Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (25 page)

A steep hillside rose behind the orchard, intensifying the summer heat. This, I thought, would hold the orchard in good stead. (Clearly, the settlers who named Hillhurst and Sunnyside were literalists.) But as I walked closer, I could see that the effects of a recent mid-June hailstorm had pockmarked the small green apples and pears. Other saplings had been almost eaten down completely by deer. The apple, pear, hazelnuts, apricot, and cherry trees would have to fight hard to survive.

But it was possible to grow all these fruit and nut trees in cities, even as far north as Calgary and Edmonton, with latitudes of fifty-one degrees north and fifty-three degrees north, respectively. In fact, in the small park adjacent to the triangular Hillhurst-Sunnyside orchard, a couple of older apple trees had fruit hanging on them. A trio of teenage boys were kicking around a soccer ball and bantering among themselves. As I poked through the younger fruit trees, the boys stopped their game to each pick an apple from the older tree and began to talk about how delicious the (unripe!) apples were. After about five minutes, they whipped their apple cores into the woodchip beds that surrounded the grass and resumed their informal soccer match.

There was the proof that would convince any naysayer as to the value of a community orchard. If you plant it, they will come. Even teenage boys would enjoy fresh fruit.

I recounted this story to Tim Kitchen, president of the Hillhurst-Sunnyside Community Association, a volunteer position. He's also the orchard's steward in the community, which he admitted didn't amount to a lot of work. “The wonderful thing about trees is that you don't really have to do much. There's some really minor pruning, but the rest of the time, you just have to harvest.”
¹⁸

The city, according to Kitchen, organized a pruning workshop for the community, but at this early stage, the upkeep has been minimal. For now, the community's role is simply to monitor the health of the trees and liaise
with the city if a problem arises. “And the fruit disappears whether we organize a harvest or not,” laughed Kitchen. “It would be nice if there was enough volume that we'd have to organize a harvest, but we're not there in terms of the trees’ maturity yet.” However, this self-organizing harvesting is the “best model going,” as far as Kitchen is concerned.

The pilot project has been an education for both the community and the city. The trees were planted too close together, Kitchen said, and the location was not all that appropriate in hindsight. Kitchen acknowledged that this has been a quantum leap for the city government and its parks department. The city has had to respond to the public pressure by certain groups in the city to grow food on city land. “At the heart of it, agriculture is traditionally the responsibility of the province or state, not the municipality.” The city, Kitchen suggested, has had to weigh this pressure with the risks of liability of growing food on public land for public consumption.

The new model that Kitchen felt was emerging as the most
promising was one in which the city established fruit-bearing trees associated with established community gardens. I would later learn about and witness this as the most common model at work in the United Kingdom as well.

P
UBLIC
E
DIBLE
L
ANDSCAPES IN THE
U
NITED
S
TATES

Darrin Nordahl first noticed public edible landscapes while living in Berkeley, California.
¹⁹
Small veggie patches could be found on what was clearly public land, such as the areas between the streets and sidewalks. Sometimes they were planted with fig, orange, and Meyer lemon trees, something even Berkeley wouldn't have conceived of as part of municipal landscaping. Nordahl even noticed little vegetable gardens on the narrow strip between the curb and the sidewalk, a space so minimal and close to the road that he would never have considered it as a food-production space. On the odd opportunity he had to speak with these guerilla growers, he'd mention that they had planted on public land and that the produce was technically public produce. The growers never seemed to mount much of a counterargument. Usually, they'd simply agree with him.

Nordahl now creates exactly those types of edible landscapes as a city designer at the Davenport Design Center, a division of the Community and Economic Development Department of the city of Davenport, Iowa. He's become a Pied Piper of the public orchard and municipal food-policy movement in the United States since his book
Public Produce: The New Urban Agriculture
was published in 2009.
²⁰

The reality of fruit trees, much like zucchini, Nordahl explained to me over the telephone, is not the scarcity of produce but rather the abundance. “The reality is that people just want to be able to go out there from time to time and grab some fresh fruit for themselves and their family. They have no desire to eat the two hundred pounds of fruit that the tree is going to produce.”

In
Public Produce
, Nordahl gives the example of Des Moines, Iowa, as proof that municipalities are starting to consider the benefits of growing edible landscapes on city land. The Des Moines municipal government's parks and recreation staff has planted fruit and nut trees around schools and community buildings. The maintenance on fruit and nut trees, some might argue, is even less than that of a lawn-carpeted park with ornamental shrubs and hedges. But the edible landscape provides a little bit of food security and teaches people about what types of foods are actually feasible in a certain climate. The department has even planted papaw (also known as paw paw; a tropical fruit similar to papaya), spicebush (an aromatic bush mostly native to eastern Asia), and serviceberry (a small purple fruit also called saskatoon berry in Canada), which ironically are novelties to most area residents but are actually native Iowan plant species. Part of the idea is to increase residents’ food literacy as well.

