Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (19 page)

Seann Dory, the farm's manager, had been at work since five o'clock that morning—Wednesday afternoon was one of four market days a week—and he was keen to tell the story of SOLEfood, so far really only a locally known phenomenon. Dory, with a few days of facial scruff and a wool flat cap that made him look more like an independent musician than a farmer, technically had been a farmer for only a few months.
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As the manager of sustainability at United We Can, a grassroots inner-city community nonprofit group that fosters and runs environmental social enterprise initiatives, Dory was searching for a new environmentally friendly business venture when the idea of starting an urban farm was raised. Stakeholder groups under the United We Can umbrella were
meeting to brainstorm enterprises that would create jobs in the inner city through green initiatives. “Urban agriculture seemed to have the most energy behind it, and the most support at a city level as well.” But the year-long search for a suitable site in the Downtown Eastside proved fruitless despite the generous tax incentives the city was offering to businesses that converted unused land or brown space into green space.

Ultimately, the Astoria Hotel, a shabby rooming house on a major thoroughfare through Vancouver's most desperate neighborhood, offered up its rubbish-strewn, rat-infested parking lot that had become a dumping ground on the block. The problem was that the offer came in from the Astoria Hotel just days before the deadline for the municipal tax evaluation. Regardless, Dory and fifty volunteers literally built the farm on October 31, 2009, the day before the cutoff to qualify for that year's tax break.

With a de facto urban farm on Dory's hands but no actual gardening experience or knowledge under his belt, the winter of 2009/2010 was a flurry of consultations. “None of us had any farming experience, so we surrounded ourselves with experts. I grabbed as many master gardeners as I could find, and I put them on our advisory board. We met quite frequently for a while.” One of those farmers happened to be Michael Ableman, who now farms on Salt Spring Island, on British Columbia's coast. Despite running his own 120-acre (48.5-hectare) Foxglove Farm, Ableman joined the farm's board of advisers and gave Dory and the farm staff invaluable hands-on mentorship throughout the first year.

“We're making mistakes regularly,” laughed Dory, yet I was becoming increasingly more distracted by a woman nearby washing the most beautiful white-tipped red French breakfast radishes I'd ever seen.

Not nearly as impressed by the morning's radish harvest as I was, Dory pointed to the raised bed growing glossy green peppers. “Those stakes are inadequate. We have to redo those.” Then he rattled off a list of other missteps: watering issues, overharvesting issues, bad seeding technique. “But we're still able to grow here.”

Besides the Technicolor® breakfast radishes being washed and bundled for market and restaurant deliveries, gardeners were picking ripe, perfect tomatoes from the plastic-draped “high tunnels,” essentially makeshift greenhouses with curved plastic piping supporting heavy clear plastic, just tall enough to walk through. And they were on their third cutting of salad greens, a mix of red Lolla Rossa, green oak leaf, and arugula baby lettuces. Another young farmer, Jordon Cochrane, happily posed for me as he harvested dark-green “lacinato” kale leaves, sometimes referred to as dinosaur kale for its alligator-skin-like texture. The farm was also growing collard greens, garlic, spinach, basil, eight types of tomatoes, seven types of sweet peppers, and eight types of hot peppers.

“Want to see our pinpoint seeder?” Dory asked with that I've-got-a-new-toy inflection, pointing to a hand-sized piece of farm equipment with outer wheels, a handle, and five mini-hoppers that release seeds at perfect intervals in perfectly straight rows. He also noted that it didn't take long for bees to find the farm. He has even noticed some “volunteer”
seedlings growing in cracks in the pavement. And the recent discovery of worms in the garden beds prompted him to shout out, “Worms! We've got worms!”

I suggested that these premium market veggies look like they are out of the price range for the people shuffling past the farm. Dory bluntly agreed but quickly pointed out that SOLEfood Farm's goal was not to feed the neighborhood. Its goal was to provide real-life skills training for those who go through the training so they can find reliable work and support themselves. And to do that, the farm needed to be a commercially viable business, and for that, they needed cash flow. This meant that they were selling about 90 percent of the produce directly to highend restaurants and the farmers’ market crowd in upscale areas. The remaining 10 percent would go to the surrounding community
organizations working on food-security issues. Staying true to United We Can's social enterprise model, providing subsidized fresh food is not the answer to the Downtown Eastside's problems, but providing skills training that leads to an income stream—as an urban farm provides—offers long-term sustainable security.

That said, the immediate benefits to the community were evident as I sat there watching the activity both at the farm and around the chain-linked perimeter. The plants, bees, and birds were clearly a tonic for area residents. One man, Mario, pressed his face into the chain-link as I was talking to Dory and asked about “his beans.” Dory explained that Mario was an enthusiastic volunteer who often came around to check on the farm. Even behind the fence and padlocks, SOLEfood Farms was a little Eden for the area residents to focus on.

