temperature where these essentially tropical fish would thrive. He took shipments of free wood chips from landscapers, especially the municipal landscapers; they decay slowly, and give off heat as they do so. He covered the floor of the greenhouses with wood chips. With compost around the outside too, even the hoop houses could be kept up to 50 degrees in winter—warm enough to grow spinach. (When it got too cold for that, the beds were simply covered to prevent freezing.) Allen was on the leading edge of a growing Movement, a fact he sometimes recognizes, and was helped by resources that might not always be available to urban farmers—like a $100,000 grant from the Ford foundation and, in 2008, a MacArthur Genius Grant worth $500,000. Those were non-controversial. The $1,000,000 he accepted from Wal-mart was not, but he accepted it gratefully, knowing that “the money would permit more local food to get to more people.” In addition to reinforc-

28

 Ibid. p. 194.

Milwaukee’s “Growing Power”

29

ing his other operations, it helped a black farmer buy the two-acre farm she’d been working toward, and equip it with a commercial kitchen.29 By 2008, Allen was training 200 people a month in weekend training sessions—teaching composting, vermiculture, sprout growing, beekeeping, any activity that Allen was carrying on at the time. Growing Power went on to spread its influence through regional outreach training centers from Louisiana to Kentucky to Virginia, always with the objective (following George Washington Carver in this mission) to teach black farmers to be self-sufficient.30 A “commercial urban agriculture” program also started in 2008, three-day weekends for a series of months, dedicated to making fully sufficient farmers out of followers he had attracted over the years. In one of these he met the Detroit contingent from the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, headed up by Malik Yakini, and instantly recognized a kindred soul. Allen started visiting D-Town Farm whenever he was in Detroit, noting that it provided its visitors not only with education on growing their own food, but also on the history of racial injustice, especially food injustice, in Detroit and similar rustbelt cities.31 His conversations with the D-Town regulars underline a strong difference between Growing Power and the Detroit initiatives: because of his credibility gained on the basketball court and the corporate world, Allen was never confronted with the necessity of putting racial justice at the center of what he was doing. He is growing food, efficiently enough to have it affordable, simply enough so that with a bit of effort, others can do it too. His relations with his white neighbors, suppliers and customers, are friendly and mutually supportive. The edge of hostility, the need to fight for respect, central to Detroit’s condition, has been kept at bay in Milwaukee—at least most of the time. In the end, Allen and Yakini are aimed at the same objectives: healthy food for a community that has little of that, empowerment for communities that have even less of that, and “healing a painful rift in African American history between its agricultural past and its urban present.” The grants that he had received made it possible for Allen to play a greater role in this transition. “I could help to rebrand farming as something that could be entrepreneurial and black-owned rather than something associated with sharecropping and slavery.” This change amounts to no less than a “revolution in the food system, in which I had now invested my life.”32 D-Town Farm continues, under the same mission it started with. Growing Power, beset with debts and lawsuits from disappointed investors, shut down in November 2017. What had happened? Essentially, what the critics had predicted for all such ambitious enterprises: Allen had been running a farm, a school (in some ways a graduate college, with training sessions for agricultural professionals from around the world), farm markets, farm education supplies with a nationwide following, a center for agritourists of all ages, and a safety net security system for much of

 Ibid. p. 225.  Ibid. p. 215. 31  Ibid. pp. 218–219. 32  Ibid. p. 206. 29 30

30

2  Detroit, Michigan

Milwaukee’s minority population, and it all got away from him. Training sessions will never support themselves, and even the enterprises that were making money were not making anywhere near enough to support the others. And when Allen accepted grants, for instance the million dollars from Wal-Mart, he drew extensive criticism for complicity with the enemy, criticism that eroded needed support. Interviewed on the subject, Allen declines to talk about specifics, but insists that he is not retiring, and he intends to get it all back, get it under control, and forge on.33

A Future for Rustbelt Farms Detroit has shown us the problem; Milwaukee has shown us the solution, or at least part of it. The problem is the former industrial city, abandoned by business and government alike, torn by racial strife, deprived of all power, pride, and for the most part, food, living on potato chips from the party stores. The solution is the creation of an inclusive urban farm project—with connections, as many as possible, to local restaurants (as customers and suppliers of food waste), industries (for scrap building materials and, again, fuel for compost), groceries (whatever there are of these), schools, prisons, hospitals and recovery associations, to supply workers, customers for the food, and settings for healing. It should employ local people: the homeless, rootless young people, any who badly need some hope or vision beyond their present limited place in a once-great metropolis. The gardens will feed the city (not entirely, but will supply the most-needed nutrients in the vegetables it grows). With proper work to keep greenhouses and hoophouses warm, they should be able to feed the city most of the year. More important, they will supply purpose, dignity, badly needed income, and the common work needed to create community. The further side effect advantages and unsuspected functions of the community farms will be explored further in the chapters below. But the success of the attempts so far, in the most unpromising of locales, provides the confidence the communities need to engage in the work required.

 Stephen Satterfield, “Behind the Rise and Fall of Growing Power,” March 13, 2018. https://civileats.com/2018/03/13/behind-the-rise-and-fall-of-growing-power/

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Chapter 3

Burlington, Vermont

Burlington entered the world of urban agriculture for reasons totally different from those that inspired Havana and Detroit. Havana’s efforts at urban agriculture began with the prospect of starvation; Detroit’s began with the prospect of abandonment; Burlington’s, according to the city’s official report on the subject, began in 2010 with a chicken.1 The chicken and her small flock were being illegally kept in Burlington’s Old North End, within the city limits. (A city zoning ordinance prohibited keeping “more than four” animals at a residence, putting many families’ collections of cats, dogs, goldfish, parakeets and hamsters outside the law.) Instead of prosecuting the owner and dispatching the chickens, Burlington assembled a task force on Urban Agriculture to consider appropriate changes to the zoning laws. The motivation was more moral than immediately practical: “.…there was a sharp contrast between the feeling that Burlington is at the forefront of the local food movement and the realization that city policy does not adequately address issues specific to food production.”2 The question was not, “should some kinds of farming be permitted in the city?”—almost everyone was in favor of that—but how, specifically, should they be regulated? Chickens should be permitted, but in what quantity, gender, and housing? Goats? Llamas? (Llamas are not uncommon, running with the sheep and protecting them on local farms, and a small farm in a neighboring town, right on Rte. 7, Burlington’s highway, has a Bactrian camel performing the same function.) Hoop houses on the front lawn? It was not at all clear what the specifics of the ordinances should be, or even what city departments should be in charge of recommending them. In terms of size and resources, Burlington is no match for Detroit. It’s a bit upward of 10 square miles, with a population of 42,000; it sports a compact ­walkable downtown, with several blocks of Church Street closed to automobile traffic for

1  Alison Nihart, William Robb, and Jessica Hyman, Burlington Urban Agriculture Task Force: Report to Burlington City Council, September 2012. 2  Ibid. p. 9.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. Newton, Urban Agriculture and Community Values, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39244-4_3

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3  Burlington, Vermont

pedestrian high-end shopping enjoyment. Suburbs spread from the center city, as closely controlled as they may be to preserve Vermont’s famous pastoral landscapes. Its residents point out proudly that no Big Box stores are permitted (although the neighboring cities of South Burlington and Williston house most of the Big Box chains you can think of, within easy driving distance). Vermont is an agricultural state, largely rural (Burlington is the largest city), gun-friendly and Democratic, and the agricultural tradition pervades Burlington’s attitude toward the Task Force; the residents are normally in favor of its work and will support its conclusions. The Task Force’s first job was definition. What constitutes “urban agriculture?” “Growing food in the city,” obviously. But then what? Hobbyists, non-profits, commercial enterprises? Balconies, yards, rooftops, schoolyards, the grounds of businesses, homes for the elderly, and prisons (as in Cuba) community plots, possibly a few acres at the edge of town? Goats, chickens, rabbits, bees? Yes, all of the above. Clearly the appointment of the Task Force had not simplified the issues; one sweeping rule would not do for all, and the resolution of each question was going to rely much more on common sense than on legal principle. Next, is urban agriculture worth taking the trouble to struggle with these questions? Toward the start of its report, the Task Force ticks off the benefits, assumed to be non-controversial in this context and for the most part mentioned in this text so far: education, especially of the children, as to the nature and origin of their food; increased access to healthy food, grown by the consumer or right next door, more likely to be eaten, especially by the children, for having grown it; the ability of a common garden to create a community from traditionally socially isolated urban dwellers; economic advantages, especially to the farmers, of a direct link between farmer and consumer; urban beautification and a consequent increase in property values; the creation of multiple small businesses around the processing, storage, and serving of food from the farms; the satisfaction of participating in a food system not dominated by huge agribusinesses, and the boost to social justice contained in the inclusion of all neighbors in the gardening enterprise; ecological restoration in the effects of agroecology on the soil; and a variety of others, down to “green space micro-climate benefits such as mitigation of the urban heat island effect, humidity regulation, wind reduction and shade provision.”3

Background: Lyman Wood The task force recognized that it was not operating in a vacuum; it could reach such specifics in such a short time because it was working against a background of local agricultural enthusiasm. In summary, the foundations for urban and periurban agriculture in Burlington were laid by three pioneers, Lyman Wood, Tommy ­ Thompson, and Will Raap.

 Ibid. p. 11.

3

Background: Lyman Wood

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Lyman Wood started his first business with a few friends in his summer colony in Charlotte, VT. (down the road from Burlington) on the shores of Lake Champlain; they bought candy in town and sold it door to door among the summer cottages. The enterprise was only a little less illegal than his college employment of purchasing cases of Canadian Club and selling bottles to the fraternities (all this during Prohibition).4 He graduated from the University of Vermont in 1932, worked for J. Walter Thompson (an advertising agency) for a few years, but almost immediately started mail-order businesses, his first love. He could sell anything, and found the mail-order approach very profitable. He even sold prayers for awhile, and set up a Life-Study fellowship (in Noroton, Connecticut) promising his subscribers help with any problems, including those stemming from money, addictions, and attempts to lose weight. In May of 1943 his friend Ed Robinson (also an alumnus of J. Walter Thompson) invited him to a “barn-warming” at the Robinsons’ new place in Norwalk, CT (then out in the country), and there convinced him to join in an enterprise to promote “country living”: residence on small acreage, intensively farmed, to support a family for the most part even while one member (at that time, the male in the picture) worked outside the home for the bulk of the income. Wood and Robinson, together with fellow alum Wallace Boren, rapidly developed a project and publication to spread this vision—the “Have-More” Plan, in a book full of diagrams and seeding schedules, sold by mail for $1. The vision—“A Little Land—A Lot of Living” was essentially a plan for small farms, larger than the suburban plots that followed the war, but nowhere near the size of the standard farms.5 The “Have-More” project was surely inspirational, but it never made money, and when the war ended, it became a financial disaster; to the eternal disappointment of Wood and his friends, when the shooting stopped and Victory Gardens were no longer necessary, Americans hung up their hoes and went driving in their new cars.6 “Back to the Land,” at least as far as homesteading was concerned, was over, at least for awhile. Looking around for another business, the friends responded to an invitation from C.  W. Kelsey, of Troy, NY, who had invented the “rototiller,” a hand-­ operated engine-driven plow perfect for the home gardener: the suburbanite who had no interest in decamping for the real country, but who had developed a fondness for a vegetable garden beside the house. Wood was able to convince Kelsey that rototillers could be sold by mail order, and the business again started making money. “In five years,” Wood exulted, “from 1947 to 1952, we boosted annual sales from $600,000 to $2,500,000.”7 When Kelsey proved unwilling to award Wood and Robinson an equity interest in the company, the friends went back to Vermont and invented a “Town and Country Cart,” a wagon of wooden construction, two wheels, for most gardening purposes better than a wheelbarrow. Wood also joined up with

4  Roger Griffith, What a Way to Live—and Make a Living: The Lyman P. Wood Story, Charlotte, VT: In Brief Press, 1994. pp. 1–7. 5  Ibid. pp. 53–60. 6  Like the Cubans when the special Period ended; note that Detroit supplied the cars. 7  Griffith, op. cit. p. 70.

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3  Burlington, Vermont

Wally Boren again to create an ad agency of their own, and became a top-ranked consultant in the fields of advertising and sales. But the rototillers returned, 10 years after Wood had left. Kelsey had retired, the rototillers company, renamed Watco, had been sold several times; George Done, a former Kelsey employee, had bought the remains of the factory and was going broke, and he needed a lot of help, so he called Lyman Wood, who had engineered the company’s last period of prosperity. Wood agreed to help, in return for a small equity position in the company and the adoption of his practice of selling direct to consumers by mail order rather than supplying dealers all over the country. (One of his pieces of advice to new businesses was that “the cash flow works best if you get the money before you have to manufacture the product.”) Why did Wood agree to help? His biographer, Roger Griffith, believes that the primary motive was to get back to work on the countryside; “[a]ll his life, and especially since his experiences with The “Have-More” Plan, Lyman had preached that people could live their lives to the fullest only in the country, where they could provide for themselves.”8 So he hired another refugee from the advertising industry, Dean Leith, and went to work for Watco selling the Trojan Horse, the latest edition of the rototillers. In 1969, lawyers were telling them that “Trojan Horse” violated a trademark (held by another maker of earth-moving machines), and had to be changed; they changed the name of the tiller to Troy-Bilt, and while they were at it, changed Watco to Garden Way. They were very successful selling the tiller: The most productive ad we ever ran was the offer in Organic Gardening in 1970 of the free booklet titled How to Do Wonders With Green Manures, Cover Crops and Organic Mulches. We had a two-page ad, and a card ran with it. It pulled 16,000 inquiries from 400,000 circulation. That’s 4 percent of the circulation. From it we sold $800,000 worth of tillers, a phenomenal response. An average response might have been 800 inquiries.9

The 1970s revival of the Back to the Land movement had begun, and there was national enthusiasm for organic gardening and compost; cover crops promised the same fertilization. There was an audience eager to try, even if they had to buy a rototiller to do it. From the 1969 shareholders’ meeting, where Wood could report a doubling of sales, to 1981, Garden Way prospered and expanded, selling several versions of their economical Carts (and building a plant to make them); starting research gardens run by employees Dick Raymond and Sky Thurber in nearby Ferrisburg; creating Garden Way Publishing with new writers, Stu Campbell and Jack Williamson, to turn out garden books for them, how-to books for gardeners and eventually a successful catalog of garden supplies, Gardeners’ Marketplace. In 1972 Wood started a new gardening initiative, Gardens for All, starting beginners’ gardens in Burlington’s Oak Ledge Park. Wood’s conviction was that “everyone was entitled to have a garden. A lot of people didn’t have the land or the money, but we would help them with those. This was a community activity.”10 So  Ibid. p. 150.  Lyman Wood, quoted in Griffith, op.cit., p. 164. 10  Wood, quoted by Griffith, op.cit. p. 180. 8 9

The Last Days of Garden Way

35

did the Community Gardens movement begin in Burlington. It needed its own leader, and through a friend, Wood found one, Bryson H. “Tommy” Thompson.

The Last Days of Garden Way (and the beginning of Tommy Thompson and Community Gardens) Thompson had run his own restaurant in Windsor much of his life, and was looking around for something to do when he retired. Wood brought him into the “Gardens for All” project of Garden Way and assigned him to promote community gardens. He proved to be a fountain of energy: He started in January and by planting time he had more than four hundred garden plots going. He got everybody in the city involved, city officials, churches, civic clubs, everybody. Within a few years the number of garden plots had grown to 1,500, in what had to be that city’s greatest cooperative effort. Gardeners were helping gardeners on everything from transportation to planting, watering, and weeding.11

On the Shelburne farm then owned by the Webb family (now its own non-profit educational establishment, Shelburne Farms), Gardens for All set up equipment for canning and preserving, and taught the neighborhood farmers how to keep the surplus food from the successful summer. In succeeding years, Gardens for All enrolled some 250,000 members, helped with family gardens all over the Burlington area, published books and a magazine, sold greenhouses and generators, and generally accomplished its objective of getting everyone possible into the garden. But it cost a lot of money: Wood estimated four million dollars by the end. They had a research laboratory, developing a solar water heater, and eventually consolidated many of their Vermont activities into a Garden Way Living Center—part hardware store (selling Troy-Bilt rototillers and anything else that might be useful), part school, dispenser of seeds and gardening advice, neighborhood gathering place, and center for the spread of the Gardens for All message. (Among the employees in the Living Center was one Will Raap, who was intrigued by Wood’s concept and undertook its marketing.) By 1978 there were Living Centers in Portland, Oregon, Atlanta, Georgia, Seattle, Washington, and of course in Troy. In 6 years the Williston store had a retail volume of $1.8 million. In addition to traditional offerings, they stocked and sold for current needs: during the oil shortage, in 1978, they sold more than 1200 wood-burning stoves. The offering continued to expand, with a full line of kitchen supplies and a catalog to help sell them, Garden Way Rental Services (later folded into the hardware division), and even Garden Way Broadcasting. Back in Troy, Done continued to develop new and popular models of the rototiller, producing nearly 97,000 tillers in 1980.12

11 12

 Ibid. p. 181. Jim Flint puts the number closer to 1000.  Ibid pp. 185–191.

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Wood hadn’t stopped dreaming. Even as rumbles about “spreading ourselves too thin” were heard in the organization, Wood was working toward the establishment of Garden Way Communities, clustering houses on one part of a large tract of land, establishing a village of craftsmen and small shops, leaving the rest for farming, creating a self-sufficient community. None were built in his lifetime, but the idea still lives, and experimental communities point in that direction. And as was typical for Lyman Wood: no matter how successful his current projects were, he was always starting work on the next one, in pursuit of happiness for all. At heart he was an evangelical preacher for the moral, hardworking life he himself had always lived, and he was willing to invest whatever money was available in the next realization of his vision. He was pro-business, of course, but with a vision of not-for-profit-only businesses that served the human race as much as the investors. That, probably, is what led to the coup. When Garden Way was small, Wood hired people who were in tune with his mission—this is not just a job, it is a crusade! But as the company grew, more financial experts and managers had to be hired, and allotted shares of the company, and while all of them admired Wood’s talent in marketing, not all of them were on board with any “crusade.” As the number of employees grew, until there were over 800 in Troy (making the tillers) and 300 in Vermont (running all the rest of the activities) it became harder and harder to unite them behind a “message,” especially as Wood’s time had to be increasingly devoted to corporate management, with less time for personal contact. The pattern is familiar; as a matter of fact, we just saw one variant of the phenomenon in Will Allen’s Growing Power. In Wood’s case, it crystallized around one clear resentment, possibly justified: the major profit for Garden Way continued to come from the sale of Troy-Bilt rototillers, while all the fun was being had up in Vermont. By 1981, while sales were up ($105,307,000), earnings were down by almost half from the previous year, with the loss blamed on the Vermont operation.13 Then Wood invested in two major pieces of real estate in Williston and Burlington, to house all Vermont activities plus a farmers’ market and expanded administrative offices. That did it. On January 26, 1982, at the annual meeting of Class A stockholders at the Troy Country Club, the Board chairman, Dean Leith, brought the meeting to order only to announce that he and a few others, representing 51% of the shares, were taking over the company. Then they fired Lyman Wood (and several others). The group that had taken over the company did not survive long; the most ambitious member shouldered out the others, who went off to different endeavors. Garden Way itself went bankrupt in 2001. Lyman Wood puttered around with various experimental products, none of which took off, dying in 1997 at the age of 86 (3 years after Griffith’s biography was published). But Tommy Thompson’s community gardens continued to thrive. Jim Flint, one of the founders of the Community Gardens, has written their history, “35  Years and Still Growing: The History of Burlington Area Community Gardens, 1972–2007.” For when Garden Way (rather abruptly) decided not to continue its sponsorship of the Community Gardens, they

13

 Ibid. p.223.

Will Raap and the Intervale

37

were taken over by a new non-profit, the Burlington Area Community Gardens (BACG); when it became clear that the BACG did not have the resources to maintain them, it appealed to Bernie Sanders, then mayor of Burlington, to adopt the project. Sanders immediately agreed, the Community Gardens became a part of the Burlington Parks and Recreation Department, and in company with dozens of individuals, schools, and nonprofit organizations, continues sponsorship to the present.14 Tommy Thompson died in 1983, having spent the last decade of his life promoting community gardens. Probably his major accomplishment was to convince the city of Burlington to release part of the property of the Burlington Electric Department for the establishment of a permanent Community Garden in the Intervale—a floodplain of the Winooski River with beautifully fertile soil (if occasionally prone to floods). He is remembered as the founder, and celebrated with a bronze plaque on a red rock boulder in that Community Garden, which now bears his name. A quote from Thompson is on the plaque: “When enough people see this joy, or experience it for themselves, there just may be gardens for all.”

Will Raap and the Intervale The Intervale, meanwhile, 700 acres of the floodplain of the Winooski River, had been under cultivation for some 5000 years during the ascendancy of the Indians who lived there before the white man came. Burlingtonians, however, had chosen to use it as a landfill: “a neglected, dangerous, dumping ground for cars and trash.”15 Will Raap, a former employee of Garden Way, figured that there had to be beautiful soil underneath those discarded tires, and in 1983 he located his new venture, Gardener’s Supply (a multipurpose hardware, seed, plant and landscaping store) right at its entrance. In 1987 the cleanup began, “almost 1000 tires” and about 350 junked cars were removed, so that the good soil could be seen and put to work. From Gardener’s Supply came the Intervale Compost Products, a leaf and yard waste facility that served all of Chittenden County, and recycling that waste to fertilize the startup gardens. Gardener’s Supply also led the effort to establish the Intervale Community Farm in 1990, and created a mechanism to accept several small additional farms in the area. By now the Intervale has become an agricultural center and an excellent model of periurban farming. The Intervale Administrative Center oversees the community gardens (some part of the three-acre Tommy Thompson plot, but others as well), a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) enterprise based in the Intervale Community Farm, a Food Hub that feeds many local institutions for the homeless  An account of these gardens, “35  Years and Still Growing: the history of Burlington Area Community Gardens 1972–2007,” was written by one of the founders, Jim Flint; it is available from the Vermont Community Garden Network, North Street, Burlington, VT. 15   Maree Gaetani, “Our Backyard: The Intervale,” http://www.gardeners.com/how-to/intervale/5446.html 14

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and indigent, and a school for beginning farmers. Gardener’s Supply, meanwhile has become wholly owned by its employees, and is run as a cooperative. With the success of the company and the Intervale behind him, Raap is now founding ecological projects and communities in Costa Rica and Central America generally, and building a community, South Village, near Burlington, which revives Lyman Wood’s Garden Way Community. It clusters houses on one portion of a 220-acre tract, leaving the rest as a solar orchard and organic farm. These initiatives are supplemented by (and more or less integrated with) the Vermont Community Gardens Network, which maintains a teaching garden and grants certificates to its proud graduates, a cooperative grocery (City Market) which takes as a major objective the local sourcing of its produce, and the influential Agricultural Extension, a branch of State government that operates out of the College of Agriculture at the University of Vermont in Burlington. Several of the current Community Garden participant organizations operate as much as possible with volunteers; volunteers are rewarded with discounts at the cooperative grocery. (There are benefits to being a small city.) Burlington’s Community Gardening initiative is becoming famous; on April 4, 2014, Alice Waters, internationally known chef (from restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California) and author of many books on healthy eating, founder of the Slow Food movement, visited the Intervale to praise Burlington’s work and share a meal with some of the pioneers (Jessica Hyman, head of the Vermont Community Garden Network included) and Miro Weinberger, the mayor of Burlington. Focus of the discussion was the entire locavore (AKA localvore) movement, with special emphasis on the schools, growing and eating their own produce.16

Public Schools and Refugees Burlington has taken its agroecological commitments into its schools. In particular, Burlington’s Sustainability Academy, an elementary magnet school in the heart of the city’s historically poor Old North End, shows how commitments to nutrition, environmental concern, and social justice can be integrated into urban institutions. It was founded by a group of parents in 2008, at what was then the Lawrence Barnes School, a “failing school” by any measure: enrollment was declining, test scores were abysmal, it was generally not a good place to be.17 In that year, the decision was made not to shut the school down, but to make it a “magnet school,” dedicated to environmental sustainability and ethnic diversity (aided by the inclusion of ­refugees from Africa and several Asian nations). The parents bravely established a couple of raised beds for the students and teachers to farm. Partnerships were established with the University of Vermont’s Ecological Learning Institute, and designs

 Burlington Free Press, Saturday April 5, 2014, pp. 1B–3B.  Deborah Fallows, “Vermont Report: Shaping the Soul of a School,” The Atlantic, October 9, 2013.

16 17

Public Schools and Refugees

39

for further projects were enthusiastically adopted. Budget cuts delayed everything, but the commitment was still there in the spring and summer of 2012, when Outdoor Classrooms were built and more ambitious transformations planned—including an ADA Accessible Trail, a Bike Path, an amphitheatre and a spectacular playground, including a plan for an ADA accessible treehouse. By 2015, the Sustainability Project (Schoolyard Transformation Project) had partnered with UVM, as above, also Shelburne Farms (the Webb property become local educational farm), 7th Generation (a local manufacturer of environmentally friendly paper goods and detergents), the Vermont Community Garden Network, ReSource VT (a major household goods recycling company), City Market (that cooperative supermarket), local building firms, artists and activists. Note that the same organizations are turning up in many places; partnerships have become a vibrant network. Such partnerships are the key to the success of this and similar initiatives; they may serve as a model for the development of urban agriculture. Food is at the center of the Sustainability Academy’s commitments. Breakfast, lunch, and an after-school supper are served every day at the Academy (and at all Burlington schools); breakfast and the after-school supper are free for all 4000 students in the school district, lunch is free at most schools, as much as possible of the Academy’s food (depending on the season, 10–40%) is locally sourced, and nutrition is taught at all levels. The school’s energy supply is primarily solar and geothermal; an outdoor classroom is built from donated scrap lumber (by donated volunteer labor); and in 2014 the school received a “Green Flag Award” from the National Wildlife Federation for their “exceptional school grounds, use of sustainable food and improvements in our energy efficiency.”18 What is most intriguing in this (very self-conscious) model of sustainability is the very intentional work at integrating many of the values of urban agriculture: the creation of the infrastructure by volunteer members of the community (forming themselves into a community in the process), the integration of children and adults in a common project, the emphasis on nutrition and physical health in general (a school wide exercise program has been incorporated in its program), deliberate inclusion of racial diversity and social justice in the program, and the establishment of partnerships with a variety of private, government, and non-profit enterprises with complementary commitments. It was important to Community Garden pioneers in Burlington to make the Gardens movement multiracial, a task not made easier by the racial uniformity of Vermont, which is almost all white. If the objective is to include, in the farming enterprise, all citizens of the city, of all ethnic and socioeconomic groups (and it is), the barriers to success include (as we saw in Cuba) a strong association of farm work with punishment, or at least with the despised peasant class, and for African Americans (as we saw in Detroit) a strong association of farm work with the field slaves and tenant farmers of a few generations ago. Burlington’s African American population was minuscule, but it had another ethnic presence: the Refugee Resettlement Program had placed a large number of Vietnamese, Somali, Bhutanese

18

 http://sa.bsdvt.org

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and Nepali immigrants in Burlington, and their food preferences came nowhere near the New England traditions that governed the area. Burlington did not want a system of community gardens tended primarily by white middle class hobby farmers, excluding precisely those groups that most needed fresh food, education and community participation. One major initiative in the area was undertaken by Somali immigrants soon after establishing their homes here: they formed the Association of Africans Living in Vermont (AALV), and staked a claim to some of the land available for gardens, especially at the Winooski Ethan Allen Homestead site. This initiative took on a new direction when more refugees arrived from Asia, with their own tastes, food customs, and traditions of farming. They were recruited into the New Farms for New Americans (NFNA), operating under the aegis of the AALV, and soon began trials of their native plants in Vermont soils. The refugees arrived with food preferences at variance with Vermont traditions in the area of meat as well as vegetables. Where many of the Africans (especially) had come from, the preferred meat was goat, not beef—they’re cheaper to buy, easier to raise, will (famously) eat almost anything, and provide very good meat. They are smaller than cattle, which is good—in areas without refrigeration, the slaughtered goat can be consumed by the family in one sitting. The refugees also brought with them the skills needed to raise, herd, slaughter and cook the goats. One of the workers at the Vermont Refugee Resettlement office, Karen Freudenberger, noticed that as soon as the families with which she was working accumulated a little extra income, they were buying goat meat for family gatherings. Vermont had no practice of raising goats for meat, so the refugees were buying frozen goat meat imported to local groceries from New Zealand. That struck her as irrational, so she arranged to buy goat “bucklings,” baby male goats born on our goat dairy farms, of no use to the farm owners, and assigned small herds of them to refugees with some experience with herds. The goats are browsers, preferring to eat branches and brush, rather than grazers, like cattle; they found plenty to eat in the brush and third-growth woods by the Winooski River, fare that would have been spurned by cattle. By arrangement, the herdsmen became owners of their herds, turned into entrepreneurs, and made a good living selling mature goats to their own communities. The Pine Island Goat Collaborative, as she christened her enterprise, prospers, although Freudenberger herself died in 2016. The result of the practices, preferences and initiatives of the refugees leaves the Vermont fields looking very strange: a large plot of red rice, which most of us had no idea could be grown in Vermont, addresses the needs of the Asian populations while very unusual greens and exotic herbs crowd the surrounding plots. If the families awarded these patches of cropland do not need all of their produce, they can sell them at local farmers’ markets, adding modestly to their income. These markets have introduced Asian and African foods to native Vermonters—often very successfully.

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The Creation of a Food Center The Intervale Center also runs a “food hub.” Along with the CSAs attached to the establishment, the food hub carries on direct sales to consumers around the area. In addition, it supplies fresh local food to Sodexo, the food service company that serves the University of Vermont (about half a mile away from the Intervale.) The Intervale Community Farm, dating from 1990, started on a small plot in the Intervale, mostly to be a small local source of organic vegetables; it has now become a very active center for community-supported agriculture (CSA), selling subscriptions, to be paid for at the beginning of the season, entitling the purchaser to regular allotments of vegetables as long as they can be grown. As its reputation spread, it attracted many more subscriptions and spread out over more land. They now manage a couple of barns, several tractors, and many hoop houses. Staff, equipment and membership grew until the CSAs were serving 500 households. In 2005, they added a winter share program. In 2009, they expanded their land use to 44 acres, and arranged to share equipment to make mulch for the farm, develop and share seeds, and grow fuel for their pellet stove. Their tractor runs on homemade biofuel. One of the facilities at the Intervale Community Farm, dating from 2006, is a storage, packing and washing facility, to support and improve the harvesting operations. Surprisingly, this seems to be the only systematic attempt at the Intervale to integrate auxiliary operations in their farming. When Garden Way was going full blast, Lyman Wood incorporated facilities and instruction for canning and preserving; it would seem to be a natural extension of the garden enterprise. But at no other point in the history of these gardens, since the initial work of Garden Way, does there seem to be any attempt to integrate complementary or value-added activities—regular arrangements for canning or processing produce, (except for the schools) or nutrition education. The Vermont Community Garden Network does offer a yearly instructional garden, teaching beginners how to care for the soil and the plants that grow from it; still, some more systematic work might be expected. The enthusiasm for these gardens has a history of uneven development: under an inspired neighborhood leader or institution (Burlington College, the University of Vermont Medical Center, the Episcopal Diocese of Vermont) Garden plots come into being and flourish for seasons; someone retires, interest is lost, or development overtakes the land, and they disappear. The number of plots recently under cultivation in Burlington tops out at about 1000; the number today now stands in the hundreds. There was a new burst of community agriculture when the neighboring city of Winooski designated a portion of a large park of historical significance (Ethan Allen’s homestead is there) for new gardens, and that is where most of the refugees work; beyond that, expansion is welcomed, but spotty.19

 The Burlington Free Press, Burlington’s local newspaper, published a special section on Community Gardens on Sunday, May 20, 2018. Lauren Banister, “Community Gardens Sprouted in Burlington,” History Space Burlington Free Press, Sunday May 20, 2018.

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3  Burlington, Vermont

Periurban Experiments Along with the pursuit of community ideals, the region has been sorting out ways to keep small farms near the city economically viable. An example of the Burlington area farm of the future is Bread and Butter Farm, located on the town line between neighboring South Burlington and Shelburne. The Farm got started in 2009 as a partnership between a baker and a dairy (naturally). In an echo of the original Homestead Act, by law the partners had to earn the right to buy the land at agricultural value (kept low to attract successful farmers) by hard work and proof that the enterprise was sustainable. They were able to do this with the support of both of the bordering towns (public money), the previous landowners (private money) and the Vermont Land Trust (Third Sector or non-profit money). This type of public-­private-­ non-profit partnership may be the key to the success of all urban and periurban farming. The original baker moved off premises, but the Farm Store continues to sell bread, some of it baked by the new Blank Page Café coffee shop; the small dairy sells raw milk to registered customers (and butter), home-grown lamb and beef, and a wide variety of vegetables grown in several acres of greenhouses. Like the Intervale Community Farm, Bread and Butter Farm runs a CSA, selling subscriptions locally. It also sponsors numerous educational and musical programs for children, including a Friday Burger Night and rock concert in the summer, and summer camps. In the area where the bakery used to be, they have opened up the coffee shop. They also offer classes in Gentle Yoga, and are starting a children’s television show in partnership with Vermont PBS. In a business arrangement that might have appeared strange some years back, several of the enterprises, including the dairy and the Café, are independently owned, leasing space from the Farm. The result is a multi-enterprise collective, akin to a small village, encouraging cooperation for mutual profit.20 A similar enterprise is found at Shelburne Farms, the educational farm in the town next door, where the Farm shelters a school, a store, a carpentry/cabinetmaking shop, summer camps and a wonderful independent bakery, O Bread, carrying on both wholesale and retail trade.21 The transferable model is that of several private enterprises, growing organically from a central farm, incorporating food, physical wellness, music and art, and a broad educational enterprise. Not every farm can start its own television show, but here it is a natural extension of the educational work. Another bellwether example (written up in the local newspaper) is Footprint Farm, in nearby Starksboro. The farm is a tiny 10 acres, supporting organic vegetables, eggs from 100 laying hens, pigs (eight per year), cut flowers, and maple syrup from their sugarbush. They also host workshops at the farm on gardening and forest foraging for mushrooms and other edible plants. Their major income is from 30 (soon to be 50)

 Melissa Pasanen, “‘No One’s Doing Anything Like This’: At this Shelburne farm, you can buy a coffee, artisan bread and of course, vegetables,” Burlington Free Press, Friday, May 27, 2016, pp. 1D–4D. 21  Sally Pollak, “‘They’re Old School’: O Bread rising in Shelburne for four decades and counting,” Burlington Free Press, Friday, May 20, 2016, pp. 1A, 1D–4D. 20

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CSA subscriptions, where consumer payments at the beginning of the season entitle them to weekly pickups of whatever produce is in season. (The food can be picked up at the farm, or at one of several local drop-off stations.) More produce is on sale at local farmers’ markets, and some is delivered directly to local restaurants. Significantly, according to its owners, this complex operation depends on hard work during “spreadsheet season,” winter, when customer satisfaction surveys are returned, prices compared, restaurant orders lined up, and plans made for the allotment of land to crops in the growing season to come.22 This is no bucolic daydream; this is a business, and the economic value of efficiency guides the decisions they make. But it is a local business, serving local citizens, which is the key to its success. Local enterprise flourishes in dynasties in this area: Dylan Raap, the son of Gardeners Supply founder Will Raap, now promotes the growing of cannabis—only recently made legal in Vermont, but almost certain to be profitable at the level of very small enterprises.23 Urban and periurban farms normally sell their produce at farmers’ markets, and often contribute what does not sell to the community food banks, which distribute food to the poor free of charge (completing the circle of obligation that began when, as with the Bread and Butter Farm, above, public and non-profit money supported their beginnings). One Burlington enterprise that has gone beyond these connections is the Chittenden Emergency Food Shelf’s Good Food Truck, which brings free hot meals to poorer neighborhoods on a weekly basis. The cooks in the truck volunteer their time; the food is contributed to the Chittenden Emergency Food Shelf (located in Burlington’s less stylish Old North End) from local grocery stores; the neighborhoods include working families, refugee communities, and temporary residences for the homeless. The rationale is simple: although Burlington is in one of the more affluent areas of the state, it is estimated that 20,000 citizens of the county are food insecure, and the Food Shelf had almost 45,000 visits last year from many of these. But for reasons of transportation, or pride—at the Food shelf itself, one must demonstrate need and ask for help—many of those who could use help would not go there. The presence of the Food Truck makes a neighborhood gathering out of an essential service, no questions asked, and again, teaches the children the value of contributing to the neighborhood.24 The initial section of the Report of the Burlington Urban Agriculture Task Force concluded with a vision: We envision a city where everyone who wants to grow or raise their own food has the space, information, and support to do so safely, responsibly, and in solidarity with their neighbors and the greater community. We envision an urban agriculture system that integrates with local and regional systems for a food system that is place based, sustainable, resilient, socially just, and secure.25

 Lettie Stratton, “It’s Spreadsheet Season on the Farm,” Shelburne News January 21, 2016, pp. 1–14. 23  Jess Aloe, “Pot Biz Carries On: Despite defeat, entrepreneurs prepare for legalization,” Burlington Free Press, Thursday, May 19, 2016, pp. 1A–4A. 24  Sally Pollak, “Food Truck on a Mission: Delivery of free meals to fight hunger in the county is unique,” Burlington Free Press, Saturday, May 28, 2016, pp. 1A–4A. 25  Ibid. p. 13. 22

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More Visions for the Future Like the Cubans, Vermonters tend to embrace the value of agricultural research along with food production. Among the partners in the Burlington area agricultural enterprises is the University of Vermont’s Agricultural Extension, which has taken on the role of explorer for the agricultural future of the area. Among their more recent projects, by way of example, is an investigation into the practicality of growing saffron crocus (Crocus sativus) in the area.26 (It was suggested by a research associate from Iran, the native home of the crop.) Saffron is a very high value crop, the finished product selling for $500 per ounce in grocery stores, and it can be grown in small plots of land in unheated greenhouses. The project is just beginning, and there is no guarantee it will turn out to be workable; but it is a good example of the possibilities that can be investigated when a first-class agricultural research facility joins with a community-rooted preference for small farmers. Partnerships involving the University of Vermont are working at many levels. When, for instance, the Burlington Winter Farmers’ Market was displaced for safety reasons from the crumbling Memorial Auditorium (its home for many years), UVM opened the Davis Center, the Campus Center for all UVM activities, to accommodate the market. Now every market day the first floor atrium of the Center offers raw goat’s milk, greenhouse-grown chard, turnips and an array of local baked goods.27 The preference for farming is part of Burlington’s history. Unlike Havana and Detroit, which in recent history saw themselves as sophisticated urban hubs of industry, culture and art (with farming in their distant past), Burlington’s story is one of a proudly agricultural state and city, seizing the opportunities presented by such enterprises as the Community Garden Movement. Burlington is no stranger to a municipal ideal of local democratic communalism; the social philosopher Murray Bookchin, lifelong advocate of communitarian anarchism, lived in Burlington much of his life, and was politically active in city matters in his latter years. Bookchin had begun his political odyssey as a doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist, eventually broke with the Communists when Stalin’s purges suggested that the future, at least in the Soviet Union, really didn’t work after all, and experimented with several varieties of socialism and anarchism before his death in 2006. His most important work, The Ecology of Freedom, essentially espoused a teaching of “libertarian municipalism,” arguing that all social change should begin at the municipal, local, level, where direct democracy remains a real possibility, and real solutions to social problems can be reached and tested.28 His ideas were widely read and disputed during his career, but at the end of his life they had few real followers in the United States (outside of Burlington),

26  Joel Banner Baird, “Saffron Harvest Begins in Vermont,” Burlington Free Press, Saturday, November 5, 2016, pp. 2A–3A. 27  Nicole Higgins DeSmet, “Farmers Market vendors settle in at UVM,” Burlington Free Press Saturday, January 14, 2017, pp. 1A–3A. 28  Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy, 1982, 2005.

