One Urban Farmer Traces the Movement's Roots

I commute to the city to grow vegetables for other people. I know it sounds crazy, but it's true.

Three days a week, I leave the wilds of Oakland, CA. and head for the farm I co-manage in San Francisco. If I’m riding the train, my commute takes me past the giant Port of Oakland, where huge cranes off-load stacks of shipping containers onto trains and trucks. The maze of heavy metal boxes stretches for miles, big tins marked "Hanjin", "Maersk", and "Cosco" and packed with Chinese imports. If I’m driving in the “farm truck” (aka a 1994 Volvo sedan), I glide over the Bay Bridge and speed by the crystal towers of San Francisco’s financial district, peering down into the chasms of glass. When I arrive at the farm, I’m always happy to see the little oasis. Oasis is exactly the right word to describe it given that our four-acre farm is wedged between eight lanes of highway and a 165-unit public housing complex. Green Acres this ain’t.

My experience may be unique, but it’s not entirely unusual. That fact became clearer to me last week when I participated in a panel on urban farming at the San Francisco Commonwealth Club. I was joined on stage by Chris Burley of San Francisco’s Hayes Valley Farm, the ever-hilarious Oakland homesteader Novella Carpenter, and David Gavrich of a new company called City Grazing, which manages a herd of goats as a kind of lawn-mowing service. During our hour-long discussion, Chris, Novella, Dave, and I all agreed: City farming is booming, and it's only growing in popularity. The audience helped prove this point. The auditorium was packed with a standing-room-only crowd of some 200 people.

Perhaps even more impressive, the Commonwealth Club event was just one urban farming event happening in San Francisco that night. A few blocks away, Counterpulse, a politics and art space, was hosting the exact same topic with urban farmers from San Francisco’s Little City Gardens, a women-run enterprise that sells micro greens to local restaurants. The women were joined by folks from The Free Farm, a garden in a low-income neighborhood that gives its produce away at no cost. That event also boasted a full house.

Now I know that San Francisco isn’t exactly the most accurate barometer of the national mood, and that any Bay Area trend needs to be viewed with a large dose of skepticism. But here’s the thing: Urban farming is truly a national phenomenon. Good-sized gardens are sprouting up in city centers across the country. As their roots deepen, it's clear that they're revitalizing people’s relationship to natural systems and to each other.

In Sacramento, CA., for example, Soil Born Farms runs an 80-family CSA out of a garden next to a middle school and a 25-acre ranch stuck between a subdivision and the American River. In Brooklyn, the group Added Value is growing produce on a lot that used to be a ball field. Milwaukee’s Will Allen (winner of a MacArthur “genius” award) has pioneered an amazing system of year-round greenhouse production at Growing Power, an operation that feeds some 10,000 people a year. Philadelphia boasts Greens Grow Farm and Mill Creek Farm. Birmingham, AL. has a 14-acre tractor operation, Jones Valley Urban Farm, not far from downtown. And perhaps most surprisingly, Detroit has become a hub for urban sustainability. In the last decade, farms and gardens have taken over the Motor City landscape as residents reclaim properties abandoned during the decades-long hollowing out of the city.

From all these examples, it's clear that the urban farming trend has been well-documented. But most media reports fail to answer the larger question of why, exactly, city farming has become so popular. The short answer, of course, is food. As Burley pointed out at the Commonwealth Club panel, food is the “gateway drug” to the larger environmental movement. The hordes of volunteers that descend on our farm every week are trying to connect with the old Wendell Berry aphorism that “eating is an agricultural act.” Foodies' insatiable enthusiasm has translated into an equally powerful curiosity about agricultural production.

But that’s only part of the story. After all, if you really want to become your own food producer, you should probably move to a farm. That’s what the hippies did a generation ago with the back-to-the-land movement. Those wannabe homesteaders figured (not unreasonably) that sustainability would have to be grounded in self-sufficiency. But many back-to-the-landers found farm life to be lonely, isolating, and just plain hard.

Today’s aspiring agriculturalists see things differently. With 50 percent of humanity now living in cities, folks know that many of our sustainability solutions are going to come from urban places. Part of that solution is going to mean small-scale, hyper-local food production that can reduce our reliance on fossil-fuel dependent, long-distance produce distribution. The other part entails creating resilient neighborhood networks. The great advantage of urban agriculture over homesteading — and the main reason why I think it appeals to so many people — is that city farming is, by definition, a communal endeavor. You don’t have to toil alone: There’s a whole group there to help.

So far, urban farms’ harvests have been modest. Despite all of their successes, they are too few and too small to do more than tinker with the edges of our broken food system. At this point, these operations’ most important crop is cultural change. Urban farms are growing community, and as we plow toward a more ecologically sustainable society, that is likely to be our most important renewable resource.

If you doubt me, just come visit us in the concrete jungle. You'll understand once you get some dirt under your fingernails.

Photo Credit: Linda via Wikimedia Commons