farm interns – Sustainable Market Farming

Book Review: Breaking Through Concrete: Building an Urban Farm Revival, David Hanson and Edwin Marty

University of California Press has a page for Breaking Through Concrete

ISBN 978-0-520-27054-1 hardcover, 200 pages. Published January 2012 $29.95

I am not an urban farmer. I hadn’t thought much about the whole movement. This book opened my eyes to the many types of urban farm, the different problems and concerns they address, and the various creative ways they do that. The myriad benefits provided by urban farms include:

Food for low- or no-income people, food sovereignty for the neighborhood,
An increased supply of more local produce, especially in food deserts,
Meaningful work, especially for those less likely to find employment,
Physical exercise for people, especially young people,
Interesting things for people to see and do,
Education about organic and sustainable farming, introduction to a vision of a more sustainable food system,
Human connections, via work and dialogue,
A way to welcome and integrate people of different cultures, and differing abilities,
Green space – “lungs” for the city,
Places of beauty, solace and respite from the cityscape,
Revitalization of abandoned city lots,
Projects that can start small, with few resources, and yet make big changes in people’s lives.

This book came about after a cross-country road trip in 2010 by the authors and photographer, to celebrate the American urban farm movement. As well as descriptions of the 12 farms they visited, there are sections giving very practical dos and don’ts related to an issue addressed by each particular farm. This is a well-structured book with beautiful photos and inspiring stories.

Edwin Marty, who started an urban farm in Alabama with a partner in 2001, defines an urban farm as “an intentional effort by an individual or a community to grow its capacity for self-sufficiency and well-being through the cultivation of plants and/or animals.” The authors distinguish three types:

Urban Farms, for profit or non-profit, growing produce, flowers, herbs, and/or animals, within a city. Usually they have a paid staff.
Community Gardens, where individuals or small groups grow plants and/or animals for their own consumption or to donate to the needy. They may be on public or private property.
School Gardens, where the main focus is educational and a small amount of food is provided for students; and I would add another:
SPIN (Small-Plot Intensive Farming) and SIFT (Small-Scale Intensive Farm Training program) created to help communities increase their food security by producing their own healthy food. SPIN focuses on helping individuals earn a living by farming a collection of urban backyards. SIFT, with the National Center for Appropriate Technology (NCAT), is developing a working, sustainably managed, demonstration farm on five acres at Butte, Montana, (far from urban). Both (and their unbranded cousins) teach how to commercially produce high-value, nutrient-rich food on small parcels of land.

The main part of the book describes each farm in turn, gives its vital statistics and is followed by a multi-page “How-To” section on a related theme. Here’s the journey:

P-Patch Neighborhood Gardens in Seattle, WA, 73 gardens covering 23 acres. Started in 1973. Beds are allocated to individuals who pay a nominal fee, agree to some basic rules and share a few responsibilities for site maintenance. People grow food for themselves, or donate to those in need. There are no paid workers. The follow-up is How to Change Your City’s Urban Agriculture Zoning Codes. Seattle is the poster-child for urban agriculture.
The Homeless Garden Project, Santa Cruz, CA, focuses on job creation, training, therapeutic horticulture, organic vegetables and heirloom wheat. Watching the triple bottom line of ecological, social and financial success, the farm manager, interns and 14 employees provide for a weekly CSA (Community Supported Agriculture Farm) for 25 households and 5 social programs. They balance growing and selling quality organic produce with their mission to provide training and a therapeutic environment for their workers, who come with serious mental and physical health troubles and homelessness. Two-thirds of the trainees become more stable as a result of their time there. This chapter is followed by How to Grow Good Safe Food, which explains USDA Organic Certification, Naturally Grown, and organic philosophy and practices.
Fairview Gardens, Santa Barbara, CA, produces vegetables and chickens, and provides temporary housing for the farm workers. High-price real estate developed around them, so they are dealing with workers who cannot afford housing in the neighborhood. How To Plant Perennial Fruit Trees in the City is a natural follow-on, as Fairview includes fruit trees.
Juniper Gardens, Kansas City, KS and MO is a project of New Roots for Refugees, which acts as an incubator project for 14 women farmers from Burundi, Somalia, Bhutan and Sudan. Training, tools and seeds are provided the first year, with the goal of having the farmers able to move on and start their own farms after three years. There are also community plots for local people to grow their own food. How To Access Start-Up Capital for Urban Farms logically fits here.
Versailles Community, New Orleans, LA is a parish with land alongside the canals growing traditional Vietnamese produce. After extensive damage in Hurricane Katrina, the people are replacing their unregulated homes and gardens with a purpose-built sustainable village for 6000 Vietnamese Americans. Much of the work is done by “retired” elders. The How-To section is on Developing a Congregational Urban Farm.
Jones Valley Urban Farm, Birmingham, AL, the first urban farm of Edwin Marty, expanded beyond its original abandoned city block in 2007 with funding for a paid educational director and a separate children’s garden, so that efficient production could co-exist with plenty of education. This is followed by How to Engage the City with Education Programs. Some of my favorite quotes come from this chapter: “The assumption of inherent goodness [of urban farms] has unfortunately perverted many well-intentioned projects from realistically matching the available resources with the changes originally envisioned.” In other words, a vision is not enough, you have to do appropriate things to make it work. “The inherent goodness attitude can also lead to a lack of accountability for a project’s outcomes and can, subsequently, be a challenge to an urban farm’s long term sustainability.” It is important to engage the community, listen to their concerns, express the farms’ objectives and clearly show how it will help the neighborhood.
Greensgrow Farms, Philadelphia, PA, on a remediated former steel plant and brownfield site, has three income-sources (direct sales from the farm, a CSA, and a nursery) and a paid staff. Any profit goes to the parent organization, the non-profit Philadelphia Project. “The farm grows vegetables and the nonprofit grows ideas.” In 1897, Philadelphia founded a Vacant Lot Cultivation Association to help people garden unused spaces. The City has allowed lots of unfettered food production by whoever wanted to do it, until relatively recently. Newer forms of urban gardening have needed a more commercial approach, as real estate prices have risen. How to Rehabilitate Contaminated Soils is the practical lesson from this farm.
Eagle Street Rooftop Farm, Brooklyn, NY has a view of the Manhatten skyline. The director runs the farm with one intern, a few apprentices and volunteers. It’s as much about education as about supplying their CSA, market and high-end restaurants. Film crews are often there, on the warehouse roof among the plants and chickens. How to Convert Rooftops to Residential Gardens and Urban Farms follows naturally.
Catherine Ferguson Academy, Detroit, MI, a school for teenage mothers, includes an urban produce and livestock farm, teaching students and their children self-confidence as well as practical farming skills, growing vegetables, feeding chickens, milking goats, growing 10 acres of hay on vacant city lots. How to Raise Urban Livestock is the practical section.
Wood Street Urban Farm and Growing Home, Chicago, IL, is a paying job training farm, helping those thrown out-of-work by the real-estate market crash, who became incarcerated as a result of decisions made among limited options. How to Extend the Growing Season with Hoophouses and Greenhouses is the topic Wood Street can tell us about.
Sandhill Organics and Prairie Crossing, Grayslake, IL is a 100 acre for-profit organic farm right next to a planned conservation community development of 400 large homes. Home-owners were happy to live beside an organic farm, while they might not have chosen to be neighbors to a chemical farm. A term for this combination is “agricultural urbanism.” This last chapter is followed by How to Start an Urban Farm. With benefit of all the information and the range of perspectives in this book, we are well-equipped to ask the right questions and gather the resources we need.

Edwin Marty gives a thoughtful conclusion, with pointers to the future. This is a book all farmers, educators, ecologists and community-builders can learn from. To buy a copy, visit http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520270541 or call 800 777 4726

The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food and Love, by Kristin Kimball, Scribner, 2010 – Book Review

I feel drawn to autobiographies of women farmers, and Kristin Kimball’s story of growing food for a hundred people particularly appealed to me. I grow vegetables and some fruit for a hundred people at Twin Oaks Community, and our farming as a whole provides meat and dairy products too – what would be the points of similarity and of difference?