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and he died still bitterly disappointed that the Revolution had never come. Interestingly, he has followers now, in Rojava, a Kurdish region in the north of Syria, where young Kurds (in between deadly battles with the Islamic State forces) are attempting to establish just such a democracy in their own communities.29

Burlington Agriculture For a preliminary evaluation, we may say that a passion for agriculture is firmly part of the DNA of Burlington. To reinforce the bucolic daydreaming that brought city dwellers “back to the land,” at least in part, there’s the agriculture curriculum, at undergraduate and graduate level both, at the University of Vermont, which as a land-grant school has no choice but to keep its farmers on the radar. Through its Ag Extension programs, it can take knowledge directly from its studies, or laboratories, counting calves or disentangling saffron from crocuses, to a commercial operation. The hallmark of Burlington agriculture seems to be its understanding of partnerships: among private, public, and not-for profit sectors—businesses, schools, prisons, hospitals, homeless shelters, public housing, native Vermonters and refugees who arrived yesterday—to create a varied and mutually reinforcing network around the topic of food. Agriculture at the level of the private garden, the community plot, or the nearby farm, can be completely integrated into a larger vision of good food, strong community, and gardens for all. In the long run, the significance of the Burlington agricultural movement may lie in its pioneering experiments in partnerships among the private, public and non-­ profit sectors. Historically, these three sectors, operating under different rules, have focused on different problems—and interacted often as rivals rather than as partners. The experiments in cooperation introduced in the mayoral administration of Bernie Sanders not only revived areas of the city that had fallen into disrepair, but set a precedent of optimism and municipal activism that survives in the city. The Intervale continues to expand its activities, schools are extending their gardens and student involvement in farm activities, and innovative projects like the Pine Island Goat Cooperative emerge as with the arrival of new refugee populations the city changes. In an increasingly xenophobic nation where farms are dominated by ­industrial agriculture, Burlington strikes a hopeful note and possibly sets a national example.

 Wes Enzinna, “The Rojava Experiment,” The New York Times Magazine November 29, 2015, pp. 40ff. “A dream of Utopia in Hell: In the ruins of northern Syria, a generation of young Kurds is fighting ISIS with guns and ideas.”

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Chapter 4

A Tale of Many Values: What Can We Learn from the Cities?

The Urban Farm: A Preliminary Sketch With our three cities as background, we are ready for an attempt at constructing the urban farm. Let us review the chronology of creating the farm. We start with a vacant lot (or piece of public or private land that no one has any present plans for). We make sure of its legal availability, learning a great deal about civic government in the process, and getting to know some of the local civil servants. We test the soil to make sure it is free of contaminants, learning about soil science as we do it. We clear up the trash and dispose of it (this is not always easy; recall that to create the Intervale, Burlington volunteers and others had to clear upward of 1000 discarded tires and about 350 trashed cars). Already the place looks better, and those who want the farm there primarily to beautify the city are already happier. Even that amount of work will not get done unless many people are working on it; that group expands in the tedious work of pulling up the weeds and getting the soil ready for farming; already the neighbors are getting to know each other. To “familiarity with local government,” “Science 101” and “neighborhood beautification” we may add “the beginnings of cooperative community spirit,” as first fruits of the urban farm. When the farm is ready for planting, more people will be needed; urban projects have found children particularly amenable to (short) spells of planting work, and the education of children on the sources of their food has begun. Also the children (and the adults) are getting some outdoor exercise, probably better for their health than whatever they would be doing if they weren’t in the garden. If we have more sprouts than we can use, we can sell them to the neighborhood, helping the children learn what it is to run a business. In an era of short-term amusements, the farm requires tending—weeding, watering, worrying about pests—on a daily basis, and someone has to be responsible for that; commitment and responsibility are the next (and possibly the most valuable) lessons on the educational agenda. Plants poke through the ground and start to grow; for urban children, these may provide their first experience of planned projects actually working out. As they grow, they need more © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. Newton, Urban Agriculture and Community Values, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39244-4_4

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t­ending; more science—lessons in botany, soil nutrients and water management— accompanies the summer’s work. None of this sequence is logically or physically necessary, but it’s an indication of the way the enterprise itself advances values as possibly unintended consequences. Meanwhile, the newborn community must unite to put in place the structures auxiliary to the farm; sheds for cleaning the harvest, cellars for storage of roots, a small commercial kitchen to process food for canning or freezing (acquisition of the stoves and freezers may require crowd-funding), and if possible, a simple restaurant/coffee shop, to serve the soups and stews that the work of the neighborhood has produced, and where the neighbors can hang out and enjoy the fruits of their labor. This period may present the opportunity for partnership with local churches, often motivated by their faith to develop sources of healthy food for the poor. They may also have commercial kitchens to lend or rent out. At harvest, the results of the summer’s work are divided among the workers—their first experience of abundant fresh food, for some—or preserved for the winter in the food processing kitchen, practically a lost art in some locations, or sold at the farmers’ market, providing lessons in how to run a business, or cooked and served at the farm’s restaurant, more skills acquired and business experience gained, or donated to the local food shelf through the partner churches—providing further lessons in community responsibility. At the end of the experience, everyone is sunburned and tired, but fed, educated, and maybe happy with the summer’s work. Some of the farmers, especially the adolescents of the locale, may have been hired to do some of the work; whether or not paid positions were available, they have acquired marketable skills in all aspects of a local food system. And that’s just the first year. It gets better after that. At a second level, what has the farm taught us? First of all, that we can do for ourselves; we do not always need someone else to do for us. If the term were not so overworked, I’d suggest “empowerment” as one of the first products of the work of the farm. The urban farmers can grow some of their own food; to that extent they are free from the global food system that now dominates the food choices of most of the globe and endangers the food sovereignty of the world. Second, that we can work together with our neighbors, people we might not have had any reason to meet prior to the farm work. In fact, we have become an effective collectivity, able to unite for other purposes as opportunities to expand or threats to our independence may arise. Ultimately, after all, we are going to have to confront that global system politically and reduce its power; we’ll need viable politically active communities to do this. Third, that we can create our own miniature community-oriented educational system, preparing the younger members of the community to participate in the economic system with skills that will always be in demand (not necessarily bountifully paid). They now know that they can work and wait for the reward, that they can take responsibility, and that they can contribute usefully to the needs of the larger society. They have also learned a great deal about food, the food that will keep them healthy for all their lives, their community, and themselves.

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The Moral Universe of the American Farm None of the above emerged in a vacuum; the United States, early in its career, spawned a faith in the moral rewards of farming that we know as “American agrarianism.” To understand American agrarianism, we start with Thomas Jefferson’s praise of farmers and of the life that farmers necessarily lead, on several levels. For purposes of this chapter, I will rely on the excellent exposition of the American agrarian tradition, and Jefferson’s place in it, from Paul Thompson’s 2015 book, From Field to Fork1 (and his 2010 book, The Agrarian Vision, on the relationship of agriculture to the goal of environmental sustainability).2 As Thompson points out, Jefferson bases his defense of the life of farming not on the usual eighteenth century libertarian defense of property rights, nor on any utilitarian structure of necessary production for the general welfare, but on the role of the farm in inculcating human virtue—joining a philosophical tradition originating in the work of Aristotle in the fourth century BC, which “holds that a concept of human virtue is the touchstone for moral and political philosophy. One needs a just society because justice is instrumental to virtue, not the other way around.”3 The initiating (and, for Aristotle, also the final) level of the good society is the individual who lives the essentially human life, the life of deliberation and choice, or as we would recognize it, the life of responsibility. Farming inculcates responsibility, that deliberate care for tasks that are unavoidable if the enterprise, and life, are to continue. Along with responsibility go the companion virtues: patience, self-reliance, courage in the face of adversity, self-control (temperance), and prudence—the practice of working out the consequences and implications of action, entailing flexibility, the ability to react to new and changing situations. Jefferson was more interested in the social aspects of virtue than the individual aspects and noted in the farming community the virtue of community self-reliance, the practice of mutual aid among the neighbors, the immediate willingness to help without waiting for or expecting any higher body to intervene. He was particularly interested in what we would call the political aspects of the farmer’s character, the effect of the practice of farming on the practice of republican democracy: Thompson brings Jeffersonian self-reliance up to date in the notion of “agency,” as found in the work of Amartya Sen and David Crocker.4 Unlike the fortunate recipient of food raised by others, or the farmhand working on another man’s land, the yeoman farmer (smallholder) has agency, a complex of skills, capabilities and

 Paul B. Thompson, From Field to Fork: Food Ethics for Everyone, New York: Oxford U.P., 2015.  Paul B.  Thompson, The Agrarian Vision: Sustainability and Environmental Ethics, Lexington, KY: Univ. of KY Press, 2010. 3  Thompson, The Agrarian Vision, pp. 80–81. 4  Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famine: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, New York: Oxford UP, 1981, and passim; David A. Crocker, Ethics of Global Development: Agency, Capability and Deliberative Democracy, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008; cited Paul Thompson, From Field to Fork, pp. 123 ff. 1 2

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opportunities that amount to occupational autonomy, a measure of control over the conditions and activities of his daily work. While food security is one capability that is important for human development, agency is another. To undertake a pattern of growth that replaces smallholder production with industrial farming over the course of even two or three generations will annihilate much of the capability for agency that farming people currently have. Relative to wage workers who depend on someone else to provide opportunities for employment, farming represents a form of agency that is currently within reach for many of the world’s poorest people.5

The poorest people in the developing world, but also the poorest people in our cities; it may take awhile to recover the memories, but the jobless in the cities, without property of their own, can become gardeners and farmers, exercising a level of autonomy, or agency, impossible for those whose only relationship to the food system is that of consumer, dependent on gifts from government and NGOs to feed themselves. In the overwhelming expansion of industrial agriculture in the last half century, we have seen individual smallholders, yeoman farmers, swept away by forces too great for them to understand or resist. The move to re-establish food sovereignty now places the local community in the place of agent, with a better chance of successful resistance. Jefferson himself did not concern himself with the autonomy of the individual; he was interested in persuading all-too-independent individuals to become good citizens of a democracy. Jefferson and the other founding fathers recognized the challenge of binding self-interest to the social good, opening up the possibility for a broader conception of national interest…an economy based on small yeoman families occupying the land will be superior to one in which individual self-interest is tied to movable and consumable assets. The farmer is tied to the land. His economic livelihood is bound to the security of his lands…What is more, the farmer must find some common compact with his neighbors and take an interest in the long-term stability of society.6

Jefferson recognized that the “artificer,” or manufacturer, the entrepreneur whose assets are mechanical devices that operate indoors, “can spoil the air, exploit others, poison the wells, and then pick up his assets and move on down the road when the business environment becomes hostile.”7 Down the road, or to Mexico or Ireland. The yeoman farmer of Jefferson’s time had no choice but to care for his community, the rural town; it provided protection for his property, transport and customers for his product, and was in the end his only guarantee that he would not himself fall victim to exploitation. At all levels, individual, neighborhood, town and eventually nation, the farms were expected to provide the food for the people to eat, and the farmers to possess and impart that sense of responsibility that would guarantee good government. 5  David Crocker and Ingrid Robeyns, “Capability and Agency,” in Amartya Sen, ed. C.  Morris, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 60–90, cited in Paul B. Thompson, From Field to Fork, op.cit. p. 124. 6  Op. cit. pp. 187–188. 7  Loc.cit.

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Rural agriculture in contemporary America, at least in its iconic Midwestern settings, falls tragically short of Jefferson’s ideals, economically, environmentally, socially and politically. Rural towns—each with a high school football team, a movie theatre, Main Street full of moderately prosperous stores, supported by a rich patchwork of small farms and run by the smallholders themselves, on the Jeffersonian model—are mostly gone. The Great Plains, America’s heartland, began to depopulate during the Dust Bowl, the long drought of the 1930’s that signaled the ultimate unsustainability of the American way of farming. In the last 80 years, Wil Hylton relates, Rural communities across Kansas and Nebraska, Montana and Texas, Oklahoma and the Dakotas have shrunk each decade… In Kansas alone, more than 6000 towns have vanished altogether.8

Why did the people leave? Mostly, because there are no jobs in the new huge farms dictated by the new economic arrangements. Against a background of desperately poor subsistent farming, carried out by hand labor in small plots, the economies of scale realized in combining many of those farms into a few larger farms are undeniable: labor-saving machinery that made no sense on the small farm now enables the combination of many fields into one, practically eliminating the expensive manpower necessary for the smaller farm; seeds can be purchased more cheaply in bulk, as can fertilizers and pesticides; the large farm’s market range is regional, possibly national, increasingly international, as opposed to the immediate locality to which the subsistence farmer is bound, potentially giving the farmer a much better price for his produce. (Note that the farmhands are now unemployed.) All of this is true, efficiency dictates it. Nothing has changed at the national policy level since the late nineteenth century, when the big machines (then drawn by horses) showed up in the fields. Because of these efficiencies, American farmers were able to expand their production, to the point where markets were unable to support it; during the Depression, Congress had to authorize government price subsidies to keep “family farms” in business. Later legislation paid farmers not to produce to capacity, in order to keep production down and prices high. But in the third quarter of the twentieth century, that policy was reversed by Earl Butz, Secretary of Agriculture under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, urging farmers to plant corn “fencerow to fencerow,” counting on expanding markets to take up the surplus. To the complaint of small farmers that they could never compete with huge mechanized farms, Butz replied (according to legend, at least) “Get Big or Get Out,” which, to a large extent, they did. With the departing population, has gone the viability of the rural town; with the economic need to expand, the mutual support of the farm community is lost. The result of the loss was a fragmented, alienated society of those left behind, increasingly dependent on various levels of government for collective survival and on drugs for personal survival: the drug methamphetamine became a fixture of the 8  Wil S.  Hylton, “Broken Heartland: the looming collapse of agriculture on the Great Plains,” Harper’s Magazine, July 2012, pp. 25–35.

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small towns that had been our icons of virtue.9 The self-sufficient agriculture of medium-sized farms had brought them into existence, and industrialized agriculture killed them. “It used to be,” comments one of Hylton’s informants, “when one family was struggling, all the other families would help them out…. But now, if somebody’s in trouble, everybody else is looking to see if they can buy their land.” Another adds, “These days, you’ve got to grow to survive…. It changes how people relate.”10 The goal of community, of social solidarity, no longer forms a part of farming. A dystopian vision claimed the farmers Hylton talked to, with …the cycle of farm dissolution and amalgamation [continuing] to its absurdist conclusion, with neighbors cannibalizing neighbors, until perhaps one day the whole of the American prairie will be nothing but a single bulldozed expanse of high-fructose corn patrolled by megacombines under the remote control of computer software 2,000 miles away.11

From the local perspective, then, rural life has lost its moral foundation in individual and community self-sufficiency. It would be expected that the political responsibility of the same countryside, based as it had been on the farmer’s rational appreciation of his own self-interest and of its congruence with the interests of the nation, will also be weakened. That weakening, or utter collapse, was documented in a 2016 Harper’s article, Richard Manning’s “The Trouble With Iowa,” on the 2016 Iowa caucuses leading to the Presidential election of that year. Manning introduces the reader to the corporate hold on Iowa (of which more below), with an additional institution, a homegrown restaurant chain called Pizza Ranch, which believes in the power of prayer and invites its customers to submit prayers of their own. Now that Iowa is in the heart of evangelical country, and among the very first of presidential tryouts in an election year, …the chain is a mandatory stop for Republican presidential hopefuls. …This election cycle, klatches at the chain take place almost daily: a candidate in a suit (or jeans, depending on the desired optics of the day) scarfs a slice while ringed by ruddy men in ball caps, most of them obese, many of them corn growers, chicken growers, or hog growers under contract to a handful of corporations. There they speak about the problems that affect their lives, such as the coming imposition of sharia law. They also talk about the need for the federal government to “get out of the way” of free enterprise, especially their particular brand of federally subsidized free enterprise.

The caricature is surely unfair, but the message unmistakable: whoever is heir to Jefferson’s idealization of the farmer, it is not the Midwestern farmer of the former heartland. The ownership, of land and enterprise, is gone, and with it the economic independence, the political independence, and even the grasp of political reality. Agriculture, as practiced in the farm belt, is not what we thought it was. We will argue, below, that urban agriculture has the better claim to the inheritance of Jefferson’s agrarian ideals. But it is important to understand the larger

9  See Nick Reding, Methland: The Death and Life of a Small American Town, New  York: Bloomsbury USA, 2009. 10  Ibid. p. 27. Emphasis added. 11  Loc.cit.

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context of industrial agriculture, of which the Iowa growers form a part, which has changed the face of global agriculture and created the very disturbing situation to which this argument reacts.

The Point of the Enterprise Picking up the theme from the Introduction, we may start with a general observation: the reason why we think and talk and write so much about food these days, especially its provision to the poor, is that the vast injustice of the present pattern of allotment of food in the world—the coexistence of surpluses and starvation, skyrocketing food prices in the developing world while government subsidies divert corn into ethanol in the United States, the epidemic of obesity and consequent epidemic of diabetes, bearing especially heavily on the poor, food deserts in the cities and the abandonment of the countryside—troubles the conscience. As it should. We need to sort out what has gone wrong and do something about it; that is why this work embeds an exposition of values to be attained by a good food system. It is often said that “our food system is broken” and that proper understanding is the first step to repair it. The diagnosis does not seem to be correct, an insight I owe to Eric Holt-Gimenez: The food system is not broken. It is working just the way it was designed to work, by the people who designed it, for their own profit.12 Our analysis follows from that point, and the solution is not some technical “fix,” but a political reinvention of the economics surrounding the provision and consumption of food in the pursuit of justice.

The Critique of the Industrialized Food System It may have been Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma that brought the forms of contemporary agriculture to our attention,13 but its practices had been targeted for some time by an impressive literature. The focus of some of the earlier attacks on the system (like Peter Rosset’s Food Is Different!) targeted overt international practices rather than systemic domestic practices—the use of US power to force economic agreements on developing nations that essentially allowed the US to dump subsidized surpluses in poorer lands while providing them very little access to US markets, through mechanisms like the World Trade Organization (WTO).14 A more comprehensive critique, focused especially on the plight of small farmers all over  Taken from an address by Holt-Gimenez to the University of Vermont Food Summit, June 2014.  Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, New York: Penguin Press, 2006. 14  Peter Rosset, Food Is Different! Why We Must Get the WTO Out of Agriculture, New York: Zed Books, 2006. 12 13

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the world, impoverished and starved by the same global forces, was presented in 2007 by Raj Patel, in his Stuffed and Starved, possibly the first best-seller on the workings of the global food system.15 A year later, Paul Roberts followed up his The End of Oil (about the coming energy crisis) with The End of Food, tracking on the domestic as well as the international scene the accumulating calamities of the present practices of producing and distributing food—from the risks of food-borne illness, to the declining nutritional content in the foods we buy, to the resulting paradox of obesity and starvation, ultimately to the possibly irreparable damage to our soil and water.16 Wenonah Hauter’s scrupulously researched Foodopoly homes in on the corporations themselves—Cargill, Tyson, Kraft and ConAgra, among others—that have modified the farming practices of the nation to promote their own profits, then, with outstandingly successful lobbying, bent the agricultural policies of the United States to subsidize those practices.17 Also in 2012, Jennifer Clapp brought out Food, showing the distortions introduced into the provision of food by its commoditization, or financialization, making the very definition of a food product subject to its market value on a world market controlled by oligopolies.18 The problem, in short, is that economic practices have overridden any political institutions that might stand in the way of globalized agriculture or might protect the farmers, here and abroad. Corporations have purchased, or been awarded, land over much of the developing world, often on the promise that the cash crops they would grow would bring badly needed income into the country. Just as often, the transactions were the result of, or consisted of, a series of bribes that lined the pockets of the de facto rulers of the developing nation. These transformations inevitably displaced subsistence farmers (who may have had no clear title to the land they farmed), sometimes giving them the opportunity to work for cash on the new plantations of sugar, coffee, or palm oil, sometimes simply driving them into the cities to manage as best they can. Again, no novel claim of the right of conquest was involved in these happenings; the expansion of corporate agriculture to the rest of the world (except for the bribery) was entirely in accord with Adam Smith’s eighteenth century exposition of the free enterprise system. The critique of industrialized and globalized agriculture sets political rights to self-determination squarely against economic rights to private property and the free use thereof. If there is a villain in the plot, it is capitalism itself. Eric Holt-Gimenez sums up the situation in brief: The food crisis is rooted in a vulnerable global food system that has become socially, environmentally and financially dysfunctional. Food has become another commodity subject to  Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2012 (second edition). 16  Paul Roberts, The End of Food, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008. Incidentally, both Stuffed and Starved and The End of Food feature comments on their covers by Michael Pollan, identifying them as “indispensable.” 17  Wenonah Hauter, Foodopoly: The Battle over the Future of Food and Farming in America, New York: The New Press, 2012. 18  Jennifer Clapp, Food, Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2012. 15

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financial speculation. The trade regime serves predatory markets instead of human needs. Agriculture has become an industrial mode of corporate accumulation rather than the basis for productive livelihoods and sustainable supply of good, healthy food. Local and national food systems have been mercilessly uprooted to make way for global corporate interests. Land, labor, water and the planet’s genetic patrimony have been privatized and commodified. Even diet has been colonized by agrifoods corporations in their relentless drive for profit. Because the food system and the financial system have coevolved, the twin crises are inextricably linked.19

The political movement that responds to the clear injustice of the global food system is the campaign, mentioned in the Introduction, for “food sovereignty.” La Via Campesina, the peasant organization that developed the concept, defines it as “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.” The claim includes the right of each region to determine its own patterns of production and consumption of food, and to create the institutions that will ensure democratic control over those patterns. At bottom, food sovereignty claims the right to the resources necessary to produce that food: land, water, sunlight, and seeds. Food sovereignty is distinguished from “food security,” the right to food, which means only that you know where your next meal is coming from and that there will be others after that. A prisoner in a well-run jail has food security. Only a politically empowered citizenry, with control over the economic institutions in which it lives, has food sovereignty.20 The implications of food sovereignty for the present system of food production and trade are disquieting: the entire life cycle of corn, from GMO seed through mechanized harvest through a wide variety of non-food distributions, through expansion throughout the developing world, is called into question. For America’s huge overproduction of corn (from the policies of Earl Butz, above) had two immediate consequences: cheap feed for fattening cattle for slaughter, and strong pressure from farm state representatives to create, then continue, subsidies for the production of ethanol as part of the gasoline used for fueling vehicles. The usefulness of ethanol as an oil-saving measure was questioned from the start—it seemed to require a gallon or so of petrol to produce a gallon of ethanol, which had less energy than the petrol. The claim that family farmers would profit from this diversion of corn to fuel also seems unworkable; overproduction has kept the price of corn so low that corn farmers would, but for the subsidies, be out of business. There are profits in the food system, but present arrangements ensure that the “middlemen,” the suppliers of farm inputs and marketers of farm outputs, absorb most of those profits themselves.

 Eric Holt-Gimenez and Raj Patel, Food Rebellions! Crisis and the Hunger for Justice, Oakland, CA: Food First books, 2009, p. 81. 20  For the campaign for Food Sovereignty, see Holt-Gimenez and Patel, op.  cit., and Eric HoltGimenez, ed. Food Movements Unite! Strategies to Transform out Food Systems, Oakland, CA: Food First books, 2011. Food sovereignty is the central focus of the NGO Food First. 19

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How does that work? Raj Patel describes the food system in the US as an “hour glass.” Upwards of five million suppliers of raw product (farmers, of various descriptions), supply food to upwards of 300  million consumers—through a few thousand corporations that supply the farmers with inputs (fertilizer, seeds, machinery, insecticides and herbicides).21 The same corporations are responsible for the transport and marketing of the products of the farm. Among these, a handful of corporations effectively monopolize the trade: Today [2010] two companies, Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill, capture three-quarters of the world grain trade (Vorley 2003). Chemical giant Monsanto controls 41% of maize seed and 25% of soy production (GRAIN 2007). Monopolization of the world’s food provides these companies with unprecedented market power. This translates into profits in the midst of crisis. In the last quarter of 2007 as the world food crisis was breaking, Archer Daniels Midland’s earnings jumped 42%, Monsanto’s by 45%, and Cargill’s by 86%. Mosaic Fertilizer, a subsidiary of Cargill, saw profits rise by 1,200% (Lean 2008b).22

Percentages have probably changed by now (2019), but the pattern remains the same. The hourglass is particularly evident, ironically, in the livestock farming enterprise most amenable to urban adoption: the raising of broiler chickens (raised for meat, not eggs). These chickens are now almost exclusively raised by farmers under contract to Tyson Foods, Pilgrim’s Pride, Perdue Farms, Koch Foods and Sanderson Farms—five huge agribusinesses. In the terms of the contracts, “farmers provide the barns and labor to raise the chickens, and the company provides chicks, feed and expertise to raise birds to slaughter weight,” at which time the company processes them, sells them and keeps the profits.23 The amount paid to the farmers is barely enough to keep them in business, and the conditions are regularly made more burdensome by company demands for barns with the latest technology, demands that the farmer must meet out of his own pocket or lose the contract and his entire infrastructure investment. One bad year, or bad luck, and the farmer can lose everything; a class-action suit brought by farmers against those companies alleges collusion on pricing, designed to keep all the profits in the hands of the processors, and demands relief. This antitrust action shows the oppressive heart of the industrial agricultural regime. The sources describe an oligarchy—central control of a vital resource, held by a few powerful parties in collusion, governed by money. This is where “resistance” becomes a central value even in the peaceful capitalist West: such governance is worth resisting.

 Ibid, p. 21. Figures are 2007.  Loc.cit. Sources: Vorley 2003: Billy Vorley, 2003. “Food Inc. Corporate Concentration From Farm to Consumer.” United Kingdom Food Group. http://www.ukfg.org, accessed July 15, 2008. GRAIN 2007: “Corporate Power—Agrofuels and the Expansion of Agribusiness,” Seedling, July. http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=478, accessed April 30, 2009. Lean 2008b: Lean, Geoffrey, “Multinationals Make Billions in Profit out of Growing Global Food Crisis,” The Independent, http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living, accessed October 14, 2008. 23  David Pitt, “Chicken farmers battle processing companies: Class-action status sought for lawsuit,” Burlington Free Press, February 10, 2017, p. 16A. 21 22

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Narratives of Resistance Can such power be generated in a political democracy locked into a capitalist economy? Politics is also something we know how to do, but it’s much harder. Effective politics begins with the recognition that the exercise of power, by some people, many or few, in some ways, productive or not, is a necessity; if social action is currently unproductive, power is being exercised wrongly, and our first job is to announce that we are opposing it, even in advance of knowing just what it is. That is why a central theme in our cities’ experience with urban agriculture, sometimes preceding the food security at which their initiatives aim, is “resistance”: to plant, tend, and harvest a garden is an act of rebellion, resistance to an oppressor. The theme is most clearly seen in Cuba, where the patios and parcelas were a direct counter to the attempts of the United States to starve the Cubans into submission. The anger at this Great Power malevolence, the callous disregard for Cuban civilians in the increasingly strict blockade, was a powerful motivator during the Special Period. A similar anger sparked the D-Town Farm in Detroit. Detroit had by the end two very different community farming initiatives: the (mostly white) urban pioneers of the first vacant lot gardens, and the African American food security movement, whose members were rebelling in part against the heartless way in which the white capitalists had used their labor to get rich, and then deserted them, but also in part against the capitalists’ long-haired children blithely using Detroit soil for their own idealized purposes. In the process, they were able to establish the competence and self-reliance of the African American community. “Talking about resistance,” Beverly Gage summarizes, “still evokes this sense of honorable struggle against an occupying power. It implies patience as well as militancy, the ability to say no over and over and over again, to refuse to cooperate until the whole system crumbles.”24 The motive of rebellion, or resistance, is harder to establish in Burlington, since the immediate authorities (with some exceptions) were supportive of the enterprise. Yet by this time a clear set of principles of resistance had been formulated, against Big Ag, that is, against the industrialized agricultural system worldwide, but especially resident in the United States. Unlike the blockade of Cuba or the abandonment of Detroit, no motive of malevolence or callousness can be attributed to the vast economic system. It is through no one’s intentions that farmers are slowly squeezed out of business while consumers fatten on diets of high-fructose corn oil. It just happens that way, and the heartland of the U.S. hollows out while business booms for the dialysis centers. Resistance is a political movement, universally accessible. Beverly Gage puts it well: To resist is to do something negative—to push back against someone else’s agenda when your own back is up against the wall. It is a desperate word for desperate times, filled with limits as well as possibilities. A call to resist is different from a call to “organize”…[which]

 Beverly Gage, “Negative Energy: Opponents of the Trump agenda are gathering under a surprising banner: the ‘resistance.’” The New York Times Magazine, February 5, 2017, pp. 11–13, at p. 12.

24

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4  A Tale of Many Values: What Can We Learn from the Cities? conjure[s] visions of better worlds. Resistance names what you don’t want and leaves the vision thing for another, less urgent, situation…. Resistance evokes the struggle against totalitarianism, conveying personal defiance and official powerlessness at the same time.25

The peculiar rebellion of the new urban farming movement is its insistence that it doesn’t have to happen that way—that we can replace (most of) the food products of industrial agriculture with fresh fruits, grains and vegetables within the reach of everyone. Woven into the narratives of resistance is the second, positive, theme in the urban gardening movement, the pursuit of health—the health of the family, the community, and the earth itself. We know that we ourselves and our children will be much healthier if we eat more fresh vegetables and less of the sugar, salt and fat of the preferred American diet. We know that the nutritional content of those vegetables depends mostly on the health of the soil in which they grow and the air and water they draw on, so we link our desire for fresh local food with our campaigns to preserve the health of the natural environment. We know that under present economic arrangements such a healthy diet is more expensive and harder to locate; we want to do something about that, so we promote farmers’ markets, even when we know we will not have time to patronize them. And soon this theme links with the first one, for the economic arrangements have been set to favor the mighty agribusinesses of the nation—the so-called “middlemen” who supply the farmers with packages of fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides, seeds (often genetically modified to thrive with one of the herbicides, so the farmer can spray the whole field liberally to kill all the weeds without threatening the crop), and when the crop is grown, purchase it and market it to its final destinations. These agribusinesses, then, govern the system that makes it so easy to be obese and so hard to be healthy, and planting the community garden is an act at least of denial and defiance, and possibly also of rebellion, against that system. An immediate suggestion for reform, backed even by those corporations, is that we need a more “sustainable” agriculture. This is surely true if we are talking about the damage that industrial agriculture does to the soil and the aquifers, which will someday succumb to poisoning and overuse and cease to function. But if social justice is our first concern, we have to be specific about our definitions. If “sustainable” means only “able to be carried on indefinitely without destroying itself or running out of necessary resources,” then social injustice by itself does not render a practice unsustainable. After all, the evidence suggests that slavery continued from prehistory to the present time (until 1865  in the West), and the practice has not exhausted its necessary resources—powerful men and helpless victims to be enslaved—even though universally acknowledged to be unjust.26 The plight of farmers, let alone that of migrant workers in the California vegetable fields, will not suggest to its practitioners that it ought to be significantly changed.

 Loc.cit.  As a matter of fact, it’s still going on. See “Africa’s New Slavery Problem: The Trade in Human Beings Thrives on the Road to Europe,” TIME magazine, March 25, 2019, pp. 34–41.

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But industrial agriculture has long been known to be unsustainable in purely biological measures: it relies on deep naturally fertile soil, providentially available on our Great Plains consequent to its history as a vast inland sea, with sufficient rainfall in ordinary times to grow native crops. Across our Great Plains, that rainfall was backed up by an abundant aquifer, the Ogallala Aquifer stretching from South Dakota through Nebraska and Kansas to Texas, when agriculture began on the plains. And it relies heavily on cheap petroleum, as fuel for its increasingly gigantic farm machinery, transport of its far-flung crops to central processing centers, and above all as the feedstock of its essential fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. “Peak Oil,” the point at which world oil supplies would start to decrease and all activities dependent on it would have to change, had been predicted for some time; in Cuba, of course, it had already happened. With the prevalence of industrial agriculture, soil was fatally eroded, the process culminating in the Dust Bowl—a period of drought occurring and reoccurring through the 1930s, with tons of soil lost to windstorms during this period. With the return of the rain in the 1940s, agriculture settled back to its industrial normal, but we now know that the soil is fragile, and will require radical changes in agricultural processes in the near future, just to keep going. Meanwhile, the increasing use of chemical (petroleum-based) fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, poisons the soil (and occasionally the food growing in it). Somehow, we are going to have to find a way of growing our food that does not deplete or destroy our soil but replenishes it. We do know what a rational agriculture would look like. As Fred Magdoff describes it: A rational agriculture would be carried out by individual farmers or farmer associations (cooperatives) and have as its purpose to supply the entire population with a sufficient quantity, quality and variety of food while managing farms and fields in ways that are humane to animals and minimize ecological disturbances. There would be no exploitation of labor—anyone working on the farm would be like all the others, a farmer. If an individual farmer working alone needed help, then there might be a transition to a multi-purpose farm. The actual production of food on the land would be accomplished by working with and guiding agricultural ecosystems (instead of dominating them) in order to build the strengths of unmanaged natural systems into the farms and their surroundings.27

Magdoff is describing an agriculture that does not exist in today’s countryside. Can we bring it into existence in the cities?

The Fate of the Beasts The same system that destroys the soil for plants destroys the lives of the animals we raise for meat, in the same way. Our relationship to animals, especially those close to us on the evolutionary line, has been problematic since the dawn of human  Fred Magdoff, “A Rational Agriculture is Incompatible with Capitalism,” Monthly Review 66/10, March 2015, pp. 1–18.

