Food Files: Taja Sevelle on Urban Farming to Fight Hunger

Taja Sevelle may seem like an unlikely founder for a revolutionary hunger-fighting NGO — Detroit-based Urban Farming — but this singer has substantial experience in farm and wilderness and a heart big enough to match those landscapes. As a child, she was home-schooled by her parents in a wilderness cabin for a year and later spent three years working on a potato farm. Now she spends her time worrying about how to help inner-city-dwellers get the food they need to survive and thrive.

Sevelle was set on being a botanist when she became a recording artist with Prince's Paisley Park Records label and her first single, "Love Is Contagious," hit it big in 1987. She put out the albums Fountains Free (1991) and Toys of Vanity (1997) and wrote songs with Burt Bacharach, Prince and Nile Rodgers.

Now she's back to her farming roots as founder and executive director of an organization at the forefront of the urban farming movement. Urban Farming is hailed as a leader in re-envisioning the urban landscape as a productive and nourishing place; this year the NGO won the Garden Crusaders Award and the MySpace Impact Award. I recently chatted with Ms. Sevelle about her path-breaking organization, edible walls and her take on local food.

How did you get inspired to start Urban Farming?

I was recording a CD in Detroit for Sony Records and started to become acquainted with the city, and I saw a lot of unused land in the city, and I also was learning about the job loss and things like that. So I decided to start planting food on the land to alleviate hunger and food insecurity in the city.

Did you have a background in farming or gardening?

I lived on a farm for three and a half years when I was young and when I was a teenager. And before I landed my first record deal, I was studying to be a botanist. I had also had an interest in doing community gardens. And then I got a record deal with Prince, so that took my life in a completely different direction.

How long has the organization been around?

I started it in 2004, but our first real planting season was 2005. In 2005, we planted three gardens, and we now have the equivalent of over 650 gardens across the country and abroad.

How do you decide where the food goes or who gets it?

The food goes to people who are starving and suffering from food insecurity. We harvest the food and give it to food banks. One of the hallmarks of urban farming is that our community gardens do not have any fences around them to keep people out. People are welcome to come and pick the food from the gardens to feed their families. We’ve just had wonderful feedback and experience with this type of approach to a community garden.

Do people in the community rally around and get interested in it?

Oh yeah. They’re totally into it. They support the gardens. They protect the gardens. I’ve had people come up to me crying and thanking us for these gardens. Everybody really respects it. It’s not like anybody comes and takes more than they should. It’s really the true sense of a community garden. It’s for the community. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, people have access to food if they need it.

Whether people work on the garden or not, they have access to the food. Some people are not able to work on the garden. Sometimes you have seniors that are not able to work. Or you have single mothers or single fathers who are so overworked that by the time they get home at the end of the day they’re too exhausted and they’re too stressed out. When people are at the point where they’re starving or suffering from food insecurity, there are so many different dynamics that come into play.

I know that you have a lot of youth outreach going on. Do you see it benefiting them?

We really get a diverse group of people, diverse ages; youth, seniors, adults. They all work in the garden. They’re inspired, they’re motivated, they learn to give back to their community. They learn about gardening, they learn about food, they learn about healthy eating. They get outside in the fresh air. Many, many benefits. They learn on many different levels.

Gardening is a fairly addictive and therapeutic activity. There’s something about getting your hands in the soil and planting and seeing things grow that touches a human chord within everybody.

I heard you do vertical gardens?

We’re the first organization in the country to put up edible walls. Many people have done living walls, but our twist at Urban Farming is the edible walls.

The wonderful thing about these vertical walls, whether they have a food component or not, is that they have all the same benefits as a green roof. They have many wonderful environmental benefits. They cut down on 60 percent of the heating and cooling costs of a building. They cut down on the rainwater runoff in a city. They cut down on the urban heat index within a city. They provide green-collar jobs.

And with our twist, of course, they also provide food for people who need it. They also bring more bees and butterflies and hummingbirds into the environment. And they’re a lot easier to get going and a lot less expensive than green roofs. Green roofs are fantastic, but a lot of people are doing green walls because they’re less hassle and less expense.

What kinds of vegetables can you grow on the wall?

You can pretty much grow everything with the exception of some of the root plants. You can grow eggplants and melons and cucumbers and tomatoes and peppers and lettuce and all those types of things. It’s interesting what you can grow on a wall.

Do you put up a lattice or do they grow right on the wall?

It’s a unit that’s mounted on the wall. We work with Green Living Technologies, which is a great company that specializes in living wall systems.

How do you think this fits in with the broader local food movement that’s gaining so much interest right now?

Locally grown food is something people are talking about for obvious reasons. In the urban areas, there’s an added factor that you don’t see in the suburbs, which is that people don’t have access to good, healthy produce. Most of the urban areas in the United States are what we call food deserts, so people have to drive long distances to get good-quality fresh produce, and many people can’t afford to do that. Our gardens are serving them in that department.

We also support local farmers. We have an entrepreneurship program where we work with youth and adults that are interested in growing for profit. When they work with us in that capacity they’re able to make some money. They can take some of the produce to the local farmers market and they can train with some of the local farmers. And we work with some of the local farmers as well, so we completely support that movement.

We understand that not everything is going to be locally grown; sometimes it’s nice to have products from other countries that we can’t get here, but we support the idea of trying to have the majority of food locally grown.

In your opinion, what’s the most important thing that someone who’s interested in sustainable food should know?

I think that it’s important for people to understand where their food comes from and understand how food is grown and where it’s being grown and the methods that are being used.

There are a lot of angles to food issues, but our particular angle is related to making sure that people have food to eat. We believe that if you’re living on this planet, you should be able to eat and have access to food on a consistent and regular basis. Beyond hunger and starvation, we also like to start talking about healthy eating and other ways of empowering people so that they don’t have a problem getting food in the future.

It’s a multi-layered situation that we’re dealing with. It’s like taking a patient that’s in the ICU. We first want to stop the bleeding. When they’re in the emergency state, they’re not necessarily caring about where their food came from. They just want to eat because they’re starving. But once they get a good meal on a consistent basis, you start talking about other concepts because now they can hear you.

Some people have the luxury of being able to think about whether they’re eating something organic or not. And some people don’t have that luxury because they just want to eat. We try to look at it from all different levels and try to attend to every different level.

Photo courtesy of Urban Farming