Detroit’s Urban Farming

DETROIT: A CITY WITH LAND TO SPARE

Detroit is big, at least in land. It takes up 138 square miles of land for 700,000 people. By comparison, 600,000 people in Boston live in about 50 square miles. Detroit has lots of open space, and empty lots are everywhere. For some, the open fields, which once were neighborhoods, represent a city’s final end. However, for many people, open spaces have generated an exciting new movement called urban agriculture or urban farms.

According to Rebecca Salminen Witt, president of Greening of Detroit, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the environment of Detroit, there are about fifteen thousand people in Detroit who can be called urban farmers. You see urban farms everywhere in Detroit: along the expressways, in empty lots, beside burned-out buildings and in community parks. Some restaurants, like Russell Street Deli in Eastern Market, get their herbs and vegetables from their own urban farms. Even in downtown Detroit, Compuware has an award-winning garden behind Lafayette Coney Island—a living beauty amid the towering buildings and traffic. The City of Detroit offers empty lots for people to farm for free, although they do have to pay for annual permits. Greening of Detroit provides the tools, seeds, supplies and knowledge for people and neighborhoods to get started. Greening of Detroit’s budget began at $250,000 and has grown to more than $6 million through donations, corporate sponsorship and federal grants. People grow everything from vegetables to exotic flowers and fruit trees. They raise chickens and other animals. Witt knows of one cow on a farm in Detroit. (Keeping livestock in the city is not permitted.) Greening of Detroit will supply bees if you want to raise bees. Its goal is to get healthy vegetables to Detroiters and provide training for some who see a career path in gardening, farming and even marketing and selling their produce.

Urban farms are defined as being less than three acres in size. All the farming must be done by hand, as there are no tractors or machinery. Finally, they are organic. Most farms are grown by individuals from all walks of life: retirees, hipsters, families, schools and even religious organizations. Many are community-based, with neighbors volunteering to water and weed. While many consume what they grow, others like Compuware donate garden vegetables to various charities. A small percentage (about seventy to eighty farms in Greening of Detroit) are what Witt calls “market farms,” which grow things to sell to restaurants, florists or at the Eastern Market. The demand for locally sourced organic produce is strong, so it allows some farms like Brother Nature Produce and Rising Pheasant Farms to make a living from their farming.

BROTHER NATURE

Brother Nature Produce was in the Greening of Detroit co-op, but it has been successful enough to go it alone. Brother Nature is owned by former teacher Greg Willerer. He farms about an acre in North Corktown off Rosa Parks Boulevard. In addition to Brother Nature, Willerer helped start a composting business called Detroit Dirt, which he says generated three hundred cubic yards of compost last year from restaurant, brewery and landscaper waste. Detroit Dirt also gets manure from a horse farm in River Rouge Park. Willerer has been at it for six years and, until recently, doubled the amount of growing space every year. He sells about two hundred pounds of exotic salad greens a week, much of it mizuna, and there are twenty-seven families in his CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) who get produce from him on a regular basis.

The city has concerns. There are still sixty thousand empty lots in the city, and the land is cheap, sometimes $300 for a lot (measuring thirty by sixty feet). There is a worry that a large company might come in and buy acres of land to farm. Hantz Farms, which grows hardwood trees, is an example. A State of Michigan “Right to Farm” law was passed to protect farmers from complaints and pressures of subdivision developers to stop farming. For the City of Detroit, it could lose zoning rights for the city if large farms claim “Right to Farm.” Witt explained that this is something that must be worked out at the state level.

In the meantime, urban farms continue to grow at about a 10 percent rate per year. Bigger organizations are getting involved, like Michigan State University. And a smiling Rebecca Witt sees things as all good. “Our goal is to get 51 percent of Detroiters veggies from organic urban farms. Everybody wins.”

IN THE FIELDS WITH SINGING TREE GARDEN

Emily Brent is twenty-nine years old. She’s co-owner of the urban farm Singing Tree Garden, an organic urban farm in Detroit’s north side, in an area within Detroit called “Highland Park.” The spring and summer of 2013 had a lot of rain, and the farm looks lush, but she apologizes for the weeds.

The farm is located on East Parkhurst Street, which was once residential but is now a street of empty, weed-choked lots. Emily’s small house at the farm is one of the last houses standing on the block. At the end of the street is an abandoned public school that has now become a dump; the end of the street is blocked off with logs and scrap wood dropped by the trucks dumping trash, so to get to Singing Tree Garden, you need to drive the wrong way on Parkhurst, which is a one way street.

