Star Trek

Tired of importing your food from the corporate dominated farm system of California?

 Why not join the urban gardening trend that has started up in Cleveland and Detroit.

http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/insight/stories/2010/07/18/urban-garden.html?sid=101

CLEVELAND - Amid acres of vacant, abandoned buildings and debris-strewn lots, flowers rise within the ruins of 20th century industrial America.

So do tomatoes, kale, corn and carrots.

Here in Cleveland, urban gardens flourish while the city founders. Neighborhoods once teeming with immigrants who toiled in factories and African-Americans who headed north in the last century searching for better lives now go wanting for people.

What to do? Other American cities facing the same problems are turning themselves back to nature, recreating and repositioning themselves for the 21st century.

"There's a lot of vacant land in Cleveland and Ohio cities," said Mary Gardiner, an entomologist at Ohio State University's Agricultural Research and Development Center in Wooster.

Gardiner is studying vacant lots and gardens in some of Cleveland's most downtrodden neighborhoods.

"I'm excited about how people are reclaiming this land," she said earlier this month while touring a number of the city's empty lots.

Officials in cities including Youngstown, Detroit and Flint, Mich., have discussed or are bulldozing city blocks so they don't have to provide them with costly city services.

They're talking about turning entire city blocks into green, pasture-like settings or parks. And in some cases, small produce farms.

The question is whether these ideas are just short-term, trendy solutions to urban woes or something that will become part of urban landscapes everywhere, including Columbus, which now has 200 community gardens with a goal of 500 by 2012.

Cleveland's buying into it. The city council last year passed legislation allowing residents to raise and keep bees, chickens and other farm animals.

And the city council introduced legislation last month to create urban agriculture districts of at least 10,000 square feet - roughly a quarter acre - that allows larger farms and mentions residents raising cows, horses and alpacas.

Mike Walton, director of Cleveland State University's Environmental Institute, said it's about creating landscapes that are useful to communities and attract residents.

"Most urban farming is at the garden scale. Some visions out there are much more ambitious. The questions for many people are how economically sustainable it is," Walton said.

"If you're looking at places like Cleveland and Detroit, if you're looking at installing agriculture, it's a whole new way of looking at cities."

Others aren't so sure.

"Urban agriculture is an interesting idea. It gives some people hope," said Hunter Morrison, a former Cleveland planning director and now director of campus planning and community partnership at Youngstown State University.

But some neighborhoods will never come back; they've outlived their usefulness, Morrison said.

The people of Youngstown figured out before the political class did that the city would never be the Youngstown of old, that it would be smaller and never regain its old population, Morrison said.

"Most people recognize what they see," he said.

In Cleveland, many leaders don't, he said.

"Drive down Chester Avenue and see the Hough neighborhood blown apart, and folks at City Hall are chewing around whether they'll see half a million people again," Morrison said. "It's easy to get all sentimental and wish it will all come back, but it will not."

Since the 1950s, nearly 1 million people have left Detroit, and nearly one-third of its 140 square miles have been abandoned.

So Detroit Mayor Dave Bing is emptying out the worst parts of his ravaged city to best serve the remaining stronger neighborhoods. He wants to demolish 3,000 homes this year and 10,000 abandoned buildings overall.

"He doesn't see any value in sugarcoating reality," said Morrison, who wishes more officials in Ohio cities would accept that their cities will never regain what they've lost.

Some see large-scale urban farming as a salvation for parts of the Motor City.

In 2005, Taja Sevelle founded Urban Farming, which cultivates 7 acres in Detroit.

She was inspired to create the nonprofit after moving from Minneapolis.

"The amount of job loss and the sheer amount of unused land is unbelievable," she said.

Ohio's industrial cities -Toledo, Dayton, Canton and Youngstown among them - also have suffered population losses as manufacturing jobs went overseas.

Few cities have been harder hit than Cleveland. Once an industrial juggernaut and a prime driver of Ohio's economy, the city has tumbled in decline for more than four decades. Many parts of the city have become acre after acre of abandoned factories, crumbling homes and weed-choked lots.

Exacerbating the city's urban woes in recent years was the foreclosure crisis that stripped neighborhoods of residents, wealth and sense of place, leaving in its wake 10,000 vacant homes and 20,000 vacant lots.

In Columbus, nearly 6,000 homes sit vacant or abandoned. And 30 percent of the population within Columbus' 1950 boundaries left between 1970 and 2000.

"It is not a shrinking city in the way other cities are," said Lavea Brachman, the executive director of the Greater Ohio Policy Center, a Columbus-based planning group.

