Urban farming has the potential to help us take charge of the foods we eat, green our cities, build community, and increase food security for urban residents.

Everyday, there’s articles about backyard chickens, bee keeping, or urban yard sharing. Clearly urban agriculture is at the top of the trend pile. But is it just a trend, or a part of a sustainable future?

Last week I attended a panel discussion in San Francisco at The Commonwealth Club (presented by INFORUM), about how today’s urban farming movement began and where it’s going. Attendees were treated to a variety of perspectives from four pitchfork-toting farmerpreneur leaders of the urban farming movement in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Panelists included Jason Mark, co-manager of Alemany Farm; editor-in-chief, Earth Island Journal, Novella Carpenter, author of the book Farm City about her farm Ghost Town Farm, Christopher Burley, founder, Hayes Valley Farm, and David Gavrich (aka The Goat Whisperer), founder of City Grazing. The panel was moderated by Sarah Rich, writer; editor; co-founder, The Foodprint Project; and co-author, Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century.

The panel started off with a discussion about the most recent “back to the land” movement and how it differed from today’s urban farming movement.

Back in the 60s and 70s young people migrated back to the countryside to make a go of farming. Novella Carpenter’s parents were part of that movement. But it didn’t last. People found that growing food is very hard and rural life can be extremely isolating. The motives of today’s generation of farmers are different, and more communitarian. They’re not trying to drop out. They’re trying to engage more fully with the world around them.

“We’re realizing that maybe there is a different way. We can stay in the cities and grow food where we live and it can serve as a model for sustainability, said Jason Mark. “There’s not enough room for all of us in Sonoma.”

“We’re all trying to find balance and bring the rural environment into the urban environment. We’re trying to find that niche that we live in. Everyone who plants a seed is sowing a bit of sustainability,” added Chris Burley.

Though the movement is young, things are changing rapidly. According to David Gavrich, the goat whisperer. When his business, City Grazing, put an ad in Craigslist for “goat herder, San Francisco,” they got 200 applications, and half of the applicants actually had goat experience. According to Gavrich, “people are yearning to get away from their desks”.

Urban farming does seem to be helping to revitalize neighborhoods and foster community. For example, Burley, of Hayes Valley Farm, who was featured here in a Q & A a couple of weeks back said that he was amazed to find that 50 people will consistently show up on a Thursday to shovel horse manure for four hours. Sunday work parties regularly attract 100 folks.

Jason Mark says, “community is what distinguishes this from the back to the land movement.” Alemany Farm is completely volunteer run and over the years has built up a core group of volunteers that are friends and together make up a vibrant community.

For Novella Carpenter, the community happened more by accident. Her farm begin as a personal project but has evolved into one in which neighbors are involved in various ways. The involvement started with people picking her produce without permission. Describing herself as “not a do-gooder” but saying that. “If my neighbors are hungry and I know how to grow food how can I not feed them?” she says, “everybody gives what they can.” This includes everything from the wagon proffered by the neighbor who likes her mustard greens to goat butchering lessons from the Yemeni liquor store owner.

What about bureaucratic hurdles to farming in urban areas?

They do exist but each panelist had different experiences. Gavrich has said he’s had no problems in enlightened San Francisco but recommends anticipating problems and getting everything in writing. He has a “goat clause” in his agreement with the railroad line he maintains stating that all landscape is done by natural means.

Mark echoes that San Francisco has been extremely supportive and that the mayor has laid out a food policy proposal that is sweeping and visionary. He does cite “getting the city staff to connect with the mayor’s policies” as a hurdle.

Burley said that the city came to his group to develop Hayes Valley Farm, so they have the full blessing and support from the authorities. He also said that a bottom- up approach to urban farming that utilizes people’s backyards has worked.

Most of the panelist agreed that policy changes that support urban farming are important because (though many of the non-profit farms and farms located in private backyards don’t run into problems) when an urban farm is commercialized, all it takes is one neighbor to complain about commercial activity in a residential area for a farmer to get cited.

And as Burley said, “We need to advocate for farms in residential areas because 60 percent of land is in people’s yards.”

Can urban farming help us rebuild our food systems and increase food security?

Urban farming can certainly increase access to fresh fruits and vegetables to city dwellers but we need to look at how the food is distributed and find creative ways to get the food to the people who most need it. The most sustainable way of all to provide food is to teach people how to grow their own.

For example, Alemany Farm is right next to public housing. The farm runs youth programs and provides plots to nearby residents where they can grow their own food. The farm once held a farmers market where nearby residents could purchase produce on a sliding scale. The farm is no longer allowed to sell the food, which means they have to give it away. Yet all the panelists agree that a charity model is too top-down and not sustainable.

