DETROIT, MICHIGAN
Most urban food deserts in the United States occupy a small portion of a larger city, spanning low-income areas where nutritious food is scarce and residents lack the means to travel far from the neighborhood to get what they need. In Detroit, however, food deserts are not small islands surrounded by economically diverse and food-rich areas. Virtually the entire city has become what amounts to a food Sahara, with not a single major grocery chain within the city limits. Driving up and down Gratiot Avenue, a central thoroughfare that cuts diagonally across the city, one spots nary a meal option beyond fast food.
But less than a mile off Gratiot, a one-block community of motivated citizens has taken the situation into their own hands, producing food and raising farm animals for themselves and their neighbors. On Farnsworth Street, most of the run-down houses have been bought up either by young Detroit natives who’ve chosen to stick around and try to implement change or by transplants from bigger cities like San Francisco, New York, and Chicago, who were drawn in by the low cost of living and the creative possibilities of urban decay.
Behind the houses, which are in various states of restoration, the fences dividing the properties have been taken down. The backyards run contiguously, and much of the grass has been replaced with vegetable beds, chicken coops, and pigpens. On one corner of the block, where a house or two might once have stood, Andrew Kemp and Kinga Osz-Kemp maintain a sprawling garden that runs alongside and behind their own home. The beds are dense with vegetables and flowers, wrapping around a dilapidated shed, a few towers of bee boxes, some chickens, and several piles of steaming compost. At the rear of the lot is a small fruit orchard.
The couple has been fixing up their own house for more than a decade, working to pay back the money their friend Paul Weertz paid to purchase it several years before giving it to them. Amazingly, the asking price was a mere $5,000, but Kemp and Osz-Kemp have spent another $50,000 making improvements. Before they took it over, it was a crack house, and then it was used to store bales of hay that Weertz grew to support his own urban farm project at Catherine Ferguson Academy (see this page), where he teaches biology.
To look at the house now, there’s no doubt that the current homeowners intend to bring back the vibrancy of the neighborhood starting with their own abode. The exterior wall facing the garden is now painted in brilliant shades of yellow, teal, and pink, colors that are reflected in the echinacea flowers, daisies, and abundant green vegetables surrounding it. Turning the garden into the bounty that it is today took work, starting with the quality of the soil Kemp inherited. “Detroit is largely the cheapest fill dirt the city can find,” he says. “Before the protocol changed about fifteen years ago, they used to just push houses into the basements and cover them up. In a way the city is full of little landfills. When I dig to plant a tree, I find some pretty ugly stuff.”
Soil testing revealed some contaminants and proved very poor growing conditions, but Kemp was committed to remediating the earth around his house no matter how much work it would take. “I am foremost a composter, and then a farmer,” he declares, invoking the well-known farmer Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms in Virginia. Though Salatin raises cows, chickens, hogs, rabbits, and lambs, “he calls himself a grass farmer. If we want to garden, we better know how to make healthy soil.”
Kemp’s garden design decisions were driven primarily by “intuition, inspiration, and improvisation.” It is planted in a large circle that functions as a sundial and a henge. “Since I have a wide western exposure, I can follow the sun’s course throughout the year,” he explains. “This is as important to me as the gardening itself for keeping in touch with the cycles around me.”
Originally the shape was driven by logistics. “It started out circular because it was most convenient for the tractor to pull the leaves and wood chips around. The circle was the most efficient way to use the tractor.” Around the circle, Kemp has dug a trench that collects and stores rainwater during the spring and fall. Eventually he hopes to store water year-round and to raise fish in the trenches.
But this takes time, and the couple keeps plenty busy with day jobs and parenting on top of farming. Kemp teaches English at a local high school, and Osz-Kemp is an artist, whose projects include screenprinting clothing for their small family-owned company, Ink In Bloom. They have two daughters of their own, but to visit Farnsworth is to witness a living example of the philosophy that “it takes a village to raise a child.” Kids from up and down the block roam together, wandering through backyards, helping to weed or shovel compost, giving the neighbor’s pig a back scratch with a rake, and finding an open door wherever they go.
Around Detroit, Farnsworth has become synonymous with subculture. The residents joke that when they leave the block, it’s clear from their hand-altered clothes and the soil under their fingernails that they’re “straight out of Farnsworth.” Between the homegrown food production, organized skill sharing, and plentiful helping hands among the neighbors, Farnsworth residents hardly have to venture far to get their basic needs met. But their small community is connected to a larger network of citizens around Detroit who are all committed to enlivening the city through art, gardening, cottage industry, and activism.
One of their major civic concerns is the Detroit incinerator, which lies just a few blocks from Farnsworth and sends a noticeably foul odor wafting down the street when the winds are right. The burning of trash is considered by the city to be a sustainable form of energy production, as it generates steam that is used to power buildings downtown. “They call it ‘waste to energy,’” says a frustrated Kemp. “I call it ‘waste to asthma.’” Garbage is imported to Detroit’s incinerator from as far away as Toronto, adding to the air not only the emissions of the burning trash itself, but also the vehicles that haul it hundreds of miles to its final dumping ground. “We need to push the nascent recycling system to starve them of trash to burn,” Kemp suggests. “But if they can import it anyway, I don’t know. . . . I guess we just continue to remediate in their face.”
That Kemp views gardening as a form of revolution is a defining feature of Detroit’s urban agricultural scene. It is both reminiscent of the constructive social change movements of the past and reflective of a different kind of future for the city, where the hole left by the auto industry gets filled by another form of productive work—this time the cultivation of local food. “Gardening and even farming have really increased in Detroit over the past ten years,” he says. “I can say that there are far more restaurants, cafés, and breweries giving up their waste for compost, and in turn buying local produce. When I first proposed taking the waste from the Avalon bakery fourteen years ago, it seemed very pioneering and lots needed to be worked out. Now when I ask, there is often someone already taking it.”
