by Michael Ableman
Early Girl and Celebrity tomatoes hang ripe and ready in heavy clusters. Lima beans cover their mother plants with swollen pods of beans, the deep orange shoulders of carrots line up in long rows buried in the ground, and collards, black-eyed peas, and okra stand up in their fullness against the din of this urban world.
An urban gardener. |
"Do you know where you are?" two Los Angeles police officers ask me. "I think so," I reply, somewhat confused by their question. "Do you really know where you are?" they ask again. "Do you realize that these two blocks are the two most violent blocks in the entire city of Los Angeles?"
I am standing on the corner of 103rd and Grape in Watts, in a three-acre garden. Half of the land is devoted to small private plots farmed mostly by Hispanic families. Their gardens are filled with foods from Mexico, Central and South America: tall "milpa" corn, dry beans, hot chile peppers, epizote, verdulaga, alfalfa, and various squashes. The other half of this land is a market garden planted in okra, black-eyed peas, lima beans, carrots, tomatoes, collard greens, cucumbers and squash: foods from the south grown for the African-American community that lives in the Jordan Downs housing project that borders this land.
This is a community that has an average income of $8,000 per year; a neighborhood where more than 50 percent of the male population is unemployed.
One hundred miles to the north, floating in a sea of tract homes and shopping centers, is the small farm where I live and work. Most of my neighbors are employees of Raytheon, Applied Magnetics, Santa Barbara Research and Delco -- the companies that designed the "smart" bombs used during the Persian Gulf and Kosovo wars. Here the average income is $65,000 per year, each home has at least two cars, and crime is virtually non-existent.
The farm produces a hundred different organic fruits and vegetables: avocados, mandarins, peaches and plums, tomatoes,
peppers, melons, corn, asparagus, artichokes, potatoes, berries, and herbs. We also provide nourishment of a less tangible nature through the tours and programs we offer the community. The land is located in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the country, saved from the threat of development, preserved by the community through a conservation easement, protected in perpetuity for future generations.
I have farmed this land organically for the last 20 years, actively involved with the national movement to return to a more sensible and considerate food system. But the truth is that most organic food is only available to a narrow segment of our society -- those who can afford it. The food our farm produces is no exception. And while I struggle to extend our work into lower-income communities, the economic realities of our own survival require that we grow white asparagus and French beans and baby artichokes to help pay the bills and occasionally sell to upscale restaurants that can pay us a premium for our efforts.
Jobs and fresh food do not exist in most low-income urban communities. The open field at 103rd and Grape in Watts was a chance to provide a little of both.
Tractors to Watts
We load two tractors, a disc, a mower, a rototiller, a subsoiler, and various cultivation equipment onto a semi-truck for our agricultural journey to Watts. The driver is hesitant and everyone I encounter seems to have some piece of advice or casual warning: "You can't farm in the middle of the city" or "Isn't it dangerous down there?"
In two days, our farm crew and local community members remove 20,000 pounds of asphalt, old wiring, hubcaps, trash, rubble, bones, hypodermic needles, old dolls and tires. The hum of urban life circulates around the perimeters of the garden. Boom boxes blast, cars and trucks cruise by, groups of kids come and go to school, people hang out together on every corner.
Directly across the street at Mom's Place, a small graffiti-covered restaurant with bars on its windows, a constant line of people in cars come and goes. At first I think that they must have good food: Later I find out that other things are served up there.
In contrast to the sterile suburban world we come from, the streets here are alive. Groups of kids stop by to see if they can help. Moms with little ones in tow hang on the fence wanting to know what we are doing, and a burgundy Mercedes with tinted windows cruises back and forth, checking us out. A chain-link fence surrounding the garden provides the illusion of security from vandalism and theft.
Within a few months, however, the fence is cut and a 40-foot container with six-inch steel walls is broken into. Everything is stolen: 600 feet of PVC pipe, 30,000 feet of irrigation tape, market tables and awnings, construction materials, chippers, shovels, rakes, hoes. The container is emptied, yet the produce in the gardens remains untouched -- not a single tomato removed.
