Urban Farming - A passing Fashion or a viable Solution?
Many legacy cities are saddled with high rates of vacant buildings or land, crime, a falling tax base, food deserts, huge health disparities, and high unemployment.
A solution that promises job creation, healthy, locally-produced food and the recycling of lands lying fallow in the core of cities all at once, therefore, would have obvious appeal.
Urban farming makes that promise. Although it started on tiny lots with a few volunteers dabbling in homegrown tomatoes and basil, it has grown into a full blown urban strategy coddled by administrations in cities here and in many other countries. Sustainability offices and, at times even economic development agencies actively promote urban agriculture and everything that goes with it. Can it deliver?
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| A real glass green house at Great Kids Farm, a Baltimore City Farm operated by the Baltimore School system. |
The commitment of city government was clearly on display when Holly Freishtat, Baltimore City Food Policy Director addressed a busload of conference participants from all over the country. The story she had to tell is a good one, it is so good, in fact, that even Associated Press, the US Conference of Mayors and others took notice of Baltimore as city on the forefront, a city that "get it" when it comes to food, health, schools and community development and the linkages between these topics. Topics that often lead a sad existence in the shadows of glamorous urban projects.
Created as a non-profit and still largely funded by grants, the food section of the planning department can act nimbly by shifting from the useful heft of a city agency to the flexibility of a non-profit within the blink of an eye. Freishat doesn't operate in a silo, she collaborates with the departments of housing, the Baltimore City School System and even the Baltimore Development Corporation, who has assigned Michael Snidal, who is also on the bus, to deal specifically with food retail issues. The scientific database comes from no lesser a source than the local Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In this collaborative effort called the Baltimore Food Policy Initiative, the city attacks the problems of lack of access to healthy food and bad eating habits on many fronts simultaneously:
Created as a non-profit and still largely funded by grants, the food section of the planning department can act nimbly by shifting from the useful heft of a city agency to the flexibility of a non-profit within the blink of an eye. Freishat doesn't operate in a silo, she collaborates with the departments of housing, the Baltimore City School System and even the Baltimore Development Corporation, who has assigned Michael Snidal, who is also on the bus, to deal specifically with food retail issues. The scientific database comes from no lesser a source than the local Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In this collaborative effort called the Baltimore Food Policy Initiative, the city attacks the problems of lack of access to healthy food and bad eating habits on many fronts simultaneously:
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| Holly Freishtat, Baltimore City Food Policy Director explaining Baltimore food policies to a national group of urban planners |
- by actively promoting city neighborhoods as locations for supermarkets,
- by creating incentive programs for corner stores to carry a minimum assortment of healthy food choices,
- by bringing healthy food to local residents (Virtual Supermarket)
- by negotiating local food sourcing with school cafeteria vendors
- by sending school kids to the farms run by the school system to become ambassadors of fruits and vegetables offered in their school after having contributed to their seeding, growing, cleaning, chopping and packaging.
- by designating certain vacant lots or derelict city properties as areas for farming
This article will now focus on the urban farming aspect of Baltimore's Food Policy Initiative to get a sense what role urban ag can play in regeneration and healthy food.
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| Michael Snidal, the city's food retail expert, with tour participants in front of the historic Great Kids Farm buildings that now house a kitchen and packaging facaility |
Urban farming isn't something that happens in the glare of the public eye along the major arteries of town; instead, it occurs in the crevices of the city, so even as a resident of a city one may not know what is out there. Case in point, the Great Kids Farm, a city property in the diaspora of the surrounding county, lies behind a wooded buffer and is gated, not a space that most people are aware of, even though this place has history that goes over 100 years back to an orphanage for African-American kids founded by George Freedman Bragg. As Chrissa Carlson of the Friends of Great Kids explained, today the Great Kids Farm includes not only fields but a commercial kitchen, packaging and washing stations, a food hall, and green houses. Cabbage, carrots, cucumbers and greens are produced here at a rate of 13,000 pounds annually, enough to deliver to 60 out of 198 Baltimore City schools plus 1000 pounds of specialty greens delivered to five area restaurants. The point here isn't to replace Sunbelt's big food contract with Baltimore City schools (the 12,000 pounds are just a drop in the bucket, really) but to create a link between the student as a consumer and a producer. To this end 14 months of training programs are offered to students, though only to seniors, who again represent just a drop in the bucket – there are 85,000 city school students. But these are seeds, in the true sense of the word, the trained students are ambassadors for local and healthy food and their message goes back into the schools. To scale it up all Baltimore City schools will soon have mandatory field trips to the urban farms to give students at least a first hand view of healthy food and its production.
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| Elder C.W. Harris, the "mayor" of Sandtown explains the Big City farm operations in his community |
The next stop on this urban farming tour is a private enterprise, a co-op really (employees own 50%), the Big City Farms in Sandtown-Winchester. Ted Rouse, the son of renowned developer Jim Rouse and Sandtown's "mayor" Elder C.W. Harris explain the rough road this enterprise took from a dream born out of a Bioneers conference to where it is now. Big City Farms describes itself on its website like this:
Big City Farms, a Baltimore-based urban farming company, is building a network of urban farms that create good jobs for worker-owners, transform neighborhoods by improving vacant and blighted urban land, and produce ultra-local, organically grown, healthy food using sustainable, biological growing methods. We grow, process, and sell produce from our network of hoophouse farms to restaurants, institutions, grocers, and individual consumers.
