PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA
When Mary Seton Corboy started Greensgrow Farm in Philadelphia in 1998 with Tom Sereduk, urban farming—and sustainability in general—were not yet household words. And the corner of the city where she chose to set down roots had not previously been a bastion of greenery. The traditionally working-class neighborhood of North Philadelphia had seen the rise and fall of various manufacturing industries, and much of the land was contaminated, including the three-quarters of an acre on which Greensgrow was born.
“The EPA had cleaned the lot up and put up a fence and gate around it and left,” Corboy recounts. “It sat as a short-term dump site after that for about five years—nothing here but rubbish.” The community around the farm was mostly white and working-class, with many people unemployed and, according to Corboy, having a not uncommon distaste for outsiders. “They thought we were insane,” she says of their arrival, and not everyone was welcoming. “But they’ve gotten used to us.”
Greensgrow operates as a for-profit business, and making a living off the land is important to Corboy, who has spent more than a decade building the farm to the point where that’s possible. A DC native, Corboy didn’t have an agricultural background when she started, so Greensgrow provided an immersive environment for learning the ropes of gardening. “Common sense and frugality were our guides,” she says.
When Greensgrow began, they focused only on growing lettuce, which continues to be one of their primary outputs, though they have expanded to include other vegetables. All Greensgrow produce is planted in raised, hydroponic beds, which require no soil and have a permanently recirculating water system that keeps resource use to a minimum. Overhead remains modest as well, since the farm sends almost no wastewater back into the municipal system.
In recent years, Greensgrow has installed living roofs atop the permanent structures on the farm site, to further prevent water runoff. Planted with hardy sedum and wildflowers, the green roofs attract beneficial insects to the farm and support the bee population that lives in the Greensgrow apiary. In one of these permanent structures, the Greensgrow nursery runs year-round, providing a spot for ambitious Philadelphia residents to source vegetable starters for their own home gardens, purchase plants, or pick up cut flowers.
Today, Greensgrow employs about twenty people, most of them recently out of college. In her dry, humorous way, Corboy expresses doubt that a high percentage of them will still be digging in the dirt when they’re her age. The relentless labor and relatively low pay can lose its romance after a time. A few years of farming weeds out the dabblers from the lifelong farmers. “I don’t believe all these kids who say they want to be farmers,” she says. “They’ll want something else when they are thirty. Urban agriculture is part of the solution but a darn small one.”
But her attitude perhaps underestimates the difference her own small farm has made in Philadelphia and the cumulative impact of the many small farms that have sprung up during the years since Greensgrow began, galvanizing a clear movement toward restoring local food production in cities.
At the Greensgrow site, a lively farm stand draws visitors from around the city who are eager to get their hands on the freshly picked lettuces and herbs grown there, and other goods procured from nearby, including artisanal products like cheese, bread, and pasture-raised meat. Greensgrow also creates their own value-added products, which they make in a local church kitchen and sell throughout the year. Their goods include jams, vegetable spreads, sauces, and seasonal pies—all of which enable them to use produce that is past its prime for raw consumption but still plenty valuable when cooked or preserved.
Another major component of the Greensgrow business is their CSA, which in their case stands for “city-supported agriculture.” The year-round program provides members with a box full of produce, dairy, and even occasionally a local specialty item like a Pennsylvania craft beer. Further bolstering the local food ecosystem, Greensgrow works with Philadelphia restaurants to collect waste grease from commercial kitchens, which they convert to biodiesel to run the trucks they drive to collect their inventory from around the region. It’s a comprehensive model that grows denser each time Greensgrow partners with another local company or producer. While the farm itself keeps its focus narrow, cultivating a small variety of vegetables and herbs, they are the hub of a network that showcases the many efforts in and around Philadelphia to create sustainable small-scale farms and food businesses.
But for all of Corboy’s own dedication as an entrepreneur, her outlook for the future of food at a larger scale is not particularly optimistic. “Business is a dirty word,” she says, acknowledging the common friction between the idealism of small-scale farming and the realities of achieving success in a capitalist economy. “It’s too bad,” she continues, “because it’s the only way to survive.” She believes that farm subsidies are likely inevitable, despite their negative impact on small farms, and wears no rose-colored glasses about the possibility that small farms
will feed a starving and rapidly growing global population. Of course, many would disagree with her bleak prediction for the planet’s future, but few people can criticize the work she’s doing in her own corner of the globe, where an urban Philadelphia neighborhood has become several degrees healthier and more livable thanks to the presence of her farm.
“People like Greensgrow. We’ve grown into our own work boots and never overcapitalized, so we owe no money, have no debt, and do as we please,” she says, reflecting on the growth of the farm over more than a decade. “And being slightly older than most urban farms means more work, less talk. To paraphrase Kipling: Farms are not made by sitting in the shade saying, ‘Oh, so lovely.’”