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conscience: are they merely part of the consumable landscape, like corn, only with brown eyes and fur? Are they our equals, companions on the planet? Are they possibly gods, or associated with gods, with divine power? The historical consensus has been that (like humans, in some times and places) they are agreeable to the gods as sacrifices, and we have permission from the gods to kill and eat them. That went for animals we hunted, as well as those we raised. (For religious reasons, some animals had to remain off the menu; these restrictions vary with time and place.) There was a caveat within the consensus, generally observed: the animals could not be caused pain unnecessarily and they had to be cared for, “husbanded,” in language used until recently. The ethic that governed the care of animals was stewardship, oriented to the welfare of the animals; even though they were ultimately bred and raised for human purposes, there were circumstances where the shepherd should be willing to lay down his life for the sheep.28 That duty also works into a larger utilitarian ethic of productivity: when no medicines are available, sheep well cared for will survive, and possibly bring a higher price at market. But the ethic of “care” is independent of any ethic based on rights or utility; like self-reliance, it is part of the virtue appropriate to the farmer. The change in language signaled the change in ethic. We no longer teach “animal husbandry” in the agricultural colleges; we teach “animal science” and the commercial disciplines of breeding and marketing. The animal is reduced to the status of the grain he is treading; he is flesh to be produced, cut up, wrapped for the market, and distributed to the supermarkets. That reduction triggered the reaction that we know today as the “animal rights” movement. If the sheep are no longer safe in the care of the shepherd, who will speak for the sheep? The call to action came in 1975, with Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, an argument that animals, at least those with nervous systems significantly similar to our own, should be respected and permitted to live their own lives according to their own laws; it started a Movement.29 Coming as it did (as was noted at the time) on the heels of the Civil Rights movement and advocacy for Equality for Women, Animal Lib seemed at once a logical continuation of the campaigns for equal rights for previously enslaved beings, and their reduction to absurdity. (Just how far down the evolutionary scale must we respect the “rights” of non-humans?) Another strand of the movement was supplied by Gail Eisnitz’s Slaughterhouse, published in 2007, focused on the callous and (unnecessarily) cruel and painful practices surrounding the slaughter of animals for food.30 It was a powerful argument for partial vegetarianism: animals can suffer pain, as Jeremy Bentham pointed out,31 and therefore on the utilitarian  John 10:11. At the least, the ox must not be muzzled when he is treading out the grain. Deuteronomy 25:4. 29  Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, New York: HarperCollins 2009. 30  Gail A. Eisnitz, Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment Inside the U.S. Meat Industry, Amherst NY: Prometheus Books, 2007. 31  “It may come one day to be recognized, that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or, 28

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ethic, they should be protected from cruelty. Note that two different patterns of moral argument are employed in these two strands: a “rights” (deontological) strand from Singer’s successors and his successors in the Animal Rights movement, and a utilitarian strand based on the welfare of the animals, also from Singer and Eisnitz’s book. Both strands now have an abundant literature. Eventually a third strand in the critique of industrial animal agriculture emerged, following upon some serious cases of food poisoning caused by bacteria that were resistant to our antibiotics. Where had these resistant germs come from? In large measure, they were traced to the practice in industrial meat production of dosing healthy animals raised for meat with large doses of antibiotics—to stave off contagious disease in the unhealthy crowded pens on the factory farms, but also to promote and speed up the growth of healthy animals to market size. Antibiotics were effective for that purpose, but in the animals’ systems, the constant presence of antibiotics permitted the growth of bacteria resistant to them, which stayed in the meat and (especially if the meat were not thoroughly cooked) went on to take up lodging in the consumer’s body. The outcry against contaminated meat was joined by an emerging critique of the environmental dangers posed by the industrial “concentrated area feeding operations (CAFOs)” when the huge lagoons of manure, especially hog manure, overflowed their banks and emptied into the local watercourses. Now environmental safety and human health joined animal welfare and animal rights as central grounds for opposition to the American way of meat production. There is no way of growing animals for food that will satisfy the “liberationist” Animal Rights strand of the argument. But the others can be largely satisfied with a return of the practices traditionally associated with animal husbandry: provision of appropriate food for the animals (as opposed to subsidized corn for grass-eating cattle), provision of adequate space for the animal to live, eat, breed, exercise, and generally act according to his nature, spreading wings, rooting for food, making a nest, suckling its young. If the animal lives a satisfying life in natural settings, avoiding the crowding that leads to sickness, and therefore not requiring the antibiotics engineered to fight it, no utilitarian arguments, based on human welfare or the welfare of the animal, can be raised against its treatment. Bentham also noted that animals cannot “fear death” as we do, so the mere fact of approaching slaughter does not cause it pain.

perhaps, the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month, old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? Nor, Can they talk? But, Can they suffer?” Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Chapter 17, paragraph 122.

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Justice Is a just food system theoretically possible? Of course: it is possible to imagine a system where food is grown, harvested and distributed in such a way that all are fed and few are sickened. Our current system comes nowhere near that. If its departures from that norm are simply historical mistakes, i.e. if the food system is merely “broken,” and needs to be “fixed,” then we can undertake the solutions immediately. Fixing is something we know how to do. Accordingly, the engineers of the Union for Concerned Scientists set out a sketch of a national food policy in the winter 2016 issue of their magazine, Catalyst, that they hoped would be pursued by the administration that would take office in January 2017. (No more has been heard about it: 2019). The proposed national policy is unexceptionable; among the 15 provisions (see Chap. 8) are requirements for greater production of fruits and vegetables, regionally appropriate agricultural research, reform of livestock arrangements, fair wages and safety provisions for farm workers, expansion of farmers’ markets, universal composting, nutrition education and transparency in food labeling. The result of the initiation of this policy should have been, with time, “a food system that is healthy, green, affordable, and fair.”32 It is a beautiful proposal. But the underlying foundation of the “system,” according to Holt-Gimenez and others, is such that these sensible provisions will never be adopted. Our present system is one of combined political and economic power, controlled by a very few people, and it is simply not in the interest of those who hold power in the present system to give it up, and at this juncture there is no countervailing power that could force the issue. Rural agriculture, now industrial or “conventional” agriculture, no longer fulfills the tasks Jefferson expected of it. In Jefferson’s time little food could be grown in the cities, which were crowded, foul, and much smaller. But cities have changed, as much as the countryside. We will argue that the cities have inherited Jefferson’s mantle of responsibility for the land, and that the Jeffersonian ideal, far-fetched as it may seem, is presently realizable in the cities of the present and future.

Good Food: Organic Agriculture as an Alternative33 The United States has its own native-born tradition of resistance to a food system seen as artificial, misguided and unhealthy (before it was identified as unjust). The contemporary search for alternatives to this system began in the U. S. in the 1930s,  Mark Bittman et al., “Re-Envisioning our Broken Food System,” Catalyst (Union of Concerned Scientists), Winter 2016, pp. 8–13. 33  It has been objected that the agriculture advocated by this movement—organic, centered on family-run small farms, with diversified crops, home-raised animals oriented to local consumption--is hardly “alternative”: it is the way agriculture was practiced everywhere until well into the twentieth century. What we now call “conventional,” i.e. industrial, agriculture, is the “alternative,” and it turned out to be a bad one. 32

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when J.I. Rodale became enamored of the organic farming and natural health movements of his day, especially that of Albert Howard (1873–1947). In the course of his career as a professional botanist, Howard had accepted an assignment to teach agronomy and western agricultural practices in the British colony of India, but became convinced that the organic farming practiced by the Indians (including extensive creation and use of compost) was superior to the Western practices, and returned to England to teach organic agriculture—that the health of soil, plant, animal and human is indivisible. Howard is grouped with Rudolf Steiner as one of the founders of organic agriculture. Rodale, currently recognized as the father of the organic movement in America,34 founded Rodale, Inc., dedicated to organic agriculture, in 1930. He went on to establish publications that spread his philosophy, starting Organic Farming and Gardening (now Organic Gardening) in 1942 and Prevention in 1950, committed to the proposition that good health can make modern medicine all but unnecessary. These linked publications carried on Albert Howard’s conviction that the health of all life is intimately connected. So the agroecology movement had a solid foundation in England and America. As a principle, it spread worldwide; Fernando Funes points out that there was an organic farming movement in Cuba dating to 1862.35 It had almost died out in Cuba in the period of foreign domination ending in 1959, and was not revived by the “Green Revolution” practices, established in harmony with Eastern Bloc markets, by the Socialist Government under Fidel Castro. But when the Special Period began, the Cubans already had a set of practices known to many farmers; it just remained to institutionalize them across the country. When Detroit’s unoccupied land was worked by the original community gardeners in the early 2000s, they could reach back to a potato-patch tradition originating in Detroit in the 1890s, which fed easily into the community garden movement. And Burlington had hosted promoters of agroecology and especially its European offspring, permaculture, for 20 years prior to its formal attempts to institutionalize it. The movement took hold not only in rebellion against industrialized agriculture, but for a more immediate and compelling reason—the strong desire for good health and good food. First, for food: Cuba, which provides a powerful model for the urban agriculture movement, was faced with starvation as all the supplies that it needed for farming were cut off; simple hunger was its foundation for agroecology. But even in the relative prosperity of the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a strong popular movement for better health brought about by better food, led by John Kellogg and his brother Will (W.K.), who ran a sanitarium for well-to­do patients who wished to recover a “glow of health” lost in the citified existence of leisured America. In many ways, these pioneers were the precursors of the Adkins or Mediterranean diets of the later part of the century; they had some spectacular successes, but were subjected to withering criticism as unscientific cults, which in

 http://www.rodaleinc.com/about-us/brief-history  Fernando Funes, “The Organic Farming Movement in Cuba,” in Funes et  al., Sustainable Agriculture and Resistance, Oakland, CA: Food First Books, 2002. Pp. 1–3.

34 35

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some ways they probably were. But they focused the American mind on the health implications of diet in an unprecedented way, and prepared us for Michael Pollan. By now the passion for healthy food approaches absurdity; an Amazon search for books currently available on “good food” yielded 350,000 offerings. Increasingly, the topic homes in on “clean” food, meaning apparently “pure” food, food uncontaminated by poisons named and nameless that might render our dinners unhealthy, bad for us in ways that seem to transcend nutrition. This is where the demand for organic food comes from and derives its strength. Whatever else “organic” might mean, and the disputes are endless, it means at least that no petroleum-based pesticides and herbicides have been used on the plants, so those poisons at least pose no danger.36 These developments have particular relevance for urban agriculture, since the urban setting compels the practices that the end of petroleum required in Havana: the use of natural fertilizer (compost), the replacement of herbicides with mulch and hand weeding, little if any synthetic pesticides, simply because the constant traffic of dogs, cats and children prohibits the use of anything noxious. Urban agriculture joins the preexisting predominant trends in agriculture: away from domination by the global agricultural oligopoly, toward the individual, the family, and the community, rediscovering the value of work on the land on one’s own patch of ground.

Community Autonomy as an Emergent Value In all of the experiments in growing food in the city, we find the emergent value of “community autonomy,” the search for an agriculture controlled not by state or transnational corporation, but by the community of neighbors doing the hand work on the farm. The urban gardens adopt the principles of “alternative agriculture,” above, but go beyond them to a commitment to agroecology. John Ikerd, agricultural scholar, most recently commissioned by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) to write the regional report on Family Farms of North America for the International Year of Family Farming, found agroecology at the center of concern for the global Food Sovereignty Movement.37 Agroecology is, first of all, a science, a branch of ecology, studying the relationships among plants, animals and humans in the growing of food—especially the unintended consequences of interventions. Each piece of land is unique; even on the same farm, no one prescription may be good for the whole of the planting area. Second, agroecology is a farming system, respecting the “natural ecology of place,” the unique properties of  Groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson finally managed to convince a court that his cancer was due to exposure to RoundUp (glyphosate), and since then has been campaigning for its prohibition (“the leaf that didn’t die—at least for now.”) FoodFirst News & Views, Winter 2018, p. 4. 37  John Ikerd, “Agroecology: Science, Farming System, or Social Movement?” The Natural Farmer, Northeast Organic Farmers Association (NOFA), Spring 2019, Special Supplement on Food Sovereignty, pp. B-23-24. 36

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each piece of land, in its natural and human community. Note that human beings are included in the ecology: “The farmer is treated as a member of a farm’s ecosystem and the relationship between a specific farm and a specific farmer is critical to the farm’s success or failure.”38 Nor can the farmer be separated from his community, his suppliers and customers; agroecology covers all relationships that make food grow on farms. Third, agroecology is a social movement, taking many forms: campaigning to end chemical (poisonous) inputs on all farms, insisting on local focus— the uniqueness of each local system and the many advantages of growing for a local market, underpinning the local food movement. The emerging principles of agroecology can best be understood as a community extension of the Jeffersonian value of individual responsibility resident in the smallholding farmer. The new values are not of one logically connected system but emerge from the experience of urban agriculture itself. The central value of this new form of farming is the autonomy of the community, or of the neighborhood—the assemblage of citizens who manage the farm cooperatively. At the heart of this account is the fact that, at least in Havana and Detroit, community autonomy was no one’s first choice for a value when urban farming started. It would have been an abomination for centrally controlled Cuba, which saw the state as a whole as the legitimate locus of the control, and “communitarianism” as a kind of anarchism, individuality running out of control. Local autonomy was accepted only on a temporary basis, for the sake of getting as many people as possible involved in producing food. It would have been heartily disliked in Detroit or in any proper capitalist system, as presenting at least potentially unwanted restrictions on the autonomy of the individual, whose support and cooperation is demanded for the enterprise to succeed, and inconvenient occupation of land that the city had in mind for some future industry. Yet when it is threatened, capitalist and communist alike will fight to retain it. Community autonomy is what we call an “emergent” value; it is essential to the creation and preservation of urban agriculture in its present form, but against the presumptions of the rest of economic enterprise, it is terribly fragile. It appears as the convergence of (1) agricultural efficiency on the small scale—getting everyone fed with the least expenditure of energy (born in conditions where petroleum is unavailable); (2) community organization aimed at other ends—beautification for the sake of property values, clearing away trash, anything that had to get done on the local level requiring the participation of many, (3) the sense of accomplishment in achieving something good by the effort of a group of neighbors (empowerment), (4) initiatives to live and eat healthy, and teach your children to do the same; (5) a strong desire to live in a way that will save the planet, with the cultivation of green plants as a centerpiece. The sense of community becomes a goal in the process, a value not wished by anyone at the outset, but sufficiently valuable to fight for if the dominant system attempts to take it away. Now, how does “community autonomy” fit into our accepted schemes of social values? As above, it is at odds with many of them, limiting political and economic

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 Ibid. p. B-23

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control from the outside, and limiting individual initiative from the inside. For the “community” here is not the intentional community of the 1960s utopian commune, participants self-selected in part from an ideal of an organic body, a group of like-­ minded idealists functioning as one from shared ideals, let alone the religious community bound together by an oath of obedience. The neighborhood community, in any society where domicile is largely a matter of individual choice, is composed of whatever people happen to be there, bound together only by a love of gardening (some of them) or a desire for fresh food (others), or possibly a determination not to have such an important part of life ruled by remote centers of power that comprise global agribusiness, cemented by a (possibly silent) commitment to keep the garden healthy and harvest its produce. This commitment to resident strangers may not be as difficult as it sounds. We evolved to function in groups and survived because of secular cooperation—not bound by oath or ideal but bound by circumstance and tradition. The community for purposes of urban agriculture is a random assemblage of unlike people gathered for disparate motives for a common task, often voluntary, that decides to make itself into an effective force within its limited area, and often a united voice for dealing with those outside.

Extensions and Conclusions The urban farm transforms a community, in many good ways. We can see this on two levels: first, chronologically, the formation of the actual farm, on the ground; second, politically (or spiritually), in the light of long-term lessons learned in the process and the product. That is why urban farming matters.

Part II

Building the Urban Farm

Part I gives us three cities whose trajectories were transformed by the adoption of a program of urban agriculture, and a summary of reasons to hope that farming among the apartment houses and the remaining manufacturing plants might brighten the future of many more of them. But how, in fact, have such agricultural cities been conceived, how have they fared, and how might we construct one on our own? The history of “utopian” thinking—thinking about places that are not but might yet be— throws some light on the planning available for such work; conceptual work from the fields of health and education show how farms may be integrated into the life and mission of a city; and a recent spate of very practical literature (published in 2016 and 2017) provides directions for the new urban farmer down to the selection of timber for the raised beds and the proper way to grasp a bunch of greens to cut them for harvest. We begin with utopia.

Chapter 5

Growing the City as a Community

The Overview: The Search for Utopia The effort to design a perfect city, an ideal society, eutopia (the good place) rather than utopia (nowhere at all), has a history centuries long; it deserves an overview, a picture of what the city would look like from the cab of a dirigible, perhaps, so that all its parts can be seen, and seen to work together. The enterprise goes back at least to the Greek philosopher Plato (c. 427-c. 347 B.C.), whose Republic described a carefully layered social system that worked beautifully as long as all classes—farmers and tradesmen at the bottom, soldiers (guardians) in the middle, and a few philosophers at the top—remembered to do their duty in their proper place, in the proper way, and not try to cross lines and become something else.1 Since then, a variety of thinkers have tried their hand at the construction of the Ideal Society—the human community where all people can live in harmony, ensure their safety, govern their affairs, produce what they need to live, and make each other happy. The work has turned out to be very tricky, for reasons too long and tangled to go into here—human nature, it turns out, does not fit very well in ordered boxes. One major source of ill fit is the fact that human society as we know it is a two-stage affair. It begins in small homogeneous villages, composed for the most part of people closely or distantly related to each other, honoring their own gods and ancestors, ruled by sacred tradition and traditional rulers on their own sacred land, articulated into complex social strata derived from family relationships, suspicious of and very often at war with all other clans or villages. But then a major development, some collective decision, allows it to proceed to a larger society, diverse, nondiscriminatory, grounded in civility, somewhat impersonal, operating under a law made by its

1  Plato, Republic, ed. and trans. G.M.A.  Grube, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Pub. Co., 1992. We know, of course, that designing some “ideal state” was not Plato’s main interest; his state, in its three ordered parts, stood for the human soul, and he was after the good life more than the good society.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. Newton, Urban Agriculture and Community Values, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39244-4_5

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princes and its people that has little relation to the sacred traditions of the villages or ranks within the families. In the “Community” (Gemeinschaft), as the nineteenth century sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies called the first stage, primary relationships govern all contacts, and the relationships are the same over many generations. Social change is neither expected nor desired, all important rules of conduct are traditional, often sacred, and the status into which an individual is born determines his rights and duties throughout life. Incidentally, the same rules seem to apply in all those primate societies related to humans—gorillas, chimpanzees, down through the monkeys. In the “Society” (Gesellschaft) as he identified the second stage, everything is new and nontraditional: laws are made, chosen by calculations of utility (what will most advance the welfare of the state) and justice (what most fairly distributes the benefits and burdens of its functioning.) Citizens are equal regardless of family background, change is often welcomed and can be very rapid, and voluntary contracts determine some of an individual’s obligations. The two stages do not get along at all, presenting different histories, different rules of life, and vastly different sets of expectations for the residents.2 Yet both seem to be necessary. Aristotle may have been the first writer to recognize these two very different levels of society, in his Politics; he recognized the village, or first tribal level of society (in his time still very much in charge of household life, religion, and most of the matters of making a living), but came out with a strong defense of the second stage, the polis, as governed by reason and law, and therefore more closely realizing and protecting the best qualities of human nature.3 From ancient Greece to our own time, we have watched recurrent eruptions of conflict between loyalty to one’s own family and ethnic group (“nativism,” a strong form of “conservatism”) and desire for the freedom of acting in the larger society, that society expanding to include the whole world (“globalism,” a strong form of “liberalism.”). Powerful defenses have been written for both sides—for the protection of Community as essential for human identity, love, and happiness, and for the expansion of the individual into the freedom of global Society, as inevitable in an interconnected world.4 We may note that that “freedom” is at once negative—freedom from the tradition-bound restraints of the village—and positive, opening up new avenues for personal exploration and development. Those who realize such freedom simultaneously challenge the order that has ruled them to that point, weakening it, and deprive the village of their energy and talents for carrying on the traditions and doing the work of the village. 2  Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, trans. Charles P.  Loomis, Old Chelsea Station, NY: Cosimo Inc., 2005. See also Henry Maine, Ancient Law, Old Chelsea Station,: Cosimo Inc. 2005, and G.  Feaver, From Status to contract: A Biography of Henry Maine, 1822–1888. 3  Aristotle, Politics, Book One, chapter Two. 4  See Manfred Steger, Globalisms: The Great Ideological Struggle of the 21st Century, Lanham, MD, Rowman and Littlefield, 2009; on the Community side, the classic by Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom, Wilmington, DL: ISI books, 1970 (originally published in 1953), and, to bring the subject up to date with fearful relevance, Kimberly Bratton, Hillary’s Globalism, Trump’s America; no city of publication given: Vixen Publishing, 2016.

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No wonder the village does not like it. The urban farm does not need to settle the conflict; but we may expect that it will flare up unexpectedly as we try to grow a city around its farms. City Planners have been slow to adopt community farms and gardens as central to their field—in part because the opposition of “city” and “country” goes back to Mesopotamia (usually with a class division thrown in) and farms belong in the country, but also in part because the paradigm of the community garden, as seen in our cities, is spontaneous, developed from the ground up, utilizing random patches of otherwise unoccupied land, all of which exclude “planning” by definition. Yet city planners did bring gardens into their thinking, at an early date: influenced by utopian literature from the pens of saints (Thomas More’s Utopia, published in 1516, for example,5), scholars (Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, from 18716) and even novelists (Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, written in 1888, for instance7) Ebenezer Howard undertook to create a new kind of utopia, centered on gardens: To-Morrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform in 1898 (retitled in 1902 as Garden Cities of To-Morrow), proposes an urban design of compact cities (divided into town and country zones) surrounded by greenbelts for agriculture and recreation. Their population was to be strictly limited; when a Garden City had reached its maximum, another would be created nearby. The city plan was the popular radiating avenues design, exemplified by Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s plan for Washington D.C. (The only real cities based on Howard’s model, Letchworth and Welwyn in England, did not follow the concentric design, but adapted building to their sites.) The “greenbelt” surrounding the city was not specifically designated for agriculture, which does not occupy a central place in the literature, but to convey the benefits of green spaces and beauty for the city dwellers. For those who live and work in the country (recall that farms were still small and free of poisonous pesticides in 1898) the short distance between greenbelt and center city provides an easy commute for farmers bringing goods to market and for city workers who prefer living in country settings.8 Seen from the air, Howard’s Garden City is symmetrical, rational, and beautiful, with green spaces appropriately outlining the industrial, commercial, and residential centers. The idea impressed developers in the United States and was realized ironically in a way totally contrary to Howard’s vision: it became the model for planned suburbs, often gated communities, providing beautiful residences in a compact grouping, surrounded by lawns and woods, with very little of the industrial and  Thomas More, Utopia, ed. Paul Turner, New York: Penguin, 2003.  Henry George, Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry in the Cause of Industrial Depressions and Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth…. The Remedy, Old Chelsea Station, NY: Cosimo, Inc., 2005. 7  Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward 2000–1887, Boston: Dover books, 1996. 8  See Robert Fishman’s account of Howard and others of the movement, “Urban Utopias: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier,” in Susan S.  Fainstein and Scott Campbell, Readings in Planning Theory (Studies in Urban and Social Change), Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. Pp. 21–59. 5 6

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commercial inclusions foreseen by the founders. The reason for this change, of course, is that industry evolved as much as farming from 1902 until the end of the century and could not be contained in the park-like setting of the Garden City. In a doubling of the irony, our clean and technologically sophisticated industries now might very well fit in Howard’s vision. Garden Cities addressed one of the major problems of the city, in accordance with one of the major value-orientations outlined in Part I: the city as it stood was ugly, dense, discouraging, and unhealthy. A Garden City would be beautiful. But it would also be inflexible, forbidding entrée to any individual or community initiative. The idea, as an idea, never caught on among the lovers of cities, who always preferred some grit and unpredictability. Percival and Paul Goodman, central architects of city planning in the 1940s and authors of the pioneering Communitas, are appalled by the “sameness” of the utopia as suggested, pointing out that all spontaneous behavior (like children climbing trees) seems to be forbidden. The citizens are supposed to “cooperate,” but separated from all productive activity, it is not clear that they have anything to cooperate about; separated from “management” decisions, i.e. the exercise of political power, it is not clear that they even have anything to talk about. Anyone with any spirit would much prefer the excitement of living in a real city, and in the end, “rather than live in a garden city, an intellectual would rather meet a bear in the woods.”9 Further, as Evan Eisenberg points out, in a short discussion of the trend toward rooftop farming, there are lovers of cities who want nothing to do with the reintroduction of Nature into their lives: Let us grant that all the technical hitches can be fixed: that Styrofoam pellets in the soil will make roof loads bearable, that building materials will be found that can cope with dampness and probing tendrils and roots. Will these organic forms so appealing to back-to-the-landers appeal to people who like cities? Many city-dwellers may be city-dwellers because they want to escape the messiness of nature and dwell in a man-made order, or at least a man-­ made mess. The influx of insects and other flying, crawling, and swarming things so relished by the planners may strike them as a plague. The riot of green and gold may seem so much tinder for hay fever. “Wildlife,” to them, means deer bearing Lyme disease, raccoons bearing rabies, owls eating cats, and bears eating babies.10

He cites Oscar Wilde, whose understanding of “nature” was “a place where birds fly around uncooked.” Wilde was at the end of the spectrum; other city folk may share many of his views. But the Garden City movement, unsuccessful in the eyes of its founders and ridiculous in the eyes of its critics, laid the groundwork for the work that concerns this book. It articulated the universal distaste for the city of the nineteenth and early twentieth century city, a random collection of factories and slums, a Petri dish for every disease, native or imported, that the crowded residents might catch, channeling human waste down the centers of the streets and coating buildings and lungs in toxic ash. But it was where everything was happening; no matter how beautiful and  Percival and Paul Goodman, Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life, 1947; p. 35.  Evan Eisenberg, The Ecology of Eden, New York, Random House, 1998, p. 372.

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healthy the countryside, no one wanted to return to the isolated, backbreaking and monotonous life of the farm, even were that possible. Their first prescription, then, was for a city in the midst of a greenbelt garden, reintroducing the greenery of the farm to the densely packed city in the only way that seemed feasible. The same disposition led to the creation of city parks. The community farms that concern us in this work may be seen as a simple extension of the insights of Ebenezer Howard, without the demand for uniformity: people enjoy green plants in their experience, their beauty is appreciated, and people are much healthier in settings where green plants are accessible. (Now we have evidence to back up that belief.) Vegetable gardens bring to city living all the benefits that Howard foresaw from his greenbelt. Would it be possible to develop a new “aerial perspective,” a new agenda for the urban planners—a design for a city that would enable urban farms without destroying the possibility of spontaneous cooperation and neighborhood adaptation? Is there a green city that the Goodmans could live in happily?11 Among the imaginers, Howard has had followers. In 1948, psychologist B. F. Skinner published Walden Two, a projection of an ideal community that might be secured by proper behavioral conditioning.12 His community is presented, narrated by a skeptical Professor Burris visiting some former students, as a farm, rationally run, with allotted chores, functioning in an orderly manner—but far from cities. Surprisingly, in at least one experimental community founded on his principles, his ideas work very well. A community (“ecovillage”) founded on Skinner’s guidelines, established by eight non-farmers in 1967, survives to this day. Twin Oaks Community, as it named itself, makes its living manufacturing hammocks, casual furniture, and tofu, growing vegetables in greenhouses to produce seeds for sale, but very intentionally devoting most of its time to pursuit of the arts and other forms of self-fulfillment.13 It apparently works. A website posting in November 2016 regretfully announces that there are no openings for new members at this time, but that applications for the waiting list are accepted.14 No such success attends most other accounts of possible communities. For a more recent example (1975), Ernest Callenbach brought out Ecotopia, a fantasy of a similar visit by a skeptical reporter (William Weston) to an ideal community, oriented toward environmental preservation, created when the breakup of the United States in some imagined future left the states of Washington and Oregon,  As a matter of fact, the Goodmans made a start at the agricultural city, in chapter 6 of Communitas; unable to situate the farms in the city, they established a middle ground, surrounding working farms with city workers houses, and requiring all children to spend a lot of their time working on the farm. I borrow some of their ideas for Chapter 7, below. See Communitas, op.cit., Chapter 6, esp. pp. 166–168. 12  B.  F. Skinner, Walden Two, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2005. Originally published 1948. 13  See Kathleen (Kat) Kinkade, A Walden Two Experiment: The First Five Years of Twin Oaks Community, NY: William Morrow, Inc., 1974. Kat Kinkade, “Is It Utopia Yet?: An Insider’s View of Twin Oaks Community in Its Twenty-Sixth Year” Twin Oaks Publishing; 2nd edition (August 1994). 14  www.twinoaks.org, accessed January 3, 2017. 11

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along with the northern part of California, united into a new separate country.15 Interestingly, the first system that Weston is introduced to, in this account, is the provision for disposing of human sewage: it is recycled, along with food waste and animal manure, into fertilizer for the crops. By the time Weston gets there, all agriculture is organic. He spends much of his visit trying to expose faults in the Ecotopian systems—which must have seemed fairly radical in 1975, when the book was first published—but ends up falling in love with the place, the same outcome as that for the scholarly Professor Burris in Walden Two. There’s no evidence anyone ever tried to put Ecotopia into practice. The optimism of Skinner and Callenbach is exceptional. After the flowering of visions of possible futures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for the most part the mood turned sour; possibly World War I taught humility and a more critical perspective on utopian dreams. From utopias, the literature turned to “dystopias”—significantly, portraits of societies which had been designed on the utopian plan, but whose efforts to enforce collectivist rules had made their citizens’ lives a living hell. The 1930s brought us Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World16 (in which agriculture is relegated to the lowest classes and the furthest places—like Indian reservations), and Ayn Rand’s Anthem,17 both praising individual rebellion against even the best collectives; the 1940s gave us George Orwell’s classics, Animal Farm (which has very little to do with farming and much to do with the politics of betrayal), and 1984 (a description of the utterly oppressive society, with all the technological possibilities that had been revealed by the Third Reich).18 That turn of the tradition is not dead: 2017 brought forth the publication of William Murray’s Utopian Road to Hell: Enslaving America and the World with Central Planning.19 Yet the vision of the utopian agricultural community lives on, presenting itself primarily as the initiative to create ideal farms of one form or another—farms whose purposes turn around the production of food, but in echoes of Chap. 4 above, go on to include preservation of the ecosystem (with a fundamental commitment to organic farming), the education of children, especially in the production of their food, involvement of as many adults as possible in projects of healthy living, and research into the possibilities of producing more and better food for those with limited access to food. One of them, in the neighborhood of Burlington, VT, we

15  Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston, Berkeley, CA: Banyan Tree books, 2004. First published in 1975. 16  Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, originally published in 1932; New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2006. 17  Ayn Rand, Anthem, originally published in 1937. New York: Mockingbird classics Publishing, 2015. 18  Animal Farm was first published in 1945, 1984 in 1949. There’s an edition containing both these classics, with an introduction by Christopher Hitchens, Orlando, FL: Harcourt Books, 2003. 19  William J. Murray, The Utopian Road to Hell: Enslaving America and the World with Central Planning, Washington, DC: WND Books, 2016. For utopian literature generally, see The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, ed. Gregory Claeys, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2010.

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­ entioned in Chap. 3—Shelburne Farms, an educational farm supported by a comm bination of private and charitable money. (A similar example might be Stone Barns, in Westchester County of New  York.) Such farms thrive in a friendly and wellordered larger community, including nearby cities, but impact urban agriculture only tangentially. An interesting example of attempts to create a new institute, part farm, part engineering laboratory, in very hostile circumstances, is Gaviotas, a commune on the plains of Colombia, South America.20 It has at its heart an organic farm but set itself the task of gathering scientists and engineers from the rest of the country, to develop labor-saving and energy-saving devices that could be applied throughout the developing world. (Example: a community water pump that is operated by the children’s playground seesaw.) It survives, but very few of its objectives were accomplished; caught in the vise of guerrillas (the FARC), government soldiers of legendary cruelty, and the private militias of the drug lords settled in the region, the community found it difficult to retain staff or funding, and even more difficult to spread the word and use of their many inventions. The community branched out with attempts to establish small farming enterprises in Bogota, the capital city, but they failed, due to the political situation; Gaviotas is a reminder of the political and moral infrastructure presupposed by most utopian projections. Can the best ideas from utopian Garden City speculation bond to the conclusions of Chap. 4 to teach us how to create the working urban farm? If utopian thinking does nothing else, it raises the possibility of productive directions that existing communities might take. Let’s do a bit of utopian thinking on our own, starting from where we left off. By this point the role of a local farm or garden in forming neighbors into a community should be familiar; we saw it happening in the opening chapters, and brought that role to the foreground in Chap. 4. The role emerges from the daily needs of a farm: tasks (weeding, watering, harvesting) have to be done or the farm fails; supplies (seed, tools, bags and buckets) have to be purchased or the work cannot go forward; and both tasks and purchases have to be arranged cooperatively, for they exceed the resources of any individual. The neighbors have to work together. The extent and intensity of the cooperative work is increased as the community takes on the additional tasks of preparing and preserving the food they harvest, possibly opening a small coffeehouse/restaurant to serve that food and provide a gathering place for the community. As a capstone to working together, most of the working gardens also incorporated the practice of playing together, punctuating the season with periodic celebrations—potlucks and anniversaries, with lots of homegrown music. Our utopian community, a supportive gathering of local citizens who are aware of each other’s capabilities and needs, can be sharpened to a point to accomplish political tasks; that direction will be pursued below. For present purposes, the role of the community itself in the lives of its participants deserves some consideration.

 Alan Weisman, Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent The World, White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publications, 1998.

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(The first observation to bring to the front is that the search for the small supportive community, incorporating all members in work and play, is very old.) Start with the children.

Raising the Children Attempts to start community gardens seem always to yield the observation that children happily turn up to see what’s going on and can easily be recruited to help out— by someone who knows how to work with children of various ages. This stage of community engagement is one of several which will require the hiring of a professional, even if the professional happens to be one of the neighbors who turns out to have the requisite skills of engaging children of many ages to take part in a common activity. It has to be fun for the children, and not everyone has the ability to make it so. Professional expertise deserves compensation, and if the enterprise is to be sustainable, volunteers should not be significantly burdened with skilled work. In a neighborhood where there are many children, the farm should find itself functioning as a day care establishment, a public school, and a summer (and after-school) camp; recruiting teachers and counselors should be the first job the community undertakes. First, as a day care establishment: we know that day care expenses for pre-­ schoolers are outrunning parental ability to pay, especially for the increasing number of families where both parents must work to secure sufficient income, just as college expenses are outrunning the students’ ability to pay. Of all places to entertain and educate pre-schoolers, gardens may be the best—the children get outside playtime and an introduction to the sources of their food and are fed from the yield of fresh produce. There are limits to this practice: a spacious indoor location must be available for naps, games, and shelter from the rain and cold, but as a community alternative to exorbitantly expensive private arrangements for day care, its advantages are significant. Among those advantages are the retention of family and neighborhood connections: the pre-school garden is near the home, and the toddlers’ older brothers and sisters join them in the garden after school and on weekends. Second, as an afterschool and weekend school for older children: garden work is not every schoolchild’s favorite activity, but it is a marvelously healthy alternative to their preferred video games. A certain amount of daily work can be requested of every schoolchild, enforced by the family on the promise of a share of the produce at the end of the season. Beyond the work, the farm itself is an excellent school. Whether or not they intend to, children will learn where their food comes from and how much work it takes to get it to the table; they will learn food-handling skills in the preparation and preservation of the garden’s produce, useful in career directions later in their lives, and they will absorb a good deal of knowledge about nutrition and health, soil and plant growth, in the process. If the farm participates in, or runs, a farmers’ market and/or a restaurant, a rudimentary education in business is included.

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The community farm melds seamlessly with a far better school system than we have going today. We know, theoretically, that most learning takes place between birth and 3 years of age, but right now most of us have no way to put that knowledge to any use. The very wealthy, of course, can hire the crew of professionals that would be needed for really good early education, even for only one child, but the rest of us face serious problems. We know, with the experience of the Romanian orphans behind us, that infants whose physical needs alone are met, adequately fed and diapered, but otherwise given no companionship or stimulation at all, are very badly impaired by the time we require children to be in school, 5 or 6 years old. We need a setting for our infants that will provide them with lots of love and stimulation to grow their brains. A better school system would enroll children to start the learning process at 6  weeks, rather than 6  years, or absolutely as soon as the child’s health permitted it. The farm itself can serve as the neighborhood public school, free and available for all. As a school for all children in the area, it satisfies the definition of a public school. If an existing bureaucracy makes it impossible for a new farm school to be a “public” school, a representation can be made to the state or province that the adults engaged at the farm are perfectly capable of educating the children, at least at the elementary school level, and the state or province will issue a license to “home-­ school” the children, an increasingly popular option in the United States. With the outbuildings required for the farm (and canning facility, and restaurant) already built, a separate “school building” may not be necessary. Space not needed during the day (the restaurant, for instance) can be used for an educational program that starts with the earliest child care and continues through the elementary level (probably through age seven or eight), with areas of the facility divided for infant care, toddler explorations, and recognizable schoolrooms for the older children. Here is where the urban setting creates advantages: all over Vermont, right now, rural schools are closing or being merged with distant schools, for lack of funds to keep them going for just a few students. In the city, there is sufficient population density to make a full elementary facility possible. The school would be a combination day care, nursery school, and primary school up to about third grade; it would be small (five or six rooms spread across the farm buildings, perhaps) and serve a relatively small number of students, all from the immediate neighborhood of the farm. The children of a single family could stay together, instead of being scattered through several facilities in the town. The mother or other caregiver of the infant could pay or stay: if she works for a living, she will have to pay for child care somehow, and whatever her other involvement in the farm, a publicly provided facility will probably be as inexpensive as she could hope for. If she does not hold a job outside the home, she need pay nothing, but will stay through the day to help take care of the children. The pay-or-stay option is particularly valuable in neighborhoods of families with very low incomes, where first-time mothers are often on their own, with little experience of child care, and can profit from learning from the other mothers and professionals that staff the program. The stay at the school will be an opportunity for the professionals to teach mothering skills—

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including, with the farm as part of the curriculum, food choices and food ­preparation for the family. Best yet, the mother gets to stay with her child all day, in a setting providing stimulation and skilled care for the child. How will the school be paid for? For the youngest children, the money contributed by the working families will help, but will probably not cover all the salaries needed. A best-case scenario has the city fully supporting the facility, from child care starting at 6 weeks of age through the transition to a regional school for the teenagers—in short, as a public school. The schools of Burlington described in chapter three may provide a model: Public money from the city will provide the basic support for the primary school, parents will chip in for special projects related to farm or school, and alert grant writers in the principal’s office will seek out sources of non-profit funds. This triple partnership may be our best model for creating the farm city. The resulting school may well be the envy of the region: teaching reading and writing, math and science, but also stimulating creativity in the search for community projects and the uses of expanding gardens, while giving the children a full education in the sources of food, the essentials of nutrition, and the value of hard work at necessary tasks. (History and social science can start from the farm and branch out to the city as a whole and the surrounding region.) Possibly of equal importance is the family orientation of the school: the children of each family stay together through their primary years, learning to care for the babies and helping to teach the younger children in the process. Since the school is not divided artificially into “grades,” students can master skills at their own pace, as they become capable and interested, guided and encouraged by the children a little older or further along, and not judged inadequate if they take a little longer to master the work than some of the others. The major advantage of such a school program for infants and young children is that it keeps them together with their families, in their neighborhoods, actively learning, older children helping the younger children (which turns out to be the best way to teach the older children), and it is impossible for any of them to get lost and ignored by the system in the vast labyrinths of concrete block that now constitute our public school system. In this setting, children can be taught to be sensitive, kind, and considerate of the varying needs of children of several ages and abilities. The expense will not be great; we need professionals for the youngest children, and primary school education specialists for the older ones, but the mothers who stay through the day can be trained to take on much of the work—changing diapers, reading to the toddlers, playing games or helping with lessons. There should be no need to build new schools; existent buildings can be refitted to accommodate these small collections of students using only readily available supplies and contributed toys. There is no hard cutoff for finishing primary school and moving on to the next level. When the child is bored by every activity in the small school, and has mastered the basic skills of reading, writing, arithmetic, and programming an I-Pad, he or she will head out to the next level, tentatively called the Explorer level. The family-oriented garden is left behind as the child’s horizon broadens. Here there would be separate buildings, laboratories, larger classes, field trips, more rigorous

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standardized tests—but no grading by age. The student’s abilities and interests will determine in what group he is put. The point is that the students at this level, ranging from about age eight to the onset of puberty, are learning how to tackle real problems, theoretical (does anyone still learn arithmetic?) and practical. The home farm, of course, can supply an ample number of problems to be solved, while a larger city school amplifies earlier lessons with training in logic, science, careful procedure, and responsibility. In the larger city schools, students will also meet a more rigorous math, literature, history and the challenges of global thinking. Intellectually challenged students can stay in the primary setting, if they want, learning to help out with the maintenance tasks as they get older. Children change at puberty, and the educational system should take that into account. This is not a treatise on general education; there are enough of those to satisfy every preference. We cannot say at this time even whether the education of the future will include books—or homework. It would seem that young adolescents should spend as little time in a classroom as possible and as much time in sports and outdoor activity as possible. In later adolescence they can divide into the standard two tracks, academic (aimed at college, graduate school, and careers requiring intellectually challenging knowledge) and applied or technical, paired with apprenticeships in regional trades. This is hardly a socio-economic class division: in recent year, it seems to be the case that the “blue-collar” tradesmen can make as much as, and sometimes more than, traditional professionals, factoring in the time and expense of professional education. The important part of the educational system is that it is flexible and adjusts to the growth and development of the individual student. There is no reason why high schools that specialize in science, art, or the natural environment, which seem to be successful in preparing students to do marvelous things, should not continue. Possibly the community farm will be so successful in inspiring some of the students that they will choose apprenticeships in farming and spend the rest of their lives contributing to the health of the world. Instead of judging students by their ability, or lack of it, to fit into a grade-specific mold (and pass a variety of grade-specific tests), the system will try to teach all students to take responsibility for their own education and career work, starting in primary school and going on as far as their talent and desire will take them. School is compulsory, but the farm school is no more compulsory than the others. The alternatives to public education that exist today will be available to parents under the farm-centered system. If a mother has the resources, and the desire, to stay at home and raise her children there, the original “home schooling” is certainly available for as long as the family qualifies for it. If a family prefers a religious education for their children, and the churches are willing to qualify to provide one, there is no objection to that choice. But the advantages of the farm’s school should be made known to all the parents; it solves many problems at once. The farm should also sponsor a summer camp: Successful community farms have discovered that setting themselves up as a day camp for children of various ages is not only a natural extension of the after-school and weekend activities of the school year, but by attracting families from outside the neighborhood, it ­supplements

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the income from the farm (and helps pay for the professionals involved). The camp can focus part of each day on the activities of the farm, while conducting field trips and normal camp activities for the balance of the time. One function of the camp might be to show parents from outside the neighborhood the beauties of a community farm and encourage them to start one of their own.

