Growing Food for the Soul on City Lots

‘People are no easier to recover than the land buried under layers of pavement.’

In the forty years I’ve been farming, the vast majority of the organically grown food I’ve produced has been available only to a narrow segment of society: those who can afford it. Even as I’ve worked to address this basic problem, I’ve lived for most of my career with some related pressing questions: How can we make high-quality fresh food more affordable and available to all, while still supporting the farmers who work so hard to produce it? Could farming be used to provide jobs and healing to people who have become marginalized because of poverty, mental illness, and drug addiction? Knowing that these social ills are often concentrated in urban centers, I’ve asked myself: Is it possible to create viable farming enterprises on pavement and contaminated land in the heart of our cities?

Photo of Sole Food urban farm in VancouverPhoto by Agricoltura Urbana A Sole Food urban farm in an old Petro-Canada station in Vancouver’s East End.

During the years I was starting to farm, abandoned land was common in most low-income neighborhoods in North America’s cities. Common, too, in these areas were high unemployment and a shortage of fresh food. I founded the Center for Urban Agriculture in the 1980s with the idea that we could create small farm businesses on urban land, providing much-needed employment and food for those underserved communities. Most people at that time were confused when I used the words urban and agriculture in the same sentence.

Over the years I created and operated both rural and urban farming enterprises. Some looked like the prototypical vision of a farm: wide-open fields, rows of vegetables or fruit trees, a welcoming farmhouse, a large barn, animals grazing, tractors cultivating, and trucks stacked with boxes of food. But some of the projects I started were in urban places like Watts in Los Angeles, a neighborhood known for its poverty, violence, and unemployment. Starting in 1999, through the Center for Urban Agriculture, we created a three-acre farm on the site of the Watts health clinic, which had burned down during the uprisings in the mid-1960s.

I was young when I helped to develop that farm in Watts. Naively, I thought I could cure some of the neighborhood’s ills. Like so many do-gooders who had come and gone through there, I believed I had some answers to the deep-seated challenges that plagued that community. I discovered that I knew nothing. My own privilege kept me from really understanding the needs of the people who lived there. I did not come from that neighborhood, had never had to cope with that level of poverty and desperation, had always had a place to live and food to eat, and the color of my skin is not black or brown.

In the end I had to be satisfied that the best I could do was to share some of my skills with the people who call Watts home. Now in my mid-fifties, my idealism tempered but my belief in the power of growing food still intact, I’ve started another urban farm, in another infamous neighborhood.

Seann and I had been introduced in January 2009 by Liz Charnya, who from her employment services office in Chinatown was organizing training and job opportunities for people from the Downtown Eastside. Seann had already been working as a project manager for United We Can, which employs hundreds of folks from this neighborhood as “binners,” cleaning Vancouver’s alleys and streets, and running the largest recycling center in the region. Our partnership in this seemingly quixotic endeavor has been built on his youth and energy coupled with my farming experience.

Born in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1977, to working-class parents, Seann embodies a blend of street-smart edge with a deep concern for other people. Seann studied acting, got a few bit parts on Battlestar Galactica and in Robert Redford’s Unfinished Life, and then spent a few years as a bartender and running nightclubs. End up in jail or in the hospital or flat-out broke, and Seann is the one you want to call on. And although we come from very different backgrounds and are more than twenty years apart, together we’ve been able to raise more than a couple of million dollars, and cobble together a parking lot and a ragtag group of folks from the neighborhood to grow food and jobs and provide some hope and stability.

My work in Watts and my recent urban farming in Vancouver have left me with few illusions about the challenges we face in our effort to help grow these communities. I’ve shared my experiences with Seann; he’s done the same for me. And we sometimes encounter the reality that people are no easier to recover than the land buried under layers of pavement. Ours remains an imperfect endeavor.

book cover

But I know that we all need to eat and that we all need something to do each day that connects us to one another and to the broader world around us. If growing fruits and vegetables at Sole Food Street Farms could provide neighborhood men and women a rock-solid, always-there, grounded-in-the-ground place to return to, then we would accomplish a great deal. Producing excellent-quality food for the community and creating a lush, green, multidimensional break from so much pavement are bonuses.

Having worked with soil my whole adult life, I’ve come to see it as a metaphor for so much else. This neighborhood and its inhabitants remind me of the abused farm fields I’ve taken on before — soil so mistreated that it felt and looked like hardened concrete. I nurtured those soils with compost and cover crops and mulches and watched as they recovered and came alive. After a few years you could reach your hands deep down into soil that had become loose and friable and fertile. Is it possible that here in this hardened landscape we could do the same, make useful and productive what had been abandoned and abused and forgotten?

