If you’re among the 79 percent of Americans who live in an urbanized area, you may assume that food is only grown hundreds or thousands of miles away on large commercial farms. Some of it may be. If you’re more into local or organic food, you may visit a farmers’ market on the weekend that features produce grown a few hundred miles away at farms in the suburbs or exurbs. But you’d probably never imagine that, right in your own backyard, urban farmers are growing produce in the shadow of skyscrapers and subway trains.
Whether they’re in large areas of blighted sprawl or sandwiched onto a vacant lot the size of a postage stamp, urban farms are capitalizing on the current trends of organic local produce and community agriculture, making our cities—as well as their residents—a whole lot healthier.
Earthworks Urban Farm, Detroit
Detroit’s population has fallen by almost half in recent decades, and the combination of a poor populace, an emerging movement of activists, and plentiful land (more land than in San Francisco, Manhattan, and Boston combined) has made it the epicenter of the urban-farming movement. What began in 1997 as a side project for a Capuchin monastery’s soup kitchen has grown into a 1.5-acre farm whose mission is “food justice.” Inner-city neighborhoods are far less likely to have real grocery stores selling healthy foods than other neighborhoods are, so the produce grown at Earthworks is used to provide healthy meals at the adjoining community center and soup kitchen. Their produce is also sold at a farmers’ market, where poor Detroiters who may not have access to fresh vegetables can buy it. The Capuchin Franciscan monks who run the farm say that it’s their mission to introduce children to cooking and eating fresh homegrown food, to provide work and learning opportunities to homeless people who have an interest in farming, and to correct the imbalance of food distribution that puts poor people at a disadvantage. Detroiters who collect food stamps or WIC are able to get food at the markets, and volunteers even take food to customers who don’t have transportation to get to the farm. The operation now includes a greenhouse for seedling production as well as a rooftop apiary for keeping honeybees. In Detroit, urban farms provide another vital service to the community by caring for and regularly using once vacant land—land that otherwise might fall into disrepair, become infested with pests, or become riddled with crime.