But in some neighborhoods it's certainly more prevalent than many people here realize, she said.

And while the city is buying dozens of vacant homes to rehabilitate and sell, it's clear that most cannot be salvaged. That will leave neighborhoods in Linden, Franklinton and the Hilltop with even more empty houses and vacant lots.

In some of those areas, people are building community gardens.

At the corner of S. Champion and Fulton Street on the Columbus' Near East Side, young people performing community service for Franklin County Juvenile Court tend to a garden.

Kale, cabbage and peppers grow in several of its 15 beds.

Not only does the garden provide food for the neighborhood, it's also spurring property owners to fix up their houses, said Bill Dawson, coordinator of the growing to green program at the Franklin Park Conservatory.

Those include three nearby houses that were either boarded-up or graffiti-covered and now have new siding.

"The owner next door said, 'I'm doing this because of the garden,' " Dawson said.

Much of impetus behind them is the need for vegetables and fruit in neighborhoods that don't have grocery stores that carry fresh produce. But Dawson said gardens help spark the rebirth of tired neighborhoods.

"It shows care and ownership in their community," he said. "It's not just a trend but a changing culture and a way of living."

In a report released this year and co-authored by Brachman, the Brookings Institution said these emerging "green areas" won't become large farms or turn into urban woodlands.

They'll be interspersed with existing houses, where some people will want to stay because they like the new rural nature of their environment.

Kelly Young, a volunteer coordinator at the garden, lives in the impoverished Franklinton neighborhood that is home to several gardens.

Young, 23, said she doesn't know if they spark any community development. But they create an oasis of relaxation and beauty, she said.

Some say they should be more.

Tom Murphy, a former mayor of Pittsburgh and now a senior fellow at the Urban Land Institute, said urban farming is more of a land-banking strategy - a way to use the land until something better comes along.

Even Columbus officials agreed to raze the barren City Center mall to create a park while waiting for the development market to rebound.

"Demolition is only one step," Murphy said. "What are you going to do with the property?"

Assembling land in a central city is often cumbersome, Youngstown State's Morrison said, making large-scale farming that much more difficult.

Plus, there's simply the rural-urban conflict, he said.

"I'm not sure people want to live next to a chicken factory," he said.

Edit: Here is a photo I thought I would include to add a little human interest to the story.

Gus Chan / The Plain Dealer

Maurice Small stands in the community garden he and others helped develop in Tremont near Lucky's Cafe Wednesday, July 1, 2009. Small is a pioneer in urban gardening and believes the gardens can help revitalize Cleveland's blighted landscape.

For those who enjoy gardening and indeed for those who would like to learn but wouldnt otherwise have the chance its a brilliant idea. Great for the whole community.

This is great for the community, and it's very much a grass roots uprising in opposition to mass agribusiness. There are a variety of new outlets for localized farming. Urban Gardens are but one. Community Supported Agriculture is another. CSA's permit individuals to buy seasonal shares, then get produce delivery weekly or biweekly. I recently obtained a share of a farm, and now have access to a variety of truly fresh from the farm fruits, vegetables, and raw goat's milk. No more pasteurized junk! Share holders are also encouraged to visit the farms/urban gardens, so the farmers are strongly encouraged to maintain sanitary conditions.

Unfortunately, there are agribusiness reps in Washington lobbying against these movements, and even wanting laws which permit the government to seize urban gardens in times of a national crisis.

Caltrek2, thank you for posting the above article.

Edited as my post didnt show, just the quote.

So basically 'We dont want these gardens but if we cant stop them we want to seize them when we need them'.

Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.

This is a continuing news story nothing wrong with updates especially since this is a good human relations story line that actually helps people and communities. The benefits of this and other programs may be small in the sense that the gardens cannot produce enough food to sustain a city. The greater benefit of urban gardening is being able to teach many aspects of farming from planting seeds to marketing the products. As the article sites below many other benefits go along with urban gardening and now branching off into other fields.  

 Project Overview

The 2011 Cleveland/Akron Urban Gardening Internships are an opportunity for up to 5 College of Wooster students to partner with, assist, and learn from one of two urban gardening programs in northeast Ohio. 

The first opportunity is Green Corps, a well-established urban gardening program coordinated by the Cleveland Botanical Garden.  Green Corps employs over 90 high school students from inner-city Cleveland each summer to work at a handful of gardening sites in their own neighborhoods that produce food for local families as well as for sale at area farmers markets.  The high school students engage in every aspect of the gardening process, from planting to cultivating to harvesting produce.  They are supervised by crew leaders and site managers at each site as well as an overall farm manager.  Through the process they learn valuable lessons about food production and distribution, ecological management, urban development, and agricultural sustainability. 

