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In 2002 John William Kulm, a Washington State farmer, published a book of poems and essays entitled The Five Stages of Quitting Farming. In it, he shared that farming is sublime. That it’s absurd. That it’s a calling. John’s tormented good-bye to what would’ve been a fifth generation family legacy mirrored thousands of other practical and unfair good-byes as America’s foundation industries of farming, logging, ranching, and mining were shuttered, spitting out their worn and tired laborers as they closed. John looked to the nearest city to try his hand at a more predictable job.
Around the same time that rural family farms like John’s were going into the steep decline of the 1980s, people in cities started growing their own food again. They did so in response to the parallel demise of America’s urban manufacturing, distribution, and food processing industries and the blight they left behind. A collective called Green Guerillas seed-bombed vacant lots with sweet peas, tomatoes, and butterfly weed. Their mission was to clean, green, and beautify city neighborhoods and to relearn basic life skills. Their motivations were political, economic, and environmental.
Out of these subversive activities have come new enterprises. The Green Guerillas and others like them have been propelled forward with knowledge culled from diverse sources, such as tips from immigrants who planted kitchen gardens on fire escapes and created backyard orchards, sometimes skirting outdated legal statutes to create something meaningful and useful. City zoning be damned or catch up with the times. As U.S. trade policy moved agricultural production and jobs to “the global periphery,” seeking cheap labor and new consumers overseas, small groups of intrepid U.S. residents began taking it upon themselves to re-anchor food production and jobs at home.
Do urban farms yield jobs? Yes. A highly diverse one-acre neighborhood plot can generate income for one or more individuals. But it’s revealing to talk about jobs in a broad sense. Urban farms also provide volunteers with skills-building opportunities that often help their careers in other sectors, and they enhance the value, safety, and beauty of a neighborhood as well, which, in turn, builds residents’ self-esteem and earning potential.
There is also an interest in farm-work outside of blighted urban communities. Educated residents living in well-equipped neighborhoods are working the fields as well. Some are on their way to a career on a rural farm, others to becoming proprietors of an artisanal grocery, and increasingly, some have an urban farm as their ultimate career destination. For everyone it seems to be about “Satisfying the Hunger for Meaningful Work”—the tagline of Good Food Jobs, a national food and farm job placement service cofounded in 2010 by a farmer’s daughter from Kentucky, Dorothy Neagle, and a New Jersey native, Taylor Cocalis (aka the Gastrognomes). Their pace stays breakneck to keep up with demand. This is in contrast to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2008–2018 occupational projections, which lead us to believe that only the construction and service-providing industries are on the rise in America. Agricultural work prospects, they say, are static at best but generally on the decline because of high imports and the ability of the U.S. agriculture industry to achieve higher outputs with less labor. But we don’t eat output. We eat food.
One of the many challenges urban farmers face is the need to develop relevant production protocols. “We borrow from authentic farming practices, but how do we sustainably deal with our city pests?” asks Linda Bryant, the feisty artist and director of the Active Citizen Project (ACP), which is incubating seven community farms throughout New York City. “We have to make peace with the rats! How do we peacefully coexist with our wildlife? And other human life?”
The veteran team running Greens-grow Farm in North Philadelphia since 1998 seems to prefer these types of challenges. For one, they say good land is readily available and affordable in cities when leased. Urban farmland is also closer to the city farmers’ markets, which allows farmworkers to easily direct-sell and cuts transportation costs that whittle away profit. And, “it’s easier to find farm labor in urban areas than in rural areas. There are a lot of very smart, motivated, and hardworking people who want to work in urban agriculture. The biggest problem with urban labor for agriculture is the lack of training. There just aren’t training programs yet for urban agriculture—but it will come as the industry grows. We’re all still just trying to figure out how it works,” writes Mary Seton Corboy, Greensgrow’s chief farmhand. (For more on Greensgrow, see this page.) The wait won’t be long. Urban farm production protocols have been developed internationally and are being exchanged throughout North America through sites like cityfarmer.org and Grow Youngstown urban farm in Ohio, which regularly provides an affordable daylong training—Hands-On Urban Farming: Sustainability and Profits in Small Spaces—in partnership with the National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service and others.