By the end of the 2010 growing season, SOLEfood Farms had grown ten thousand pounds of high-market-value produce. It was enough to pay the wages of two full-time and five part-time staff. As a start-up, farming or otherwise, it was a raging success. Dory hopes that other commercial urban farms take inspiration. “In one year, we've grown one of the most successful social enterprises in North America and it's in an urban setting.”

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As I poked around in urban agriculture, food policy, and community development circles in North America, Herb Barbolet's name kept bubbling to the surface. After a few e-mail exchanges, he agreed to chat with me about his involvement in what is perhaps his most ambitious project in his forty-year involvement in local agriculture, community activism, food-policy creation, and sustainable food systems. For the past few years, Barbolet—who brings some serious academic credentials to the table with a master's in community development and two PhD
programs (ABT) in community development and in community planning and political economy—has been a member of a collaborative called Local Food First. Its mission is none other than to reinvent Vancouver's food system around local supply and distribution. If it succeeds, Vancouver could make major strides toward breaking the chain that the global industrial-supermarket model dominates even in one of the most leading-edge sustainable cities.

In his twenties, Barbolet lived in an “intentional community” in Vancouver while farming organically just outside of the city. Exotic organic salad greens in the 1970s were novel and somewhat of a tough sell, but for a decade he managed to sell high-value greens to health- and taste-conscious Vancouverites. This would be just the beginning of his role as bridge between the rural food producer and the urban eater.

In 1993, Barbolet founded FarmFolk/CityFolk, to raise awareness of food growing and farming with consumers in the city. (Farm-Folk/CityFolk is still an energetic education and advocacy group for local, sustainable food relationships between producers and city dwellers in British Columbia.) That same year, he helped form the Vancouver Food Task Group, a grassroots group that was beginning to look at the complicated relationships between food security, nutrition, agricultural land use, and civic planning, among other broad areas. By 2003, Vancouver's city council passed a motion in support of the development of a “just and sustainable food system for the City of Vancouver.” A sustainable food system was defined as one in which “food production, processing, distribution and consumption are integrated to enhance the environmental, economic, social and nutritional health of a particular place.”
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The motion also supported the forming of the Food Policy Task Force, which in turn led to the creation of Vancouver's Food Policy Council in 2003 to advise the city council on food-policy initiatives at the city level and later to the adoption of the Vancouver Food Charter in 2007, which gave municipal endorsement to the vision of a city food system that benefits the community and the environment it serves.

Local Food First began to discuss scenarios for an alternative, local food system in Vancouver in 2006. By 2010, the group revealed its preliminary business plan and design drawings for the New City Market. The design included plans for a processing facility for value-added food preparation and production of local foods, a permanent and year-round market space with storage, wholesale, and retail capacity for local farmers and producers, and a space for community education and outreach and marketing. And it would be a self-sustaining business entity, not subject to the whims of city council budgets. Vancouver city officials are currently very much behind this proposal, as stated in the city's 2020 goal-setting document, which declared that the city wants to create a food hub model that, if successful and adopted, would change the supply lines for the city's foodshed dramatically. If the stakeholders in the New City Market can actually make this leap from the page into the community, it might be a new civic model for urban food systems elsewhere.

“Those of us who have been working in the alternative food system for decades have been working with 1 to 2 percent of the food system,” Barbolet explained as we met over coffee at Vancouver's famous Granville Island Market. “When Walmart decided to go organic, they did more in one year across the world than we had done in decades.”
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This was just further proof for Barbolet that the alternative food system needed to organize, to consolidate its buying and selling power, and to scale up to the point where it could be a true challenger to the industrial food/supermarket model.

With so much change happening so rapidly in the mainstream food system, Barbolet and his colleagues saw the opportunity to get in on that change and started to think about how to support small producers, protect local farmland, and service the demand for local food. At Local Food First, they mused about how to connect the twenty thousand smaller and mixed-farming outfits that could supply the metropolitan Vancouver area with eager restaurant owners, retailers, and households clamoring for more access to local food.

The result of those musings was a design document and business plan for a 30,000-square-foot (2,780-square-meter) vertically integrated food hub in the middle of Vancouver. The proposal included space for wholesale and retail buying and selling, an indoor-outdoor year-round farmers’ market, space for food storage, distribution, processing, education, and research and development facilities. Cafés and restaurants would round out the business mix.

When Local Food First unveiled this proposed food hub in late 2010, it was already the result of three years of work, and the group was “three to five years” away from breaking ground, or not breaking ground, as Barbolet put it. The ideal scenario was to retrofit existing buildings when possible. In fact, Local Food First identified the city-owned buildings that now stand where Vancouver's original city market-wholesale café was first established in 1908.

Barbolet acknowledged that the New City Market, currently budgeted at $8 million (Canadian), is uncharted territory both as an urban redevelopment scenario and as an alternative food system. But having worked with the city planners and on the development of a nuts-and-bolts feasibility and business plan, the new food hub might soon be a reality. “The fact that on a municipal level the city government is ‘getting it’ changes everything. It's script-changing.” Overall, the momentum has become undeniably positive, and other cities are looking at the concept. “Everyone sees this as an opportunity to reinvent the city around food.”