Kristin is a freelance writer from New York City. She interviews an energetic young farmer, gets pulled into joining in his work, and then moves from the city to start a new life with him. After some time looking for suitable land for free, they find the deeply run down Essex Farm. This book is the story of their first tumultuous year at Essex Farm (2003), operating a Full Diet CSA.

For farmers, this book will not be a cozy read – you’ll be on the edge of your chair! I probably got over half way through the book before I had any hope that they could succeed. Kristin and Mark’s success defies the quantity of hard work, the number of disasters and arguments, and their opposing strongly held opinions. And yet I know they succeeded, because several years have elapsed since the book was written and they are speaking at the Virginia Biological Farming Conference in February 2013. But my goodness, in the early days, they seemed doomed to fail.

Their Whole Diet CSA model is revolutionary not only in the range of food provided, but also in the radical distribution method, which is simplicity itself: “Take what you need.” They provide vegetables, fruit, herbs, maple syrup, flours, dried beans, eggs, milk, beef, chicken and pork, for $2900 (in 2010), on a sliding scale. The members can show up every Friday afternoon to collect what they need from what’s available. Some members live pretty much on the food from Essex Farm, and others also buy elsewhere. There were about 100 members in 2010.

Kristin starts from being a very soft-handed non-farming townie in tight jeans and heeled boots. She has a lot to learn! How will it ever work? Especially as Mark is experienced at farming and seemingly obsessed with working long hard hours in top gear. We don’t hear so much from Mark’s perspective, but Kristin does tell us that he avoids the word “work”, preferring to say “I farmed for 14 hours today.” I like that approach. Mark is an excellent cook as well as a very good farmer. Early in their relationship he kills a deer and cooks dinner. Kristin says “I fell in love with him over a deer’s liver.”

Mark has all the farming knowledge and plenty of opinions besides. He believes he has a magic circle around him, and that good things (such as a free farm) will manifest. Naturally enough, this is exasperating for Kristin, who is accused of draining the magic with her negativity. The clash of the earnest woo-woo hippie and the middle-class lover of manicures and foreign travel doesn’t look promising. Mark tells Kristin to give away her beautiful bed rather than bring it with her to the farm, as he will build a more beautiful bed. They sleep on a mattress on the floor for a very long time. How is this all going to lead to a thriving farm and two thriving farmers?

They (led by Mark) decide to farm in ways they enjoy even if they are less efficient: working horses, hand-milking, no fussing over picayune pricing of individual products. They move to Essex farm in early winter. There are tenants in the farmhouse, so they rent a place in town and commute to milk their cow, feed their chickens and restore the outbuildings. Meanwhile they make plans. Their plans are way beyond reasonable. In one week in February they intend to plan and build a greenhouse. The next week they will cut and split the whole year’s supply of firewood. They planned to hold their wedding in October, coinciding with 50 chicks arriving. Their honeymoon week they would also be extracting honey!

Kristin gets library books about construction and plumbing. She realizes how wrong her prejudice was, that manual workers are stupid and lazy. She gets herself through this big change in lifestyle by pretending she’s visiting a foreign land and will one day go home. She enjoys the present, the everyday, but doesn’t consider the hard work in the dirt and cold as a long-term lifestyle. She doesn’t want the emergencies – runaway cattle, freezing pipes, work at all hours, endlessly.

Despite the ill omens, they survive the winter (and we’re talking a long Northern winter here). “March was a tense and slightly dangerous time, like a border crossing between two conflicting countries. It’s not the deprivations of winter that get you, or the damp of spring, but the no-man’s land between.” The unpredictable weather, the dull and depressed fields. This resonated for me. When I lived and gardened on the Yorkshire Moors, I felt like this in March. Winter seemed endless, but it didn’t help to expect spring in March, because it just was too early. Now I’m in Virginia and we have weeks of work behind us by the end of March – winter is so much shorter.