There are many practical and idealistic motivations for pursuing urban farmwork. But one typically prevails: Life in America is expensive. Housing, health care, education, fuel—there’s little relief from the inflation. And then there are food prices. The International Monetary Fund determined that between March 2007 and March 2008, global food prices rose 43 percent. “I paid attention during the early part of the food crisis [of 2009],” reflects ACP’s Bryant, who started an initiative called EATS at the Active Citizen Project, which facilitates food access and healthy eating through art and new media. “I saw Haitians eating cookies made from dried mud and a drizzle of honey. I thought to myself, money aside, what would happen to the eight million people in New York City if we lost access to, say, the bridges that brought food to us? Could we feed ourselves?” That, after all, is our basic human job.
Bryant’s EATS urban farms do two things: produce food and distribute food. In doing so they’re also creating a new workforce with the skills to feed itself. For three years an entire community is taken on for a farm apprenticeship. Workers receive training at their local farm lot—at Gorzynski Ornery Farm in Sullivan County, New York, for instance—and they design and run their farm stand retail operation. Several teenage EATS participants finishing high school at the Brownsville, Brooklyn, EATS farm have said that they thought they’d go into the military or nursing, but now they want to see if they can go to college for agricultural science.
Bryant is pleased, but only partially satisfied. “The most important project and the biggest challenge for us as urban farmers is to cultivate a shift in people’s consumptive food behavior so people who live where food is grown are actually eating it.” In observing, surveying, and listening to community members, EATS found that most participants consume prepared foods. And so, EATS partnered with Kingsborough Community College, home to CUNY’s Center for Economic and Workforce Development, a commercial kitchen incubator and a culinary degree program. Now EATS community markets have a product line that includes not only just-picked vegetables but also ready-to-cook and ready-to-eat foods like beet applesauce made by culinary students at Kingsborough who are also community members with a cultural taste sensitivity. The products are even packed by young food manufacturing entrepreneurs.
High-quality ingredients used to make good-tasting prepared foods have actually propelled a food crafting renaissance in cities around the United States, which can be a pathway to urban farming. Take Brooklyn’s Michael Cosaboom:
“My decision to start a cottage industry coincided with buying a home with my wife and the birth of my youngest kids. I felt like our mortgage was so big that the house needed to pay for itself somehow. I had never had unlimited roof access in a home before and I had done some previous experiments with container gardening and drip irrigation, so I began to experiment on my own roof. My vague notion was that I wanted to start a business that my kids can participate in someday. Over a few growing seasons I focused on the chiltepin family of peppers and started growing in quantities that I had a surplus of. I formed an LLC, developed a recipe for a spicy condiment I call Chunky Chile Oil, and developed a process for that product in collaboration with the Food Entrepreneur lab at Cornell.”
Michael sold several hundred jars at a local makers market before discovering that his product was vaguely illegal. He put sales on hiatus but continued to grow peppers. He recently gained access to a commercial kitchen and hopes to start legally selling again soon.
This snarl is partly why urban planning experts, like Alfonso Morales at the University of Wisconsin, have advised cities to set up a “one-stop-shop for urban farms, like they have for small business development, so that city farmers can deal with zoning, home business regulations, and nuisance laws all in one place.”
In other words, urban farms are generating jobs. They’re also recalibrating people’s sense of their job options. Urban farming and rural farming are increasingly seen as complements to each other. They are being rightly recognized as part of the same regional food systems. The divide between (city) consumer and (country) producer is also dissolving as knowledge is exchanged. But training is needed.
Back in the late 1990s when Michael Ableman wrote On Good Land: The Autobiography of an Urban Farm, he described “the parade of young people” at his door, eager to work on a farm. “Their enthusiasm,” he wrote, “tempers on the second or third day when they discover that it is repetitious work, that it can be hot or wet, and that one’s mind must be dealt with to stay out there and work all day. Learning how to work physically, tame the chatter of the mind, and push through a sore back or a hot day, takes time and perseverance.” This new generation of city farmers is proving they can pull their own weight. As much as city life is about the fast, restless pace, it’s also about pushing through difficulty to realize one’s potential. Farmer-poet John William Kulm grew up hearing that farmers are optimists, for better and for worse.
And so, to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we say the future for small, bio-intensive urban farming is strong. As city-born farmer Kristin Kimball describes it, “If you’re a medium-sized conventional farmer, things look tough. But if you’re diversified with direct-to-consumer sales, then things are pretty hopeful.” Kimball credits urban homesteaders in the 1970s “who dropped out to go back to the land—we wouldn’t be here without them. Our generation [though] is more focused on maintaining a business out of it and sustaining it in the real world on a long-term basis.”