Real Food
At 3:00 in the afternoon on a Saturday I'm doing an informal survey. I ask several of the local kids who come by the distribution/ sales stand we have set up along the edge of the housing project what they have had to eat that day. One kid tells me a corn dog.
I ask him if that was it for the whole day and he tells me "Yes."
I've never actually had a corn dog but I'm pretty sure it's not enough to nourish a growing body. Other kids provide similar reports: Chips, a piece of bread, a candy bar, a coke. I send each one off with a bunch of carrots. They stuff the carrots in their back pockets and I watch them as they walk off, carrot tops dancing out of their pants. I wonder if they will eat them.
The politics around this garden are intense. Tensions between Hispanic and Black, among the Hispanic families who garden their own plots, between the organizations that oversee the grant that supports the project, between the on-site hired staff member and the community gardeners.
Outside the fence, on the streets, there is even more tension. Crack is openly sold and smoked on every corner. A family is murdered in the housing project that borders the garden. Piles of trash build up along the edges of the fence. No one comes to haul it away.
The city has blocked off the street separating the garden from the housing project with huge potted trees on one end. I am told this is to reduce access and provide a dead-end to help with arrests. A police helicopter hovers and circles overhead. Are they looking for illegal activity amongst the carrots and beans or are they just fascinated with this strange world-within-a-world?
When we start selling the products on the street next to the garden, older black women are in ecstasy over the collards and fresh beans. They sample watermelons still warm from the heat of the field and argue with each other over okra recipes. On the street, a young couple high on crack argue and fight over other things. The kids who come by look on in bewilderment, not recognizing most of the fresh foods on the tables. We offer samples of different foods and watch as their minds struggle to process new information.
The Quiet Revolution
There is a quiet revolution stirring in our food system. It is not happening as much on the distant farms that still provide us with the majority of our food: It is happening in cities, neighborhoods, and towns.
It has evolved out of the basic need that every person has to know their food, and to have some sense of control over its safety and its security. It is a revolution that is providing poor people with an important safety net where they can grow some nourishment and income for themselves and their families. And it is providing an oasis for the human spirit where urban people can gather, preserve something of their culture through native seeds and foods, and teach their children about food and the earth.
The revolution is taking place in small gardens, under railroad tracks and powerlines, on rooftops, at farmers' markets, and in the most unlikely of places. It is a movement that has the potential to address a multitude of issues -- economic, environmental, personal health and cultural. It is especially important for the world's poor.
Hundreds of millions of people worldwide are receiving at least some of their nourishment from urban gardens. In the city of Accra in Ghana, 90 percent of the vegetables consumed are grown within the city. In Poland, 30 percent of urban families farm almost a million plots and, in the Netherlands, 33 percent of total agricultural production is from urban lands.
In every major city in the US, neighbors are gathering together to clear abandoned lots of trash and rubble and are growing food for themselves and their neighbors.
Survival
A majority of the world's poor currently lives in cities. Hunger and malnutrition already effect approximately 800 million people worldwide. Earth's capacity to feed exploding populations is reaching its limits. Current world grain reserves are at an all-time low and steadily declining agricultural yields are a sobering reminder that food scarcity is increasing. With as much as 80 percent of their income being spent on food, the impacts of such scarcity will be felt first by the poor and primarily in cities.
In Calcutta, the composted soils of old garbage dumps are being used for food production, providing employment for close to 25,000 people. In the US, urban farms produce 13 times more per-acre than their rural counterparts. Small plots in some of the most rundown neighborhoods in America's cities are producing herbs, flowers, and specialty vegetables that are being sold to upscale restaurants and at local farmers' markets. This trend has the potential to create thriving cottage industries and community-based economies that would put income directly into the pockets of those most in need, while recycling waste and enhancing urban environments.
