The Urban Farming Imperative
10:30 a.m., September 19, 2010: The day’s presenters were 20 minutes late. My classmates weren’t sure why, our instructor offered no explanation. Frankly, we didn’t care.
Silent rejoice swelled through the lecture hall, since, well, class didn’t start on time, which gave everyone extra time to update Facebook statuses, and cram for impending exams.
There we were. Sitting. Anticipating arrival by two of Detroit’s leading innovators, handpicked by Professor Scott Kurashige, educator by profession, activist by passion. The course, American Culture 301, or “Detroit History,” approached urban issues through a uniquely vivid prism, entailing firsthand engagement with city leaders and landmarks.
It also required (surprise surprise) pre-readings. These texts, drably filtered and emotionless, still, somehow, left within us a residue of interest for the topic of the day: Urban Farming.
10:31: Enter Wayne and Myrtle Curtis, trudging coolly, solemnly, visibly anxious, founders of Feedom Freedom Growers. The man’s charming charisma radiating through graceful gestures, with his partner trailing loyally behind; hers was a nurturing, loving spirit— the two, an immediately endearing sight, frequently trading glances, in awe of each other. Their faces, time-tested, and beautifully weathered by decades of selfless activism, were both bright as enchanted children, packing youthfully zealous minds and voices to match.
The duo snatched our attention immediately, forcing the aura from one of jovial banter, to concern, wonderment. Obviously, something was amiss, though, no guesses as to what it could be. Perhaps this just was their everyday demeanor.
Or, perhaps it was their subconscious protest against the heart wrenchingly apparent disparities, between their barren Eastside Detroit block, and our campus nestled in a vibrant, richly populated enclave, not even an hour away.
From a 139 square mile plodding colossus, they had trekked to Ann Arbor, 28 square miles of privilege, if not opulence. Subsistence farmers in a food oasis, “Tree City,” a relatively tiny region which manages to boast 8 of the nation’s largest, most popular food retailers, between Kroger, Meijer, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe’s.
Detroit, with a population 6 times as large as Ann Arbor, is devoid of even a single one of these retailers. With plans to erect a Whole Foods in Midtown, this does not change the urgent direness, especially those for whom the upscale retailer is uneconomical.
Allow a rephrase: not three; not two; not one; there were, and still are, zero major food retailers in the city of Detroit.
Though plausible, this contrast wasn’t the reason for their somberness.
10:32: The Thompsons gave an enthusiastic apology for their tardiness.
Someone had stolen their only method of transportation overnight, causing both a late entrance and their temporary doldrums.
Actually, “stolen” is somewhat imprecise. Rather, someone had “liberated” their vehicle, mused Wayne, undauntedly, a former Black Panther, gentle as a cub, and poised as a lion.
Less than 24 hours after a cowardly act jeopardized their very livelihood, they still managed to make their appointment, to speak to students in a college lecture hall—students now completely empathetic and invested in their story, their triumphs, their ordeals, their lives.
Wayne and Myrtle went on to give an impassioned 40-minute oration, which left an indelible impact on each pair of listening ears, an invigorating one. Their sermon was uplifting, inspirational, and left us craving more, wanting to know how we could involve ourselves in their cause, and the cause of the city’s denizens at large.
After a potentially life-changing setback, the couple still managed to make their appointment.
This brand of tenacity—fervent, unflinching, by any means necessary—marks the spirit of today’s urban farming conglomerate, in a nutshell.
What happened on September 19, 2010 is not purely about Wayne, Myrtle, and Feedom Freedom. It’s about a city at large, food equality for the multitudes. What happened on this date is, however, paradigmatic of the Urban Farming movement and its decade-plus-long growth. The commonality of goals, motivations, and that distinctively enduring spirit, fashion the Thompson anecdote as an exemplar of Detroit’s farming syndicate. Sure, minutia may vary from garden to garden, yet foundational ideologies, shared struggles and ordeals, remain consistent.
In ideology, and practice, urban agriculture destroys the imaginary lines of separation that exist within our minds; it is uniting all colors, races, and creeds, on the basis that unites us all: food. The Urban Farming movement, embarking in 1997 with Earthworks Urban Farm, is now coming of age, forcefully. As the mutual desires and creative ideation of innovating minds would have it, at present, urban agriculture is a network of over 900 gardens and farms, stretching from school to community, from personal to commercial. Thousands of players, hundreds of thousands of hours of relentless, collective toil, aim at affecting a better life for the community, by ensuring that people have access to adequate, safe, and nutritious food at all times, that citizens enjoy food security.
The idea is not entirely novel, either. The precursor to today’s urban agriculture, the 20 million Victory Gardens of WWII, provided, at their peak, some 40% of the nation’s crops in a period of stringent wartime rationing, in the name of patriotism.
In 2011, it’s time to embrace gardening in the name of humanity, and 2011’s Detroit is the perfect landscape to renew the project.
With 91,000 vacant lots, that the city and its residents should use the land both practically and effectively is a truism. More than 30,000 lifeless acres, and an insufficient number of grocers, classify the city as a “food desert,” which is an area “far out of balance in terms of day-to-day food availability,” according to field leading researcher Mari Ghallagher. In such a desert, the average person must travel twice as far to “reach the closest mainstream grocer,” than they must travel to fringe food locations, i.e., liquor stores and gas stations.