Bringing Everyone Else into the Garden Where children go, parents will follow; parents, however, often work for a living in settings far from the farm. Their active participation cannot be counted on during the work week at least. The running of the community farm must be organized so that these weekend participants can have an active part in the planning and administration of the farm; this is one group that the farm cannot afford to cut out of the conversation. The parents’ age group is exactly where we expect executive talent and business experience to be found, and their interest can be expected from the involvement of their children. (That’s why community engagement starts with the children.) Grandparents also are a welcome addition to the farm activity: retirees sometimes have time on their hands, and a variety of experience (often with gardening) to add to the mix. Grandparents often have physical limits, however. They tire, and must work in short shifts; bending, kneeling, squatting, part and parcel of normal garden work, may be difficult or impossible. But the benefits of participation in the farm outweigh the difficulties to the elderly; for retirees, often widowed, whose children are scattered, the major dangers to life and health come as much from the psychological distress of isolation as from the physical frailty of old age. It is worth the effort to build raised beds on the farm, to accommodate the needs of the old and arthritic, just to keep them involved. These beds, simply constructed from scrap wood as a weekend’s project, will also serve the needs of any physically handicapped residents who want to participate in the work of the farm.

Creating Jobs After the farm is established and successful, it can turn its attention to larger social problems. One of the more serious problems afflicting the cities is finding occupation for the teenagers. Teens crave independence, which in this country means money, but part-time jobs are hard to come by, even for those old enough to be legally hired. Agricultural work of any kind is ideal for teenagers, or indeed for any inexperienced workforce: the tasks vary from dead simple to very complex, and it is clear how to progress from one to another; they are easily understood, both in performance and effect, and are clearly necessary, unlike the make-work often suggested to keep teens busy; they involve physical labor, easier for young bodies to

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perform; and the product of the work is immediately observable. It is essential that the work be paid, not only to provide the teenagers with cash to spend, but to show respect and recognition for their contribution to the community. The farm’s role in the creation of jobs will be central to the community. Adolescents are not the only members seeking paid work with few marketable skills. Our national habit of locking even minor offenders away in prisons devoid of rehabilitation programs has resulted in a substantial population of ex-offenders, released from prison, after years of learning very little (except how to commit more crimes), older than most entering the job market, and further handicapped by the stigma of prison. They are in desperate need of fulfilling work, the dignity of useful participation in common projects, and the companionship of a community. All these the farm can provide. In addition to these populations, there are those in recovery from addictions that have cut short their preparation for full lives of work and family. They need community support for their continuing recovery, and in the process they need what all others need: work, respect, and a source of food and housing. Not all urban farms can provide housing for their workers, but all of them should aspire to, even if only for those in transition—like ex-offenders and recovering addicts.

Health Care for the Community If the farm is to center a complete community, ideally it should have a health-care facility as part of it. One way to do it is to have the primary school (6 weeks to about 8 years) attached to a health care center, about the same size, modeled on the walk­in clinic, or “urgent care” facility found on corners or in strip malls all over the country. The center would be the place of first resort for all and any ailments in the neighborhood, for residents of all ages; it would also be the infant and child care location for the school. Periodic physical examinations, especially in the early years, immunizations, any corrective medications that a baby might need, could be provided in the single location of the school/wellness center. Under current arrangements, if a baby is due for an examination, someone has to leave work or home to take the child to a clinic which may be some distance away, with serious inconvenience to the child’s learning life and the parents’ work life; under a reformed school system, all exams and medications will be handled by the same staff that has charge of the children all day anyway, facilitating observation and communication. The health care system follows the same flexible pattern. The heart of it is the local clinic, specific to each neighborhood, where all the children receive their examinations and shots, and where all residents of the area go when they feel sick or get hurt. The clinic, run by the town’s public health system, is open 24 h a day, staffed by professionals: each clinic is run by a nurse practitioner, staffed by physician’s assistants and nurses’ aides, with a physician available, on site or on call, most of the day. It is perfectly adequate to handle most of the ailments of the neighborhood, indeed most of the ailments that are presently brought to the Emergency Departments of even our largest research hospitals. Since they are staffed 24 h, they

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will maintain infirmaries for temporary stay, for observation or treatment. The clinics are anchored by a public community hospital, which takes all cases that the clinic cannot handle, and will take care of all broken bones, childbirth, chronic illnesses, and any illness that might be life-threatening. It is anticipated that very few medical problems in the community will require midnight helicopter rides to the huge research hospitals that dominate the medical scene, although that will certainly be possible. Large institutions are not conducive to good care or good education. Even terminal cases of cancer can best be treated near home, where family can visit. The health care system will be completed with a Visiting Nurse service to take care of the homebound, hospice facilities for dying patients who cannot be cared for at home, rehabilitation centers for those requiring help recovering from injuries or substance addiction, and a variety of senior centers to help, along with the farm, to end the isolation of the elderly. Our utopian urban farm has about half to three-quarters of an acre actual farmland; it may have greenhouses, like Will Allen’s Milwaukee farm, or high tunnels to extend the season; it has facilities for processing food from field to final product (the product to vary with the region and the skills of the farmers), and a restaurant/coffee house for gatherings. All of this is possible. Some of it is implementable immediately. All of it is worth keeping in consideration.

Saving the Broken City: Sole Food Street Farms After a trip through utopia, it is time to return to the actual present very non-utopian practice of current farms. Can an urban farm address the worst problems of the worst places in the city—and still remain in business? Michael Ableman attempts to do just that, managing Sole Food Street Farms in downtown Vancouver, Canada. In his engaging account of the origins and operations of the enterprise, Street Farm: Growing Food, Jobs and Hope on the Urban Frontier21 Ableman describes the farms and the mission: Sole Food Street Farms [is] a network of four urban farms located on five acres of reclaimed land throughout downtown Vancouver. We produce over twenty-five tons of fresh produce per year, including tree fruit from a large urban orchard, supply more than thirty area restaurants, sell at five Vancouver farmers markets, and operate a community supported agriculture [CSA] program. We also donate up to $20,000 of produce per year to community kitchens and provide jobs to twenty-five people. Central to our vision from the beginning has been a commitment to building a community with and for the people we’ve hired and trained—among them the poor and homeless, the drug-addicted and mentally ill—and the story of the farm is as much about the farmers I’ve come to work with as it is the food we’ve produced together.22

 Michael Ableman, Street Farm: Growing Food, Jobs and Hope on the Urban Frontier, White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2016. 22  Ibid. pp. xi–xii. 21

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Ableman, who had run his family’s farm in the country for 40 years, started the city farm at the invitation of several NGOs who had been working to combat inner-city problems. It was important to set the enterprise in the midst of them, so he ended up …smack in the middle of one of the most infamous neighborhoods in the world, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, the Low Track, ground zero, home of the term skid row. Ours is the poorest postal code in the country and holds the dubious distinction of having the highest rates of HIV and hepatitis C per capita in North America. It is also home to one of the continent’s highest concentrations of open prostitution.23

Drugs define the neighborhood more than anything else; crack, powdered cocaine, and heroin are readily available and deadly; the Downtown Eastside claims more drug-related deaths than anywhere else on the continent. In this context, Ableman and his partner, Seann Dory, set out to save the city, or at least a very small part of it, by employing and empowering individuals from that district, giving them agricultural training beyond the immediate job, including them in a supportive community, and helping them fight their demons—drug addiction, alcoholism, chronic mental health problems, homelessness and isolation. The farm had to be accessible and visible in the neighborhood: “We wanted the world to know that people from this neighborhood, those who were viewed as low-life losers, could create something beautiful and productive; that they could eat from it, feed others, and get a paycheck from its abundance; and that it could sustain itself for more than a few days or weeks or months or years.”24 The first year’s growth on the Downtown Eastside parking lot was successful; the farm supplied good greens to restaurants, along with radishes, tomatoes and peppers. That was important to the farmers, even more so to the donors and sponsors; the farm would continue. Like most urban farming exercises, Sole Food Urban Farms had to negotiate bureaucracies that had no experience with farming, nor any desire to acquire that experience. Spring was the worst time for bureaucracy, when Sole Food Farm workers had to try to explain to desk-workers why permits to go forward could not wait just a few more months while the plant starts went unplanted.25 They had to seek shelter under a variety of licensed charitable organizations, then, braving the complications, to form their own. Leasing land in the city to grow their raised-beds farms was another headache; in Vancouver, as in most cities, land was increasingly valuable, and landlords did not want any barriers to million-dollar sales. Ableman figured out how to move the farms on short notice, using rented cranes and a flatbed truck to lift and transport the raised beds to other locations; he could assure landowners that beyond the beautification and tax advantages he could bring to their sites, he could vacate the site on short notice. Money would remain a problem. They soon discovered that even in successful growing years, their combined expenditures on employment and other projects would cost about a quarter of

 Ibid. p. 1.  Ibid. p. 5. 25  Ibid. p. 53. 23 24

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a million dollars more than the food would pay for; they became skilled fundraisers. (Eventually they found a millionaire who agreed to help.) By right, they should have been able to ask the government for compensation for their services. A team from the MBA program at the local university “determined that for every dollar Sole Food spent on employing people who are ‘hard to employ,’ there was a $1.70 combined savings to the prison and legal system, the health care system, the social assistance networks, and the environment through carbon sequestration [from the green plants] and the energy and transportation benefits that our ṻber-local farming system provided.”26 To illustrate “hard to employ,” most of the stories in Street Farm are about the people that come to the farm to work: Kenny, with his history of drug addiction and homelessness, Donna, with a history of crack addiction but with a talent for cranking out “the most beautiful bunches of radishes,” Rob, very bright, with a diagnosis of bipolar and borderline personality disorder, who plunged into learning all he could about farming and even undertook some management tasks before his demons made it impossible to continue, Cam, a down-and-out “First Nation refugee,” Sandra (or “Seven,”) bipolar, psychotic and addicted (still using) to crystal meth, and Alain, surviving major physical challenges and addiction to the drugs he took to combat them, raising a son with fetal alcohol syndrome. Over and over, Ableman insists that growing food is only one part of their major mission, growing people. Sole Food Farm is, as Alain pointed out, “a place to go, somewhere to start over.”27 Nova arrived after a long spell living on the street; she was the employee who first called the crew a “farmily,” recognizing it as the first “family” she (and several of the others) had ever had. (There were “easy to employ” allies too, Kira, a city planner for Vancouver, and Kelsey, who came on board to do their marketing.) It is not always easy to balance the social agenda with the agricultural one: “In many ways, our two primary goals—to provide meaningful employment to individuals who have challenges and to create a credible model of production urban agriculture—rub up against each other and can be contradictory.”28 Another of their key employees, Lissa from Dartmouth, assumed the post of director of operations and found herself in charge of keeping that balance—how much can really be expected of the physically and emotionally challenged staff? On the other hand, how best can that staff be kept focused on the real work of growing food, and away from ingrained tendencies to indulge their neediness? Sole Food Farm suffers from the natural hazards of its mission: staff lifted so recently out of addiction and chaos don’t show up at work or events or show up drunk (particularly inconvenient when the event is an ambitious fundraiser aimed at city officials and generous donors).29 And then there is theft.

 Ibid. p. 27.  Ibid, p. 107. 28  Ibid. p. 121. 29  Ibid. p. 151. 26 27

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Four scales, five new market tents, backpacks, a circular saw, six drills, the farmers market cashbox, a Sawzall, jugs of sanitizers from the portable toilets (to drink because they contain alcohol), clothing, boots, screws, nails, bolts, wheelbarrows, bicycles, aluminum greenhouse parts, computers, live electrical wiring, an entire truck-cooling system, and more have been stolen from our farms.30

“The skill required to pull off some of these heists is impressive,” Ableman comments. The early myth, that residents would not rob an enterprise open to the neighborhood and clearly for their benefit, disappears in the face of addiction: “when someone is dopesick or needs a fix he’ll do whatever is necessary.” Someone managed to carve a hole in one of their shipping containers—14-gauge welded corrugated steel—large enough to steal the Sawzall. Others managed to disappear with all the aluminum stripping needed to finish the high tunnels. Eventually Ableman had to hire a night watchman, Mike, who loved gardening and would weed and water during his shift. All told, is Sole Food Farm a success? “Success is difficult to measure in this work,” Ableman observes, and his instincts as a farmer—produce as much food as profitably as possible—are often at war with the mission of his farm. “But how do you value a life reanimated with new purpose, a person given hope, an abused and abandoned piece of land made abundant and nutritious?”31 Ableman and his associates went into the work to see if the provision of meaningful—indeed, lifegiving— work could help those apparently lost to society to recover from their addictions, engage with others in a productive community, and finally recover their family—in a “farmily.” It would seem that it can.

Fundamentals What does a city need? Two answers to the question precede any others: First, no city needs a complete plan—most of its space should be open to the residents to shape once some basic requirements are satisfied. Second, any cities worth thinking about are already there, the location dictated by patterns of cultural and economic development that precede planning; any planning will have to start from an existing population and its infrastructure. The first need, then, is to make sure that the city’s infrastructure can do what it has to do for people to survive—provide security for its citizens, protection from thieves and terrorists and fire, a physical infrastructure to support heat and ventilation for its buildings, potable water and electricity, some sort of public transportation, some way of disposing of the city’s mountains and rivers of waste, trucks to keep the streets clean in summer and plowed in winter, and the manpower in municipal services to make sure all these are in place, enforced, and maintained. None of these necessarily entail the provision of food. For

30 31

 Ibid. p. 181.  Ibid. p. 200.

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10,000 years we have essentially counted on ready supply and infinitely powerful demand to make sure that adequate food is available in the city. It doesn’t always work. Sometimes the provision of food is problematic (see “food desert,” above), and the field of urban agriculture, as part of the general field of urban planning, addresses that problem directly. For starters, any city planning compatible with urban agriculture must include the city farms. There is no accepted protocol for determining the number, type or location of farms in the city; all we can say for sure is that they will have to be small, organic, and open to the public (for the sake of public acceptance alone). One of the more plausible descriptions of the agriculture appropriate to the city follows the Cuban model: individuals and families are encouraged to raise vegetables in small backyard plots or on balconies and porches (think tomatoes), primarily for their own consumption, on the pattern of the Havana patios. A small neighborhood patio-­ farmer’s market will distribute the excess, and adjustments to local property taxes should be enough to provide motivation. A surprising amount of vegetables can be supplied to the city this way. Then, each neighborhood will surround a farm, half an acre to an acre, run as a community garden, each community to decide collectively what to plant and how to allot the work of farming (from universal participation and celebration, to hiring a professional farmer to do most of the work, as they choose), on the pattern of the Havana parcelas; municipal grants should be available to get these gardens started, and again, mini-farmer’s markets established as outlets for the produce. Then, around the outside of the city, we should find several eight to ten acre organic farms (historically “truck farms”), possibly with orchards, with greenhouses and high tunnels to extend the growing season, bringing fresh vegetables into the center city on a regular basis, on the pattern of the Cuban organiponicos; most of their produce will be consumed by the city, and the farms will play an active role in educating the city’s children (perhaps providing the summer camps for them) and employing the city’s adolescents.32 As with the Cuban models, animals can be included in the pattern: rabbits, chickens and bees can be kept in the city, possibly by individuals and certainly on the neighborhood farms; dairy and beef cattle (along with pigs, sheep and goats) can be kept on the truck farms on the city’s edge. Schools and hospitals, and some private businesses, can be encouraged to permit and support their own staff and students to grow their own gardens on institutional grounds for their own families. Prisons, too, have had some success in growing fresh vegetables for their cafeterias. More important than the actual farms and gardens themselves are the networks that integrate them into the whole life of the city. The most obvious network is economic. The farms have to support themselves, by sale of their produce—primarily to the residents of the neighborhood that grew the produce, but secondarily to the rest of the city. (The educational function, as at present, will have public support.) The city infrastructure can be designed from the beginning to place farmers’ m ­ arkets

 A new book describes the possibilities: Josh Volk, Compact Farms: 15 Proven Plans for Market Farms on 5 Acres or Less, North Adams, MA: Storey Publishing, 2017.

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by the neighborhood farms, to market the surplus from each garden; such an arrangement would permit the farms to specialize in their favorite crops (compatible with sustainability), sell some of them, and use the income to finance the next year’s planting. Hard by the farmers’ market the neighborhood can establish processing facilities to prepare and store food, and a restaurant, to give the local chefs a chance to show what they can do with fresh organic vegetables (and an occasional chicken stir-fry or rabbit stew); the restaurant can also be a profit center for the neighborhood. Proximity to restaurants and high-density residential complexes permits agricultural enterprises that would have difficulty prospering in rural areas. As described above in the discussion of Milwaukee, Will Allen’s Growing Power initiative contains aquaponics (or hydroponics), and maintains greenhouses which combine the cultivation of fresh herbs and fish, tilapia and perch, the droppings from the fish fertilizing the plants. The fish and herbs can be delivered absolutely fresh each day from the greenhouses and are prized by local restaurants. What is waste from the enterprise (and other activities on their urban farms) goes into the compost bins; heat from the compost keeps the greenhouses warm in the winter. The city’s responsibility is to ensure that its infrastructure is adequate to the demands of the farms; it must supply water for irrigation as necessary and handle the disposal of wastes. Waste disposal is the area where urban farming makes possibly its greatest contribution to city life: Every neighborhood will have its own recycling facility, on its own terms as long as no waste leaves the neighborhood (without compensation for its destination). They can devote acreage to a landfill, or carefully sort all trash to make sure as little as possible ends up as waste. Above all, they can retain all organic waste to contribute to the neighborhood compost bins that fertilize the farm. Organic waste includes all the refuse from the gardens (weeds, stubble at the end of the season), all the discarded vegetables not sold at the farmers’ market, all the food waste from the restaurant, all the animal droppings from the rabbits and chickens (and on the periurban farms, the livestock), all leftover food discarded from the residences, and all human fecal waste also (properly sterilized). Human feces, “night soil,” has traditionally been used as fertilizer for farm fields but now generally disappears down the sewer into the lake (or ocean); there is no reason for this loss of nutrients, and no danger in adding them to the compost. (Recall that this system was the first pointed out to the skeptical reporter in Ernest Callenbach’s 1975 novel, Ecotopia.) This policy may take some explaining to the neighbors, but as Philip Ackerman-Leist points out, the matter is simplicity itself: we have the technology to make biodigesters that will remove all pathogens and odorous compounds, yielding biogas for cooking and heating and biosolids for fertilizer.33 The two guiding principles for the farm city, actually two parts of the same principle, are transparency and education. The entire food system is open to the public for examination: the farms for all 12 months, from seed to harvest, to enrichment of the soil before the next planting; the arrangements for hiring, supervising, and 33  Ackerman-Leist, Philip, Rebuilding the Foodshed: How to Create Local, Sustainable, and Secure Food Systems, White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2013, pp. 88–95. Enjoy the extended quote from Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables on pp. 87–88.

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rewarding workers and volunteers; the distribution of the produce, to workers, institutions, food shelves for the poor, farmers’ markets, and of course the restaurant; the processing and preserving of the food; the cooking and serving; and finally the cleaning up and collecting the remains for the compost. It is all open, and it all, with few exceptions, invites neighborhood participation. The educational project is founded on the whole system: the fundamental lesson, for the schoolchildren and for everyone else, is that there is one food system, soil to soil, that nourishes us on its way around, and that we are part of that system and responsible for it. After that, the first responsibility of the educational arm of the agricultural city is to turn the entire process into a classroom, teaching above all the schoolchildren, where food comes from and what makes it good for them (as opposed to the highly processed convenience meals, heavy with fat and sugar); what foods arrive in what season, and how we can celebrate the seasons of food; how we can preserve food for the seasons when it will not grow; how to prepare the food. There is no reason why a simple cooking school (“culinary institute,” for the advanced students) cannot be attached to the restaurant, ideally in between the restaurant and the farmers’ market; as an after-school activity, it is wonderful training for students, teaching them to raise their own children in patterns more healthy than those to which Americans are accustomed, and preparing them for food system careers which pay considerably better than the average fast-food job. Educators seem to agree that to the extent that career preparation is an objective of education, an “internship,” a formal or informal exposure to the practices of the trade to which they aspire, is the surest way that adolescents can learn the necessary skills, obtain the kind of work they want, and succeed in that work. From the air, then, the agricultural city, unlike the Garden City of Ebenezer Howard, will not look particularly neat or ordered. It will follow the contours already laid down before it decided to embark on this agricultural project, which it undertook for the sake of the health of its citizens, the provision of excellent food, the enablement and encouragement of community, and the grace of living in natural beauty even while engaging in the work that founded the city to begin with. There will probably be areas of mess and odor in this city, and with all the animals and plants around, there is sure to be interference with the frictionless life of the ideal urban machine. But there will be no food deserts; all neighborhoods will have convenient access not only to wholesome food, but to fresh food that they grew themselves. The people will be healthier, the children will be more helpful (having something real to do with their time), and with the community expectations of active participation with your neighbors, who knows, there may be significantly less danger of homegrown terrorism. I think the Goodmans would be happy there.

Chapter 6

Commercial Farming In (and Around) the City

Not every urban farmer sets out to feed the world, turn a broken neighborhood into a family, or establish a crusading beachhead on the shores of industrial agriculture. Many, in common with farmers in all times and places, just want to make a living, possibly even a profit, by growing and selling food. Farming started out as a business, and certainly can be still. This chapter will take a look at some commercial urban farms, with special attention to the instructions for following in their footsteps. One of the best examples of a for-profit city farm is Curtis Stone’s Green City Acres in Kelowna, B. C., described in his readable The Urban Farmer, published in 2016.1 We will track the philosophy and practice of Green City Acres, then go on to the Brooklyn Grange, an extraordinary enterprise in rooftop farming in the middle of the city, one of whose founders published an account of its founding and operations (also in 2016).2 The chapter finishes up with two periurban farms, Cook’s Garden, in New Lebanon Ohio, just outside Dayton, and Mellowfields Urban Farm outside Lawrence, Kansas.3

1  Curtis Stone, The Urban Farmer: Growing Food for Profit on Leased and Borrowed Land, Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2016. 2  Anastasia Cole Plakias, The Farm on the Roof: What Brooklyn Grange Taught Us about Entrepreneurship, Community, and Growing a Sustainable Business, New York, Penguin, 2016. Further described in Josh Volk, Compact Farms: 15 Proven Plans for Market Farms on 5 Acres or Less, North Adams, MA: Storey Publishers, 2017, pp. 182–191. The foreword, incidentally, is by Michael Ableman. 3  Ibid. pp. 48–61.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. Newton, Urban Agriculture and Community Values, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39244-4_6

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Green City Acres When farms were passed from father to son, all skills for farming were acquired in childhood or not at all, and city folk kept their distance from the problems of the countryside, there was little interest in instructional manuals for agriculture. Times have changed: for many of the reasons cited in this chapter and in Chap. 4 above, farming has taken on the color of an ideal, a haven into which to withdraw as soon as the finances can support it. The hobby farm, intended only to break even, has evolved as a prime retirement activity. These farms tend to be in the countryside, therefore not of primary interest to this work, but the emergence of a population of intelligent and curious citizens who suddenly need to know how to raise alpacas and vegetables has spawned a how-to literature enormously useful to the new urban farmer.4 One of the most recent contributions to this literature, Curtis Stone’s The Urban Farmer, provides a wealth of information for an urban community setting out to feed itself.5 Stone begins with a quick rundown of good reasons to start a farm in the city, recapping much of the material in this work (even citing urban farms in Cuba as a guiding example), presenting an overview of the kinds of farming that might be expected to succeed in the city, then turns to practicalities, with a new (for us) and refreshing emphasis on how to make a go of the enterprise. Many people want to grow vegetables that they like or perhaps because they have some ideology, such as health or environmental benefit, based around them. It’s good to have ideology and an ethical stance on things, but if your ideology makes you go broke, then nobody wins. Don’t abandon your ideology; just keep it in your back pocket and be practical.6

As with any business, the farmers must first determine if there is a market for fresh produce in the city in which they will operate—if so, for what, in what quantity, and at what price. Who will buy the produce? If this question does not have a good enough answer, the enterprise fails from the start. In Stone’s case, that requirement had him scouting farmers’ markets and above all talking to chefs at the local high-end restaurants, since fresh greens, sold immediately for salad, are the most profitable crops to grow. Start out with research, Stone instructs. What local restaurants advertise “fresh” and “local”? A phone call can tell you more about where they get their greens now (you could pretend to be an over-zealous customer, he suggests.) Find out their size, hours, price points; an app like Yelp can be helpful here. Then go visit them, starting with the small ones, where the chef may be the owner. Bring a list of the stuff you 4  Vivian Marino, “Green Acres Is Their Place to Be: Farm living is popular for those looking to stay productive or fulfill a dream,” The New York Times, Sunday, February 12, 2017, Business section (Retiring), BU 3. 5  Curtis Stone, The Urban Farmer: Growing Food for Profit on Leased and Borrowed Land, Gabriola Island, CA: New Society Publishers, 2016. 6  Stone, p. 23.

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grow (or will grow, if this is your initial research), a pad and pencil, and a friendly attitude. In the larger restaurants, the person to talk to may be the Executive Sous-­ Chef; make sure you talk to the person who does the buying. Find out what they’d like, and don’t make promises you can’t keep. Useful hints for expanding your market are added: at the height of summer, many growers may have run through their supplies. If you can find the restaurants they usually supply, you may be able to increase your customer base. Once it’s clear there is a market, and you want to start a farm, find a place to grow. Unlike Ableman, Stone avoids the difficult neighborhoods, as burdened with disadvantages that add to the difficulties of farming (as Ableman documents.) How do you find farmland in the city? The first step in this process is, oddly, to advertise yourself and your soon-to-be farm. Create flyers; print business cards; build a website. Then get started somewhere, anywhere: Maybe it’s your grandmother’s front yard or something like that. The key is to get something started as soon as you can, and that will become a pivot point to other opportunities. Starting something, getting something going and letting people find you is the best way to look for land!7

Land, in short, will come to you. Don’t knock on doors to inquire about the availability of a piece of fertile land; the owners will assume you’re a Jehovah’s Witness, and will be very rude. When selecting a piece of land to lease from among the offers, Stone presents an orderly list of factors to check: Is the landowner someone you can work with? Is the soil clean (test it)? Is it big enough, sunny enough? How bad are the weeds? Is it visible from the street (It should be. Every urban farm is an exercise in public relations)? Does it have a ready supply of water? If it is on an open lot in a dense neighborhood, is there fencing to deter dogs and others from trampling the crops? Don’t buy land; that raises the cost of starting up and could become a burden in the long run. Stone assumes that there is no particular urgency in getting land into production. There was such urgency in Cuba and in Detroit, where the farmers relied at first on repurposed lots. Laws in Cuba opened up unused land for parcelas, community gardens, as it encouraged small patios around individual dwellings. Since Cuba had never been a manufacturing center, the problem of seriously polluted soil did not arise. Detroit’s lots were generally the plots where substantial houses had been, within city limits but not in manufacturing areas; as the houses were abandoned, then demolished, the land stood open for use (or misuse). The small farms and gardens that arose in those lots were one of the better uses. Again, these lots were not brownfields; although in the city, the land had generally been used for small lawns or possibly gardens. In both Havana and Detroit, desperation led to the farms—in Cuba, hunger, in Detroit, abandonment. In Milwaukee, the major initiatives centered on greenhouses. The city greenhouse’s soil is most likely imported; there is a barrier between the growing areas of the greenhouse, arrayed on shelves, and the ground beneath, assumed to be polluted.  Ibid. p. 82.

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The need to import soil adds significantly to the greenhouse farming expense; in Milwaukee, Will Allen already owned acreage outside of town from which he could draw his supply. Once the soil is there, the compost operation maintained by any respectable urban farm (aided by the proximity of restaurants and occasionally grocery stores with a steady supply of organic waste) can refresh that soil, replenishing nutrients lost in the harvest. Stone’s experience centered on taking available lawns, some of them very hard-­ packed from years of neglect, and turning them into farmland. A detailed (and profusely illustrated) chapter describes how to do this.8 But he also built several high tunnels, as space and landowners permitted, including some that make economical use of vertical space, stacking flats of greens on shelves suspended from the structure. When the decision is made to set up the farm on a permanent basis, other practical questions arise. Access to water is a major requirement. Irrigation systems have to be installed; Stone suggest several schemes, with details. For a plot of 1000 square feet, for instance, you will need 3/4″ poly tubing, 100′ roll; (used for) main lines that connect to the sprinklers; (item cost) $28.00; … (total cost) $112.00; Tee, coupling, (used for) connects the main line to the drip lines (item cost) $2.50 each; … (total cost) $10.00; 90″ elbow coupling (used for) on the corners of the plot (item cost) $2.50 each; … (total cost) $12.50; straight ¾″ coupling (used for) connects main lines or severed drip lines (item cost) $2.50 each (total cost) (purchase as needed) ….9

And so on, down to “1/2” threaded poly impact head (used for) the sprinkler (item cost) $10 each … (total cost) $90.00. Total cost for the 1000 square foot area, $579.00. In the book, of course, the whole schema is in a neat table, suitable for photocopying, taking to the hardware store, and posting on the shed door as you assemble the apparatus. The way Stone describes the process, it sounds long and frustrating (a common note among the urban farmers). But, Stone suggests, there’s a certain benefit to the frustration: in the course of carrying out the tasks of finding a site, dealing with landowners and zoning boards, arranging access to enough water to grow the crops, just that length and difficulty constitutes an initial selective screen for perseverance in the beginning agriculturist: the energy and patience the farmer will need to get through the initial hoops predicts those required to make a success of an inherently tiring job. Once set in place, water assured, the farmer must get his crops in the ground. His research among the chefs should have presented a general schedule of crops that will make a profit. Stone’s first advice is to choose crops that will grow quickly all season long, allowing multiple harvests and steady sales. The choice is not to be made by guess or intuition, but on his “crop value rating (CVR) scale.” Assign each crop you want to grow one point (out of five) for each characteristic: (1) shorter days

 Ibid. pp. 107ff.  Stone, p. 129.

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to maturity (DTM); (2) high yield per linear foot of row; (3) higher price per pound, (4) long harvest period (4 month minimum; the obverse of DTM); (5) high demand, low market saturation.10 On these calculations, for Stone, an ideal crop, 5 out of 5, is spinach: Spinach has short days to maturity (45 or less), a high yield per linear foot (1.4 pounds per foot), a higher price per pound ($7 per pound); it has a long overall harvest period (10 months), and it’s a common vegetable that is popular because of its many uses.11

Cherry tomatoes also make the cut, but only with a 3 out of 5, because the yield per foot is lower and the DTM is longer. We have not seen this kind of precise quantitative thinking in our urban farm studies so far; the change is significant. The shed also has to be built, or adapted, as in Stone’s example, from a carport; any other local structure will do. (Barns are not practical for the urban farm.) The central piece of equipment is a cooler, or better yet, several coolers. These receive the produce directly from the trailers or wagons from the field, then hold it after processing until it is taken to market. Medium-sized, walk-in coolers are recommended. There is a whole chapter on tools, listed with the same specificity. Essential tools include: Pitchfork: $40.00; … Stirrup hoe: $60.00; Landscape rake: $50.00; … Harvest bins: $500.00; Harvest knives: $50.00 …

And so on, ultimately including (with optional additions) a walk-behind tractor and a Quick-Cut Greens Harvester, for a total of $1550 to $7050.12 It is advisable to acquire tools second-hand or rent or borrow them; those possibilities account for the difference in the two price estimates. Stone is dogmatic on the use of some of these tools: Proper seeding equipment is a must on a commercial farm. Don’t even try to plant seeds in the ground by hand. Some farmers think that since they are operating at nearly a garden level, they can get away with hand seeding. Please save yourself the wasted hours and buy a seeder!13

Specific instructions are also given for harvesting. Greens (salad and fresh for steaming) are his major crop, and correct harvest technique with a serrated harvest knife (“bunch in the left hand and cut with the right”) is illustrated clearly in a series of color photographs in a section dedicated to step-by-step farming.14 Tools hang or stand, in some neat order, along a wall near the door, convenient for retrieving on the way out to the field. A washing station, hose attached, is essential. Figure 31: Washing station: 34″ wide × 95″ long × 31″ high. Materials: 8′ × 3′ ¼-inch steel mesh; five 2 × 4 × 8s, two 2 × 6 × 8s; 30 mil PVC pool liner (60″ × 100″); 100 × 1.5″″ wood  Ibid p 20.  Ibid. p. 22. 12  Ibid. p. 143. 13  Ibid. p. 145. 14  Ibid. following p. 105. 10 11

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After washing, his greens are dropped into mesh laundry bags (to reduce handling and possible damage), then spun dry (in his case, in a modified second-hand washing machine). Spun greens are then divided into portions, by size or weight, bagged and twist-tied (or elastic banded) and dropped into bins, crates or totes to be returned to the coolers until the trip to the market (or restaurant, or CSA hub). What does the urban farmer need in the way of fencing? Stone does not make a point of farming in unsafe neighborhoods—as a matter of fact, he seems to avoid them. Fencing is only to keep dogs and people from cutting through his plots, and a major concern is its appearance, that it improve the look of the plot.16 The crops have to reach the farmers’ market (or restaurant, or wherever they’re sold). Do not buy a large truck. It will be difficult to maneuver in narrow city streets, and expensive to buy, insure, and maintain. Stone has a small (3-cylinder) truck for larger loads, but for the most part he relies on bicycles: two electric-assist bikes with custom-built trailers (creation of a local welder) transport his crops wherever they need to go, and can even haul the rototiller. Along the way he and his colleagues discovered that the bikes were good advertising to a niche audience: “People still today know us as ‘the bike farmers,’ and we have a very dedicated following of people who firmly believe in what we are doing.”17 The city farmer operating in the northern cities must find ways to extend the growing season beyond the bounds set by nature. Here the city is an ally: the “heat island” effect, mentioned elsewhere as one of the city miseries that green plants can help alleviate, brings city-raised plants to maturity sooner than those raised on the truck farms around the city, giving the urban farmer an advantage in the farmers’ markets. Beyond the heat island, crops rely on the greenhouse effect to grow before and after the warm times: high tunnels give more air and flexibility in working with the crops, but they are expensive, and landowners can get persnickety if they don’t like the way they look. Stone prefers low poly tunnels. The beds must be completely prepared before the plastic goes up, watering will be difficult unless you put in drip irrigation, and you have to watch the weather and be prepared to create openings if a warming spell overheats the plants and causes them to bolt.18 Stone goes on to develop a small consulting business to augment his farm (one of his clients was the Brooklyn Grange, below), but on the whole his business relies on carefully monitored harvests and steady customers. There are other possibilities in the heart of the city, as in what follows.