Under Nordahl's purview, Davenport has also allocated $370,000 for reconstruction of an underutilized surface parking lot, which will soon become a “green space filled with fruit and nut orchards, garden plots, and pergolas replete with rambling grapevines.”
²¹
Volunteer maintenance support will come from the local schools and university and from community groups such as Big Brothers Big Sisters and the United Way. And reportedly, the Thai restaurateur across the street is looking forward to planting, tending, and harvesting some Thai chili peppers, basil, and eggplant for his restaurant.

Nordahl lamented that tomatoes, that poster child for local produce, are difficult to grow well in Davenport. “It's best to leave that to the professional farmers,” he conceded.

It doesn't take one-acre patches of land to produce food, Nordahl clarified. “Municipalities are the largest landowners within any city.” Nordahl listed the inventory of municipal land that most cities have in abundance, all of which can be turned into more productive space: street medians; flood easements; utility corridors; parks; town squares; and the grounds around libraries, courtyards, schools, and city hall
buildings. These areas typically are already planted with ornamental plants, so switching over to edible plants wouldn't really mean more up-keep. Just more output.

“The idea is not to rip out fountains and park benches but to start searching for spaces that you know will never be utilized,” said Nordahl, knowing that citizens value their parkland, soccer fields, and other green space we generally think of as parkland. Cities own a lot of land that will simply never be developed because it's along a street, it's a utility corridor, or it's on a flood plain along a river.

Nordahl also took issue with the current solution for urban blight, which was to turn vacant lots into community gardens and other food-growing spaces. Community gardens on vacant land are especially susceptible to the economics of the situation. Once a vacant lot gets cleaned up and turned into a fertile space where food starts to grow, it becomes desirable again, and someone will want to develop it. Cities are always looking to increase their tax base, “and most of the time the community will lose.” For true food security, these edible landscapes need to happen where the risk of competition from development is lowest.

The other problem with community gardens, Nordahl argued, is that they really aren't all that public. It's one thing for a private citizen to plant on public land in a community garden. “Community gardens, however, are tended by private citizens and are treated as small pieces of private land.” The produce is not publicly available. “That's the crux of my book and where I am now personally as a government official. It has to be on public land, and it has to be available to the public,” insisted Nordahl. And this is where Nordahl said the rubber hits the road in mainstreaming the concept of public produce: “These initiatives have to be funded, spearheaded, and supported by public officials and public policy.”

“Some of the critics of my idea argue that this is not the role of government. I'm arguing that it is.” Nordahl has seemingly hit the trend of public food growing on an upswing. Since his book has come out, he's become aware of the surge of other municipal governments taking a closer
look at edible landscapes instead of ornamental shrubs and plants. That is what made former San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom's 2009 food-policy efforts to bring edible landscapes under the city's umbrella such a bold move. Nordahl pointed to this as the way that local municipal governments need to be heading. “His directive was so clear that food-system planning is the responsibility of local government,” Nordahl said.

Most city governments that are leaning in this direction, however, are only just beginning to do a land inventory. Often it's not even known how much municipal land is available or appropriate for producing food. Some cities are also including rooftop areas in this inventory. Some estimates state that one-sixth of the landmass of most cities is covered with buildings with flat roofs—schools, big-box stores, high-rises, malls, and warehouses—largely unused space that could be put into use for food production.
²²

Nordahl acknowledged that the demand for fresh produce is very high, hence the fenced and padlocked community garden plots. There are even some community gardens where the individual plots have their own fences and locks to protect from intra-garden raiding.

In fact, the question that Nordahl is most often asked is how to control the distribution of this public produce. Herein lies the beauty of public produce, Nordahl replied. The food is available to the public, so the situation has to be self-regulating, often at the community level. But it usually, miraculously, works out in a rather civilized manner. The solution to the distribution problems is really as simple as not fencing off the food and trying to control it. Rather, it's better to just plant more of it. Make more of it available, and lower the scarcity issue.

Nordahl, though biased, sees this edible streetscape revolution continuing to spread, city by city, from a municipal level reaching up to a national level. But the momentum will come out of the cities that choose to address their food securities and not wait around for national food policies. As he told Diane Rehm while being interviewed about his book on National Public Radio: “City Hall will always act faster than Capitol Hill.”
²³

C
ities like Toronto, Vancouver, and New York get a lot of press applauding their urban-agriculture initiatives. Yet, it was in the American Midwest where I met actual hands-on innovators and saw the most ambitious projects at the forefront of the urban-agriculture movement. Chicago is on track to being the home of the world's first vertical farm, growing food on a smaller footprint by layering indoor fish farming on one floor, pigs on another, and vegetables on another, and so on—a farm in a skyscraper, in a sense. The world's largest commercial urban farm is being planned in Detroit, Michigan. And though he'd probably be uncomfortable with the title, a sweatshirt-and-blue-jeans-clad, worm- and-soil-obsessed Milwaukeean, Will Allen, is undeniably the world's biggest urban-farming celebrity.