In the early 1980s, I made two extended trips to China. In China's cities I observed urban farmers not only making more income than their rural counterparts, but earning more than many Chinese professionals. I photographed them wearing their expensive watches and smoking imported cigarettes while they harvested products to be sold at the daily markets nearby. The separation and disconnection of farms and cities did not exist in China the way it does in most of the Western world. The borders of many Chinese cities often blend with local farms and every available urban plot is in production.
Creating a Nutrient Circle
But the most remarkable aspect of the Chinese system was the value placed on urban waste and the infrastructure that existed for recycling that "waste" into the local food production system. Public toilets had signs on them encouraging passersby to stop and make a deposit. Contractors offered to pay large sums to collect this "nightsoil" and transport it to local farms.
In the US, we spend millions of dollars constructing and maintaining sophisticated sewage systems, which then pollute our oceans and our rivers while our soils suffer from an ever-increasing fertility deficit.
New York City alone receives 20,000 tons of food each day via an army of trucks, ships and airplanes. Ten thousand tons of solid waste are hauled away each day -- and as much as 40 percent of it contains valuable organic matter. Tokyo Bay now has entire islands built from waste generated in that city. Urban waste is creating severe ecological and health problems while the cost of transporting and dumping it erodes precious financial resources.
Relatively little organic waste is returned in any usable way to the land from which most food is grown. In a sustainable system, cities would separate the organic matter out of that waste, convert it into soil-enriching compost, and distribute it onto local lands. This simple idea converts "waste" into a major asset. It also helps challenge the popular but unsustainable idea that soil nutrients should be exported from our lands and then replaced with petroleum-based fertilizers. Manufactured fertilizers can never replace the need for organic matter as a primary component of healthy soils.
In the California's Central Valley, where a majority of the fruits and vegetables consumed domestically are still produced, water is transported hundreds of miles or pumped hundreds of feet from deep acquifers to irrigate this arid region. Labor is brought in hundreds of miles from Mexico, and food is shipped an average of 1400 miles from the fields to its urban destinations. Vast amounts of human energy, fossil fuel, and packaging are required to feed our cities, and yet few of the beneficial byproducts of those resources ever return to the land.
Feeding Body and Soul
Along with the economic and nutritional safety-net that growing food in the city can provide, the exploding movement towards urban food production has other benefits as well and is reaching all levels of society. Personal health has always benefited from fresh home-grown produce. With the trend towards supermarket flight from many lower-income inner-city communities, fresh food is often not available and the diets of poorer residents is dictated by limited availability.
Even greater, is the potential for urban plots to provide a much-needed psychological boost to people living in urban areas devoid of trees, plants, and soil. Reconnecting to the earth and to the natural process of growing food has a well-documented balancing effect on the human psyche. Having personal control over the source of one's nourishment is also empowering to urban dwellers who have become totally reliant on the industrial food system.
Urban gardens can provide a critical link to culture through seeds that have been passed down and through the cultivation and preparation of traditional foods that are not available in local stores.
In Philadelphia, Marina La Pinia grows bitter melons, nine kinds of squash, and yard-long beans for herself and her Filipino family and friends. And for her Puerto Rican neighbors, she grows hot peppers. At the end of the season, she opens the garden to the neighborhood serving a feast from her bounty. The sense of community generated through these gardens endures even under the most difficult of conditions.
The Challenge
It is estimated that there are some 2,000 acres of vacant land in New York City alone, enough land to provide jobs and produce quantities of food for thousands of people. Most abandoned lots require major cleanup before they can be used. Debris must be removed and the soil often is contaminated with asbestos, lead, and other toxic materials that remain from previous buildings or from the unregulated dumping that commonly takes place. In some cases, the soil must be completely removed and replaced. Some work is being done to clean up these soils by planting non-food crops such as hemp or cotton, but without local government support and the financial input necessary to clean up these sites, it is difficult get started.
Most of the infrastructure, technical advice, and capital input for urban agriculture are not coming from local or national government but from private organizations. Many urban gardeners and farmers have only temporary use of private or public lands, and their future is always at the mercy of the city and the landowner.