 Ibid. p. 139.  Ibid. p. 86. There is no index entry for “security.” 17  Stone, p. 156. 18  Ibid. p. 206. 15 16

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The Brooklyn Grange One of the founders of the Brooklyn Grange, Anastasia Plakias, wrote a lively, informative and even inspiring account of its origin and working: The Farm on the Roof takes us from the daydreams of a few successful Wall Street professionals to a working, profitable enterprise thoroughly integrated into its community.19 Its first mover, Ben Flanner, was a Wall Street analyst; as part of a team of analysts, Ben studied companies to identify which areas of their business gave them the greatest bang for their buck. Mostly, he looked for the inefficiencies of a given operation and figured out how to strike the loss leaders—sometimes shaving millions of dollars from a budget in the process—without sacrificing too much of a brand’s identity or integrity.20

The time was 2008, just before the recession; Ben’s job included recommendation to lay off employees to save money. The job paid spectacularly well, but Ben was bored—he spent very long days, on some of his consultancies, plugging data into Excel spreadsheets—and he missed any sense of community at work. So he started reading everything he could find on farming. He met an extraordinary set of collaborators—Chris and Lisa Goode, who did green installations on roofs, Tony Argento, who did film and TV commercial shoots and liked the idea of green roofs as backdrops, and Annie Novak, a farmer who wanted to try farming on the roof. Together they started a small rooftop farm on Eagle Street, where Anastasia Plakias and Gwen Schantz joined them—also Ivy League, prosperous career New Yorkers. They set up gardens around Roberta’s, a trendy Brooklyn restaurant where Plakias worked, acquired infrastructure from a closed brewery, and became productive. Eventually, the group decided to leave Roberta’s and create a farm of their own. The recession was closing in; all of them had been part of the problem and were well aware of it. We found ourselves asking not whether urban agriculture could feed cities of the future— we knew it couldn’t—but, rather, whether an urban agriculture business, which was inherently committed to environmental stewardship and community engagement, could be fiscally sustainable as well…. each of us was driven to dispel the notion that business and greed were intrinsically linked. We were determined to prove there was space for compassion in commerce.21

These are the first appearances of “stewardship,” “community,” and “compassion” in this work. By the end of the book they make much more sense. The friends took off from there, leaving Eagle Street in Annie Novak’s hands and looking for a site for a larger farm. They started with a few advantages: first, they’d spent their professional lives crunching data and filling in spreadsheets, and had kept excellent records of planting and yields in Eagle Street. They knew what their crops would yield, and t­ herefore

 Plakias, op.cit.  Ibid. pp.9–10. 21  Ibid. p. 33. 19 20

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how much they could afford to pay in rent for an attractive roof. Searching for a landlord who could use a little extra money from some small-scale farmers proved fruitless; their first success came with a building owner who realized that a rooftop farm with a veggie farmstand in the lobby would attract the educated high-tech tenants he wanted for the rest of the building. The farm’s first success came, then, not from its carefully cultivated greens or carefully kept spreadsheets but from the fact that it was trendy. That, of course, is how its name came about: Brooklyn was a trendy place to be in 2008, and “grange” was heirloom agricultural. As they put it, “the cultural capital we brought to the table was our real value.”22 That cultural capital also secured them their second roof, in the Brooklyn Navy Yard; its management was primarily interested in the uses of the farm as an educational and community gathering space. A second advantage was their diverse history: among the originators, one had a background in commercial shoots, including weird aerial shots for unusual commercials; the entire enterprise of hiring cranes, flatbed trucks, and an occasional helicopter, baffling to beginners, was second nature to him, and the messy business of getting soil in huge baskets up to the roof was handled as a matter of course (including the usual delays). A third advantage was their continued access to the established folks and organizations that sponsored them in the first place; their first big fundraiser was a party thrown at Roberta’s, and friends and families continued as sources of help and funds. Incidentally, the chief fundraiser at the party was not the ticket sales, but the auction of donated items, another tribute to the value of their contacts. Chefs, waiters, cheesemakers, breweries, even a local motorcycle gang donated their goods and services to the fundraisers. A Kickstarter campaign brought in a satisfying $20,000. Three friendly investors came through with another $25,000. Two friends came through with another $15,000. Then the NYC Department of Environmental Protection came through with a grant for $600,000 to install the green roof on the Brooklyn Navy Yard facility, and suddenly they were in business. The entire process of the actual build—starting in May 2010, craning soil up to the roof of the first garden, gathering the tools, building the beds, transplanting the seedlings, starting to farm—was a nightmare, exhausting the participants and straining every projection. Counseled by experienced roof gardeners that no building permit was really necessary, for example, the group had not applied for one, only to find a Stop Work order plastered all over their building halfway through construction. Again friends and contacts were called out, and the order was rescinded in time to finish the job; their first season on their first roof was under way. Their pre-build calculations made the actual ground work possible, if not easy: While too much planning can be a time suck, the right amount is essential to keeping bedlam at bay. Anticipating your workload and building systems to stay organized in the craziest of months is essential to keeping a business running smoothly. To that end, we calculate and record just about every aspect of our business in Excel: the amount of seed we need to order, the number of seedling trays we should plant of each crop, and the yield we can get from each row into which those seedlings are planted. Even simple things like proper 22

 Ibid. p. 53.

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s­ pacing of each crop is noted and uploaded to a shared drive, accessible to everyone on the farm.23

The important part of the planning is the creation of efficiency. Each input, of space, effort or cost, must be rationed to produce the most output. In planning the crop layout, “We dedicated more space to the crops that had yielded large quantities of high-value vegetables at Eagle Street, and less to those that we knew to be loss leaders: the ones that took more time and more space and yielded a lower average per square foot … So when we planned how much of the farm to dedicate to each type of vegetable, we weighed our salad greens, kale, herbs, and tomatoes—our most profitable crops—more heavily than the summer squash that sprawled out and hogged space, or the carrots that took a leisurely eighty days to reach maturity.”24 Efficiency is often the enemy of the unique, but that cost is part of doing business. You can get excited about new and beautiful ideas, but “if these ideas come at the expense of even 5  min of your time, you’re doing yourself and your nascent business a major disservice.” Time and effort should be strictly counted: Any extra minute it takes to walk from the wash station to the cooler might seem negligible, but when your crew makes that trip thousands of times during a season, often carrying a stack of packed harvest bins loaded with heavy carrots and cucumbers, you realizing you’re hemorrhaging efficiency. Strategically designing shortcuts into a business from the outset means working smarter, not harder.25

Space and time must be economized, and all choices on planting must be done with the final value of the crop in mind. Plakias takes, as an example of the kind of thinking needed on the farm, Ben’s project of growing cucuzza squash in order to please an early customer and friend of the farm. They were pretty, and fun to have in the market stand, but just didn’t make enough to justify the planting. We know exactly how much money those cuccuzzas brought in per square foot because Ben took the time to track their data and create an enterprise budget for them. An enterprise budget is an important bookkeeping practice for farmers. It takes into account the profit and loss for each crop or project individually rather than the farm as a whole…. So rather than just calculating the price per square foot of a given crop, a well-designed enterprise budget also factors in the cost of seed and fertilizer, the value of the labor required to cultivate the crop to maturity, and packaging materials, such as plastic cartons, pint containers, or rubber bands for bunching.26

Farming should be profitable; gathering and crunching reams of data is the only way you will find out if your farming is profitable; so learn how to use QuickBooks and Excel and put your farm on a rational basis. An urban farm must be profitable or it will go out of business. Winter is spreadsheet season, recall. Part of the job of the farmer—any farmer, not just those on the roof—is to go through a painful review of

 Ibid. pp. 109–110.  Ibid.111. 25  Ibid. p. 123. 26  Ibid. pp. 124–125. 23 24

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the season, find out what worked and what did not, and create a more rational model for the season to come. The basics established, the account of the Brooklyn Grange continues with further rationalization of the farm—moving some of the peripheral members of the group, now calling themselves a “farmily,” (a term they seem to have coined independently) into new initiatives to realize efficiencies—and with new enterprises to open up new income streams—like beekeeping, and renting out the farm for commercial photo shoots, weddings and other events, while becoming entrepreneurial green roof installers themselves—opportunities that might not be available except in certain urban settings. The group learned to distinguish bad deals from great opportunities, to acquire partners carefully and to grow the business slowly. “That is how we’ve managed to grow one company on two rooftops into what are arguably three symbiotic businesses: A productive vegetable farm, a venue for private events and public programming, and a designer and builder of urban green spaces.”27 Numbers don’t lie: they would never have made it on vegetable sales alone, and without their diverse backgrounds, the enterprise would not have been manageable. They keep their business sustainable by listening very carefully to what their customers tell them—and their most important customers are from the immediate area, who want to participate, in many different ways, in the work of a neighborhood farm. We started as farmers, and that continues to be the backbone of what we do, but our additional revenue streams—primarily events and design and installation, but also speaking and talent engagements, third-party tours, commercial photo and film shoots—are vital to the health of our business.28

They discovered that their most profitable product—after all of that yield-per-square foot accounting—was the experience of the farm itself. Customers of the farm market, or visitors after a tour of the farm, appreciate “not only the physical space but the atmosphere, the culture we’ve created,” and want to secure for themselves a pastoral retreat steps from the office. The Grange’s expertise in installing gardens led to gardens at low-income housing projects in the Bronx, and even a garden at the United Nations.29 The recognition that it was the experience, not the product, that was maintaining the farm, led them to expand the events menu—from every kind of private party imaginable to low-cost community events that make very little money but are lots of fun for the neighborhood. Plakias’ account goes back and forth between “we do this because it’s fun for the neighborhood” and “there can’t be any loss leaders—everything has to make money or at least break even,” rationalizing that the neighbors who have so much fun at a low-cost party may well come back to reserve the space for a birthday. And they firmly resist invitations to make presentations for free, insisting that every appearance contribute revenue. Yet there has been a discernible

 Ibid. p. 204.  Ibid. p. 210. 29  Ibid. p. 213. 27 28

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change in Plakias’ account’s emphasis. By the end of the account of the expansion of their activities beyond the vegetable market, we find this conclusion: Because among the other things the branches of our business afford us is the almost constant interaction with our community. At the end of the day, it is the time we spend with the people on the farm that we love the most. Money is not the only metric by which we measure our success…. Our cultural capital is of greater value to us than our bank balance. The relationships forged on our rooftop, the lessons learned, the hope regained, the vows made … these are the things we feel most deeply and profoundly. So while, thus far, we’ve largely focused on running a profitable business, that’s only because we’ve had to illustrate the difficulty of being shrewd when you’re chasing a dream. But we wouldn’t give one red cent for any of it if it weren’t for the connectivity that the farm affords with the community around us.30

So ends the next to last chapter in this lively narrative. To complete the circle we’re drawing—that they drew, actually—the last chapter is titled, “It Takes a Village,” and a village is what they’ve created in their customers, friends, donors, and ­colleagues, city farmers from across the region. We have argued previously—in Chap. 4, to be exact—that “community,” the recognized and desired end of people who know, respect and trust each other working together for a common objective, is an “emergent” value in the creation of an urban farm: no one goes into farming in order to realize community, but when the enterprise is achieved, it is community that the members recognize as their highest accomplishment. We saw this in Cuba, and repeatedly in the United States and Canada. Here it is again. Beyond the special case of the Brooklyn Grange, what might be the future of rooftop farming? Farming on the roof is not simple. First, the municipality must be on board with zoning permissions; most cities will also insist on safety regulations to keep the farmers safe on the roof. Second, the construction of the building must be sturdy enough to support a few tons of soil, compost, water, and plants. (The Grange figured out how to determine this by measuring the distance between bearing columns.) Third, care must be taken not to punch holes in the roof, or there will be leaks. Even if the roof is intact, a water barrier must be laid down between the plants and the roof itself. There must be some way to handle water, from any irrigation system and from the rain and snow. (Commercial companies already advertise roof-specific drainage systems.31) And there must be some way to get the farmhands up to the roof (not all buildings have such access) and to get them quickly off the roof in an emergency. But the benefits of rooftop farming are significant. Most apparently, the farms reduce the “heat island” effect: the normal black roofs of cities absorb heat all the summer day, then radiate that heat to the surrounding neighborhoods all night, making the city an “island” of heat in the hottest part of the year, adding enormously (depending on the income of the residents) to the discomfort of the city-dwellers or to the expense of air conditioning. The farm is itself an air conditioner, and while it’s at it, a filter for the ambient pollution. The presence of fresh vegetables grown right 30 31

 Ibid. pp. 233–234.  ZinCo Worldwide: www.zinco-greenroof.com

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in the city also cuts down on the transportation necessary to fill the grocery stores, eliminating some portion of the truck exhausts which contribute to the greenhouse effect. City residents are healthier and more comfortable when there are farms around. Additionally, most obviously to the sanitation department, the rooftop farms slow the runoff of storm water, preventing the disastrous combined sewer overflows that typically follow heavy rainfall in the city. These benefits, still short of the food produced, are worth contemplating: as climate change advances, summers will be hotter, major storms more numerous, and greenhouse gases more of a problem. A convenience and an amenity at present, urban agriculture may become a necessity before many more years. Most importantly, the rooftop farms supply fresh vegetables and herbs to the city, making it possible for even poorer neighborhoods (which, as above, often turn into “food deserts” in the inner city) to enjoy fresh food. Their future is potentially great; they already flourish in New York City (as above), in Chicago and in the South End of Boston.32

Periurban Farming Part of the agricultural scene of the city are the small farms right on the city’s periphery. In their history, they are known as the “truck farms,” that supply the city’s wholesalers with most of the fresh produce consumed in the city. The name, by the way, has nothing to do with the trucks they use to transport the produce; it comes from the Old French troquer, meaning to trade or barter. These farms are commercial by definition, in contrast to the subsistence farms, designed only to feed the farmer and his family, that occupy the countryside. They specialize in compact plots, intensive cultivation (often bringing several crops to market from one plot in the course of a season), high value produce sold very fresh, and flexibility in plantings, often dictated by the peculiar demands of their customers. Besides serving the city’s wholesale markets, they are often able to maintain farmstands for weekend traffic, and sometimes CSAs. A recent account of several such farms provides some good examples; Cook’s Garden is one of them.33 Stephen Cook was raised in England, part of a working market garden, and moved to the U.S. with his family after a stint in the Peace Corps. He was inspired by John Jeavons, a pioneering organic farmer who, along with I. Rodale, worked to teach a generation how to do sustainable organic farming. Jeavons founded Ecology Action, dedicated to that mission, in 1972, and his major book, with the implausible title of How to Grow More Vegetables, Fruits, Nuts, Berries. Grains and Other Crops than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land than You Can Imagine,

 The Higher Ground Farm; check out website at http://www.highergroundrooftopfarm.com/  Josh Volk, Compact Farms: 15 Proven Plans for Market Farms on 5 Acres or Less, North Adams, MA: Storey Publishers, 2017.

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p­ ublished in 1974, is now in its eighth edition. It has sold more than 600,000 copies in nine languages, and inspired a generation and a half of farmers.34 Stephen Cook was one of them. Cook’s Garden, started on property owned by Cook’s family, is in New Lebanon, Ohio, outside of Dayton, whose Farmers Markets he visits to sell his produce once a week. It’s a two-acre piece of ground, including ¾ of an acre of very intensively farmed market gardens that supply the markets, but also a farmstand, fish pond, flower beds for cut flowers, chicken coops (to supply at least the family and favored friends with eggs), a moveable greenhouse to shelter crops at various stages of development, a moveable tomato house for the same purpose, a beeyard (6–8 hives) for pollination and honey, a solar greenhouse, a barn, and a swingset/play area for children of customers, of his family in the main house, and of the interns in the farmer’s cottage. Cook grows and sells a reliable mix of greens (arugula, chard, kale, lettuce, parsley etc.), onions, beets, beans, cucumbers, squash, tomatoes (lots of tomatoes), shallots and herbs—dill, cilantro, basil. His farmstand business is conducted with a dinner bell instead of counter staff: a customer rings the bell, Cook bikes in from the field, takes the customer’s order, then bikes back to the field to fill it. You see why the farm has to be small. In strawberry season, the farm’s “U-pick” system also saves on staff and guarantees that the produce is maximally fresh. Another small farm exemplifies the role that public partnerships can play in urban agriculture. Jessi Asmussen and Kevin Prather were two graduate students with a love for farming and no land, working small scattered rental plots to supply a small CSA. Then the city of Lawrence set up the “Common Ground Program,” an initiative “to transform vacant or under-utilized city properties into vibrant sites of healthy food production.”35 Acquisition of a lease to more than two acres under this program allowed the pair to leave the jobs that had sustained them and devote full time to farming. (The city also supplies compost.) They named their parcel “Mellowfields Farm,” undertook almost all of the labor themselves, and the income from a larger CSA and sales at the Lawrence farmers’ markets are sufficient to maintain them. The farm supplies these markets with greens (arugula, chard and kale mostly), larger quantities of root vegetables (beets, carrots, leeks, potatoes, onions and a few turnips), squash, herbs and at the end of the season, sweet corn. Not all of these are the most profitable choices: the roots and corn take much longer to reach harvest than the greens. Asmussen and Prather see themselves as taking advantage of their larger land allocation to grow many crops that don’t all ripen at once, and as their markets expand, moving to more intensive cultivation of greens, quickly grown and harvested.36 Small size has its economies: Asmussen and Prather start all of their seedlings themselves in the basement of their own house; the only water supply they need is

 Ibid. p. 10.  Ibid. p. 133. 36  Ibid. p. 136. 34 35

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provided by the city; that same water, stored in barrels in their hoophouse, holds the heat of the day during the night and cuts down on electricity bills. Almost all of their cultivating, during the growing season, is done by hand, as is the harvesting (scissors and knives, predominately); a salad spinner suffices to dry greens after washing (recall that Stone needed a second-hand washing machine); their walk-in cooler is made of foam and can be moved, depending on what crop is being processed. Cook’s Garden and Mellowfields Urban Farm have been slower to adopt the computerized record-keeping and planning adopted by Green Acres Farm and the Brooklyn Grange. Mellowfields has adopted QuickBooks for keeping records, but have not, at the time of Volk’s account, gone to the Excel spreadsheets governing every aspect of their operations. Stephen Cook’s system is downright medieval: he “keeps records in three different bound books: one for receipts and financial records, one for farmers market records, and one for the garden records.”37 He has found these quite sufficient to review past performance, plan for the next year, and order the seeds. Earl Butz did not have the last word when he told farmers to “get big or get out.” Josh Volk calls attention to the virtues of the small, compact farms that recommend taking them seriously as a major component of the future of agriculture in the U.S. and Canada. First, the farms are “human-scale:” one person can understand and monitor the entire operation. That scale is perfect for education: if our purpose is to teach children where their food comes from and how it gets to their plates, a day’s tour of a small farm will teach them that, with time left over to play on the swingset. Second, the small plots of diversified farms mirror the natural diversity of nature, with natural protections against devastating pest infestations or blights—even in the absence of a commitment to organic farming, adopted by most of our examples, extensive use of pesticides is not necessary. Third, the huge up-front costs of the latest agricultural machines (some able to plow and rake 40 rows in one sweep) and mechanical systems (irrigation to cover 2500 acres) are not necessary, and the damage to the soil and to the water supply, and the enormous cost in fossil fuel, brought about by their use, are avoided. These costs also constitute an enormous barrier to entry as an industrial farmer, making it very difficult for a new farmer to get started. Small farms, as Volk points out, require relatively little in the way of farming’s start-up costs of land and tools, but if intelligently and intensively worked, can bring in income adequate to cover costs relatively quickly. And, to pick up on a theme that has become familiar, Volk points out that a small farm can become the focal point for a supportive, food-centered community.38

37 38

 Ibid. p. 61.  Ibid. pp. 3–4.

AgriBurbia? The Spread to the Suburbs

103

AgriBurbia? The Spread to the Suburbs Real farms—small and organic farms, not part of the industrial agribusiness system—can flourish in the area immediately surrounding the city. After the organiponicos outside Havana, we met current periurban farming first in Burlington, especially in the floodplain of the Winooski River, known as the Intervale. The “compact farms,” truck farms, of the last section, are proof of that. These lands are difficult to find; within easy commuting distance of the city, they are usually gobbled up by the spreading suburbs. One ingenious solution to the problem of locating farms near cities is a new movement to bring farming out into the suburbs themselves, suburban subdivisions planned with a working farm at their center, on the model of subdivisions planned around a golf course. “Agriburbia” is both a general term for such developments and a trademark owned by the TSR Group of Golden, Colorado, a consulting firm that builds garden structures, develops gardens, and works with customers to provide abundant local foods.39 The company has projected several farm-centered communities, notably the “Farmstead” project in Granite Quarry, North Carolina, a sample of this kind of development. Its 126 acres (inherited from an old farm) are divided into two major areas, a permanent farm (about 15 acres) and a housing subdivision, about 40 acres of single-family plots, plus a sustainable agriculture educational center and a farmers’ market. The 15-acre farm, run by a professional farmer, will supply fruits and vegetables to the homeowners, selling the surplus at the farmers’ market open to neighboring farmers as retail space, and to the public. (Revenue goes to the homeowners’ association.) Homeowners may participate in a Steward Farm program, adding their property to the farming enterprise instead of growing a lawn, hosting a “micro-farm” on their land; that produce is available to them to eat at home, or put in with the general farm produce for sale. They may pitch in to the central farming operations as much as they want and share the community revenue in line with the land, time and produce they contribute to the community. Not everybody likes farming or can handle its physical tasks; the project specifically includes affordable housing, in part to assure themselves of a workforce, in part to assure themselves of a market for their food. They expect teenagers, retirees, and anyone in between to take part in the field work.40 The virtues of Farmstead are still theoretical; the community does not seem to be in existence at this time.41 But it is not the only exploration into agritopia; Smithsonian of May, 2015, contains a description of a going experiment, Serenbe Farms, 100 acres of suburban community containing an 8-acre certified organic farm at its heart. Along the model projected by an increasing number of existing educational organic farms (such as Stone Barns in Sleepy Hollow, NY, or Shelburne Farms in Burlington, VT), Serenbe offers subscriptions to its CSA (Community Supported  http://www.agriburbia.com/about.html  http://www.agriburbia.com/landowners.html 41  The Farmstead website referenced on the Agriburbia™ home page is blank as of 03/11/16. 39 40

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Agriculture), a cost and crop-sharing arrangement that has customers pay a substantial fee to a farm at the beginning of the season, fronting the farmer’s costs and removing the necessity of bank loans on the season’s produce, in return for a share of the crops when they come in; runs tours, educational internships, nutrition classes and farming workshops, runs a weekly farmers’ market, and invites the suburban residents to join in the farm work.42 There is much in the “FarmTopia” idea that includes values outlined in Chap. 4 above. For the locavores, it supplies its neighborhood with good fresh food from its farm; it attempts to include several constituencies in its activities; it teaches the children where their food comes from and how to raise it; it values its soil with organic practices and cherishes its land; it creates a community. Can we use this as our achieved model of the farm in the city, agricultural urbanism? Not likely. In the end, the FarmTopia has all the faults of the suburbs in which it resides: it pretends to be city and farm both but ends up being neither. It is not a real farm, but a leisure attraction like the golf course that it imitates, amusing its participants but assuming no real role in providing them with food, work discipline, or the responsibilities of a joint project. And it certainly is not a real city: it does not have the cultural and educational centers that define the city, it does not have the ethnic diversity that makes a city interesting, and for most of the same reasons, it does not have the people who cannot afford to live in multimillion-dollar suburban mansions clustered around some attractive gardens. It plays at farming, rather along lines laid down by Marie Antoinette. We can do better. As is probably clear from Chap. 1 above, the agricultural city has a major size problem. Establishing the required number of one-acre farms would take up more space than a large city has. Compromises are possible; we will return to the problems of the megacity. But the objectives remain the same. We want a real city—with a symphony orchestra, theater, every form of art, finance, light manufacturing, preferably a university or two, and essentially a refuge for those who arrive needing help to survive—and we want real farms, tended by those with a solid commitment to the enterprise, providing real value for its city. It will not come into being on its own; we also need a community of people willing to bring it to fruition, a community created in part by the first, village, farms.

42

 Franz Lidz, “Welcome to FarmTopia,” Smithsonian, May 2015, pp. 75 ff.

Chapter 7

The Farm in the Sky

“Can a city produce most of its own food and recycle most or all of its own wastes? I believe the answer is yes. In fact, I know the answer is yes.”1 Dr. Dickson Despommier sets out to prove this claim in his groundbreaking—no, sky-­ breaking—2010 treatise on the agriculture of the future, The Vertical Farm. It is possible, and economically practical, he argues, to raise all the food the city needs in complexes of skyscrapers, each floor stacked with trays of growing plants, light regulated to give those plants just what they need for photosynthesis, their roots bathed (or sprayed) with nutrient solution, harvested when mature and taken fresh to the customer, (starting with high-end restaurants). Cities need much food; a large city would have many such complexes; and all food this side of cattle and sheep can be grown right there. Despommier started working on soilless farming in the early 2000s. At the time he was teaching Medical Ecology at Columbia University. He set his students a project—figure out a way to feed the 2050 population of New York City entirely on food grown within city limits. It took the first class’s research to conclude that rooftop gardens wouldn’t do the trick—with every roof planted (and all vacant lots, down to the flowerpots), only 2% of the people could be fed. Succeeding classes moved on to the idea of farming in skyscrapers, and finally, theoretically, solved the problem. By the class’s final year, Despommier and his students had determined that a complex of two hundred buildings, each twenty stories high and measuring eighty feet by fifty feet at its base, situated in some wide-open outlying spot, …could grow enough vegetables and rice to feed everybody who will be living in New York City in the year 2050. These vertical farms could also provide medicinal plants, and all the herbs and spices required for five different traditional cultures.2

1  Dr. Dickson Despommier, The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century, New York: Picador, 2010, 2011. P. 130. 2  Ibid. p. 55.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. Newton, Urban Agriculture and Community Values, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39244-4_7

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Despommier, now retired, set down his conclusions in a 2010 work, The Vertical Farm. He begins at the beginning of agriculture, with an examination of the agricultural heritage of ancient civilizations, following the same track as Clive Ponting, in A Green History of the World,3 and concluding, with Ponting, that agriculture was doomed from the start to destroy the earth it needed to produce food. (Specifically, that the heavily irrigated agriculture of ancient Mesopotamia must saturate the soil, bringing up intolerable amounts of salt and ultimately destroying the fertility of the fields.) Contemporary agriculture, treated at some length above (Chap. 4), is dealt with in the second part of The Vertical Farm, again reaching the same conclusions as all other scholars who have examined the practice, concluding that “the future of agriculture, at least as practiced outdoors, looks grim.”4 The most alarming part of his depressing analysis homes in on the Central Valley of California, a desert reclaimed to enormous productivity by the importation of vast amounts of water, much of it piped in from the Colorado River. The agriculture in this large valley alone is currently worth about $65 billion per year. But not for long: the valley is transforming into the last offspring of Mesopotamia, with the soil saturated with poisoned runoff from the irrigation, saline, fairly soon no longer able to produce food. It may go back to desert until some huge new source of uncontaminated water can be found, and there is little hope of that.5 To the other problems of agriculture as currently practiced he adds one from the environmentalists’ lists: the loss of “nature’s services,” the endless gifts to human and other life from the intact ecosystems of the world—the production of oxygen, the supply of pure water, the absorption of carbon, flood control, species habitat, air purification, and rest for the soul. The conclusion: “that traditional agriculture is not working and probably never did work,” that although it has taken 12,000 years to assemble the proof, farming in the fields of the world has failed.6 Then agriculture is going to have to come in from the cold (and heat, made worse by global warming). Despommier envisions skyscrapers, floor after floor of hydroponic (or aeroponic, according to the taste of the entrepreneur) shelves of growing plants, where the water that grows the plants is completely recycled, filtered between irrigations of the plants. The entire procedure is organic; there are no pesticides, because in the sealed buildings, there are no pests (or pathogens that might taint the plants for consumption).7 Fertilizers are part of the nutrient mix in which the roots of the plants are bathed. There are no GMOs; where there are no weeds, there is no need for Roundup, and therefore no need for Roundup-Ready GMOs. College

3  Clive Ponting, A Green History of the World: the Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations. New York, NY: Penguin books, 1991. 4  Despommier, op.cit, p. 118. 5  Ibid. p. 119, 121. 6  Ibid. p. 135. 7  There’s a powerful move among organic farmers to deny the term “organic” to any farming not done in soil; they have some political support. Should they succeed, there still won’t be any pesticides used; don’t need them.

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p­ rofessor as he is, he places the advantages of vertical farming in a neat list, taking a chapter to elaborate on them: 1. Year-round crop production: since the atmosphere is held constant 12 months a year, there is no off season; 2. No weather-related crop failures: hurricanes, hailstorms, flooding, and drought cost us millions of dollars a year, and with climate change, damage will get worse; 3. No agricultural runoff: most of the pollution of our waterways at present comes from non-point source runoff from farm fields; that would be gone. 4. Allowance for ecosystem restoration: left to itself, in a generation or two, wild nature will return, and all ecosystem functions with it. 5. No use of pesticides, herbicides, or fertilizers beyond those included in the nutrient bath (main contributors to polluted agricultural runoff): in sterile surroundings, no weeds, no bugs, no pathogens. 6. Use of 70–95% less water: hydroponics uses 70% less water than standard agriculture, aeroponics 70% less than that. 7. Greatly reduced food miles: no reason why these skyscrapers cannot be in the center city; at least, they’ll be in the neighboring borough or warehouse district. 8. More control of food safety and security: most food poisoning at present comes from pathogens arriving on our food in the field or during transit. 9. New employment opportunities: to keep the nutrient mix right for the plants requires constant monitoring and tweaking; work for former farmhands. 10. Purification of grey water to drinking water: a hydroponics facility can be a “living machine,” transforming mildly polluted water into water we can drink. 11. Animal feed from postharvest plant material: all the parts of the plants that we don’t eat are perfectly good vegetable food for the animals we milk and eat.8 He goes on to enrich this summary with examples of agricultural failures and environmental damage that vertical farms will prevent: India’s changing monsoons (impacting the growing seasons), consequent loss of topsoil, consequent failure of farms, consequent mass migration to the cities, which have no way to house or employ former farmers. Florida’s catastrophic loss of farm soil from Hurricane Andrew in 1992; droughts in sub-Saharan Africa; loss of aquatic life in the Gulf of Mexico from agricultural pollution of the Mississippi; the growth of a whole new island off the coast of China from silt washed downstream by the Yangtze River. Of first importance in the shift to indoor agriculture (will we have to find another name for it?) is the withdrawal of agriculture from the fields and forests currently damaged by farming. For starters, vertical farming will produce much more food than the farmer’s fields ever could from the same planted acreage, just because crops can be grown 12 months a year and there is no loss from weather or pest damage; there is that much less need for fields out in the changing weather. His examples of

 Ibid. pp. 145–146; pp. 146–175 (elaboration).

8

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e­ cosystem regeneration once human interference is removed are striking: the Dust Bowl, that contemporary commentators thought would never recover, went back to prairie (until the farmers came back); the radiation-devastated area around the Ukrainian nuclear reactor at Chernobyl now flourishes with trees and deer; the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea is now “a verdant, peaceful wildlife reserve …Once again, nature hung out its NO HELP WANTED sign and proceeded to regenerate itself.”9 These regenerated forests may be our best means of absorbing carbon dioxide, and moderating climate change. After ecological restoration, the most important contribution of indoor farms is the reduction in the use of fresh water. Right now, 70% of all available (not locked in glaciers) fresh water on earth is used for agriculture, and when it has finished irrigating the crops, it is polluted, at least temporarily. Hydroponic cultivation uses 70% less water than field irrigation (other than drip irrigation) and aeroponic cultivation uses 70% less than that. (Something magical in that percentage.) Since all the nutrients we need in our food must be included in the water that nourishes the roots, Despommier foresees a bright future in devising nutrient mixes for the agrochemicals companies that will have no more business in the fields after his skyscrapers are built. An obvious advantage of crops grown in the city is that they don’t have to be trucked in from countryside miles away (or flown in from fields a continent away), saving fuel and refrigeration and making sure the food is fresh. Locavores will be ecstatic, and the U.S. will be able to reduce its carbon emissions. Possibly the most obvious advantage of skyscraper farming is control: in the fields, where hailstorms destroy and pests break in, the farmer can control nothing; indoors, “positive-­ pressure buildings with filtered air supplies, secure locks, and workers who must change their clothes before entering will guarantee that the vertical farm is a sage and secure place to raise our crops.”10 Food borne disease will be a thing of the past. Additionally, the skyscraper farms will develop many new categories of employment, some of it directed precisely toward the former farmers who came to the city because their farms failed. Small restaurants will spring up in the vicinity of the farms. As a final touch, non-edible plants in these buildings can reprocess “grey water,” waste water from which all solids have been removed, into pure drinking water, just as plants in the earth have been doing for centuries; once the plants have taken up the water, it transpires into the atmosphere within the rooms dedicated to water recovery, and a simple dehumidifier removes the clean water from the air. And when the water purification is done, and the food plants are harvested, the remaining stems and leaves can be fed to the animals pastured in the periurban plots outside the city. Another advantage to the high-rise farm is that in many cities, its house is already there. When industry moved on from the cities in New England and the Rust Belt, it left behind massive buildings, brick and concrete, which had been factories and

 Ibid. p. 157.  Ibid. p. 169.

9

10

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109

warehouses. Some cities have bravely repurposed these hulks as condos and malls, but they fit perfectly the specifications for vertical farms: they are (for the most part) structurally sound, they are available for immediate renovation and use, and they are in a part of town long abandoned by any profitable enterprise, making them affordable. They are often the centerpiece of massive food deserts; while peripheral buildings became residential, the area was not safe enough nor sufficiently densely inhabited to attract and keep economically large supermarkets. Above all, with suitable subsidies, vertical farms can be built where there is little or no arable land, transforming any region or nation into a self-sufficient producer of its own food.11 Despommier goes on to describe the high-rise food producer: In its most complete configuration, the vertical farm will consist of a complex of buildings constructed in close proximity to one another. They will include a building for growing food; offices for management; a separate control center for monitoring the overall running of the facility; a nursery for selecting and germinating seeds; a quality-control laboratory to monitor food safety, document the nutritional status of each crop, and monitor for plant diseases; a building for the vertical farm workforce; an eco-education/tourist center for the general public; a green market; and eventually a restaurant.12

Despommier leaves the problems of raising animals to later scholars. We can say that certainly chickens and rabbits could be raised in high-rise buildings; disposal of wastes would present a larger problem with animals than with plants, but their food supply would certainly be convenient. Despommier repeatedly emphasizes the necessity of careful science as the basis for the farm. Nature is difficult to predict accurately, and failure to do the homework will “all but guarantee a repeat of the Biosphere 2 fiasco.”13 The actual farm must have controls to manage temperature, humidity, and security—the “holy trinity” of farming. A careful arrangement of spacing and light must capture sunlight and disperse it among the crops to allow photosynthesis; since the plants need only the red and blue wavelengths of the spectrum, artificial sunlight can be provided from LED lights. In those portions of the world with massive exposure to sunlight, the shelves for the plants can be arranged in long lines, oriented north and south, with photovoltaic cells to supply whatever power is needed to run the farm. For interior spaces in northern cities, before resorting to LEDs, fiber optics can connect mirrors on the outside of the building to dark places in need of light. A crescent shape for the plant-­ growing building “would present a uniform surface to the sun as it progressed across the horizon each day, making this design the most efficient for using passive

 Ibid.  Ibid. p. 179. 13  Ibid. 181. Biosphere 2 was an earth-science laboratory, designed in the late 1980s and built for $200 million, funded in part by the Bass brothers. The purpose was to duplicate the self-sufficient living webs of the earth itself, “Biosphere 1”, to show that a self-sufficient living system could be constructed that could sustain human life on the moon, or on Mars. It failed spectacularly; in its initial run, from 1991 to 1993, it could not keep out the local ants, it could not maintain carbon dioxide levels sufficient to nourish the plants, and it could not keep the human scientists inside from intolerable bickering. It has served as an icon of scientific hubris ever since. 11 12

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sunlight.”14 Plants would receive a day’s worth of sun, with no grow-lights necessary; of course, Despommier acknowledges, we might want a 24-h grow cycle, now quite possible. The building itself should be maximally transparent, using glass or (more likely) plastic, which can now be made from recycled materials; recent compositions resist yellowing over time. There are parts of the world that simply cannot count on sunlight for enough of the year to feed the city. Electrical energy will be needed to run the lights; it will be better if that energy is renewable. His first recommendation is geothermal energy, either tapped directly from local volcanoes (Hawaii, Italy and Iceland) or brought to the surface with geothermal pumps. Wind power is also available and becoming more efficient in the current enthusiasm for it; for this energy, countries nearer the Poles have an advantage that compensates for the seasonal lack of sunlight. This technology, too, is progressing very rapidly. He rejects composting as a way of disposing of wastes; it may work for the backyard farmer (especially if there are worms in the pile), but is much too inefficient for any commercial enterprise. The best way to dispose of wastes from the vertical farm (after the animals have been fed) is to incinerate them and use the energy from burning biomass to run the buildings. (A newer process, plasma gasification, will produce energy without leaving residue.) Despommier treats food security issues (keeping the plants safe from outside attack, as from bugs) and food safety issues (keeping the consumer safe from food-­ borne disease) as two sides of the same coin; after all, the pathogen that sickens the consumer had to attack the plant first. So both issues can be addressed by security measures: positive pressure in the building, locks to prevent possibly contaminated visitors from entering, sterilized disposable safety uniforms for all workers, shoe coverings, hair coverings, showers. The facility’s isolation from all animals will ensure that none of the E. coli infections can affect the plants; and if there is a breach, and a pathogen does contaminate a unit of the plants, that planting can be destroyed and replanting done that very day, since no seasonal limits apply to planting cycles. How shall the plantings be arranged in order to maximize the actual growing space? Despommier acknowledges a wide variety of patterns in existence at his writing and the possibility of more emerging as the hydroponics industry matures. Even corn can be grown hydroponically, with the possibility of five crops per year. Materials for these factories are still in development; Despommier mentions a “Dacron-based clothlike sheet” as a medium for growing plants aeroponically, and several types of plastic that can be used for piping (or if plastic is disliked, bamboo). The choice of crops to grow in these high-rise gardens depends on the availability of markets; all the tricks of growing them successfully will be found out as the facilities are built and operated, and fail or succeed. Despommier’s description of the failures of present cities is merciless; the city is a

14

 Ibid p. 188.