During the maple syrup run, Kristin finds her feet, a job she excels at: evaporating the sap. She begins to love the work, seeing the connection between her actions and their consequences, believing in what she’s doing. She and Mark still argue a lot, with their different styles (passive-aggressive grudge-nurturer versus dog-like shaking of the issue.) Kristin sees that their arguments come from their two different basic fears: hers of poverty, debt and being enslaved to repayments; his of ruining themselves with overwork: “the farm gaining mass and speed until it ran over the farmer and squashed him.” He worried they’d be overwhelmed and life would not be fun anymore. Both problems are certainly deserving of fear. Organic farms fail most often from burnout or divorce. Kristin comments that they were fighting so much they could reach divorce before even reaching marriage.

Which farmer will not relate to this, my favorite quote from the book: “A farm is a manipulative creature. There is no such thing as finished. Work comes in a stream and has no end. There are only things that must be done now, and things that can be done later. The threat the farm has got on you, the one that keeps you running from can until can’t, is this: do it now, or some living thing will wilt or suffer or die. It’s blackmail, really.”

They somehow continue to build up the farm and by the time the ground has thawed [I wonder when that is in the Lake Champlain area?], they have seven paid up members for their CSA, and tensions recede. They have direction, purpose and a weekly goal. Neighbors and friends rally to help. The first week of their CSA they offer milk, meat, eggs, maple syrup and lard.

Once they reach June, the peak of the farming year, they are starting work at 3.45am and not finishing till 7pm (and even then they still have to lock up the chickens). Kristin even falls asleep on the seat of the cultivator. Mark seems to have “diabolical energy” and exuberance. Kristin is happy, working alongside Mark and walking the fields in the evenings, making more plans.

Kristin realizes “the things I admired most about him [Mark] in the abstract were what drove me nuts in the specific.” His beliefs were informed by his experiences and his research. He was uncomfortable with anything where he was unable to know and measure the impact – he wanted no part of it. He tried hard to live by his beliefs of low consumption, handmade items, responsible decisions. Kristin, for her part, was a hedonist with no particular ethic. Mark’s unbending strength carries him and the farm through very hard times. Unbending strength = rigidity = inflexibility = stubbornness. Kristin accommodates to Mark’s beliefs (perhaps another example of Mark’s good luck – without a partner like Kristin, flexible, hardworking, accepting, he would not have made it)

The CSA membership reaches 30 by late summer. They realize the house will not be all fixed up in time for the wedding. Their “To Do” list includes “Find tables and chairs. Slaughter bull for ox roast. Butcher chickens for rehearsal dinner. Write vows.” Kristin is still unsure she wants to marry Mark: “Poverty, unmitigated hard work, and a man whom, for all his good points, no reasonable person would describe as easy to be with.” She is very candid, very open about her doubts, to a level I feel uncomfortable with – it feeds my near-certainty that they’ll never make it. She is also very perceptive: “Marriage asks you to let go of a big chunk of who you were before, and that loss must be grieved. A choice for something and someone is a choice against absolutely everything else, and that’s one big fat goodbye.”

In October the wedding does happen (in case you too, were wondering), despite Kristin having flu and the baker having gone AWOL. It was a reflection of their farming: “exquisite, untidy, sublime and untamed”. I don’t know if the chicks arrived the same week, as originally planned. One month later, Kristin is on a two month writing assignment in Hawai’i. She feels a need to anchor herself by doing some farming, so she visits a vegetable grower. She is taken aback by the leisurely pace of harvesting, and records that that was the moment she made the emotional commitment to her marriage. She realizes the difficulties in her chosen life are hers by choice, and she can’t wait to get home.

When she gets home, Mark has settled into his own rhythm, and they work together looking for harmony, not for conflict. But this isn’t the sugar-coated happy-ever-after ending. Their marriage remains fiery. They engage a few interns each year, and employ some of the local people. CSA membership grows to a hundred. In year 4 their daughter is born and they buy part of the farm.

Kristin leaves us with these words of wisdom: “in my experience, tranquil and simple are two things farming is not. Nor is it lucrative, stable safe or easy. Sometimes the work is enough to make you weep.” And yet “A bowl of beans, rest for tired bones. . . . these things. . . have comforted our species for all time, and for happiness’ sake they should not slip beneath our notice. Cook things, eat them with other people. If you can tire your own bones while growing the beans, so much the better for you.”

Phew! It worked out! Who needs suspense novels for winter reading when there are farming tales as gripping as this one? to read more, go to her website.