550,000 Detroiters cruise in this unfortunate boat.
This is in spite of an abundance of “food.” If McDonalds, Burger King, Coney Islands and KFC factored into Ghallagher’s equation, Detroit would be a flourishing food ocean. But they don’t count, and rightly so, with offerings that are often nothing more than laboratory concoctions masquerading as food.
Crucially, this abundance of unhealthy, inexpensive food poses a public health nightmare. Detroit’s life expectancy is noticeably lower than any other major city, and ranks as the nation’s fifth highest in obesity rates. Throw in the lack of inadequate public transportation, and that more than one in five households are carless into the equation, and it’s clear that these health effects are the results of poor food choices that many Detroiters are forced to make.
Urban farming crusades in hopes of suffocating this depressing trend. It is crafting a new culture, one away from the ultra processed, salty, and the artificial, and toward the life sustaining, sustainable, and the essential, amongst other staples, offering potatoes, tomatoes, green beans, peppers, broccoli, nutritious and organic—free of pesticides and genetic modifications—food.
With two years remaining until the grand opening of a midtown Whole Foods, there will be no awaiting the saviorship of large grocers. People living in the city need food now. The absence of large chains means less competition. There will be no moaning about the plethora of fast food options, nor fringe food locations; their presence is merely an unhealthy alternative. There will be no weeping about stratospheric unemployment rates; it provides the perfect workforce. Farming-wise, the city is perfected by its “imperfections.”
This massively scaled urban agricultural experiment is the perfect multipronged juggernaut. More than food, Urban Farming is an attempt at societal transformation, peaceful societal revolution. Its creed beckons us away from our current materialistic modus operandi, in hopes of realizing Dr. Martin Luther King’s other dream, the transition from a “thing oriented society to a person oriented one.” It’s about counteracting the ills wrought when one lacks capital in a capitalistic society. It’s about reforming the bond between ourselves, and bond between the earth and ourselves, eschewing the profit motive and prioritizing the human condition. And underpinning all is perhaps the paramount relationship, self versus self.
In a recent globally inclusive survey on happiness, conducted by researcher Ben Page, concluded with an adage, “If you want to be happy for a few hours, get drunk. If you want to be happy for a few years, get a wife. If you want to be happy forever, get a garden.” He found that people who gardened were measurably happier than those who did not. There’s something sublime about connecting with the ground, which in turn uplifts one’s own spirits.
This is all urban farmers want—to have their own gardens, to hark back to a simpler earth-centric lifestyle, inducing the most natural high of any.
Though noble to its core, as with any growing revolution, urban farming is not without its fair share of controversy. The farm cogs face clog, from the city and state.
Currently, a non-neglible number of farmers—many growing food out of sheer necessity—occupy city lands illegitimately. They’re squatters, technically. But without clear, transparent, and effective city or state policy in regards to urban farming, it’s hard to blame these “squatters.” They save the city from frittering away an unsustainable $1,200 annual maintenance fee that it would otherwise have to expend, on the arable fraction of the 61,000 city owned vacant plots. No precise data exists as to what percentage of vacant land is farming suitable, but with the prevailing norm of 1-2 acre plots, it would doubtless ameliorate food availability, substantially.
On the other end, many farmers, such as Wayne and Myrtle Thompson, rightfully own or lease their land. Yet, per Michigan’s Right To Farm Act—a piece of legislation intended for suburban agriculture, not a postindustrial powerhouse—preempts city administered zoning and regulation for “commercial” farms, gardens with intent to sell goods. This is an unnecessary detriment to Urban Agriculture. The city government also lacks zoning and regulatory powers because of act.
The needless roadblocks to legitimate gardening, owing lack of policy, and a lack of urgency to fit the farming model within the books of law, weigh heavy on today’s farmers, dangling them in persistent limbo.
Especially with a cohort as capable and motivated as Urban Farmers, and their supporters vying to make productive and beautiful a city, a desert peppered with the cacti of rusty scaffolds, dangerous debris, and unsightly litter—eyesores that double as breeding grounds for crime and mischief.
Governments, both city and state, should, if anything, incentivize this movement. The Federal Government encouraged and facilitated the victory gardens; this historically merited aspiration is fully realizable. A start would be demolishing the $1,000 fee that it costs to even apply for a farming permit—a fee that no doubt forces many would-be farms to abstain from gardening altogether, and perfectly honest citizens to go the undocumented route.
Too much is at stake to wait on a churning political machine to produce these results, it would take too long to wait for sensible policy to navigate itself through the maze of bureaucracy.
In the meantime, though, we can all play some part to push the movement in the direction that it needs to go. We can write letters to politicians, make donations through proper channels, recruit friends to this battle in our backyards, and, for more robust contributions, we can donate a liquid that certainly costs us nothing: our own sweat.
It’s time for everyone, Detroiters, Metro Detroiters, laymen, and policy makers alike, to get drunk with enthusiasm for the urban farming movement, so that we can begin to eradicate hunger for our fellow humans.
Collectively, how could we not support a movement of self-reliance, a revolution par excellence? It’s the American, and Motor City Creed—taking matters into one’s own hands, turning a deaf ear to all thwarting externalities, even a carjacker.