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Monstrous parasite when viewed from an ecological perspective. It sucks up prodigious quantities of the earth’s raw materials, gulping down the nutritious parts in a single, noisy, pollution-producing swallow, then spews, sprays, flings out waste of all kinds onto its own doorstep and well beyond. Seen through the eyes of the natural world, a modern city is a twisted amalgam of concrete, steel, and glass crammed full of two-legged, very aggressive life forms; a place to be avoided at all costs …15

Not all creatures avoid it, of course. Besides the two-legged aggressors, there is a complete ecosystem of rats, mice, cockroaches and other insects, sparrows and pigeons, living off the uncontained mountains of garbage. And like a cancer, it grows: “Godzilla is a mere toddler’s hand-puppet compared to the way the city itself has risen up into the surrounding landscape and crushed it flat with its big foot of progress.”16 “Encroachment is what we do,” although the expansion always brings health risks with it—pollution of air and water, noise, light, and the particulates that land the children in hospitals with asthma attacks. There has to be a better way to do cities. Will the vertical farm serve all the people in the city? Probably not at first—first crops will be of baby greens for the salads of the high-end restaurants. Only the most enlightened governments will be willing to put in the necessary investment, and such are few and far between in the twenty-first century world. Probably, like television sets and cell phones, indoor farming enterprises of any size will be luxuries and curiosities at first, then as the technology matures and the quantities create economies of scale, the farm offering will expand and become much less expensive. He grants that we do not yet know if the massive food crops—corn (maize), rice, potatoes—can be produced economically in the facilities he envisions. Nor is he immediately hopeful about the expansion of this technology to the places that need it most, like sub-Saharan Africa: the delicate technology of the vertical farm cannot defend itself against sabotage and power blockages, and regions of conflict will not be able to sustain any farms that manage to get built. One of the major applications of vertical farming technology apart from food production is water purification. By way of example, Despommiers tracks the path of pure water into the taps of New York City, through multiple expensive dams and tunnels, “a civil engineering feat that even the ancient Romans would have been proud of.”17 Getting rid of the black water that the city produces is even more elaborate and costly, generating a small income (fertilizer for the Parks Department) against massive expenses for the purification plants. If water standards are raised, the expenses will only go up. Yet we all know that better solutions are at hand; the “living machines,” designed by systems ecologist John Todd, are collections of green plants that sequester heavy metals and agricultural poisons—herbicides, pesticides—taking them out of the water, which can then be reused. (Despommiers directs the reader to Vermont’s pride and joy, a large water purification complex, designed by John Todd, that recycles the waste water of a major highway rest stop  Ibid. p. 216–217.  Ibid. p. 218. 17  Ibid. p. 236. 15 16

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into an attractive indoor garden and reusable, although officially non-potable, pure water.)18 There is no reason in principle why water collected by dehumidification of the transpirations of plants cannot be used immediately for drinking; that is, after all, how water is recycled at the space station. Green plants can be grown not only for food but for medicine; indeed most of the pharmaceuticals available for treating everything from coughs to cancer are derived in one or two steps from substances produced by plants. One advantage to growing medicinal plants indoors is that a pure supply of the drug can be guaranteed. A serious problem in our global pharmaceutical market is that where a drug is in short supply, entrepreneurs will emerge supplying imitations, with disastrous results for health care; artemisinin, used in the treatment of malaria, is subject to such fakery.19 Green plants can also be grown for biofuel—incineration of the plants used in water purification, could supply energy while eliminating the risk of poisoning from the substances they have absorbed. (Most of such toxins are derived from petroleum, so should burn well.) Could the vertical, or indoor, farm be made portable, units taken to parts of the earth where starvation is a chronic problem, rather on the model of the MASH units that brought surgical facilities to the battlefront? Could food production units join the space station in orbit? Could they be placed on (or under) the sea, and produce fish along with sides of vegetables? The possibilities are endless. At this point Despommier essentially concludes his account of the vertical farm: The vertical farm is the keystone enterprise for establishing an urban-based ecosystem. Without food production, no city can emulate the virtues of a functional, intact ecosystem: Bioproductivity is key for both. It is the defining mechanism for energy management for all living organisms.20

The second edition of his work (the source for this chapter) was published in 2011. At that time Despommier conceded that “no vertical farms currently exist,”21 although he went on to talk about them; the volume contains marvelous pictures of vertical farms, all in the artists’ projections. By now (early 2018) the projections have come off the page and settled on the earth—not always in the glorious skyscraper form imagined for them, but functioning, and growing food. Despommier himself has led the way in this development. By 2015, he and a colleague, Vincent Racaniello, were hosting a webinar, “Urban Agriculture, The Third Green Revolution,” that featured farming within the built environment. His guests included two of the pioneers that are bringing his high-rise visions down to earth: Robert Colangelo of Green Sense Farms (on October 18, 2016) and Ed Harwood of AeroFarms (on April 25, 2015).22

 Ibid. p. 234.  Ibid. p. 244. 20  Ibid. p. 215. 21  Ibid. p. 181. 22  http://www.microbe.tv/urbanag/ 18 19

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Robert Colangelo and associates founded Green Sense in an ample three-storey building in Portage, Indiana, filled it with stacks of growing shelves, and made their first shipment of baby greens (to Whole Foods) in March of 2014. They specialize in herbs and salad greens, including several kinds of lettuce, and they sell to an array of local stores and restaurants. The organization is ambitious to expand, not to sell more greens from the Portage location, but to place such facilities all over the world, all designed and built by the company. Already they have a branch farm operating in Shenzen, China, one under construction in South Bend, Indiana, and many other locations on the drawing board.23 Like all successful entrepreneurs in new fields, Colangelo has a talent for marketing; Green Sense even has its own radio station. Ed Harwood and AeroFarms are the subject of extensive treatment by Local Correspondent Ian Frazier in The New Yorker, issue of January 9, 2017. Harwood started out as an associate professor at Cornell University’s School of Agriculture, and a part-time inventor. (He started out inventing a tracking device that would predict when dairy cows would come into heat.) He got interested in new ways of farming about 2003, wondering if plants could be grown “without soil, sunlight, or large amounts of water.” That last goal pointed toward aeroponic farming, which provides water and nutrients to plants by the spraying of a mist like the freshening automatic sprays over the vegetables in a grocery’s produce department. Aeroponic farming uses about 70 percent less water that hydroponic farming….If crops can be raised without soil and with a much reduced weight of water, you can move their beds more easily, and stack them high.24

Two technological problems had to be solved: if there is to be no soil, in what medium can the plants be grown which will nurture a seed to sprout and then hold the plant upright to receive light? And how can the nutrient spray be regulated to supply all the nutrients at the times they are needed? Harwood had solved these problems. To provide a rooting substrate for the plants, he experimented with every kind of fabric imaginable until developing a type of plastic “fleece” (patented) from recycled drink bottles, which could support both seed and plant. He then developed specialized non-clogging nozzles for the spraying (a trade secret, not patented). Harwood tried growing commercial crops with his new setup, selling the greens locally, but couldn’t make any money at it, so closed the business. Then, with the help of an investor, he started selling the mini-farms themselves; one of them ended up in Saudi Arabia, and one of them ended up in the cafeteria of Philip’s Academy Charter School in Newark. He still wasn’t making very much money. Harwood’s fortunes changed when two entrepreneurs, David Rosenberg (MBA Columbia University) and his friend Marc Oshima discovered his work online and called with a proposition of partnership. The result was a new company, AeroFarms, based in Newark, NJ, home of the Philips Academy Charter. After buying the remains of a defunct steel supply company on Rome Street in Newark, AeroFarms

 http://www.greensensefarms.com/our-farms/  Ian Frazier, “High-Rise Greens: Growing crops in the city, without soil or natural light,” The New Yorker, January 9, 2017, pp. 52–59, at p. 53.

23 24

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7  The Farm in the Sky had the rusting corrugated steel exterior torn down and a new building erected on the old frame. Then it filled nearly seventy thousand square feet of floor space with what is called a vertical farm. The building’s ceiling allowed for grow tables to be stacked twelve layers tall, to a height of thirty-six feet, in rows eighty feet long. The vertical farm grows kale, bok choi, watercress, arugula, red-leaf lettuce, mizuna, and other baby salad greens.25

At present, AeroFarms markets its baby greens to Wall Street, The New  York Times dining rooms, and a variety of other customers, only slowly moving into standard supermarket retail. Their ultimate goal, of course, is to sell the technology to cities all over the world, so that all salads in all cities will be fresh and, above all, local. It’s also doing good; with some state support, it has hired some 60 workers from a depressed locality, some of them from an ex-offender program. We are far from Old McDonald’s Farm: The technology it uses derives partly from systems designed to grow crops on the moon. The interior space is its own sealed-off world; nothing inside the vertical-farm buildings is uncontrolled. Countless algorithm-driven computer commands combine to induce the greens to grow, night and day, so that a crop can go from seed to shoot to harvest in eighteen days. Every known influence on the plant’s well-being is measured, adjusted, remeasured. Tens of thousands of sensing devices monitor what’s going on. The ambient air is Newark’s, but filtered, ventilated, heated, and cooled. Like all air today, it has an average CO2 content of about four hundred parts per million (we exceeded the three-fifty p.p.m. threshold a while ago), but an even higher content is better for the plants, so tanks of CO2 enrich the concentration inside the building to a thousand p.p.m.26

The lights, too, are exercises in high technology; L.E.D. grow lights that change intensities to adjust to the needs of the plants at various stages of their growth. In short, each plant grows at the pinnacle of a trembling heap of tightly focused and hypersensitive data. The temperature, humidity, and CO2 content of the air; the nutrient solution, pH, and electro-conductivity of the water; the plant growth rate, the shape and size and complexion of the leaves—all these factors and many others are tracked on a second-by-­ second basis.27

The molecular biologists and other plant scientists monitoring all this data have special apps on their phones, which beep a warning if anything is out of line. Some of them can even adjust the settings on the tanks remotely, through their phones.

The Future of the Agricultural Skyscraper Already we know the technology is sound; there are aquaponics establishments that have tested it and found it workable. For instance, a three-story greenhouse in Jackson, Wyoming, named Vertical Harvest, intends to produce 100,000 pounds of fresh produce every year—grown hydroponically on a 4500 square foot downtown  Ibid, p. 52.  Ibid. pp. 57–58. 27  Ibid. p. 58. 25 26

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lot. (The greenhouse, 13,500 sq. ft. in three storeys, uses 1/10 of an acre to grow produce annually equivalent to 5 acres of traditional agriculture.) Vertical Harvest is an example of the public-private partnership that we met in Burlington: it was founded by two entrepreneurs, Penny McBride and Nona Yehia, from careers in food system consulting and architecture respectively, in cooperation with Jackson, Wyoming, a relatively affluent area that loves its fresh vegetables but has had to truck them in from California or Mexico because, like Burlington, it’s iced over much of the year. Jackson was willing to supply the empty building in the middle of town for a very modest rent, and set a contest for the building’s use, inviting projects that could serve the town’s residents; Vertical Harvest won. It endeared itself (over some opposition) to the town fathers not only by projecting a harvest of healthy greens and vegetables, but by hiring the disabled; its 15 employees include sufferers from Down’s syndrome, spina bifida, and autism.28 Vertical Harvest delivers greens and organic vegetables to local restaurants, eager to pay premium prices for absolutely fresh clean greens—fulfilling Despommier’s prediction that such enterprises can easily make money. What does not go to the restaurants goes to local groceries, except for 5% of the produce that they sell in their onsite retail store. Another example of Despommier’s technology at work on less-than-skyscraper scale is Ken Armstrong’s Ouroboros Farms, with 15,000 square feet of grow space in Pescadero, California, and 20,000 square feet in Half Moon Bay, California: commercially viable aquaponics farms established by Ken Armstrong, owner, in 2012. There is an attached 2000 square feet for a farm market. They also supply local restaurants and other retail outlets. One of their central missions is to educate the public on the operations and possibilities of aquaponics; they conduct public and private tours of their facilities, show anyone interested how to build an aquaponic system (and then sell the parts, also part of their retail offering.) They plan an education center for regular workshops on aquaponics. Like Will Allen, they also raise fish in the water that feeds the plants (Channel Catfish and Silver Carp in Pescadero and koi and catfish in Half Moon Bay), and the fish waste fertilizes the plant roots. Whatever they cannot sell in their store is donated to the community; whatever waste comes out of the system as a whole is composted.29 And of course we can always call on the growers of marijuana to share their experience of growing intensively indoors under the lights. A useful instructional article online (unsigned), shows how marijuana can be grown indoors, even in fairly small spaces carved out of basements and attics.30 It describes, briefly, the various strains of weed on the market, recommends reputable seed companies, discusses advantages and disadvantages of hydroponic cultivation, and instructs on light sources, air flow, and security. For most of the article’s audiences, security is a

 http://verticalharvestjackson.com/our-story/  http://aquaponicfarmingcourse.com/ouroboros-farms-half-moon-bay-ca/ 30  http://grow-marijuana.com/indoors 28 29

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c­ entral problem, at least for now; the author provides suggestions on how to reduce noise and odor (instructions useful to any indoor farming), and in bold letters: “Do not talk about your grow to anyone.” One problem encountered among the marijuana cultivators, that might also show up among the indoor fields of baby greens, is the undesirable surge of electricity that enters the system when the big grow lights come on. “Amateur radio operators say the legalization of marijuana is creating a chronic nuisance thanks to interference caused by electrical ballasts that regulate indoor lamps used to grow pot.”31 Apparently a simple filtering device will solve the problem; growers may soon be required to install them. The technology of the marijuana farm received a significant boost in 2016, with the spread of medical marijuana work and the legalization of recreational marijuana projects; it may soon be possible to talk about your grow with anyone, including the police. As suggested above, one of the major contributions of this indoor farming technology is the reuse of industrial buildings abandoned by changes in manufacturing. The Business Section of The New York Times for April 2, 2017, headlines the progress made in Quincy, Massachusetts—poster child for an Eastern Rust Belt town—in converting older buildings to marijuana farms.32 Typically for the financial mind, the Times worries that enthusiasm for marijuana has already created a “bubble” in the real estate market. Certainly the new economic opportunities will change the landscape for urban farming generally: If the old downtown industrial buildings, until now useless and too expensive even to demolish, suddenly have a purpose, the market is transformed: Commercial real estate developers say they have never seen a change so swift in so many places at once. From Monterey, Calif., to Portland, Me., the new industry is reshaping once-­ blighted neighborhoods and sending property values soaring. In some Denver neighborhoods, the average asking lease price for warehouse space jumped by more than 50 percent from 2010 to 2015, according to an industry report. In the city over all, there are five times as many retail pot stores as stand-alone Starbucks shops.33

The value in marijuana is precariously balanced on legal anomalies. Marijuana sales, for recreational use as well as medical, are legal in many states. But the sale of marijuana is illegal nationwide, according to federal law. The business exists only as long as the federal government does not decide to enforce that law, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, while in office, made threatening noises about such enforcement. We will have to see what his successors will do. On the other hand, legalization of marijuana at the federal level would be the worst thing that could happen to the industry: right now it is illegal to transport marijuana across state lines (and that law is enforced), so it is profitable to grow pot in all the cities of the Eastern seaboard, even where costs are high, since the cities cannot import it from California,  Marina Villeneuve, “Marijuana lights are giving ham radio operators a buzz,” Burlington Free Press, Wednesday, March 1, 2017, p. 7A. 32  David Geller, “A Real Estate Boom, Powered by Pot: Old industrial buildings are being converted to massive grow rooms, but is it already a bubble?” The New York Times, Sunday, April 02, 2017, BU 1. 33  Ibid, BU 4. 31

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where costs are much lower. Federal legalization would open the borders and bankrupt the Eastern growers—or so fears the business community. Meanwhile, we have a wonderful laboratory for experimentation with indoor growing regimes, and there is no reason why what is learned from the quasi-legal weed cannot be transferred to the very legal broccoli—or kale. 2019s opening issue of the environmental magazine Sierra, dedicated to adaptation to climate change, contains a special feature on “Future Farming,” suggesting “indoor growing” to avoid the heat. Again, hydroponics and tuned LED lights are recommended.34 The United States will probably not be the most accommodating locale for the Vertical Farm of the future; we have too much land, and a long (partly mythic) history of farming life that nurtures virtuous people. So far, Despommier has gotten his most affirming welcome in Korea. As he describes it, I gave a talk in Korea in 2009, and they invited me back two years later. Fifty reporters were waiting for me. My hosts led me to a new building, where they had ‘Welcome Dr. Despommier’ in neon lights. I saw that, and I cried! The idea that I had described in my ‘09 talk they had used as the basis for building a prototype vertical farm, and here it was. When I’m lying in my coffin and they pull back the lid, the smile on my face will be from that day in Korea.35

There may be 30 vertical farms in the U.S., in various stages of development, and possibly hundreds worldwide; spatially challenged Japan leads the way with 160.36 As the worldwide migration from countryside to city continues, the pressure to grow crops in the city, close to markets, will only increase. To recap, the advantages of the Vertical Farm are considerable. Vertical farms will allow us to grow in appropriate light, sunlight or L.E.D., 24  h a day, 365  days a year; protect crops from anything the weather might throw at them, especially in winter; save water (since it is all recycled), eliminate the petroleum derivatives in fertilizer and pesticides, prevent the loss of product in shipping and storage, and, especially, provide jobs. The skyscraper farms can be established in abandoned buildings of any kind: the only light they need is the red- and blue- parts of the spectrum that plants need to photosynthesize. The future may not be immediate, but it looks very bright.

Questions and Conclusions Yet the whole Vertical Farm enterprise raises questions that do not arise in dealing with the parking-lot raised beds of standard urban farming. Despommier insists that any kind of food plant can be grown in these towers, but we have very little evidence  “Future Farming,” Sierra Magazine: The climate Adaptation Issue, January–February 2019, p. 16. 35  Ian Frazier, op.cit. p. 56. 36  Claire Martin, “Taking Local Produce to Another Level: A three-story greenhouse is bringing more fresh vegetables to a town famous for its snow,” The New York Times Sunday, March 27, 2016, p. BU 4. 34

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of that. The only produce readily available across the industry is salad, especially fresh baby greens. When may we expect to find out about all the others? for it would seem that growing watermelons in those stacks of trays may be almost as difficult as keeping rabbits in them. And who eats baby greens? Not the hungry of the world, I’d guess; the vertical farms’ primary markets are high end restaurants and Whole Foods Markets. What efforts have been made to grow foods most people eat all the time—potatoes, rice, peas, beans and turnips, food that will fill the stomach—in the massive amounts that will be needed, at prices people can afford? Again, claims of absolute safety from any pathogens or other invaders are dubious. Humans are remarkably poor at preserving sterility over the long haul. Remember Biosphere 2, supposedly airtight, invaded by the local ants in Arizona, which completely destroyed all other life on the ground. How will AeroFarms prepare for the first time something really ugly gets loose in there? But in the end, the major question centers on the values. This manner of farming loses most of the values presented in Chap. 4. Children cannot play in these gardens, or learn where their food comes from; the elderly of the neighborhood cannot congregate around them; there is no natural beauty to soothe the soul; as far as the neighborhood, such as it is, is concerned, the greens may taste better than the normal supermarket products flown in from Peru, but beyond that there may be no discernible difference. Should we go with the reclaimed parking lots and periurban intensive farms or with Despommier’s skyscrapers? As with the final questions on Cuba, the answer will probably not be either-or but both-and. Surely these high-rise garden spots can grow good food for the city, in several categories beyond baby greens; to the extent that they usefully repurpose industrial-era warehouses, they remove an expensive blight from the city; and if the ground floor could be transformed into a farmers’ market and café adorned with green and growing things, they may restore some of the value of soul-soothing recreational space in the city. They won’t do the whole job. But then, nothing will. All the elements of urban farming will have to work together to restore the city’s food system.

Chapter 8

Reflections: Retrieving the Values

In the three previous chapters we have three very different visions of the agricultural city of the future. One attempts to embed all the functions of a city—including education, health care and deep and difficult recovery opportunities for city residents lost to the productive sector. This model cannot ever support itself on agriculture; it functions best in a partnership of public (municipal) and charitable (non-­ governmental) initiatives, providing food as only one of its functions. The second is a set of commercial establishments, ranging over parking lots, rooftops and periurban very small farms, with no particular form or unity, but with the common function of feeding the city profitably. Of course this limited set of purposes cannot extend, as the first model did, to providing education for the children, health care for children and adults, or the sense of community achieved by the villages (although, as we saw in the Grange, community sometimes happens anyway.) Neither of the two models claims to be capable, alone, of actually feeding the population of a city large enough to support an Opera. The third looks like the steel-and-glass city of today, with plants where some of the offices used to be: the city looks the same, but the plants in the farm plots look nothing like the plants we are used to in our gardens. In sheer volume of some foods, the skyscraper model can claim to be superior to either of the previous farm types, but it is miles away from the family-farming values that landed on Chap. 4, above. Is it possible to select from these three models the parts that will work together, to develop a comprehensive vision of the farm city of the future? We can see the problem from here: the “community” driven farm city of Chap. 5 carries out (very efficiently) a large number of social objectives for the nurtured families that compose it, for any concentration of people, but can’t support itself; the “commercial” model of Chap. 6 disavows most of the value objectives of family and community (even if, like the Grange, it ends up achieving some of them); the “skyscraper” city farm of Chap. 7 simply has no room for children to visit (except briefly on a field trip), let alone go to school—or climb trees.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. Newton, Urban Agriculture and Community Values, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39244-4_8

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Let’s review three dimensions of the search for the farm city: First, the constraints—the limits within which the search will have to take place. Second, values—the ways of being, summarized in Chap. 4 above, that make the enterprise worth doing. Then, third, the strategies—the paths we can take to get past the constraints to realize the values. Total success is not anticipated; but there should be some way of getting closer to the goals we have set for this enterprise, and we will conclude the work with a section describing the farm city of the future.

Constraints We can subdivide the constraints into four categories. First, space and logistics: sitting as a contrary spanner in the middle of all our models, there is the fact that we cannot start new cities of anything like the size we need. The great cities of the world are where they are for historical reasons, and the patina of history, religion, and culture that identifies them cannot, and should not, be ignored in the name of any rational plan. The buildings, too, are where they are, and while partial demolition (as in Detroit) may open up some space, we are going to have to work around the structures (and infrastructure of water, sewer and subway) that remain. Farmers’ markets must have a place near the farms—enlightened cities now dedicate park space to farmers markets, but the unenlightened ones will take some imagination. If we want to create farm cities, we will need to remodel existing cities from within, and experience suggests that the extent of remodeling will be severely limited. Second, law and political power: we have seen how zoning laws (including, for instance, Michigan’s Right to Farm law) have made the development of urban farms complicated. Even if the substance of the law is farm-friendly, we saw, as with Michael Ableman’s farm, the simple fact of regulatory delay of permissions to use land can destroy a season. And not every city official is friendly to urban agriculture. Some in the city bureaucracy conclude, just from the tradition, that farms do not belong in the city and that those who would put them there are crazy (or hippies) and can safely be ignored. Recall, not every city dweller really wants a farm next door. More likely, the farmer’s agenda may well conflict with one or several of the agendas already hovering in the city government’s background. Every city has a hundred planners-in-waiting, each itching to put his or her favorite projects in the city. Accomplishing any agricultural agenda may require joining one or more of these planners (and antagonizing the rest). It may be difficult to find an agenda that offends nobody and avoids the battles. Third, the diversified economy: while every farm-centered grand plan seems to presuppose socialism—or anyhow, some ability to dictate plans from the top— every city we work with in fact will have to accept the free operations of the market, and will discover itself operating in a diversified economy. At this point in our account those “commercial” farms become very useful models: if you are doing anything, anything legal at least, to make money, you will have no difficulty explaining yourself to the neighbors, and (as long as you are not creating nuisances) secur-

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ing their neighborly cooperation. The landowners who lease their land to the farmers expect to make a small profit on the farm’s operations; they also expect to be able to sell that land at a profit when times are right for sale. Recall that Michael Ableman had to be able to tell landowners that he could move the plastic tubs that he used as raised beds on a moment’s notice; they could be lifted over the fences by a crane and placed on flatbed trucks for removal to the next urban farm. In many cities, landowners and officials alike have been reluctant to allow farms to form on a vacant lot, privately or publicly owned, because of the anticipated public relations disaster if it becomes established over a period of years, enjoys success, becomes popular, beautifies and raises the value of the land, which the landlord then wants to sell or the city now wants to reassign, requiring them to call in goons to drive off the frantic and tearful gardeners. … Their hesitation is well founded. Included in this third constraint is the present food system, directed, as above, by a very small number of for-profit companies with a chokehold on the production and marketing of most of the foodstuffs that we eat. Can urban farming develop in the cracks of the system, unobserved, just moving below the radar, without mentioning or taking on industrial agriculture? Is that what we want? Or do we want urban agriculture to become the center of resistance to a harmful system? Fourth, there is the ecosystem underlying the city, which demands stewardship as much as do the farms. Here as elsewhere, the natural world must be respected. How might ecological constraints come into play? First of all, by the legitimate demand for respect for whatever naturally wild places might remain in the city. Many cities have these: old parks, fallen into disuse as too expensive to maintain through the city’s hard times, often return to the wild, even reconstituting habitat for returning wildlife; old private tracts, foreclosed in the same hard times, often perch on hillsides near the edge of the city, going wild like the old parks; overgrown areas beside disused railroad tracks and canals sometimes contain virgin patches of the original flora of the city’s past. When eager urban homesteaders show up at the mayor’s office asking for land to farm, these are the most likely candidates the mayor will suggest. But they should not be turned to agricultural uses; the farm city needs its wildlife base as much as the farm country does. These are the areas that shelter the pollinators, relieve the heat islands, and guide efforts at agroecology by mapping the possibilities of the natural soil.

Values Recall that the first farms we studied were not founded in pursuit of community, environmental enhancement, or urban beautification. They were founded in hunger and in anger. The people who founded them needed good food, as did their neighbors, and it was clear to them that certain large entities—the U.S. with its blockade, the Detroit White Establishment, Industrial Ag—were out to make sure that they didn’t get it. That characterization of the object of resistance may be only partially true—it probably works for Cuba, but it was never part of Detroit’s or Monsanto-­

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Bayer’s (or McDonald’s) intention to require people to eat food lacking in nutrition. It’s just that (in Detroit’s case) supermarkets, designed to make a profit, will not continue business in an area where there is no money to be made and too many threats to security, so the food desert happens. And in any poor area, the very inexpensive food that flows from the machines of Big Ag tends not to be the most nutritious, but it is the least expensive, so the Market determines that it shall be the product that is offered. In a market economy, it seems that it just has to be this way, and every urban farm, whatever its founding ideology, insists that it doesn’t. So as per Chap. 4, our first values are Food, nutritious food to feed the families of the farmers and if possible their neighborhoods, and Resistance. Let’s put those together: the objectives of the enterprise are primarily good, wholesome food, with the assurance that it will remain available (food security) and enough control of the situation that it cannot be taken away by the actions of others (food sovereignty). Embedded in urban agriculture at its core is the protest against what is being done to us by others, in the way that it affects the families’ food, and the determination to show that we can do for ourselves in a way that feeds us, gives us the satisfaction of working in community, and shows the world that whatever Big Ag says, it doesn’t have to be done the way they do it. Whatever the motivation or circumstance leading to the founding of farms in the city, increasing the quantity and quality of food available to the city dwellers is a constant measure of its effectiveness, and the demonstration of its autonomy and sustainability a necessary condition of its significance. Placing this test at the front of the enterprise will give us a quick evaluation of any scheme for urban farming: a single showy skyscraper that does not address the needs of the district, a hobby half-acre that amuses a family, are not what we are after. And the explicit announcement of Resistance, rejection of the agribusiness oligarchy wherever it dominates the food system, joins the farm city to the marvelous traditions of the Cuban parcelas, D-Town Farm, and the cooperative groceries of Burlington. Two further values that placed themselves at the center of the enterprise as it got going are Family and Community. Only in the utopian Community model description, in Chap. 5, did these values find a central place in the actual workings of the structures. Through the closely integrated educational system, keeping all children of the family together (however different their activities may be) until about 8 years of age (or more), the value of family is underscored; through the requirement of common work for a common product, if anyone in the village is going to eat, the value of community is continually brought to the foreground. For other farming enterprises, these values are discoveries rather than founding definitions. Most of us are raised with much weakened “family” experiences and values, abandoned early in our careers; the farm can resurrect them. Ableman is delighted when one of the emotional orphans who work with him at Sole Food Farm comes up with “farmily” to describe the relationships that have developed among the workers. Note that the Brooklyn Grange, introduced here under our commercial models and founded primarily as a commercial enterprise, discovered the same term to sum up its unplanned experience of affection and mutual commitment. In the Grange’s description of its founding and growth, we see the emergence of the close ties that will allow the

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group to see itself as a community. In Dickson Despommier’s skyscrapers the value of food in sufficiency is central—Despommier was the only one who said that he was certain the city can feed itself—but it does not seem that any level of human interaction in the dimly-lit towers could create “family” or “neighborhood”— indeed, as Ian Frazier pointed out, many of the activities of monitoring the growing plants can be carried out by remote computers. The third constellation of values we track in the urban farms is democracy, specifically the Jeffersonian heritage of municipal governance.1 Thomas Jefferson, we recall, held that the small agricultural town was the seat of democracy. As he saw it, those who governed the town, all of whom were proprietary business owners and most of whom were farmers, knew in every fiber of their being that their private good and protection was inextricably bound with the public good. They did not have to be persuaded that public safety had to be maintained, public roads scraped and ditched, and public schools (for which Jefferson, along with his rival John Adams, was a tireless crusader) created so that children might be educated apart from religious establishments. It was clear to Jefferson that the farmer, who could not move his establishment elsewhere, was a far more reliable citizen of the town than the manufacturer who could easily pollute the local area and then move on. His point was simple: prudence and responsibility are required of all citizens, in their participation of the governance of their towns, but the farmer, tied to the land itself, is by far the most reliable.

Strategies The constraints are best dealt with in reverse order, corresponding to order of complexity. The ecosystem underlying the city: Here the strategies are very simple: avoid starting farms where the former natural order still prevails, and learn from the natural order, where it can be found, the underlying tendencies of the soil. On these rules, not only will the urban farm preserve the city’s remaining wild heritage, but may also save itself a good deal of time and effort trying to grow crops that are not suited to the soil. We know that urban farms already help the ecology of the city— through controlling storm water runoff, enriching the soil in their composting operations, cooling the city in summer, absorbing and filtering pollutants, and restoring habitat for some of the birds and pollinating insects excluded by the landscape of asphalt and concrete. Perhaps alliances between the farms and the remaining wild places can be worked out—by restoring pollinator habitat, for example.

1  I am aware that resurrecting Jefferson, here and elsewhere, as a paragon of democratic government, is currently very unfashionable, because he was a slaveholder. They tell me that as I write, a Ku Klux Klan hood covers Jefferson’s statue at Columbia University. I tend to be unimpressed by these recent scruples. Wrong generation, I guess.

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A diversified economy would have made Cuba’s original efforts in urban farming very difficult indeed, since it would have stood in opposition to every socialist institution Cuba had put together in its existence since the Revolution in 1959. But in the United States, this diversity is part of our social and economic being, the medley we were raised with. We recognize three different institutional plans in our complex society—the public sector, with official functions legitimately exercised by duly elected/appointed officers in a working democracy; the private sector, with independent actors striving within legal boundaries to achieve economic success in competition with each other; and the non-profit sector, with representatives of organizations collected to further the public good in some aspect of public life, collecting and distributing goods and services in accordance with their various missions. On the face of it, these institutions, proceeding for diverse purposes and accountable to different parties for different results, could not be expected to work together. But in Burlington, we found that they could: where an idea of an activity good for the city, put forward by a non-profit, could attract the attention of an entrepreneur as possibly profitable, it can win the support of a progressive mayor who can clear away legal entanglements and get it moving quickly. This possibility will have to be part of our solutions. We have seen our commercial city farmers learning to work within the constraints of the market system, keeping meticulous records of profit and loss to guide the agricultural enterprise—and making a go of it. Once we abandon dreams of a clockwork Garden City, the diversified economy appears as a strength, not a limitation. The entrenched system of Law and political power presents a more serious barrier. First we have to deal with the national system, a description of which was presented in Chap. 4 above. It is shaped like an hourglass, with the contracted middle of agribusinesses effectively governing what farmers shall grow, and how much they will be paid for it, and what consumers shall consume, and what they will pay for it. This unhappy arrangement creates major problems—problems for farmers, for public health, and eventually, for the economy of the world. Dismantling that system will be a gain for the farmers, the consumers, and the world; we suggested that urban agriculture could be a means to that end, first as a statement of resistance to it, ultimately, in the adoption of agroecology as the preferred method of agriculture nationwide, as part of its replacement. The struggle to end the system is political in nature, and given the present location of the reins of money and political power, it will not be easy. Why not economic? Can’t urban agriculture, or small farm agriculture generally, properly educated, compete successfully with the established practices? Not likely. Consider my (true) tale of the Thanksgiving turkeys, the turkey from the Sustainable Farm and the turkey from Industrial Agriculture. My daughter works at a sustainable educational farm, organic and dedicated to agrarian ideals. The farm raises Heritage turkeys, Bourbon Reds, some of which are for sale at Thanksgiving (by reservation only), so my daughter reserved a turkey for our Thanksgiving table. The farm feeds its little turkeys (poults) organic grain and clear water, so they grow slowly—and expensively. In the absence of chemical additives and antibiotics, which are never used, a certain amount of mortality must be expected; this loss adds

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to the expense of the project. As the turkeys roam their ample, semi-wild, area, fat is lost, muscle toughens, and weight increases slowly; meanwhile, the turkeys develop muscles they need for short flights and running. As Thanksgiving grew near, my daughter notified the Thanksgiving host, who lives near me in Vermont, that although a turkey was certainly hers, the size could not be guaranteed; it might be12–14 pounds, not enough to feed all of us. So the host asked me to pick up a backup turkey from the local supermarket, which I did. In the event, the Heritage turkey was 18 pounds, plenty for the table; it had cost $10.00 per pound, the cost of a decent steak, for a total of $180.00. It was delicious. My backup turkey was cooked up the next day for another family party; similarly brined and spiced, it too was delicious. But my backup turkey was the current commercial favorite, the broad-breasted turkey, specially bred for enormous amounts of breast meat. These turkeys are kept in dark cages all their lives, with no room to run around, which is lucky, because their breasts are so huge that they cannot walk for most of their lives, let alone think about flying. The turkey I bought (from a supermarket appropriately named “Price Chopper”) was 21 pounds. It cost me $.51 per pound, for a total of $11.00. And again, if you didn’t think about what its life had been like, it was yummy. Market competition will not lead the majority of the American public to buy the Bourbon Red. “Organic” can command a small premium almost anywhere, but the difference between $11.00 and $180.00 is not small, nor will it ever be. Turkeys are not the only food so shaped for the consumer. In the course of an editorial on the sickeningly cruel treatment of chickens by Pilgrim, one of the largest producers, Nicholas Kristof observes In fairness, the chicken companies excel at producing cheap food, with the price of chicken falling by at least half in real terms since 1930. Chicken is cheap partly because companies have tinkered with genetics so that a baby chick burgeons in five weeks to a full-size bird with an enormous breast. By my calculations, if humans grew that explosively, a baby at five weeks would weigh almost 300 pounds.2

Two reflections occur at this point. First, in the name of restoring American agriculture, especially to feed the cities, saving the public health (from antibiotic-laced crippled turkeys and sickly chickens), and restoring the environment, we will have to raise Bourbon Reds, and other heritage breeds of food animals, or at least unpretentious unbranded general issue turkeys and chickens, without drugs, to supply our Thanksgiving tables. That’s one of the points of this book. But on the other hand, we must not forget that the difference between $11.00 and $180.00 is very large. It is not one of the objectives we pursue here, but somehow the price of the turkey has got to be brought in line with what the American family can afford each November. Some might wonder, do we even have any right to adopt a food system where a turkey for Thanksgiving is beyond the means of the average American family? Recall that much of the input into the broad-breasted economical turkey is taxpayer subsidized. The CAFOs in which they are kept consume enormous amounts of water at public expense. The grain with which they are stuffed is subsidized, with  Nicholas Kristof, “Animal Cruelty or the Price of Dinner?” The New York Times, April 16, 2016.