“We have ten lots,” Emily explained. It is about an acre. She is tall, fit and tanned from gardening. “We grow all types of vegetables. We also own more lots—which my husband, Kevin, bought before we were married—that have ten-year-old fruit trees: apples, peaches, pears and apricots.” She noted, “We sell at smaller markets like Gross Pointe. Eastern Market is too big and overwhelming for us.” She added, “We also sell directly to restaurants, such as St. Cece’s in Corktown.”

As a strictly organic farm, weeds are a given. “Our biggest pests are flea beetles, but we also have rats. I keep them under control with cayenne pepper powder.”

Emily was born and raised in Ann Arbor, which is about forty-five miles to the west. Her first acquaintance with organic produce was working at Whole Foods and with Ann Arbor’s famous Zingerman’s, where she was the produce buyer. She dealt with local organic farms. She later became “chef special” and began cooking with locally grown produce, which she “fell in love with.” But she wanted to get deeper into the local food movement and its beautiful organic produce. She added, “If I wanted to continue making my own great food, I’d need to get to the farms.”

She used World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF), a placement agency for international organic farms, to locate a French-speaking organic farm where she could volunteer. She decided to work at Les Jardin Lieveres (Garden of Rabbits) in Quebec, Canada, outside Ottawa.

“I had spent a year in France and wanted to keep my French language active so I decided to work at a farm in Quebec.” But she missed home, so after a year, she decided to move to Detroit, where she met her future husband, Kevin, who is an arborist (a tree specialist). They were married in the summer of 2012 at the farm. Emily’s farm represents about 10 percent of the couple’s income; however, she pointed out that the farm also feeds them for many months a year, and given the price of organic produce, Singing Tree Garden is saving them $400 a month in grocery bills.

Emily’s produce is beautiful. She points out lettuces, dill, chard and candy cane beets bulging from the soil. But beyond the challenges of urban farming, there are other forces that threaten the farm’s continuance. The city is trying to consolidate residents and would like to move Singing Tree Garden off the vacant street. “They will give us ‘blight tickets’ for even minor things like a delivered pile of wood chips. We have to watch for them.” She is also near the path of the new M-1 light rail system that has been funded to be built up Woodward Avenue. “We found out somebody has been buying up the empty lots on this street recently. So, we really don’t know what’s going to happen.”

There is crime in the area. There are drug houses nearby and prostitutes at the end of Parkhurst, but in all, Emily keeps vigilant and believes that the vast majority of people in the area are courteous and good. She stays friendly and offers produce to neighbors who ask for it.

Emily Brent’s idealism and her belief in people never leave her. “The people in the neighborhood are nice people—just really broke.” She added, “If you put up fences and fight back the neighborhood, you will have problems. But if you stay friendly, offer people little jobs that ask for them, people will look after you too.”

POTATO PATCH PINGREE

Detroit has a history of urban farming. The panic of 1893 and the depression that followed in 1894 had a severe effect on Detroit’s financial and banking sectors. All manufacturing entities laid off workers, to the point that state census reports of the times estimated male labor force unemployment to be at 33 percent. Especially hard hit were the foreign-born, Polish and Germans, who were at 50 percent unemployed. Mobs threatened riots and looting.

It was in the second summer of the depression that Detroit’s mayor, Hazen Pingree, initiated his original idea of urban farming, turning vacant land into garden plots. Since many of the foreign emigrants were not far removed from peasant farms, Pingree thought that they might take to raising their own food. He sold his prize horse at one-third of its worth to kick off the potato patch program and got access to farm 430 acres of city land.

Detroit mayor Hazen Pingree began his urban farm experiment in 1894 during a severe economic depression. Pingree’s success with urban farms made him a nationally famous figure. He was known as “Potato Patch Pingree.” Library of Congress.

In 1894, 3,000 families applied to work plots, but there was only money for 945. In the first year, those families grew $14,000 worth of produce, so much that there was a surplus. In 1895, enrollment to farm plots grew to 1,500 and more than 1,700 in 1896. The value of produce exceeded $30,000, more than the outlay of the city poverty commission.

It was an unquestionable success, and Pingree became a national hero. He spoke to two thousand people in New York City. The potato patch scheme was copied in such cities as New York, Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle and Denver.