W
ILL
A
LLEN
, CEO
OF
G
ROWING
P
OWER
, I
NC
.

I first learned of Will Allen, founder and CEO of Growing Power, Inc., in a
New York Times Magazine
article titled “Street Farmer,” written by Elizabeth Royte in 2009.
¹
The fact that a New York-based magazine would spend six pages on an urban farmer from Milwaukee demonstrated Allen's fame in the urban-agriculture world, as well as his rising status in the mainstream. He had received a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation “genius” award in 2008 and had also appeared in other mainstream media such as
O
magazine. He was later named as one of
Time
magazine's “100 Most Influential People in the World” in 2010.
²

As such, Allen is currently a tireless traveler at the mercy of the urban-agriculture revolution he helped start over twenty years ago. Now in his sixties, the former basketball player turned salesman turned urban farmer seems to be on the road more than he is at home in Milwaukee. When he's not giving his seven-hundred-image slideshow presentation to standing-room-only crowds in the United States and Canada, he is consulting on projects as far away as the United Kingdom, Kenya, and the Ukraine. No stranger to hard work and perseverance, Allen has worked for twenty years to put urban agriculture on the map, and so while the spotlight continues to shine on his six-foot-seven frame, he seems to be on a mission to bring his “Good Food Revolution” to as many people in as many places as he can.

Allen grew up in Rockville, Maryland, and was a typical sports-obsessed boy.
³
But Allen's father, a former sharecropper turned construction worker, also worked a piece of farmland to supplement the family's income and grocery basket. The rules were clear. Allen had to do farm chores, along with maintaining good grades in school, before he could hit the basketball court. Both the academic discipline and the sports paid off. By high school graduation, Allen had his pick of scholarships. He chose to attend the University of Miami, becoming the first African American scholarship athlete there; meeting his wife, Cyndy; and graduating with a degree in education.

A professional basketball career followed, first in Florida, then in Europe. It was while playing for a team in Antwerp, Belgium, that Allen became an unlikely part-time hobby farmer. Allen would spend his off-court time driving around talking to farmers who grew crops in much the same way he had learned from his father. It reawakened something in him and got him toying with the idea of growing food, something he thought he'd never do again. Allen put in a request for a house with a garden—his professional basketball contract included housing arrangements—where he could keep chickens and grow foods like peas, beans, and even peanuts. Allen, Cyndy, and their children moved to the outskirts of Antwerp. He was happy to get his hands into the dirt again, and his teammates and friends didn't mind the free eggs and feasts that Allen would cook with his produce.

Allen was only twenty-eight when he finished his professional basketball career. Cyndy's family had some farmland in Merton, Wisconsin, near Milwaukee, so Allen, Cyndy, and their three children moved there. He farmed and sold his produce at farmers’ markets on the weekends, all the while excelling at sales and marketing jobs during the week. Both Royte's article and Growing Power's press materials touch on the discrimination that Allen had to overcome as a black farmer trying to break into the white-dominated farmers’ markets in Milwaukee. Tables at the popular Fondy Farmers’ Market, the central market in downtown Milwaukee, kept getting passed along to white farmers through private arrangements despite the fact that Allen was at the top of the list for the next available stall through the official process. The market finally agreed to let him set up outside the market, something that never sat well with Allen. He eventually got into the indoor market and was even elected president of the Fondy Farmers’ Market, the very group Allen had been shut out of initially.

By 1993, Allen decided he wanted to farm full time and began looking for another site to complement his existing farm in Merton. He found a greenhouse business in foreclosure in an economically depressed
working-class part of northwest Milwaukee. The two-acre site was ideal. It had existing greenhouses and was even zoned as agricultural land. As it happened, Allen was able to buy the last remaining farm in the city.

Not long after Allen began operations at this “city farm,” neighborhood kids from the largest low-income housing project in the city started coming around, asking questions about how to grow their own vegetables. Allen was thrilled that young people were interested in doing something positive with their time, and so he began to mentor them, setting them up with little gardens of their own. It was at this point that Allen realized he had an opportunity to do something more than grow and sell food with his urban farm. He could begin to address the food-security problems in neighborhoods that lacked access to healthy food. And by excelling as a successful urban farmer, he could create the methods and models for others to empower themselves within their communities in a very positive way.

By 1995, Allen's work with at-risk kids was gaining a bit of a reputation. He was approached by Growing Power, a social enterprise nonprofit group that helped teens acquire work skills. By this time, Allen recognized that he needed some help with his growing enterprise as well. Growing Power, Inc., was formed out of that partnership.