Things are shifting as policy makers realize that urban farming can be both a green solution to city ills and perhaps even a green jobs solution. Novella Carpenter is working on a project in San Lorenzo that is part of the city’s green job training program and is funded by the sheriff’s department.

All panelists agreed that the movement needs to network, share information and resources and build the system from the ground up.

According to Chris Burley, an urban agriculture alliance is forming. And indeed for urban agriculture to ever become more than isolated individuals working on scattered city plots, we need concerted organization efforts that can both demand and work with government backing.

Panelists were asked what role education plays in the movement

Chris Burley says it’s crucial. In fact Hayes Valley Farm’s mission is not even so much to produce food, but to serve as an urban agriculture resource that provides education and advocates behavioral changes. “We can’t change what we don’t know. We need to become more aware of our impact. Food is the gateway drug to a more sustainable lifestyle. Through learning about food, little by little, we’ll become more connected and thrive as a community,” said Burley.

Novella and her co-worker/owners run an urban farming store at Biofuel Oasis in Berkeley. All day they educate people on beekeeping, chicken coops and more. They teach classes on bee and goat keeping, preserving, and other topics as well. With a trend like urban farming, it is necessary to make sure people know what they are getting into or the movement will not develop in a sustainable way.

I wonder if the Internet existed during the 60s and 70s, giving people access to information and ready support from fellow travelers, if the back-to-the-land movement might have survived.

In conclusion: here are the panelist’s best 60-second ideas to change the world.

David Gavrich – “Get leadership and political people to think holistically. Think about the impact beyond what we see. Look at externalities. If we do that, it will be clear that we’ll be better off farming in our communities.”

Chris Burley – “Crop mob. Get together and transform a backyard. Have a potluck.”

Novella Carpenter – “Every city should have a demo farm. It could be a cool tourist thing with a person managing it and showing people how to raise chickens and bees and how to can and process vegetables. There should be an “˜office of urban farming.'”

Jason Mark – “Find a little bit of land and a little water, find a friend and find someone to help. Connect with you neighbors doing the same thing. Personal actions alone don’t do it. Progress happens collectively.”

This is the latest installment in Vanessa Barrington’s weekly column, The Green Plate, on the environmental, social, and political issues related to what and how we eat.

Image: Jessica Reeder

The post Is the Urban Farming Movement Here to Stay? appeared first on EcoSalon.

Q & A With Chris Burley, Cofounder of Hayes Valley Farm

Earlier this year, while speeding down a busy San Francisco street in the passenger seat of a friend’s car, I spotted a bunch of people scurrying around atop a concrete slab. They were moving dirt the hard way – using wheelbarrows and shovels.

The image did not fully compute. I did a double-take, thinking I’d just hallucinated, and interjected a query along the lines of, “Did you see that? Wasn’t that one of the old freeway ramps?” We were in Hayes Valley, one of San Francisco’s more densely populated neighborhoods. Situated west of the Civic Center, the neighborhood was once dominated by a raised freeway structure. But after the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake damaged the roadway, the city tore it down. The site I caught a glimpse of, bordered by Octavia, Fell, Oak, and Laguna Streets, was in fact, once a freeway ramp. There are a handful of others like it strewn around the neighborhood.

Said friend and I were deep in conversation so all I got in answer to my question was a vague, “don’t know.” I wanted to stop the car, jump out and investigate but I wasn’t driving so I filed the vision away in the area of my brain reserved for all things food and farming (it’s cavernous and messy in there) and vowed to check it out later.

Well, it’s later now and today Hayes Valley Farm is holding classes and work parties, and operating a fledging nursery that sells dwarf fruit trees especially suited to San Francisco’s chilly climate. The farm is still a ways away from producing food for folks to eat directly because there’s pretty much nothing more DIY than turning a slab of concrete into a farm.

After testing the site for contamination, you have to build enough soil to support plant life. Hayes Valley Farm managers and armies of volunteers started by layering cardboard, mulch, and manure atop ivy and dirt, with the goal of generating two to three feet of organic matter. Cover crops like fava beans and clover were planted to fix nitrogen in the soil and make it fertile enough to support food crops. The concrete slab will house potted plants and trees.

Growing food in the soil is a couple years down the road, but for now the farm functions as sort of a community space, education center, and demonstration garden for neighbors or anyone interested in volunteering and learning to grow food. Classes on garden design, composting, and Permaculture are available regularly. And for those who just want to get their hands dirty, there’s always a work party. Some days over 100 people have shown up to volunteer!