Too often, urban gardens get caught up in the frenzy of skyrocketing urban land values. In New York City, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani threatened to auction off 115 of the Big Apple's community gardens to the highest bidder. The gardens were saved only by great public outcry and an eleventh-hour, multimillion-dollar purchase by two different private organizations.
Across the country, conservation easements, local and national land trusts, and creative win/win arrangements between land owners and urban communities are beginning to change the face of a land tenure issue that will always lie at the root of success or failure for urban agriculture.
In San Francisco, the Bartol Intergenerational Garden at the On Lok Senior Center started life on a ground-floor lot. When a proposal to build a high-rise on the site was made, the residents protested. The building was constructed but, due to residents' efforts, the garden was preserved -- moved up eight stories to the roof. Today this small, rooftop Eden continues to produce a healthy array of Chinese vegetables and fruits for the residents who tend it.
We have come to believe that food for a society comes from distant farms far from the places where most of us now live and work. The models are there to show us that a vibrant and productive urban agriculture with its own connected cottage industries and economies is not a utopian dream but a real and practical possibility.
Many components of this possibility are already in place. What is missing is a national agenda to that would enable us to transform our cities into the biologically and culturally alive gardens that they could be.
This movement does not require the construction of expensive facilities, or new roads, or sophisticated transportation. The land, the people, and the cultural knowledge already exist to make it happen. All that stands in the way is the lack of a clear and focused vision of what could be.
Michael Ableman has farmed 12 acres of land in Goleta, California for the last 20 years. He is the founder and director of the Center for Urban Agriculture at Fairview Gardens, and the author of two books -- From The Good Earth: A Celebration of Growing Food Around the World (Abrams 1993) and On Good Land: The Autobiography of an Urban Farm (Chronicle Books 1998).
Michael Ableman will host a week-long workshop at Fairview Gardens Farm in September in cooperation with The Center for Urban Agriculture and the Bioneers. For more information, contact the Bioneers at (877) 246-6337 [www.bioneers.org].
What Do You Do When the Power Fails?
The supermarket in my suburban neighborhood is polished, clean, and brightly lit: filled with huge piles of Day-Glo fruits and vegetables and rows of four-color packages providing the illusion of abundance-on-demand 24 hours-a-day, 365 days a year. But when an earthquake struck a few years ago and the electricity went off, things began to unravel.
I visited that supermarket just after the earthquake and watched as ice cream melted in the freezers, meat spoiled in the deli, and hordes of people frantically filled their carts using flashlights to navigate the aisles.
At the checkout counters handwritten signs on torn pieces of cardboard stated "Sorry no change" -- the ATM machines were down. In the frenzy, I was struck at how incredibly fragile and precarious our food system really is.
My neighbors who shop at that supermarket are well paid, highly educated individuals, yet if the store had been crippled for more than a day, they would have been hard-pressed to know how to feed themselves. For all their resources and education, they were powerless when faced with taking care of the most basic human need.
Other Resources:
Local Harvest Links Farms to Families
The Local Harvest website [www.localharvest.org] helps shoppers find family-owned farms and farmers' markets near their homes. Local Harvest was created by Ocean Group, an activist-minded software firm. Community Supported Agriculture is now only a mouse-click away. Contact Community Alliance with Family Farmers, PO Box 363, Davis, CA 95617-0363, (530)756-8518, www.caff.org.
The Edible Schoolyard
Award-winning resturanteur Alice Waters believes that a good education begins from the ground up. "From the garden, and the kitchen, and the table, you learn empathy -- for each other and for all of creation. You learn compassion and you learn patience and self-discipline," Waters feels.
Waters put this concept into practice with the Edible Schoolyard Project, which encourages students to build organic gardens on schoolyard plots and to serve the harvested produce in school cafeterias.
Edible Schoolyard, a beautiful new book published by Leaning in the Real Worlds, tells the story of these children's gardens with inspiring photos and enthusiastic tertimonials.
The book is available from the Center for Ecoliteracy, 2522 San Pablo Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94702, fax: (510) 845-1439, www.ecoliteracy.org.
Urban Agriculture: The Quiet Revolution
by Michael Ableman