As a working nonprofit and training center with more funding and support staff, Allen found he could really unleash his creativity and test his ideas to maximize food production in a relatively small urban site. Over the next two decades, the original farm on Silver Spring Drive would develop to include a farm produce retail store that would poke out onto the tree-lined residential street otherwise lined with bungalows. Behind it, six greenhouses layered with fifteen thousand trays and hanging pots of herbs, salad mixes, beet greens, arugula, mustard greens, sprouts, and seedlings would become models of high-density planting and an effective example of using every square inch of growing space. The gurgling water sounds in each greenhouse would come from Growing Power's innovative “aquaponics” system, a closed-loop nutrient
cycle where the tilapia and perch created fertilizer for the food plants, which would then filter and clean the water for the fish tanks. Each greenhouse would also have worm bins—lots and lots of worm bins—each worm eating its weight in compost and turning it into rich, black soil for the plants. Two large aquaponic hoop houses would contain more fish and growing beds for salad mixes and seedlings. Seven more hoop houses would be used to grow salad greens and mushrooms year-round, thanks to Allen's ingenious idea of mounding compost up the sides of the polyethylene plastic sheeting stretching over the hoops, thereby creating a heat source to keep the hoop houses producing, even throughout the well-below-freezing Milwaukee winter season. Growing Power's farm would also be home to fourteen beehives as well as three poultry houses with laying hens and ducks. Goats and turkeys would be the resident livestock. Allen would innovate and refine urban-agricultural systems like large-scale composting of food waste that would otherwise go into Milwaukee's landfill. The site would be Allen's living laboratory for the model of intensive, mixed, modern farming on an urban lot that was becoming increasingly famous.

By the time of Elizabeth Royte's visit, Allen's “agricultural Mumbai, a supercity of upward-thrusting tendrils and duct-taped infrastructure,” as she described it in her article “Street Farmer,” the two-acre Growing Power flagship farm and Community Food Center on Silver Spring Drive in residential Milwaukee, was producing fresh food for ten thousand of the area residents, generating $250,000 in annual sales, and training legions of young, eager urban farmers and community food-security activists.
⁴

I caught up with Allen when he came to Vancouver, Canada, for a Simon Fraser University-sponsored talk in January 2011.
⁵
Over eight hundred people crammed into the community league hall, almost at maximum capacity, despite the wet, cold winter evening outside. There were people of all ages, from toddlers to grandparents. But the largest age group, overwhelmingly, was made up of people in their twenties and thirties.

Dressed, as always, in a worn baseball cap, blue hoodie, and blue jeans, Allen climbed to the podium slowly—he was recovering from knee replacement surgery a month earlier—to a standing ovation. Likely sensing the near-religious fervor for urban agriculture in the room that night, he prefaced his talk with a plea that “people shouldn't get so hung up on this idea of ‘urban’ that we forget about our rural farms.” He urged the crowd to do their best to support local rural farmers. “They're under a lot of stress. They are just as important.” Even though he was there to talk about his Growing Power projects, essentially his successful
approaches to urban agriculture, he wanted to make it clear that his “Good Food Revolution” was all about local—both rural and urban—at the end of the day. It was about a partnership where good, healthy, accessible food was being produced by both farmers in the city and in the surrounding countryside.

After his appeal for respect and support for rural farmers, Allen fired up his slideshow presentation. He began with a slide from the early 1990s of four preteens posing on piles of compost, goofing off for the camera the way kids do. He then asked the audience what the difference was between the kids seen in the slide and kids today.

“They're not overweight,” someone near the front shouted.

“They don't have cell phones,” was another idea.

There were a few other unremarkable suggestions, until Allen finally said, “No, their pants are pulled up.”

It may be a joke that Allen tells at every one of his presentations, but the delivery was genuine and the joke diffused a bit of the cloying earnestness in the community hall that evening. “Some of these kids are thirty years old now,” Allen added quietly, as if for his own benefit, just before he moved on to the next slide.

Allen showed another slide of the very early days of the urban farm. Obviously a mixed farm in the city drew some attention from the neighbors, who originally were opposed to goats, chickens, and a farm stand but were easily won over with fresh eggs and salad greens, Allen said. He also started to work with kids in the neighborhood who would otherwise be getting into trouble, or who had already been in trouble. Together, they established little flower gardens and grew vegetables that the kids would give back to their community. Kids who were working off minor criminal offenses could do so by growing food on community land and donating the food back to the community.

Allen clicked between a “before” slide of a street scene in a crime-ridden part of Milwaukee and an “after” slide of one of his “flower explosions.” He explained that he found early on that the mere act of
blanketing a streetside boulevard with flowers would remarkably reduce smash-and-grab break-ins in parked cars. Drug dealers also had an aversion to flowers in their favorite parks where they dealt. Allen laughed at the thought of it but came to call his flower explosions and food gardens “effective crime-fighting tools.”