The second program is the Organic Classroom/Garden at St. Sebastian Elementary School in Akron.  It is a unique opportunity to work in a gardening and education program that is just beginning.  The school is committed to establishing a garden, which will serve three purposes: 1.) to provide students and teachers at the elementary school with an outdoor classroom/laboratory in which the principles of gardening/farming, environmental science, and entrepreneurship can be cultivated, 2.) to develop community connections to the garden, and 3.) to develop opportunities to sustain the garden, i.e. to help develop a revenue stream base on produce from the garden.  To this end, the internship seeks students who are interested in helping establish a gardening program from it inception, work with teachers to develop classroom lessons related to the garden, and explore potential opportunities for the sale of produce from the garden, e.g. marketing and PR of the garden to local restaurants and the implementation of a small farmers market on the school grounds.  Interns will be involved in every aspect of the gardening process, from planting to cultivating to harvesting produce to the sale and distribution of the produce.

Great if you can manage it.

Unfortunately, I am about as green fingered as a barrel of human-herbicide.

bummer.

The benefits of this and other programs may be small in the sense that the gardens cannot produce enough food to sustain a city.

Depends on the garden's size and techniques employed therein. Takao Furuno, a Japanese farmer, has developed a system of farming called Aigamo, which uses species interdependency to grow crops. He can produce a crop equivalent of a 600 acre mega-farm off of just 6 acres, and all organic at that. Might not be able to feed a city, but certainly a neighborhood or community at the very least.

The other two programs mentioned are interesting, in some respects similar to a Montessori highschool, which is farm school. Montessori students (12-18) live on a farm for 6 years, managing the farm, its accompanying residency, and an in town store. During this time, the students directly apply academics to managing these systems, thereby demonstrating the need for and development of academics.

The "Food Safety Modernization Act" (S 510) was passed in November 2010 giving authority to the FDA over U.S. food and farms. In times of emergency, authority is extended to Homeland Security, The Department of Defense, and The World Trade Organization. It threatens urban gardens, etc. I've composed a letter to my State Governor urging opposition to this bill and strongly encourage others as well. Feel free to copy, paste, and send to your local and state reps.

Governor ________________

     On November 29, 2010, Congress passed the "Food Safety Modernization Act" (S 510), which grants the United States Food and Drug Administration authority over all U.S.  food and farms.  This authority may extend to Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and the World Trade Organization in times of an "emergency".  S 510 could limit the food supply to government-approved corporate mega-farms, wishing to promote unproven Genetically Modified produce.  S 510 is a threat to Organic Food Producations, Small Family Farms, Community Supported Agriculture, Local Farmers Markets, and Urban Gardens.

     The State of Vermont is properly responding with "The Vermont Resolution for Food Sovereignty", which asserts the right of individuals to grow, exchange, and consume farm products as seen fit.  The resolution further declares the people of Vermont, empowered by the 10th Amendment, reject federal authority threatening the above assertion in favor of local self-management.  I urge the State of ______________ to pass similar legislation for the protection of _____________ residents and to support the State of Vermont.

     Thank you for considering the matter.

Ditto! I grew some stuff once, the caterpillars loved it. But Im so bad I actually have a gardener to mow my postage stamp sized gardens, which at least makes it affordable. Thank goodness for having hayfever as an excuse.

As far as I know the use of Aigamo ducks have been used in Japan and other rice growing nations with great success. Although have not seen the use of this in other agriculture farming communities let alone within an urban garden. A good idea for ducks that love the areas that rice is grown. Not sure they would like city life very much.   Of course this could lead to others finding a local bug-eating animal that could achieve the same without having to use chemicals.  

You're last point is a gem. I don't believe areas should necessarily adopt Funuro's method expiicitly, but rather adapt it to the local landscape, as it would encourage biodiversity. And imagine it in the hands of students per the school projects discussed!

You'd want it to be a native animal though.

Not like cane toads!

what a great idea.  Revitalizes the city and gives people as sense of pride.  I don't see how it is realistically going to actually feed a lot of people unless commercial farming moves in.  I remember my grandmother's garden.  It fed the whole family but it was a couple acres and a full time job.

If by commercial farming you mean corporate owned mega-farms, they are the problem, not the solution. They have single handedly done more to destabilize the food security world wide and perpetuate world hunger than nature ever could.

Well hey, it is hard to stay on the cutting edge of every story around. I might be offended by the "document-dumping OP" line except I am not quite sure what you mean by "OP".