Seann and I had no complicated vision for the corner of Hawks and Hastings, nothing that would require a degree in psychology or extensive experience in social service, just a reason for people to get out of bed each day, a choice to make between something that is life-giving and something that will bring you down.

Though uncomplicated, ours was a big idea, and for many reasons we knew that it might not work. I knew I could survive failure, but I worried about those whose lives have known nothing else.

***

Planting tomatoes with Kenny that first year at the Astoria, everything was new, and a tomato plant was not just one more tomato plant, but something to behold. I am sure he didn’t notice, but I watched him just looking at one of those plants, in awe of its fragile nature, and I sensed in that moment that he realized that plant was dependent on him for its survival. I saw his humanity that day, and I also saw how like that small plant, he too was a little fragile and dependent. And when the first red tomatoes ripened on those plants all of us came together to sample our work, and I got to watch that crew’s expressions as their brains registered something truly amazing, something so new and so real and so beautiful.

Working this way, delighting in the world we share, is eye-opening. And still, with eyes open on this world — the pain, the poverty, the pull of drugs — it is impossible to not feel the suffering that is likewise common to us all. Rich or poor, sober or not, we all get our share. I’ve watched from a distance one of my family members go in and out of drug use. I’ve seen the misery it has brought to him, to my parents, and to all those who have gotten sucked into the powerful vortex that addiction can create. It has been painful keeping my distance from the suffering of someone so close, but I think it is easier for me to reach out to someone who is not.

I’ve told members of our crew at Sole Food, “You don’t have a monopoly on suffering.” I know that some of us got lucky, have access to more resources, were born into more privilege, got the right genes to be pretty or handsome, or have a more comfortable safety net to fall back on. And while it is near-impossible for me to live in this world and not feel the misery that so many people are going through, I know I need to recognize the difference between compassion and pity. I’m not sure the latter has ever provided much relief. Seann and I insist on compassion; we believe it drives all of us to some form of action — to make a donation, prepare a meal for someone, lend an ear, plant some seeds, or provide a job.

***

It’s a big day, our first large harvest since our little fledgling farm was planted, and Seann, Kenny, and I, together with the rest of our newly hired crew, are gathering rainbow chard, lacinato kale, French Breakfast radish, and collard greens for the afternoon market held a few blocks away in front of the train station.

We’ll soon be selling our harvest right there, to businesspeople fresh from their high-rise office buildings, travelers getting on or off trains or buses that stop a short distance from our stall, and residents from nearby apartments and condominiums. Sole Food gives local a whole new meaning, as the produce on our market tables is harvested within walking distance down the street.

On the farm we break off stems and leaves, pull roots, make bunches, and pile them into nearby boxes. It’s a familiar rhythm for me, with familiar crops, and I realize there are probably hundreds of farmers at this very moment doing exactly the same thing—except accompanied by birds singing or wind rustling trees rather than the nonstop clamor of traffic and sirens and hustle.

We interrupt harvesting for one of our farm walks, a chance for me to share some techniques or a little philosophy, answer questions, and tell stories. And I realize that even as I am telling stories to make abundance real and visual for folks who may never have experienced it, I am feeling my own doubts and questions about what lies ahead. It feels odd for me standing in this parking lot on a street corner talking about soil microbes, optimal plant spacing, or the life cycle of an aphid. On my rural farm, not far from here, I’d be carrying on similar conversations, but there I’m mentoring young, well-scrubbed kids fresh out of college, most of whom have never known real hardship, all still hopeful and idealistic, too young for life to have slapped them around.

In most farming ventures that involve breaking new ground, the initial results can be fantastic, all that untapped soil fertility. We found that here as well. Kenny and the rest of the crew were making out well; our early plantings had thrived. The bunching greens produced huge leaves pulsing with vitality and color, radishes seemed to jump out of the ground, and tomatoes and peppers grew and flowered and produced with total abandon.

I knew our funders, our staff, and the broader community had been waiting for this—waiting, and watching, and expecting. It was overwhelming to consider that we were attempting to supply Vancouver’s top restaurants and farmers markets with production quantities of food grown on a parking lot, with workers who had some significant challenges. Not to mention growing some hope and healing for our staff and the broader community in the process.

So it was a relief to witness such fecundity and productivity and blatant health in the midst of the struggles of this neighborhood. I knew this first great crop was important for our crew, too. They needed to see something thriving and working. I suspect this is why many of those who were on that first farm crew, people who may not have kept a job for very long — people like Kenny — are still employed with us after all these years. Early success was essential. And we got it.

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