2

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the subsidies required for the grain farmer to make enough money to stay in business. The taxpayer is already footing a good part of the difference between $11.00 and $180.00. Would it make sense, in the name of public health and fiscal sanity, to redirect those subsidies to lower the cost of the Bourbon Red, at least in part? Or provide food subsidies to less well-off families? Should we decide that the dangers of Industrial Agriculture outweigh the scruples about raising the price of food, where might we start? If we want to dismantle the law and political power at the national level that shores up Industrial Agriculture, the means chosen will have to be political at the national level—that is, they must be directed to the elected members of Congress, our Representatives and Senators. This book is not the work to suggest specific laws or political campaigns for this purpose,3 but any approach to the subject might home in on some obvious vulnerabilities in the present regime. A reading of the works describing the hour-glass food system cited in Chap. 44 suggests that the political strategies focused on the budget and on the treatment of the animals may be successful in crippling the springs of industrial agriculture. First, we should start with the budget: equipped with accurate information and projections of the crop “subsidies,” now mostly in crop insurance rather than direct payments, we can engage with politicians of many stripes to disseminate that information with the ultimate objective of getting all federal money out of the picture; if that is not possible, to redirect it at least in part, to support sustainable agriculture. The major vulnerability in the subsidies seems to be in the misdirection of support—we are now in cycles of overproduction, where the enormous excess of maize (corn) has to be channeled first, as transformed into high-fructose corn oil, into very unhealthy processed foods, filling the ready-to-eat aisles of the supermarket, then to largely inappropriate feed for animals, then into certainly inefficient pro-

3  Nor am I the scholar qualified to do so. See the works in the next endnote for more comprehensive treatment of the subject. 4  Chase, Lisa and Vern Grubinger, Food, Farms and Community: Exploring Food Systems, Lebanon, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2014; Clapp, Jennifer, Food, Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2012. Conniff, Ruth, “The Urban-Rural Food Movement,” The Progressive, July–August 2015, pp. 6–7. Cook, Christopher D., “Harvesting Profits: the Roots of Our Food Crisis,” The Progressive, July/August 2015, pp. 16–19. Hauter, Wenonah, Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America, New York: The New Press, 2012. Holt-Gimenez, Eric, and Raj Patel, Food Rebellions! Crisis and the Hunger for Justice, Cape Town SA: Pambazuka Press, 2009. Krupp, Ron. Lifting the Yoke: Local Solutions to America’s Farm and Food Crisis. Montreal, Canada: Privately published, 2009. Lymbery, Philip, with Isabel Oakeshott, Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014. Patel, Raj, Stuffed and Starved: the Hidden Battle for the World Food System, Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2012. Pollan, Michael, “Big Food Strikes Back,” The New York Times Magazine, October 9, 2016, pp. 40–50, 81–83. Roberts, Paul, The End of Food, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2008. Rosset, Peter, Food is Different! Why We Must Get the WTO Out of Agriculture, London, New York: Zed Books, 2006. Salatin, Joel, Everything I Want to Do is Illegal, Privately Published, 2007. Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. New  York, NY: HarperCollins, 2002. Thompson, Paul B., From Field to Fork: Food Ethics for Everyone, New York, Oxford UP, 2015. There are others.

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duction of ethanol, then into foreign markets where it impoverishes traditional farmers just as it impoverished American farmers. Simple prudence suggests that the entire p­ roduction cycle should be cut back, and its financing cut. The use of the corn oil should be restricted by law, just on concerns of public health; export to foreign markets should conform to accepted limits on “dumping,” and ethanol production should be terminated (the price of petrol is already as low as it has ever been, and we don’t need ethanol as a competitor). Growing no more maize than the market can absorb with these restrictions would save money, health, and farmers all over the world. It would also change the nature of industrial agriculture in the United States. Second, that done, we might move on to the plight of the animals, appealing to organizations like PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), the American Humane Society, the Animal Legal Defense Fund, and others as may present themselves. Experience suggests that when the current agricultural practices are made known to the public, sentiment gathers to end those practices by law. Most of the knowledge we have comes from “undercover” films, secretly made by journalists pretending to be other than they are—temporary employees, usually— recording farm practices without the knowledge of the owners. In several states, the owners’ response has been to create state laws making such recording and publicity illegal—what we don’t know, after all, we cannot oppose. Such laws are called “Ag-Gag” laws. There is no pretense that they work for the public benefit. They are simple exercises of power by those who have that power, to protect their income-­ yielding practices which they have a pretty good idea the public would stop if it knew about them. These laws, on the face of them, are very vulnerable: if you have to have laws hiding information from us, what are you hiding? And once the public decides it really wants to know, it may be hard to conceal. Further, the laws may be unconstitutional: an Idaho federal court has already found Idaho’s law in violation of freedom of speech. We should be able to get rid of those laws. We should be able to get footage of CAFOs (all species) on every TV. Let’s get complete documentaries. We may expect as an effect of that work, that CAFOs, or at least the worst of the CAFO practices, will become illegal. Farming of meat will continue, but at a greatly reduced volume. The effect of this reduction will be to drive up the cost of meat, especially beef, but also pork, chicken and turkey. Beef cattle might end up being raised as many organic turkeys are now—the customer (more realistically, a group of customers) reserves and buys the steer on the hoof, effectively pays for its maintenance and picks it up after slaughter. These restrictions might almost completely remove beef from the American everyday diet. That result would help the health of the American people no end. It would also do more good than anything else for the natural environment, in part because the CAFOs and manure lagoons are threats to the local environment anywhere they are, but especially since the methane produced by the concentrated cattle, a powerful greenhouse gas, is a major contributor to climate change.

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Do we, whatever is understood by “we,” have the right to curtail the diet of the American citizen—even for the sake of the animals, for the sake of the natural environment our grandchildren will inherit, for the sake of the consumer himself? Well, yes, we do. This is not the place to derive the imperatives that follow from a ­consistent environmental ethic or a commitment to public health, but we know that the imperatives are there, and binding on us. Space and logistics: Instead of trying to fit an agricultural agenda into some city planner’s dream, the proponents of the farm city might choose a more spontaneous path. They might aid the establishment of gardens, of many types and sizes, at random, or as convenient, in vacant lots, parking lots, rooftops, underused parks, the yards of public and semi-public buildings (schools, prisons, hospitals and the areas around public housing come to mind). Ableman, Stone and the Brooklyn Grange have led the way. As the agricultural patchwork grows, there will be time enough for making room for urban design, using the evolved pattern of agriculture to start the conversation on opening up the status quo. All of the constraints require an imaginative approach to the location of the farms. The constraint of respect for the environment limits the right of any farming enterprise to pounce on any currently unpopular piece of parkland. The requirement that nutritious food be produced sustainably results in the need to adopt agroecology as a farming system, definitely organic, very high-intensity, stressing frequent rotation of crops, illustrated best by Michael Ableman’s farm, but also by the commercial farms we have seen. Spaces for the farm must be chosen with care, and put to work with all the insights we have been able to glean from study of existing urban farms of which this book gives only a beginner’s sample. (The attached bibliography is rich with the insights of those who have made this enterprise their own.) For starters, we may suggest the following gleanings: (1) When you have collected the people you want to work with, plant your first crop as soon as you can, on any land that is available. Take pictures. Then go search for more land. An existing farm (or garden, realistically) is the best attraction for more available land. (2) Gather tools slowly, as needed, second-hand, borrowed, as low-tech as you can get away with. (Will Allen insisted on planting by hand, himself; Curtis Stone insists that a mechanical planter is your best investment; you choose.) Do not buy any tools you don’t need immediately; stay low-tech. (3) Along the same line, keep all costs down. Keep careful track of what you plant and how well it does in the market. There should be no crops that lose money. (4) Unless you have purchased the land outright, and it is yours, a course not recommended by our sources (it’s much too expensive, and then you have to pay taxes), do not count on permanence. The land may be removed at any time. (Study Ableman’s use of plastic containers for the crops; build sheds that can be taken down quickly and reassembled elsewhere, cultivate relationships with neighbors, since their help may be needed at any time!)

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Hybrid Vigor: Hope for the Farms Looking over the exploration so far, certain features of urban farming seem to be central: first, with the possible exception of Burlington, our exemplary cities do not seem to have gone into agriculture because they thought it was beautiful, or healthy, or even a good way to reinforce family values. They started farming in hunger and in anger. In Cuba, government encouragement of local initiatives met a very real need for food consequent to an economic crisis not of their making, and served as a concrete act of defiance against larger enemies trying to exploit the situation. In the U.S., agricultural practices gathered steam because despite the promises of enough food to feed the world, inner city neighborhoods did not have access to affordable good food, largely because a capitalist industrial and agricultural establishment had decided that they were not worth the effort. So they—private entrepreneurs, neighborhood co-ops, idealistic hippies—started to grow their own. All the values that we summarized in Chap. 4, save for resistance itself and the good food they were growing, are “emergent” values, not part of anyone’s planning, but recognized in the process of carrying out other plans—serving to anchor the plans that followed. In the effort to elucidate the ethical core of any activity, we search for the principles that guide the practice; in the case of urban agriculture, over a large range, the practice has created the principles. Second, against the earlier utopian tradition, no new cities will be created. The agricultural city grows within the skin of an existing city, often in opposition to many of its institutions, always retaining a tension between the city’s past and its agricultural future. At any point in its development, the city is incomplete. But from the elements given, we can conceive a model of the complete city. How does the city grow? The city can grow in patchworks. Let us imagine: In certain parts of the city, there will be clusters of fashionable skyscrapers; to judge from the opening pages of the NYTimes Magazine each week, there’s a market for high rise utter luxury with spectacular views, intermingled with high rise buildings devoted to hydroponics. On ground level in those buildings, we will have fashionable restaurants that buy the greens raised next door (or upstairs). These taller buildings can be gathered in limited areas, even as they tend to be naturally in evolved cities. We can put some parks among the high-rises, featuring shade-loving plants. Then for the rest of the city, low-rise (six stories and under) villages set around intensive farm plots for fruit and vegetables. That’s about the height of the townhouses in mature cities; most of the buildings we need are already in place. To be sure, the farm plots are not in place: but the back yards of the older townhouses, with clutter removed and all fences pulled down, would answer the description rather well. At least one third of the buildings around each plot will be dedicated to affordable housing; access to these houses will be conditioned on work for the farm, and a contract for work on the farm will accompany the housing contract. Any resident can work on the farm; each farm village will work out for itself how this work will be recruited and rewarded. These villages, as per Chap. 5 above, have their own schools and primary care health centers, and are incorporated to run them; the vil-

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lage hires its own professionals in these fields. On the ground floors of the village houses, we have the operating areas for the farm: a canning and freezing facility (attached to the outdoor vegetable washing and packing area, for summer use), a restaurant (depending on the size of the village, maybe two), storage areas for small theaters and the musical groups that play at the parties. Note that most of this space is multiple purpose: when the restaurant is not serving food, its space is used as a playspace for the youngest children; except when the work is heaviest, right after harvest, the food processing facility is divided into classrooms for the school. Up against the clusters of high-rise office and hydroponics buildings are the central cultural institutions of the city: the university, the concert halls, the museums, the opera. (Depending on the size of the city, historically given, there may be two or more such centers.) Is such a city possible? Certainly. Is it likely to come about on its own? Probably not, but here we cannot say with any certainty. It will come about, if at all, from the disjointed, spontaneous efforts of many urban farmers, following (or not) one of the models set forth in this book or in a host of others, ultimately coordinating efforts to form village after village. Its very diversity—in origins, methods, sources, philosophies of farming—will strengthen it, as melding of genes strengthens the hybrid plant. The farm city will never be neat, well organized (as a whole), or complete; but it should be a healthy and stimulating place to live.

Appendices Appendix 1: A Strategy for the Future of the Urban Farm In order to make room for the urban farm in the future of agriculture in the United States, we are going to have to reallocate political power. We know how to do this; it means putting together a mass movement, such that popular pressure makes it impossible for any legislature not to act, even in defiance of the desires of their paymasters. The road is frustratingly long, requiring the suppression of justified anger at bureaucratic delays and ignorant opposition, all on unpaid time taken away from whatever else we may have been doing, compared with which political work must seem a waste. But it is not; it is the only work which has ever accomplished anything. We need to take on industrial agriculture in a series of campaigns, starting with areas of greatest vulnerability and working toward the monied center. A suggested order follows: Campaign #1: Oh, the Poor Beasts! Stop the terrible cruelty! (a) Document as dramatically as possible the pain and sickness of the animals in slaughterhouses held in CAFOs (especially cattle) or crowded barns (especially chickens). Don’t worry about the Ag-Gag laws: they’re unconstitutional anyway, and those who defy them will look like heroes. The existence of these laws underlines the effectiveness of this approach. If we cannot get access to the facilities, use drones with cameras.

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(b) Join with PETA and the Humane Society to launch a huge public campaign to make animal raising genuinely humane—lots of space, room to fulfill their nature. Vegetarians may join the campaign for a while; that will swell numbers without forcing the outcome. At the least, to the extent that the campaign is effective in curbing the CAFOs. it will raise the price of meat, thereby improving the national health. (c) Then use the drones to document the manure lagoons, especially on the hog farms, as public health dangers. Document the overflows. (d) Then call for an end to all use of antibiotics in commercial animal husbandry, using stories of food-borne illness from microbes that have become resistant to all antibiotics because of their extensive use in agriculture. Note that antibiotics are necessary in the current system, not only to promote growth, but also to prevent disease caused by the crowding of too many animals in too small a space. (e) The aim of the campaign is to put all CAFOs out of business. As the campaign becomes more effective, begin to promote a business plan of raising few animals in any one location, letting them graze in the summer, eat hay in the winter (natural food, as opposed to maize), slaughter locally, ship regionally, minimize packing. (f) Strategic reason: Make it a lot more expensive to raise animals for meat by outlawing current practices, bringing organically raised meat more into the realm of the affordable. Also take the financial clout of the huge meat enterprises (Tyson, Smithfield) out of the confrontation. Campaign #2: We’re Being Poisoned—in the Air, in the Water, in the Soil! (a) Dewayne Johnson was awarded $289 million on August 10, 2018, as compensation for being poisoned (in a way that caused cancer) by RoundUp, an herbicide marketed by Monsanto, now owned by Bayer. The price of Bayer’s stock fell immediately by 11%, and the financial impact spread to other weedkiller manufacturers: they all use glyphosate as the basis of their product. Further impact is expected on the business in seeds genetically modified to be resistant to RoundUp, presaging a major attack on industrial agriculture generally.5 The company plans to appeal the amount, but the principle is sound. Help find lawsuits to sponsor. (b) Collect pictures of children exposed to toxic chemicals in their environment. On the principle that sympathy for animals can be generalized to children, go after the audiences reached in the first move. Laws are already on the books to protect children (and adults, incidentally) from being poisoned by someone’s pursuit of profits. Demand enforcement of the laws. Plead for a ban on the poisons. (c) Work to extend the Clean Air and Clean Water initiatives with anti-chemical regulation through the EPA, emphasizing the poisoning of rivers and air.

 The Economist, August 18th–24th 2018, pp. 54–55.

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This is very difficult in the present administration, but this administration is not immortal. Can’t hurt to keep the heat on. (d) Meanwhile extend the evidence gathered in the first move to go directly to Congress to get anti-chemical legislation. Cultivate friendly Congresspersons to lead the legislative fight. Concentrate on clean air, water. Lots of pictures of polluted China. (e) Begin to present a much more attractive picture of agriculture, as local, organic, small, and free of all toxic chemicals for whatever purpose. (f) Strategic reason: Make it a lot more expensive to do industrial agriculture by outlawing, to the extent possible, their herbicides and pesticides. Begin to make agroecology more attractive. Campaign #3: Industrial Agriculture is a Welfare Queen, luxuriating in taxpayer money! Make them earn their living! Stop the subsidies! (a) Publish in bright red ink the subsidies that Big Ag gets from the government, especially for crop insurance. (How about calling it the Red Ink Campaign?) Emphasize equally the amount of money (that could go to other causes) and the shame of supporting an apparently solid American enterprise on extensive government subsidies. Show pictures of Agribusiness executives in luxurious cars; publish their salaries. (b) Ridicule the whine that government is supporting “family farms.” These are huge enterprises, and most of the profit goes to those who never go near the land. (c) Point out that much of the subsidized product (maize, for example) is diverted to 1. animal feed (where, at least in the case of the cattle, it should not be), 2. the “high fructose corn oil” added to processed foods that contributes to American obesity and diabetes (public health problem), and 3. ethanol, the gasoline additive which saves no petrol, since often it costs a gallon or more of petrol (one way or another) to make a gallon of ethanol, which isn’t as powerful as the gallon of petrol. (d) Simultaneously promote the image of the virtuous independent farmer, who makes his money from farming, not begging from Uncle Sam, and try to re-­ direct the subsidies to support small organic farms. (e) Strategic reason: cut way back on those subsidies, which in many cases make it possible for the farms that would otherwise be out of business to eke out a tiny profit and keep Big Ag going. (Farmers say that they farm the Programs, not the Land.) This campaign will not work instantly, but should impact industrial agriculture seriously after 2–3 years. Campaign #4: Stop Poisoning Us with Contaminated Food! 1. This campaign can be carried on along with the others; it addresses many of the same problems and takes on many of the same targets. Review the dangers

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of raising animals in crowded conditions, including use of antibiotics. Make sure their use is banned. 2. Food poisoning can come from many sources; find cases where it is plausibly linked to industrial agriculture substances or practices, like RoundUp, then generalize to all uses of herbicides and pesticides in agriculture: we use this stuff because it kills things. Things rather like you. Are you sure you want us to go on using it on your food? 3. Strategic reason: Circling back now, to another attack on the herbicides and pesticides. If these are banned and unavailable, industrial ag impossible. Campaign #5: Save the Earth! 1. Join the campaigns of every environmental organization to get laws and practices to stem agricultural runoff (not a problem in small farms). 2. Repeat warnings against poisons that can end up in the water supply. 3. Tout returning of fish in newly clean rivers (etc.) 4. Begin to teach agroecology, agriculture that is carries out according to the natural processes of the region where it is working. This agriculture is entirely compatible with, and supportive of, wild nature. 5. Strategic reason: forge and reinforce alliances with the environmental organizations, which have a power of their own that we can borrow. Campaign #6: We really want Small Organic Farms, which are More Efficient than Large Machine-Driven Farms! 1. Only now do we really start talking about farming. The point here is to introduce and support the agroecological approach to farming. 2. Collect more pictures, of small diversified (organic) farms, vs. huge machines mowing down the landscape in the industrial farms. Campaign: Where do you want your food to come from? 3. Now facts and figures, all of which we already know.

(a) Most food for the world grown on small farms, intensively worked. (b) Soils lost and destroyed from large farms with exposed soil. (c) Large machines cost a lot, dictate industrial farmer’s business plan, not for the good. (d) How organic works, intercropping so pesticides are not needed, etc.

4. Bring back the animals; how to raise beef cattle without CAFOS, chickens, ducks, and pigs. (Will this be some approximation of Old MacDonald? Why not?). Campaign #7: Agroecology as the Ruling Model for Agriculture. 1 . Campaign for general acceptance: Ag schools, Ag Extension, general public. 2. Build educational campaign suitable for all elementary schools, science curricula for middle and high schools.

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3. Strategic reason: Cement agroecology in place for next generations, proof against administrations like the present, or any other undesirable political changes. Will these strategies work? They seem plausible, and similar strategies have worked before (in, e.g., the Civil Rights Movement), but we must remember that large amounts of money are available to oppose them, and as we presently see (2018), the political atmosphere need not always be friendly.

Appendix 2: The Direction of Urban Agriculture We have before us a selection, by no means complete, of initiatives in urban agriculture, farming in the city. We’ve seen some of their successes and failures, and worked out the values governing them. We have adopted one of the major directions articulated by many of our farmers—that the community farm grows people, people in community, at least as much as it grows fruits and vegetables. The objectives of the urban farm have seemed much more in tune with the values of community life—family, health, education, useful work and a sense of purpose for all its members—than the profit-driven enterprise called “industrial agriculture.” We have posed the small urban farm, necessarily organic if only to avoid poisoning the neighbors’ pets, against that enterprise, which is owned by its middlemen, sustained by chemical fertilizers and poisons for weeds and pests, able to put “food” on our tables at a fraction of the price of the produce of the small farm, only because it is massively subsidized by taxpayer money. We have not followed up on one of the themes set forth in Chapter Four’s discussion of the values at stake—the political direction of a serious movement to dismantle industrial agriculture and replace it, as far as possible, with an economy of small farms, city and country. It is time to do that. The reform initiative for agriculture has been taken up many times before, by some excellent analysts of the political side of the problem. I was particularly impressed by a summary advanced by four of the best participants in the national debate: Mark Bittman, columnist for The New York Times (and co-founder of The Purple Carrot, a vegan food company), Olivier de Schutter, co-chair of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, formerly UN special rapporteur on the Right to Food, Michael Pollan of the University of California, with several delightful books on food policy to his credit, and Ricardo Salvador, formerly a professor of agronomy at Iowa State, who directs the Food and Environment Program for the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). Their summary, “Re-Envisioning Our Broken Food System (A Road Map to a Healthier and More Equitable National Food Policy),” appears in the Winter 2016 edition of Catalyst, the journal of the UCS.6 Their objective is ambitious, possibly gargantuan: 6  Bittman, Mark, Olivier de Schutter, Michael Pollan and Ricardo Salvador, “Re-Envisioning our Broken Food System: A road map to a healthier and more equitable national food policy,” Catalyst

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to enunciate the basic principles of a National Food Policy, which would address “three of the most critical issues of our time: health care, climate change, and economic equality.”7 The authors expect that a national food policy would include “a host of commonsense components that are broadly supported by the American public,” fifteen of which they list in the article. As they claim, the features they list are not really controversial: 1. Promote greater production of seasonal fruits and vegetables—by making credit and loans available to a multitude of small farmers, to buy and run their farms, thereby creating 189,00 new jobs and $9.5 billion in new revenue for those farmers and their regions. And incidentally, improving the health of the American people, who eat much too much meat and fat and sugar and nowhere near enough vegetables. 2. “Re-solarize” the food production system—drastically lowering the amount of fossil fuels consumed on the farm, and diversifying the crops grown, thereby reducing energy consumption and CO2 emissions. This measure will help the natural environment and lower the likelihood of plant-borne diseases that torment monocrops. 3. Appoint a national Food Policy Advisor—to coordinate food policy across government, and make sure that national agricultural policy does not impede efforts to save the environment and promote public health (by, for instance, directing funds to monocrop farming and the machinery it needs to survive). 4. Redirect agricultural research—away from genetic and chemicals exploration to regionally appropriate regenerative agriculture, based on agroecological principles. Refocus government and private or non-profit sector grants, and the land-grant university system, to serve local and regional constituents. 5. Rethink livestock production—eliminate non-medical use of antibiotics, end federal subsidies and the regulatory gaps that allow CAFOs. Reintegrate the animals onto the farm. “CAFOs should be recognized and regulated as the factories they are, subject to the same standards, regulations and penalties as other industries that emit noxious products.”8 6. Launch a “Farmer Corps”—to educate a new generation of farmers and put them to work on the land. We’ll need them; the farming population in the U.S. is aging rapidly. 7. Use existing antitrust laws—to restore competition to food markets at every level. Chap. 4, above, following Raj Patel, described the U.S. food system as an “hourglass”—many farmers, many consumers, with a very few seed and pro-

(Union of Concerned Scientists), Volume 15, Winter 2016, pp. 8–11. For more details on their suggestions, the reader is referred to www.ucsusa/food_and_agriculture, or to “Memo to the Next President,” from which the Catalyst article is adapted, at Medium.com 7  Ibid. p. 9. 8  Ibid. p. 10.

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cessing companies in the middle, collecting all the profits. This measure would knock the middle out of the hourglass. 8. Establish a federal grain reserve—modeled on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, to avoid speculation-driven volatile swings in commodity prices. 9. Ensure fair wages for farm labor—enough at least so they can cook and eat the food they harvest. 10. Enforce existing worker safety rules—give OSHA the resources it needs to protect all food workers, from the harvesters in the fields to the underpaid waitresses serving in the fast food restaurants. 11. Expand farmers’ markets—providing grants to towns and cities to build year-­ round indoor/outdoor markets. The urban areas (think Detroit) and other food deserts need these most. 12. Prioritize regional producers in federal food procurement—in contracts with the biggest food customers we have, the military and the prisons, also national parks and schools. 13. Require municipal and institutional composting—of all food and yard waste, from every source, making the compost available to the farmers. Some states already levy fines against large users for burying organic matter in landfills; these laws should be universal. 14. Promote food education—in every school curriculum. Promote school gardens, farm-to-cafeteria programs, and classes in food processing. Basic biology classes should include plant cycles; more federal support for the Child Nutrition Act will bring healthy food into the school. 15. Support maximum transparency in food labeling—so that the customer can determine whether the food she buys is healthful for the family, grown and shipped according to fair labor and trade practices, and environmentally sustainable. As the authors claim, it would be hard for any enlightened legislator, or citizen, to argue with any of these. But then why are they not in force now? Measures supporting these objectives cannot pass now because legislation is not primarily a product of desirability, but of the exercise of political power. None of the sectors of society that would actually benefit from these measures—farm workers, small farmers, consumers, wage workers along the food chain, animals raised for meat—have any political power. Those with power are either those with money, who inhabit the profitable middle of the hourglass, or the legislators who depend on the contributions of those with money to get elected. Recall the insight of Eric Holt-­ Gimenez, cited earlier: The Food System is not broken. It is working precisely the way it was designed to work, by those who designed it, for their own profit. Those with power have no interest at all in radically changing the current system in order to put power in hands other than their own. The experts in economics, agriculture, and agronomy who undertook to “re-envision a broken food system” have simply been addressing the problem in the wrong way. We do not need a technical fix. We need a substantial reallocation of power. How may that best be accomplished?

Chapter 9

Postscript: An Urban Farm in Process

Review and Reflection In this brief survey of motives and methods of urban agriculture, we’ve seen several examples of farms in the city. Setting aside the skyscrapers full of fresh grown salad greens, we have been watching our entrepreneurs try to grow communities—growing people more than growing plants—in Cuba, Detroit, Vancouver and elsewhere. Now what can we learn and how put it into action? For starters, we diverge from our practice of considering only successful farming initiatives, sufficiently realized to permit books describing them, to take a look at a farm community (or farmily, as we have learned to call it) in progress—Partridge Creek Farm, in Michigan.

Partridge Creek Farm Urban agriculture was undertaken, in the cities we have studied, for reasons as various as their locations. Cuba started its city plots facing starvation and a serious attack on its national sovereignty, Detroit faced abandonment and poverty, Burlington was dealing with renegade chickens, Michael Ableman was trying to revive a derelict neighborhood. Partridge Creek Farm (PCF), in Ishpeming, Michigan, started in order to entertain, feed and educate the neighborhood children. Dan Perkins, a roofer and general contractor in the city of Ishpeming, loved gardening and had a productive garden in his Ishpeming back yard. Children from his neighborhood, of several ethnic backgrounds, some of them from the subsidized housing on the block adjacent to his house, arrived in his back yard to help out (and relieve summer boredom); Perkins sent them home with some of the produce from the garden. They came back to work and gathered more. The relationships established with these children gave birth to the idea of a community farm. Ishpeming (the name means “the summit, or high point” in the language of the native Ojibway) is on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, across the Mackinac © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. Newton, Urban Agriculture and Community Values, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39244-4_9

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Bridge, attached to land only in neighboring Wisconsin. The whole U.P. is a food desert, importing 92% of the food its residents eat from elsewhere in the country (or abroad). There is little fertile soil on the sandy peninsula. People did not come here to farm, although they carried their farming roots with them and often had garden plots to supplement their family food supplies. They came here to cut and ship the abundant timber, or to mine the abundant iron under the ground. Ishpeming hit its height of employment in the 1910s, when several mines turned out iron worth some millions of dollars and the number of Ishpeming miners stood at about 10,000; it recovered from the Great Depression to share in the Post-War boom of the 1950s, and retained much of its base through the 1970s. Then, as the mines petered out (or suffered from competition from more highly automated enterprises) a long decline set in. Downtown Ishpeming is a particularly sorry reminder of the decline; from a recent PCF grant application: Now there is an excess of housing and much of it is not maintained. Many of the stores have closed in the downtown as well, giving the town a decayed appearance. As some of the old houses are torn down with funding from urban blight grants, these aging neighborhoods can wind up looking like mouths with decaying and missing teeth. There are families living in these neighborhoods that need healthy food, a nice neighborhood, and a positive engaging community to share it with.

PCF’s proposal? “Inspiration Orchard,” rows of raspberries, beds of blueberries, apple, cherry, plum and pear trees, with handicapped accessible paths, benches, and a pavilion with rain collection, water storage, and a solar-powered pump for irrigation. An invitation to graze the berries and fruit would be extended to the entire city. Ishpeming now fits the description “post-industrial,” very like Detroit but from different causes; the generic problems of the Rust Belt—unemployment higher than the national average, high school dropouts, pervasive ill health, a ferocious problem with all manner of drugs—plague Ishpeming as well. Community gardens would help address some of these problems: healthy outdoor work for teenagers and the unemployed, possibly paid at some level, the greening of the streets and commons, projects to unify the neighborhoods, fresh vegetables for everyone. To return to the beginning, Perkins’ garden was already doing some good. Some children were being fed, becoming familiar with the life cycle of plants, and learning the value of productive work (not always predominant in their homes), and Perkins wondered if this pattern might be of some interest to the wider community. The property behind Perkins’ garden, land owned primarily by Cleveland Cliffs Mining Company with some of it absorbed by Ishpeming for a subdivision and park, had been abandoned and left to the weeds for over a decade, with seemingly no use to the town at this time; could a new initiative in community agriculture take it over for a farm? Perkins turned over some soil and planted potatoes in the area with the local kids. That year, 2013, Partridge Creek Farm assembled of a Board of Directors and created a 501 (c) (3) organization; one of the first actions was to go to the Ishpeming City Council and for permission to create the farm on the property they had just planted. The Council found the idea problematic. What kind of precedent would it set if the city allowed potentially profitable and competitive ventures to set up oper-

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ations on public lands without paying taxes, the city attorney queried? The city voted to have PCF cease and desist with the understanding it could harvest the potatoes when they were ripe. This would not be the first time PCF lost use of a piece of land it would plant downtown. Perkins and others went to the public comment sessions held by the town to protest that the farm would be exclusively not for profit according to their charter. The city did not, ultimately, cooperate, but at one of the public comment sessions Perkins was approached by a delegation from Grace Episcopal Church (Ishpeming), which had been trying to establish a community garden site on a pair of joined building lots they owned in the downtown. Perkins suggested that they work together, and in 2014, with the help of a $15,000 grant Perkins obtained from a local health foundation, that parcel of land beside the church became a jointly run farm: one half the site was rented out by Grace Church for community gardens, the other half was farmed by PCF.  Volunteers built raised beds with grant purchased and donated materials and topsoil, put up a hoop house, a miniature greenhouse, beehives, and a garden fence to keep out bunnies. A big hand painted sign was mounted over the gate celebrating the collaboration, and a media event with a city council member invited to speak marked the launch of the garden. Since the PCF garden and greenhouses would be used to experiment with crops that would grow well in the local (cold) climate, the PCF half was renamed the Incubator Site. PCF would need grant support as well as contributions, sponsorships, memberships, and sales of goods and services to sustain itself and grow. Perkins successfully applied for a second grant from the West End Health Foundation, the small local foundation charged with disbursing funds left over when the non-profit hospital sold out to a large for profit Hospital with 80 other hospital locations, which paid for the fencing of the Incubator Site, the experimental hoop house and wood and soil for the raised beds. A small grant from Cliffs Mine Foundation paid for grow lights and shelving for the Farm-to-School program; the same foundation went on to fund five raised beds in the city. The Vermont-based Green Mountain Foundation (run by an old college friend) gave PCF $15,000 for a new truck and general operations. (As a family foundation of the Dolan family, Green Mountain is bound to ensure that least 50% of any recipient’s funds must be from public support; PCF qualified easily.) Much of the other money that started PCF’s operations came from local businesses and churches that sponsored raised beds on various sites. By 2015, Perkins realized that his appeals to the city were cumbersome and ineffective, and that it was considerably easier to work with the network of businesses and non-profits that increasingly responded to his calls for volunteers on the projects. A chance to expand into periurban farming in 2016 provided further useful information. When farmland became available for lease in the next town, PCF signed up for it. A grant of $10,000 helped develop a small farming area in West Ishpeming—but that site was lost in the bankruptcy of the owner. (That was a black mark for future grant proposals—someone should have been in a position to see the fragility of the owner’s position). While they were there, the farm’s interns and ­volunteers grew crops successfully, but the experience was dispiriting: they were outside of town, they were working alone, the community was lost. The farm’s mis-

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sion—essentially, building community spirit and the optimism required to sustain it—does not work in isolation. Perkins now confines the work to in-town projects, staffed by volunteers drawn from local businesses—augmented by church groups. The church groups began to show up in 2016. Many churches have Youth Service summer programs: camps, of a kind, that combine service and recreation, financed by the congregations. In these projects, kids and counselors do service projects for five or six hours a day and enjoy recreational activities in the afternoon and evening. Coordinators of the Michigamme Bible Camp, for instance, fifteen minutes away from PCF, were the first to contact PCF with offers of participation. 2017 was the fourth year of their participation. The fees (paid by the parents) and contributions are sufficiently substantial that the sending church itself breaks even from the endeavor, and it is in everyone’s interest to keep it going. The sending church requires of the destination non-profit that the teens be kept occupied, and put to work, clearly in service to a community. Healthy outdoor work at the PCF, a non-­ profit farm, where the food is distributed to the community (or sold at a farmers’ market, with proceeds plowed back into the farm) is an ideal service assignment. Meanwhile, participants in these groups (and volunteer groups of any age) eat at the local restaurants, take in the local sights, and buy souvenirs at the local shops; Ishpeming has adopted the term “voluntourism” to describe this valuable combination. It is hoped that this arrangement will continue indefinitely. In 2018, two of the previous summer’s churches did not return; it seems that communication had failed in the middle of the year, and other plans were available to the churches. PCF concluded, from this failure, that someone would have to be put in charge of keeping up 12-month communications with its clients. Less clear was the way this could be accomplished. The first warning bell was sounded in the summer of 2017. In the spring of 2017, PCF tried to build three in-city gardens, a bit too many, as it turned out. Attending to too many sites at once with a limited number of volunteers divided energies and created confusion, occasionally chaos. Perkins, exhausted, concluded that his people need to work on one project at a time to make sure that it concludes within the time allotted, and that the volunteers experience the triumphant completion of hard work. At the least, much too much time was wasted, for instance, waiting for materials to arrive at the site where they were needed. Perkins’ first move was to limit the number of summer projects. That helped. But he also realized that his practice of recruiting and deploying large numbers of volunteers required more hands-on management and encouragement. His schedule did not allow him to do that managing himself; he needed a coordinator of volunteers. Another warning came from one of the major components of the enterprise, the Marquette Farmers Market, which Perkins uses as an educational enterprise as well as an outlet for their produce. The local farmers at the market, natural allies for PCF, turn out to be unenthusiastic about education and outreach: they have their regular customers, who come with their bags to buy vegetables, and they are not interested in the “tourists,” who eat at the restaurants and only visit the Farmers Market to enjoy the sights and soak up atmosphere. In general, any ambitious new initiative, which shows up in an estab-

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lished institution with its own settled expectations, can expect a chilly welcome; Perkins is very patient and well-liked, but these delays continue to frustrate PCF. Each spring PCF throws a party, intended to recognize, reward and encourage those volunteers, serve as a fundraiser—and blitz through the construction of another major site, complete with new raised beds. Publicity citywide draws as much of the community as possible into the effort. Perkins enlists the cooperation of other volunteer organizations in these annual events—the Elks Club (BPOE) and the Lions (Lions Clubs International), in particular, in both of which Perkins maintains a longstanding active membership. Other NGO participants include Rotary (the Marquette Breakfast Rotary Club), Big Brother-Big Sister, YMCA’s mentoring program, Transition Marquette (local sustainability), and many universities and school systems (including Michigan State University Extension and Northern Michigan University). These collaborations are infinitely valuable, directing the energies of hundreds of local volunteers; keeping in contact with them will require much more effort than PCF is currently prepared to deploy. (PCF needs more luck with the weather: both the 2018 and 2019 Earth Day fundraisers were carried out in the pouring rain with the temperature in the 30s. Work got done, but they cost more money than they raised.) The Farm continued to grow. The PCF business plan centers on sales of beds to local businesses as sponsors, and the sales continued to advance. The sponsor has to agree to supply 50% of the labor required and 50% of the materials for the bed. In return, a sign featuring the business name and logo is erected by the site. Perkins also solicited Whole Site sponsorships from some businesses, the income from which could be used for fencing, site maintenance, possibly income for a farm manager, whose tasks were multiplying as the enterprise became more complex. At the end of 2017, besides the original garden, PCF was farming in four major sites. The original Incubator Garden continued as a center of effort, both agricultural and educational, for the Farm. The key site was on land owned by the Elks’ Club, which is actually on Partridge Creek, a super example of the product of volunteer labor and sponsorships. There are now 28 sponsored garden beds inside a fence constructed by volunteers (and a carefully protected patch of milkweed plants for the monarch butterflies). Since the Elks have an inside venue available, their site will probably be the central venue for future PCF events. Then there is a half-acre garden in front of Carpet Specialists in Ishpeming, made available by an owner intrigued by the idea of a multi-site community farm. Across town, there is a third of an acre plot of land owned by pawnbroker Aaron Perkins (no relation), which now supports sixteen sponsored beds. Volunteer labor cleared land, planted grass, and put up a fence, all in the pouring rain. (Not every enterprise works out: a local proprietor, contacted while out of town, said sure, put in a garden on the back lot. When all the work was done, he came back, decided he needed the land for other purposes, and forced PCF to take out all plants and soil. Lesson: get signed leases before committing labor and other resources.) Partridge Creek Farm came to a turning point in the summer of 2018. As Perkins put it,

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We’ve hit a wall. We’ve done a lot, too much from some perspectives, but the organization keeps falling apart. We just lost our third farm manager—at the height of the season. Burned out. Too many hats on one person—no way she could do any of her multiple jobs to her satisfaction. That’s the story of too much of the Farm--we realize that we’re not doing anything completely or well. We’re relying much too much on our volunteers, who are wonderful, but we expect much too much of them.