Sandtown, of course is the same neighborhood that Ted's dad already tried to turn around, some 25 years later Big City Farms occupies one and a half acres in the backs of rowhouses, an area that had been cleared of vacant rowhouses that Ted described as a brownfield. Not to deal with urban soil or what stands in for it is one of the lessons that had to be learned, now it is hydroponics all the way in what Ted calls "hoop houses", green houses that are 22' wide and 150' long, a good dozen crowding almost as
closely in as the rowhouses once did. A half acre supports 2.5 people, Ted Rouse calculates, but it isn't quite clear if this formula is fully applied here. C.W. Harris, the "mayor" has seen to it that Sandtown got this farm, jobs and safety are sorely needed here and with the farms loitering on the once open lots has subsided. There are eyes because there is usually work done here. A thousand acres, Ted Rouse believes could be farmed like this in Baltimore alone, on vacant lots, surplus park space and the like.
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| All too often urban "groceries" look like this |
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| Hoop house greenhouses surrounded by rowhouses. Big City Farms in Sandtown |
At this scale it sounds like real agriculture and so it is only fitting that Maryland's Department of Agriculture and its representative, Mark Powell is also on the bus. He paints the big picture of the 10,000 farms in the state, their $2.3 billion contribution to the economy, the decline in dairy, the bad age pyramid of ever older farmers and the young generation not interested in farming, and the general need to re-tool away from large animals and corn and towards agro-tourism, wine and cheese and community supported farms (CSA). This narrative neatly creates the tie in with local food production, organic food, farmers markets (there are now 145 of them in the state) and seemingly obliterates the traditional urban-rural divide, at least on this bus.
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| Warm moist air on a chilly day. Even deep in winter, farming goes on in the hoop houses |
The bus has now stopped next to a tiny patch of land, also behind rowhouses, we moved across town into East Baltimore. Out the windows a big sign declares this to be the Boone Street Farm, no green houses here, not even a fence, just some brown grass and some dirt. This is maybe more like urban gardening, but organized with the Baltimore Farm Alliance this duo of women farm operators sell their produce regularly at the Waverly Farmers Market. We hear explanations about soil improvement, low lead levels in it and irrigation from a fire hydrant before the relentless schedule presses to move on to the Real Food Farm at Clifton Park, a farm that sits where a drinking water reservoir once stood, a bit of a liability for farming as we will learn. This sprawling six acre farm is carved out from the park, sits next to a school and looks more rural than the others due to ample open space and a mix of fields, an orchard and more hoop houses which here are called "high tunnels." A food truck of sorts gets dispatched from here as a mobile supermarket and brings
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| This fledgling urban "farm" is more like the urban gardening that many imagine when they hear about urban food |
the products of this farm deep into the eastern food deserts. This non-profit organization, too, has a mission statement:
Real Food Farm works toward a just and sustainable food system by improving neighborhood access to healthy food, providing experience-based education, and developing an economically viable, environmentally responsible local agriculture sector.
The farm collaborates with Baltimore Civic Works, a Johns Hopkins project, which like Great Kids and Big City farms offers training for students and community members. In addition it experiments with specialties such as bee-keeping, composting and soil creation as well as sharing amenities such as their refrigeration unit, and tool sharing.
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| The Real Food Farm in Clifton Park with green houses, an orchard, composting and other features exhibits many features that make it appear like a "real" farm |
The last stop leads us deep into the devastating East Baltimore abandonment north of the Amtrak line and outside the Hopkins biotech redevelopment zone. Here on the site of a former water pumping station in and among the gorgeous former industrial buildings now engulfed by decay and weeds is supposed to rise the Baltimore Food Hub, the crown jewel of urban farming as it were, the hub is supposed to become an incubator for new farmers and food businesses, a community space for education around health and nutrition, and a resource for city planning and food policy development. $10 million dollars of investment are anticipated. This was explained by Greg Heller of the American Communities Trust,who organizes this "impact investment" with Humanim as the partner, a firm who put their investment where there mission is, into the former American Brewery building.
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| The Baltimore food hub along the Amtrak line creates a green necklace along the railroad tracks. (source: website) |
If one were to quibble that even a thousand acres of urban farming (the reality is far from that number) would only make a small dent in Baltimore's unemployed workforce, it would miss the point. True, urban farming, the way it is springing up across the city of Baltimore and many other cities in America, is not single-handedly solving the inner city health and food crisis, nor will it occupy every bit of abandoned urban space or provide jobs to all unemployed youth. But it is a catalyst for workforce development, social equity, nutrition and education. Urban farming investments take
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| So far the food hub buildings still sit dormant. The towers of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the background |
In an experimental way urban agriculture takes up the challenge of bringing food closer to the globally growing urban population. It tries out new ways of low impact production and the integration of urban surfaces into food production. The hoop houses are just a low tech beginning.
Vertical farming included in office tower facades, green roof farming on distribution warehouses and "edible parks" will be next. Due to the global nature of the challenges urban farming is by no means a phenomenon that is limited to legacy cities or one that will soon disappear.
Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
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| The Baltimore Food Hub "business model" source: Food Hub presentation |
last updated 2/18/15 17:00h
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External Links:
Farm Alliance of Baltimore
A page of links to Baltimore City farms
10 Baltimore Urban Agriculture Projects
Peters: Creating a Sustainable Urban Agriculture Revolution
City Farming for the Future (2006)
Future Directions International: Feeding the Cities: Is Urban Agriculture the Future of FoodSecurity?
Slides: Innovation and Urban Farming Innovation am Beispiel „Städtische Landwirtschaft“ (German)
Vertical Farming in Jackson Hole (CityLab)
all photos are taken by author and copyright
of ArchPlan Inc.
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