Originally driven by neighborhood residents who had been petitioning the city to do something with the vacant land, the farm is a fiscally sponsored project of the San Francisco Parks Trust. The lot, and others like it, are currently owned by San Francisco’s Build Inc., a development agency. But due to the economic downturn, the lots are not being developed, so the San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development organized an alliance of urban farmers, educators, and designers to make up the Hayes Valley Farm Project Team.

Funded by a city grant as an interim use agreement, the farm is currently operated by Chris Burley, one of the original founders of My Farm (a now defunct garden installation business), David Cody a leader of the San Francisco Permaculture Guild, and Jay Rosenberg, volunteer coordinator of the San Francisco Permaculture Guild, and longtime community organizer, volunteer and educator in sustainable agriculture.

I caught up with Chris Burley, the co-founder and co-director of the farm to ask him a few questions about the farm and his and his fellow organizers’ vision for its future.

Q: This is an amazing project because it’s a huge undertaking, yet the city could decide to develop the site in as little as two years. Is that correct? How do you feel about that?

A: There is the imminent possibility of the site being developed sooner than later. I personally believe this site is a huge opportunity and urban agriculture will thrive because of its existence. Despite the inevitable development plans Hayes Valley Farm will steward the site until further notice, all while building soil and building community to its greatest potential.

Q: Water access is always a tough issue. Do you irrigate? If so, where does the water come from?

A: We do irrigate, but we also go through great lengths to SINK water into the ground so we can store it into the ground reservoirs and use it later. The ultimate goal of our efforts is to use none to very little water from the public water system. The more we can sink, the more we can recycle from the plants into the environment and back into the plants to meet our needs.

Q: Can you explain what Permaculture is for a lay audience? And tell how this project fits into a vision of Permaculture.

A: Permaculture is a theoretical and practical framework for how to produce food, build shelter, and approach all other aspects of life in a way that gives back to the planet as much as it takes out. Imagine if we were to give back more than we consumed? Imagine the regeneration, the abundance, and the sheer beauty that would ensue.

Q: Tell me about the potato tower. It’s fascinating. Can you explain how it works to folks who may have never grown potatoes?

A: Potato towers are vertical structures that provide a practical, no-dig, high-yield way for folks to grow and harvest potatoes in limited space. And who doesn’t love potatoes right? Potatoes are a high-calorie crop too, which means they can feed a lot of people while using little of the earth’s resources. In fact, they are also a great way to build soil because as they grow they help break down organic matter in the soil, which makes additional nutrients available for other plants.

Potatoes are tubers, which are storage containers for starches, or plant energy. Tubers aren’t seeds themselves, but they can act as seeds when buried, using their energy to propagate a new plant. So bust out that 5-gallon bucket (or make your own tower), drill plenty of holes in the bottom to ensure great drainage (potatoes hate to be wet), plop a few potatoes on top of 6-inches of compost and cover with another few inches. When the plant reaches 12 inches tall, gently cover the first six inches with compost and then repeat until you have filled the bucket to the brim. When the leaves of potatoes are covered, they turn into roots and form more tubers! Then water them as needed and harvest your bounty when the plants die off and turn brown.

If you want to learn how to make a more productive tower check out our blog for a detailed article on tuberous towers.

Q: Are there other cool ways of growing food in small spaces that you will explore?

A: First, we encourage people to just grow. It’s not rocket science, it just a matter of planting a seed that will produce a future 3-course meal. Second, Check out Sixty-Six things you can grow in containers – everyone can grow, even Ronald McDonald statues.

Q: What is the best possible outcome you can imagine for this project?

A: The best possible outcome would be that Hayes Valley Farm becomes a launching point for regenerative agricultural practices in the city, the region and in the nation. We begin to realize that food production is a source of life, both physically, emotionally and spiritually. As a Japanese master in regenerative agriculture named Masanobu Fukuoka says, “Natural farming is not just for growing crops,” he says, “It is for the cultivation and perfection of human beings.” When all know the value of our mother earth, and how the caring for their own garden of abundance bears delicious fruit, I will see this project as a great success.

For research on this article I relied on information from this article by Madeline Lynch in San Francisco State University’s online publication, [X]Press

This is the latest installment in Vanessa Barrington’s weekly column, The Green Plate, on the environmental, social, and political issues related to what and how we eat.

Images: Hayes Valley Farm

The post From Fumes to Fava Beans: San Francisco Freeway Gets a New Life appeared first on EcoSalon.