He went on to point out that the problem is getting worse. Three areas in particular need attention: First, the farm-to-school program is expanding by a factor of four, from 32 to 121 fifth- and sixth-graders next year, plus 32 advanced biology students from the high school. Incidentally, we need to thrash out a Memo of Understanding (MOU) with the schools to define the scope of our service. We need a staff member from PCF to concentrate on this program—and there’s no way a volunteer, especially one with the knowledge of the schools to do the job well, can be asked to spend that kind of time. Second, PCF has also promised expanded services to the Great Lakes Recovery Center. We’ll be supervising recovering addicts twice a week, all year long, and supplying outpatient services—keeping ex-addicts involved in the farm activities that have given them strength and direction, as the best defense against relapses. The Farm needs to assign someone to devote at least half time to this program—someone with some experience in addiction services as well as with the green and growing land. Third, we also want to increase the work we started with, greening up the city of Ishpeming for food and beauty, growing an orchard and planting berry bushes in vacant lots, in general creating edible landscaping—to carry on the work it has so successfully begun. More businesses have indicated their interest in sponsoring raised beds. The farm needs to have someone working on this—public interest has a way of disappearing if no one attends to it.

That’s three positions that need to be staffed, at least half time each, and the Farm does not have the experience or infrastructure to make filling those positions a simple task. And there are others. A fourth position, Communications Director, was mentioned above: someone needs to keep tabs on the churches that send student volunteers to work on the farm as a service assignment, or the churches will find other outlets; that job should include regular contact with all the collaborating NGOs, all the contributing businesses, and all actual or potential donors, public and private. A fifth salary needs to be arranged for the farm manager, preferably before PCF loses any more. And a paid position of coordinator of volunteers must be created. As any NGO can attest, the management of volunteer labor is tricky, and absolutely required. Volunteer enthusiasm is essential to the organization. The NGO needs it, and needs to put it to work. Underused volunteers lose spirit, get bored, then resentful (why did he say he wanted us if we’re not going to do anything?), then eventually damaging, running down the enterprise in all their social circles. You don’t want to chase them off. You need not only to put the enthusiastic volunteers to work, but to give them some ownership of the project. But that can create problems. Perkins ruefully recounted stories of enthusiastic volunteers who had been given too much responsibility, and fled the project terrified when they realized they could not complete it. A coordinator is needed; that’s six positions to fill. Meanwhile, the mission of PCF continues to expand. The Farm to School program began with a few advanced biology classes at the local high school, on which they had no impact whatsoever. The rest of high school curriculum is dictated by the

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State of Michigan, and is impenetrable. But they were allowed to teach the fifth-­ grade. Perkins describes the effort: PCF has developed a thriving relationship with the Fifth Grade Science program at Ishpeming Middle School. We have a champion of our program in Kaitlin Rich, the 5th Grade science teacher, who prepares two sections of students (45  in all) for our weekly classes there. These classes engage the students in hands on experiential learning. When the weather allows, we are outside in the extensive school garden (built by PCF and expanding every year) or in the woods cutting wild apples for grafting or visiting a local farm. When we are in the classroom, we are building worm bins, preparing healthy foods, learning the intricacies of soil science with experiments, etc. This year we will be working with MARESA and MSU extension to develop Farm to School programs in neighboring schools.1

Now all they need is someone familiar with education to coordinate the program, and the money to pay the coordinator. But it was clear from the beginning that they needed to get to students earlier. Could they find a nursery school to incorporate into the program? Through family connections, Perkins found a home-based daycare program called Roots and Wings, run by a dedicated educator preparing to open a full-fledged daycare center, who wants to work with them. There’s another reason why Ishpeming might be interested in a local day-care center/nursery school: Michigan allows School Choice, and if parents have to take their preschoolers to neighboring towns for day care, they’ll likely keep them in that town for public school, and Ishpeming’s schools may find themselves severely underpopulated (and underfunded). Another educational collaboration is emerging as we write, with Teaching Family Homes, a local NGO that houses and treats children for whom no residence can be found and are ineligible for foster care. These children have been seriously abused, and work with them will parallel work with the recovering addicts in the Great Lakes Recovery Center Youth Services. Again, a coordinator of this partnership, and the money to pay that coordinator, must be found if these collaborations are to be successful. “We’ve been doing all this with volunteers,” Perkins says, “working them sometimes 50 to 60 hours a week, and that is not sustainable. We burn out all our best people. We need full-time paid staff for the first time ever.” Where will it get the money to pay them? Fundraising, which has been personal (and haphazard) up to this point, will have to become a well-organized activity—and will require another paid staff member, with experience in the fine art of fundraising, to do the organizing. That’s seven. Connections can help, and as a successful businessman in Ishpeming, Perkins has several. Along with many other public-spirited business owners of the nation, Perkins has long been a member of several Service Clubs, traditional societies (once, but no longer, restricted to males) who take it as their mission to serve the larger society without pay. Noteworthy in Ishpeming, as above, are the Elks, who have made their headquarters available for PCF gatherings and sponsored raised beds, and the Lions, who have assisted PCF in many of its building projects. To put  Dan Perkins, Partridge Creek Farm Spring 2019 Report.

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9  Postscript: An Urban Farm in Process

the initiative in perspective, know that the Lions is the largest service club in the world, with over 1.5 million members and active clubs in over 220 countries. Perkins has been especially active in the Lions, and has served as Zone Chairman for three years (as of 2019). Zones are part of Districts; District 10 covers the entire Upper Peninsula (56 Clubs). At the Annual Convention for District 10 (April 2019), Perkins moved that district 10 adopt Partridge Creek Farm as a major (district-wide) project, and got it accepted. That means that PCF is now eligible for Lions Club International Foundation Grants, and can appeal to individual clubs in the UP for support with the blessing of the District. It is much too early to tell if such endorsement with materially change the status of PCF, but does feel like a wind at your back.

Conclusion Going Forward We are looking at an organization on the cusp of becoming professional. To this point, personal relationships and contacts with friends have sufficed for collecting volunteers, organizing labor, asking for money, and running the office. That time has come to an abrupt end. Perkins is perpetually double-booked, never intentionally but always inevitably, reminded at the last minute of meetings crucial to the future of the Farm, racing from job site to job site between his roofing company and PCF, and trying to fill in gaps with late-night phone calls. Chaos is entertaining, but is no way to run a serious enterprise, which PCF has become. The next several months will determine whether the enterprise succeeds in moving to a more professional level or fails completely. Failure is not out of the question—recall that Will Allen’s Growing Power, internationally known, universally admired, successful for decades, ultimately got out of control and had to abandon some of its commitments; that story is not finished yet, but it is a grim reminder of the fragility of these large-­ scale efforts. If it fails, will it have been worth the effort? This chapter is a chronicle of high hopes, the beautification of a city, the education of children and healing of adolescents, and genuine progress in placing nourishing food where it was in short supply. It is also a chronicle of opposition, frustration, efforts thwarted in part or in whole by lack of resources.

Bibliography

Ableman, M. (2016). Street farm: Growing food, jobs and hope on the urban frontier. White River Junction: Chelsea Green Publishing. Engaging story of starting an urban farm in Vancouver. Very good on all the difficulties. Ackerman-Leist, P. (2013). Rebuilding the foodshed: How to create local, sustainable, and secure food systems. White River Junction: Chelsea Green Publishing. A thorough exploration of the notion of “eating local,” by a local author, with chapters on energy use, environmental protection, food security, food justice, biodiversity, and market economics. Dense, very good. Alkon, A. H., & Agyeman, J. (Eds.). (2011). Cultivating food justice: Race, class, and sustainability. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Philosophically central to our objectives in this course, but in its generous survey of food system injustice—farmers’ markets, the Deep South, the American Northeast—it touches on urban areas only tangentially. Often wonky. Allen, W. (2012). The good food revolution: Growing healthy food, people and communities. New York: Penguin (Gotham Books). The classic: Allen started it all off. Shows how to create parcel farms and aquaponics greenhouses with fish, with a delightful emphasis on doing it economically. Anger, J., Fiebrig, I., & Schnyder, M. (2013). Edible cities: Urban permaculture for gardens, yards, balconies, rooftops and beyond. English edition. Hampshire: Permanent Publications. Foreword by Sepp Holzer, one of the permaculture pioneers, whose students are the authors. Excellent, practical, note permaculture theory. Sometimes a little nutty. Aranya. (2012). Permaculture design: A step-by-step guide. Hampshire: Hyden House Ltd. Barsamian, D. (2015, July/August). Food and ethics: An interview with Saru Jayaraman. The Progressive, pp. 52–55. Powerful indictment of restaurants for treatment of restaurant workers. Bernstein, S. (2011). Aquaponic gardening: A step by step guide to raising vegetables and fish together. Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers. Just exactly what it says it is, from the rationale and economics of aquaponic systems (like Will Allen’s in Milwaukee), to the choice of fish and plants, to the building and plumbing, and a chapter on “The ten dumbest mistakes I made getting into aquaponics.” Berry, W. (2009, September). Inverting the economic order. The Progressive, pp. 18 ff. Argument that economy should be based on things that are “priceless,” “fertile land, clean water and air, ecological health, and the capacity of nature to renew itself.” General rant against the consumerist economy, exploitation of innocent consumers, arguing for return to the local. Berry, M. interviewed by John Collins. (2013, October). Beyond the farmers market. In These Times, pp. 34 ff. Mary Berry is Wendell Berry’s daughter, currently executive director of the Berry Center in New Castle, Kentucky, aimed at providing a base for agrarian thought, instigating cultural change. Need a food system that incorporates agroecology, but ensures farmers of steady adequate income (like corn and soybeans do now). © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. Newton, Urban Agriculture and Community Values, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39244-4

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Lidz, F. (2015, May). Welcome to FarmTopia. Smithsonian, pp. 75 ff. Tale of “Serenbe, a 1000-­ acre suburban Eden,” a collection of neighborhoods around designed villages, environmentally sound waste water, sewage, energy provisions, three restaurants, art galleries, with farms at the center. Identifies “agritopia” (or “Agriburbia,” name of a company set up to exploit it) as one of the newest trends in real estate. Other such colonies visited. You have to put up with the supercilious tone of the author, who seems to think that suburban agricultural plots are the silliest frou-frou the aging hippies ever came up with, but there are some interesting models. Loh, P. (2015, Winter). Urban farming, one vacant lot at a time. YES! Magazine, pp  34  ff. Community Land Trusts work to ensure affordable housing, and they also are helping new city farmers get land. Tale of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Boston, combining housing with gardens, small farms, also a school. Lymbery, P., with Oakeshott, I. (2014). Farmageddon: The true cost of cheap meat. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. The evils of industrialized livestock raising, centering on the UK. Chemical contamination, antibiotic use, general threats to public health and the environment. Urges a “massive rethink” of the way we raise animals for food. Magdoff, F., & Foster, J. B. (2011). What every environmentalist needs to know about capitalism: A citizen’s guide to capitalism and the environment. New York: Monthly Review Press. Superb little book (under 200 pages with notes and index), giving a concentrated summary of environmental problems, implicating the capitalist economies in causing them (along with a host of other social problems), and concluding that capitalism cannot “become green.” A requirement for the economists. Magdoff, F., & Tokar, B. (2010). Agriculture and food in crisis: Conflict, resistance, and renewal. New York: Monthly Review Press. Excellent collection, historical analysis of the development of the crisis; the authors of the articles are major players in the food systems debates. Very little on urban possibilities. Mageau, M., Radke, B., Fazendin, J., & Ledin, T. The aquaponics solution. Solutions, 6(3), 49–57.0. Mander, J., & Goldsmith, E. (1996). The case against the global economy and for a turn toward the local. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, . An extensive set of essays, mostly the product of contemporary anarchist thought, one section focused on agriculture. Manning, R. (2016, February). The trouble with Iowa: Corn, corruption, and the presidential caucuses. Harper’s, pp. 23–30. The Trump campaign, and the reasons why it resonates in Iowa; corn, hogs and political ignorance. Not very charitable. Markham, B. L. (2010). MiniFarming: Self-sufficiency on ¼ acre. New York: SkyHorse Publishing. Hands-on, step by step manual for success in (very) intensive farming. McKibben, B. (2010). Eaarth: Making a life on a tough new planet. New York: Holt. Extended argument that we have, by our climate-warming actions, ended the era of moderate climate in which humans evolved, and we had best prepare to live differently. McMillan, T. (2012). The American way of eating: Undercover at Wal-Mart, Applebee’s, farm fields and the dinner table. New York: Scribner. A one-woman cruise through the food system. Particularly interesting on her participation as a migrant worker. McWilliams, J. E. (2009). Just food. New York: Little, Brown. A (partially) contrary view, challenging what he takes to be “dogmas” (mostly from Michael Pollan) about the superiority of local, organic, non-GMO foods. Some good stuff. Mollison, B., with Slay, R. M. (2002). Introduction to permaculture (2nd ed.). Tagari. Morrison, S., & Sweet, R. (2010). Garden up! Smart vertical gardening for small and large spaces. Brentwood: Cool Springs Press. How to grow things up walls, especially in cities. Moss, M. (2013, November 3). Broccoli, the dopest vegetable. The New York Times Magazine. A not-entirely-serious article on how to persuade Americans to eat better. Mougeot, L. J. A. (2006). Growing better cities: Urban agriculture for sustainable development. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre. A study of urban agriculture in the Global South, and the work of the IDRC in studying it and promoting it. In the last chapter, Vision of

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the Future, set in 2025, they describe schoolyard gardens and other land sharing schemes that are already in effect in many cities of the North (e.g. Burlington). Mumford, L. (1961). The city in history. New York: Harcourt. The classic, on the nature and history of cities. Urban agriculture is not mentioned, although the discussion leaves room for it. Murphy, D. (2012, September 24). Breadbasket blues: High grain costs, caused by severe drought, are hitting dinner tables from Guatemala to China. But the world has learned valuable lessons since the food shocks of 2008. Will it be enough to prevent social unrest? The Christian Science Monitor Weekly, pp.  27  ff. How the drought is affecting consumers and nations across the developing world. Need to be prepared for weather shocks in the future. Natsoulas, A. (2019, Spring). The story behind Nyéléni 2007: A forum on food sovereignty. The Natural Farmer, a publication of the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA), special Supplement on Food Sovereignty, pp. B 7–8. Naylor, G. (2019, Spring). The history of food sovereignty and the path to a caring society. The Natural Farmer, a publication of the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA), special Supplement on Food Sovereignty, pp. B 11–12. Nolan, J. (2013). From the ground up: A food grower’s education in life, love, and the movement that’s changing the nation. New York: Spiegel and Grau (Random House). Fascinating story of how to start an urban farm/garden, in the course of which we also learn a lot about her life and loves. Fun. Ohlson, K. (2014). The soil will save us: How scientists, farmers, and foodies are healing the soil to save the planet. New York: Rodale. Tracks the life in and of the soil, and ways to regenerate it, pioneered by farmers and ranchers. Soil can absorb the excess carbon in the atmosphere, saving us from climate change woes. Strong indictment of Monsanto et al, as forcing research, universities and legislators away from work on regeneration. Not much on cities. Pasanen, M. (2015, May 17). Growing young farmers: New program encourages youth to join the state’s aging farming population with financial support for agricultural business ideas. Burlington Free Press, 2G. Patel, R. (2012). Stuffed and starved: The hidden battle for the world food system. Brooklyn: Melville House. One of the earlier books on the global food system. (2012 is a revised edition.) Shows the decline of rural economy and the small farm, overproduction of profitable commodities, obesity here and hunger there, with nutrition nowhere. Not about cities (but see chapter 8, toward the end). Penniman, L. (2018). Farming while black: Soul fire farm’s practical guide to liberation on the land. White River Junction: Chelsea Green Publishing. A narrative for African American farmers, tracing agricultural practices back to Africa (including smuggled seeds), incorporating reverence for sacred soil and rituals of purity, with several chapters devoted to practicalities— business planning, soil restoration, crops, animals, seeds, tools, choice of plants, methods of harvesting, cooking, preserving, and forming a social movement. Penniman, L. (2019a, Spring). Dirt: It’s beautiful. By reconnecting with soil, we heal the planet and ourselves. YES! Magazine, pp. 18 ff. Penniman briefly describes her work at her Soul Fire Farm, Grafton, New York, a Black-led farm focused on food justice. Tracks the black relationship to soil from Africa (where Cleopatra declared earthworms sacred), through recovery after slavery and sharecropping, to present regenerative efforts on soil drained by bad practices. Penniman, L. (2019b, Spring). Soul fire farm: Toward food justice. The Natural Farmer, special supplement on Food Sovereignty, B-16-17. Philips, A. (2013). Designing urban agriculture: A complete guide to the planning, design, construction, maintenance, and management of edible landscapes. Hoboken: Wiley. Thorough. Basic instructions, careful detail. Plakias, A. C. (2016). The farm on the roof: What Brooklyn Grange taught us about entrepreneurship, community, and growing a sustainable business. New  York: Penguin Random House (Avery). A story of rooftop farming in New York City, done by a small group of techie types bored with careers in finance and media; an evolution from fun-for-profit to genuine community.

Bibliography

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Platt, R. H. (2014). Reclaiming American cities: The struggle for people, place, and nature since 1900. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Lists food security, health, youth training toward permanent jobs, urban beautification, reclamation of vacant lots, then also: environmental justice, environmental education, community pride, “neighborliness,” with no particular argument connecting these things. Pollak, S. (2013, July 13). The roots of a community garden go deep: Vegetables, flowers, mosquitoes and nature-lovers fill the plots at Tommy Thompson garden in Burlington. Burlington Free Press, Saturday, pp. 1C ff. Portrait of Fred Schmidt, founder of UVM’s Center for Rural Studies, tending community gardens in the Intervale. Part of go local, grow local, effort to take control of food and life. Pollan, M. (2006). The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A natural history of four meals. New York: Penguin. The original spark for the lay critics of the food system. Tracking food from the farm, with good descriptions of the various kinds of farm, to the table. (Even shoots a wild boar.) This is the book that made Joel Salatin’s farm famous. (Videos Fresh and Food, Inc., also feature Michael Pollan and Salatin’s farm.) Pollan, M. (2008). In defense of food: An eater’s manifesto. New York: Penguin. Source of the diet mantra: Eat food [real food, like your grandmother would recognize as food]. Not too much. Mostly from plants. Pollan, M. (2016, October 9). Big food strikes back. The New York Times Magazine, pp. 40–50, 81–83. Barack Obama started out to cut back the power of Big Food, reform the food system, and promote more healthy diets through smaller organizations. He was no match for Big Food, a “$1.5 trillion industry that grows, rears, slaughters, processes, imports, packages and retails most of the food Americans eat.” P.44. Ponting, C. (1991). A green history of the world: The environment and the collapse of great civilizations. New York: Penguin books. How agriculture historically destroyed its earth and itself. Prentice, J. (2015, July/August). Social change in a Mason Jar. The Progressive, pp 37–40. The story of the Three Stone Hearth Community Supported Kitchen, provider of home-made locally sourced cooked food distributed to purchasers of shares, along the lines of a CSA, online ordering system, cook all week, shareholders pick up at end of week. Also sell off the shelf. Returnable glass mason jars. Democratic governance. High wages ($16/hr.) Pritchard, F. (2013). Gaining ground: A story of farmers’ markets, local food, and saving the family farm. Foreword by Joel Salatin. Guilford: Lyons Press. Inspired (and mentored) by neighbor Joel Salatin, a young farmer manages to bring the family farm back into production. Register, R. (2010). Ecocities: Rebuilding cities in balance with nature. Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers. Very serious, good, book on planning cities for the future, adjusting to (and minimizing) climate change, good on environment, not essentially about agriculture. Resh, H. M. (2013). Hydroponic food production: A definitive guidebook for the advanced home gardener and the commercial hydroponic grower (7th ed.). Boca Raton: Taylor & Francis. An exhaustive how-to book, with an interesting introduction on hydroponics past (how we discovered what sorts of nutrients and light the plants need), present (very large), and future of this industry. Detailed and technical. Rich, S. C. (2012). Urban farms. New York: Abrams. Another beautiful book (more photographs than text!), that covers a wide variety of urban gardens and farms, two of them in Detroit, two in New Orleans, interspersed with short essays on growing food. Dedicated to the proposition that cities can feed themselves. Covers Boston, Milwaukee, Detroit (Earthworks, Capuchin Soup Kitchen), Chicago, Philadelphia (Greensgrow), Brooklyn (Edible Schoolyard), New Orleans (Hollygrove, Blair Grocery). Richardson, A. (2013, August 12). To help the hungry, give land rights to poor women: Women are more likely than men to increase a household’s nutrition and to spend income on the family. The Christian Science Monitor Weekly, p. 36. Roberts, P. (2008). The end of food. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Exposé of the modern food system, risks of food-borne diseases, decline in nutrition, impoverishment of half the world.

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Rodale Institute. Farming systems trial: Celebrating 30 years. Rodaleinstitute.com Anything Rodale does is good. Rogers, H. (2010, July/August). Slowed food revolution: Obama seeks to boost demand for organic food but doesn’t offer meaningful support for the people who grow it. The American Prospect, pp. 12–16. Conclusion: “The Local-Food Revolution Doesn’t Stand a Chance.” Organic farmers dependent on inherited land, off-farm jobs, free and low-cost labor. Not sustainable. Rosan, C. D., & Pearsall, H. (2017). Growing a sustainable city? The question of urban agriculture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Philadelphia, PA, and its earnest trials of community agriculture. Rosenthal, E. (2007, November 27). Backyard gardens shelter Europe’s orphan seeds. The New York Times, Tuesday, p. A4. Story of an Italian gardener who deliberately grows heritage landraces, ancient plants with unique features that may someday be needed. Rosset, P. (2006). Food is different! Why we must get the WTO out of agriculture. London/New York: Zed Books. Despite violence on the cover, a serious, even wonky, book on the evils of treating food as a commodity (like putting third-world farmers out of business). Rural orientation. Rosset, P.  M., & Altieri, M.  A. (2017). Agroecology: Science and politics. Black Point/Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing. Short, to the point, uncompromising defense of agroecology and local control vs. industrial agriculture in all its forms (including organic). Rosset, P., & Benjamin, M. (1994). The greening of the revolution: Cuba’s experiment with organic agriculture. Melbourne: Ocean Press. Excellent summary gives a brief account of the whole Cuban agricultural transformation; detailed examination of methods adopted and obstacles encountered. Written right in the heart of the transformation. (Not current.) Royte, E. (2016, March). Waste not, want not: About a third of the planet’s food goes to waste; that’s enough to feed two billion people. National Geographic, pp.  31–55. Account of the deplorable wastage of food, from field to leftovers, at every stage of the food system; solution focused on Tristram Stuart, campaigning worldwide to use all that wasted food. Clear, well-­ written, beautifully illustrated, very informative graphs, tables. Salatin, J. (1998). You can farm: The entrepreneur’s guide to start and succeed in a farming enterprise. Swoope: Polyface Inc. Very good, very practical. Start with chickens. Doesn’t say too much about cities. Salatin, J. (2007). Everything I want to do is illegal. Privately Published. An extended critique of legal restrictions in the food system that are designed for (and by) agribusiness and that make it difficult to run an organic farm and sell its products legally. Salatin, J. (2010). The sheer ecstasy of being a lunatic farmer. Privately published. A celebration of the anti-industrial organic farm, by one of its icons. Salatin, J. (2011). Folks, this ain’t normal: A farmer’s advice for happier hens, healthier people, and a better world. New York: Center Street Press. Fun. Sanger-Katz, M. (2015, July 26). America starts to push away from the plate. The New York Times, Sunday, p. 1. Calories consumed by Americans seem to be in a sustained decline. Sauerbrey, A. (2018, August 10). Are Germany’s Gnomes at risk? The New York Times, p. A21 (Op-Ed), Sauerbrey documents in German cities the phenomenon noted across the U.S.: as land becomes more valuable, once-popular urban gardens (kleingärten) come under pressure to be replaced by housing or other development. Schlosser, E. (2002). Fast food nation: The dark side of the all-American meal. New  York: HarperCollins. What the McDonald’s of this world are doing to us—from the conditions of employment to the content of the food and the effects on our health. Schumacher, E. F. (2010). Small is beautiful: Economics as if people mattered. New York: Harper (originally published 1973). The classic. Read it. Seabrook, J. (2007, August 27). Sowing for apocalypse: The quest for a global seed bank. The New Yorker. Fascinating history of seed-saving and the creation of a permanent seed bank in Norway, preserving the original plants of species now mostly GMO.

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Simpson, C. (2016, Fall). A role for colleges in growing young farmers. Tale of Occupy the Farm, a documentary about Berkeley students who took over part of the University’s Gill Tract; part of it is still an urban farm. YES! Magazine, p. 60. Singer, P., & Mason, J. (2006). The ethics of what we eat: Why our food choices matter. Rodale. Argument for vegetarianism. Solomon, R., & Nolan, M. (2010). I garden: Urban style: Grow the garden that fits your space and schedule. Cincinnati: BetterWayBooks. How to grow lots of stuff in small spaces; jazzy writing. Steinhauer, J. (2014, March 9). Farm bill reflects shifting American menu and a senator’s persistent tilling. The New York Times, Sunday, p. 12. Farm bill signed into law February 2014 contains provisions friendlier to organic farming. Stone, C. (2016). The urban farmer: Growing food for profit on leased and borrowed land. Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers. A superb new how-to book, focus on bottom line, clearly written by a successful farmer. Numbers, diagrams, instructions. After short intro chapters, all nuts and bolts. Strom, S. (2016, June 27). Giving chickens more time to peck and play in the sunshine. The New York Times, Monday, p. B1. Perdue Game Hen grower experimenting with letting chickens grow up in sunlight, and finds they like it. Tavernise, S. (2015, December 1). In major shift, diabetes cases start to decline: Data points to change in U.S. eating habits. The New York Times, Tuesday, p. A1. Incidence rates dropping, in a trend of several years; growing evidence that American eating habits are starting to improve. (Consumption of sugary sodas, major driver of obesity and diabetes, declined by 25% since 1990s.) Note: Incidence is not prevalence. Ten Eyck, L, (2008, Spring). Fresh from the farm next door. American Farmland, p. 10. Addressing the new interest in local foods. Whole issue of American Farmland carries out the theme. Thompson, P. B. (2010). The agrarian vision: Sustainability and environmental ethics. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. A philosopher’s take on the farm situation, arguing that our nation was founded on contact with the soil and the life of the small farmer, for good reasons; exhortation to remember the soil. Thompson, P. B. (2015). From field to fork: Food ethics for everyone. New York/Oxford. Moral analysis of food systems—diet, animal welfare, crises of hunger and obesity, social injustice. All choices matter. Tortorello, M. (2011a, July 28). Growing from underground. The New York Times, Thursday, p. D1. How Permaculture became mainstream. The Permaculture’s movement’s founders, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, coined the term from “permanent agriculture/culture” in the mid-70s. Tortorello, M. (2011b, August 28). Mother nature’s daughters: Why are women doing most of the work on so many urban farms? The New York Times, Thursday, p. D1 (HOME). There are upwards of 900 food gardens and farms in the five boroughs of New York City, and almost all the farmers are women. Why? Several answers: women live longer, many farms are run by immigrants from Caribbean or Middle Eastern countries where women do most of the farm work, the men need jobs that pay a living wage (farming doesn’t), the men are in jail. Unferth, D. O. (2014, November). Cage wars: A visit to the egg farm. Harper’s Magazine, Report, p. 43 ff. Pervasive sense, on part of farmer and visitor alike, that keeping hens in batteries is somehow wrong enough to be kept from public view; short discussion of “ag-gag” laws forbidding covert videotaping. Seven rows of cages, eight tiers, very long barn, mostly clean except for dust. Major concerns center on welfare of the hens, not danger to us. Van Gelder, S. (2015, Winter). Urban revolution: New energy is transforming our cities into hotbeds of democracy and progressive innovation. They are leading us into the future. YES! Magazine, pp. 18 ff. How in the absence of any action at state or federal level, cities are taking action on transportation, climate change, and poverty. Issue also focuses on urban gardens, also mobile cooking/nutrition classes.

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Varney, S. (2015, December 15). Scaling up: Nursing homes are grappling with increasing numbers of obese patients. The New York Times, Tuesday, D1 (Science Times). Consequence of diabetes: patients so heavy they cannot be accommodated in standard chairs, toilets, wheelchairs and hospital beds. Physicians maintain that they cannot lose weight. Volk, J. (2017). Compact farms: 15 proven plans for market farms on 5 acres or less. North Adams: Storey Publishing. How to run a profitable truck farm, on the borders of the city. Walsh, M. (2012, November 18). Feds put school lunch on a diet: Effort to ‘right-size’ school lunch portions hits resistance. Burlington Free Press, Sunday, p. 1B. Federal regulations designed to curb calories and obesity are putting a burden on schools like Harwood’s, that source locally and cook from scratch, because they cannot prove that the calories are as required by regulation. Warner, K.  D. (2007). Agroecology in action: Extending alternative agriculture through social networks. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. A young Franciscan monk’s work with poor farmers in California. One of the earlier books; working with Hispanic communities to raise production without synthetic inputs. Wilce, R. (2014, June). Oregon’s GMO sellout. The Progressive, pp. 24–27. Oregon has a new law, pushed by corporate interests, pre-empting counties’ rights to regulate agriculture, specifically pesticides and herbicides, forbidding a ban on GMO “Roundup-Ready” crops. World Wildlife Magazine. (2016, Spring). Food chain reaction: How a collaborative gaming exercise broke open a vision of a brave new world. WWF Magazine, pp. 14–15. Report of a two-day simulation of a food crisis sparked by political unrest. Players included diplomats, NGO reps, former Secretary of Ag, and Cargill. Concluded that advance planning is essential and that private sector is to be a major contributor to any solution. Zimmer, C. (2013, July 16). Looking for ways to beat the weeds. The New York Times, Science Times D1, D3. Problem with herbicides is that weeds, like insects, evolve to render the herbicides useless. More and stronger herbicides do not seem to be the answer.

Focused on the Three Cities: Havana, Detroit, Burlington [Havana] Premat, A. (2012). Sowing change: The making of Havana’s urban agriculture. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. [Havana] Clouse, C. (2014). Farming Cuba: Urban agriculture from the ground up. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. [Havana] Funes-Aguilar, F., Garcia, L., Bourque, M., Perez, N., & Rosset, P. (Eds.). (2002). Sustainable agriculture and resistance: Transforming food production in Cuba. Oakland: Food First books. [Havana] Koont, S. (2011). Sustainable urban agriculture in Cuba. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. [Havana] Newton, L. Notes from personal visits to Cuba with Food First, primarily to research this book; January 2014 (Sponsor: Food First tours); March 2015 (sponsor: Burlington College). [Havana] Struck, D. (2015, October 5). Cuba invasion 2.0: Cubans await America’s capitalist masses with desire and dread. Christian Science Monitor, pp. 26–32. [Havana] Chan, M. L. Unfinished puzzle: Cuban agriculture, the challenges, lessons and opportunities. Obtainable through New Haven/León Sister City Project, 608 Whitney Avenue, New Haven CT 06511. [Havana] Cohen, L.  Community gardening in Goyena. Newsletter Summer 2014. New Haven/ León Sister City Project, 608 Whitney Avenue, New Haven CT 06511. [Havana] Pearl, M. (2015, June 21). Havana on my mind. The New York Times, Travel Section, Sunday. Hanging out with a cousin in a middle-class neighborhood; no agriculture, but good atmosphere.

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[Havana] Anderson, J.  L. (2015, July 20). Letter from Havana: Opening for business. The New Yorker, pp. 22–28. Profile of a Cuban ex-pat taken to guiding investors to the new Cuba. [Detroit] Davey, M., & Walsh, M. W. (2013, July 19). Billions in debt, Detroit Tumbles into insolvency: A problem ‘six decades in the making’—Bankruptcy is largest of its kind. The New York Times, Friday, p. A1. [Detroit] Azikiwe, A. (2014, September). Fighting back in Detroit. The Progressive, pp. 40–42. Popular protest against the termination of water services in Detroit. [Detroit] Atkinson, A. (2014, Fall). Urban agriculture: Fertile Fround for community growth. World Wildlife, p. 32. One column squib by the Director of Keep Growing Detroit. [Detroit] Dolan, M. (2016, June 12). The young repolishing economy of Rust Belt: Cities like Detroit lure professional, innovative types in their 20s and 30s to help jump-start a new renaissance. Detroit Free Press, included in USA Today, pp. 1B–2B. [Detroit] Eligon, J. (2014, July 7). Testing ground for a new Detroit: In north end, hope and challenges for a Mayor’s Pledge. The New York Times, Monday, p. A1, A10. VERY useful article, detailing the foundation of a community garden in a destroyed neighborhood, the resentment of the few black families hanging on in the decaying houses—strong racial overtones, “how come these white kids are given land here in our area?”—then being won over with the kids’ industry and generosity, eventually joining them. EXCELLENT. [Detroit] Austen, B. (2014, July 13). Buy low: Black and white, young and old, billionaires and shop owners—A growing chorus of optimists in Detroit is saying that the time is right to invest. Is the post-post-apocalyptic city finally here? The New York Times Magazine, pp 22ff. Suggests that wave after wave of optimism is premature; city still in horrible trouble; mentions Hantz’s trees and “community gardens” as part of a vision not yet realized. [Detroit] Nocera, J. (2015, June 2). Is Motown getting its groove back? Celebration of new entrepreneurial activity in Detroit, conceding its small effect at present. The New York Times Op-Ed page, Tuesday. [Detroit] Zernike, K. (2016, June 29). Heralded choice fails to fix Detroit’s schools. The New York Times, Wednesday, pp. A1, A14–A15. The much-praised market option—charter schools— have not helped Detroit’s educational quality, and in many ways have damaged it, while raising suspicions of political cronyism among right-wing politicians and the wealthy landowners who rent property to the charter schools. [Burlington] Aloe, J. (2016, May 19). Pot Biz carries on: Despite defeat, entrepreneurs prepare for legalization. Burlington Free Press, Thursday, pp. 1A–4A. [Burlington] Nihart, A. (2012, September). William Robb, and Jessica Hyman. Burlington Urban Agriculture Task Force: Report to the Burlington City Council. [Burlington] Pasanen, M. (2014, October 24). Cider Resurgence: The duo behind Shacksbury Cider in Shoreham is bringing back old-fashioned flavors. Burlington Free Press, Friday, p. 1D. [Burlington] Pasanen, M. (2015, May 17). Growing young farmers: New program encourages youth to join the state’s aging farming population with financial support for agricultural business ideas. Burlington Free Press, p. 2G. [Burlington] Pasanen, M. (2016, May 27). ‘No one’s doing anything like this’: At this Shelburne farm, you can buy a coffee, artisan bread and of course, vegetables. Burlington Free Press, Friday, pp. 1D–4D. [Burlington] Pollak, S. (2015, June 19). The good food truck to serve low-income diners. Burlington Free Press, Friday. The Chittenden Emergency Food Shelf is sponsoring the truck, which will bring free locally-sourced meals to lower-income people that can’t make it to the Food Shelf. (Grant from Jane’s Trust, Boston Philanthropy, bought the truck for $125,000.) Meals from gleanings, cooked in the truck; first sites in Milton and at Harbor Place in Shelburne. [Burlington] Pollak, S. (2016a, May 28). Food truck on a mission: Delivery of free meals to fight hunger in the county is unique. Burlington Free Press, Saturday, pp.  1A–4A.  Follow-up to previous article, showing the truck in successful operation. It serves about 175 meals a week at various low-income locations.

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[Burlington] Pollak, S. (2013, July 13). The roots of a community garden go deep: Vegetables, flowers, mosquitoes and nature-lovers fill the plots at Tommy Thompson garden in Burlington. Burlington Free Press, Saturday, pp. 1C ff. Portrait of Fred Schmidt, founder of UVM’s Center for Rural Studies, tending community gardens in the Intervale. Part of go local, grow local, effort to take control of food and life. [Burlington] Pollak, S. (2016b, May 20). ‘They’re old school’: O Bread rising in Shelburne for four decades and counting. Burlington Free Press, Friday, pp. 1A, 1D–4D. [Burlington] Pollak, S. (2016c, June 17). Former lawyer finds joy behind the ‘Juice Bar’. Burlington Free Press, Friday, pp. 1D–3D. Organic farm started by lapsed lawyer Mike Winters to create very good vegetable juices sold at City Market in Burlington. [Burlington] Ross, C. (2013, June 25). Creating healthy communities, economic opportunity. Burlington Free Press, Tuesday. Praise for Fletcher Allen Health Care (now University of Vermont Health Center) for its award from Health Care Without Harm for local sourcing of its food. It takes longer to make arrangements with individual local farmers than from one industrial source. Chuck Ross is Vermont’s Secretary of Agriculture, Food and Markets. [Burlington] Stratton, L. (2016, January 21). It’s spreadsheet season on the farm. Shelburne News, pp. 1–14. [Burlington] Sutkowski, M. (2012, September 23). A community thrives: As Burlington community gardens celebrates its 40th anniversary, the program, like the produce that sprouts from the earth, keeps on growing. Burlington Free Press, Sunday. Celebration of Burlington Community Gardens (now the Vermont Community Garden Network), focused on the gardens in the Intervale. On Baltimore: http://grist.org/people/miracle-garden-brings-life-and-food-to-the-urban-wasteland/. Accessed 23 May 2013. On Will Allen: http://grist.org/urban-agriculture/soil-survivor-an-interview-with-will-allen/. Accessed 23 May 2013. On Chicago: in 1830, it adopted the motto, “Urbs in Horto,” the City in the Garden. Didn’t inspire much urban farming at the time, but yielded some wonderful parks. http://www.chicagoparkdistrict.com