CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
Many urban farms, no matter how different the cities around them may be, share a common origin story. Most occupy sites that were once vacant and neglected, and in turning those sites back into thriving landscapes, they have contributed to the overall revitalization of surrounding blocks.
According to Ken Dunn, the founder and director of The Resource Center in Chicago, there is a direct connection between vacant land and the condition of urban communities. Simply by making sure that no city lot sits neglected, he suggests, we can ensure better economic stability, safety, community engagement, and quality of life.
Dunn began developing this theory and others while working on a PhD in philosophy at the University of Chicago in the 1960s. “We specifically looked at resources that had been overlooked, such as recyclable trash and vacant lots, and their connection to long-term unemployment.” With a combination of evidence and instinct, Dunn decided to create City Farm in 2000 in order to apply his ideas and see what kind of impact local food production could have on the city. The results speak for themselves.
City Farm is situated on the edge of Cabrini-Green, the notorious public housing development on Chicago’s North Side. While many of the old housing facilities have been demolished, a relatively new single-resident occupancy building shares a border with City Farm near Clybourn Avenue, and some of the individuals living there partake in the farm’s yield.
Designed by German-American architect Helmut Jahn and completed in 2007, the Schiff Residences, as they are called, are strikingly modern, with a five-story glass facade and a set of wind turbines crowning the roof. Between the sprawling, green acre of the farm and the gleaming walls of the SRO, it’s hard to drive past this intersection without turning to take another look.
At one time, a gas station occupied the lot, followed by a concrete crushing operation, but when Dunn moved in to start City Farm, the space was empty and overgrown. “The surface was pretty stable,” he recalls, adding that soil testing revealed heavy metal contamination. “About twelve feet down you ran into a hydrocarbon problem. We’ve been doing this for forty years, and we’ve never found a site that’s free of lead, arsenic, zinc, or some other pollutant.”
While a complete cleanup is next to impossible, The Resource Center has a time-tested procedure for ensuring that its food grows in healthy soil. The farmers seal the growing area with a six-inch layer of clay, then cover it with compost collected from local restaurants, and wood chips that are available for free around the city.
To look at the farm, raised beds are not visible, but in essence, the entire farm is one raised bed, elevated several feet off of the clay foundation. The wood chips, which are used to form a wide walking path between the beds, add to the sustainability of the garden by absorbing rainfall and minimizing runoff. “The wood chips are porous and the compost is very absorbent,” Dunn explains. “The chips hold the water for up to three weeks, so we only use city water to start seedlings. Rainfall in Chicago is adequate enough that we don’t need excessive irrigation.”
The water-efficient site is ideal for growing crops like heirloom tomatoes, which City Farm cultivates in abundance and sells to Chicago restaurants, along with salad greens and other specialty vegetables. The farm generates enough revenue through restaurant sales to meet a modest overhead, and relationships with local eateries bring value in other forms as well.
Chicago-based celebrity chef Rick Bayless has come to City Farm to work with middle school students, helping them grow ingredients for the Latin-inspired dishes he serves at his restaurants, then working with them to cook meals. “Through working on the farm, kids learn biology, botany, math, and geography,” Dunn says, “I think education in our city could be enriched by being more experiential and getting students out of the classroom. It revitalizes education and excites the kids.”
City Farm also works with high school–age kids—many from the Chicago Housing Authority—in a more structured arrangement, bringing several students on as apprentices and giving them job training, teaching them skills for earning a living through urban farming and farmers’ market operations.
For farm manager Andy Rozendaal, the combination of youth empowerment and agricultural work is an optimal blend of his experiences in church ministry and farming. Rozendaal grew up on a four-hundred-acre corn and soy farm in Iowa, then got a degree in the general agriculture program at Iowa State before attending seminary. After ten years in the church, he was looking for a way to connect his theology background with his desire to address issues of food injustice and urban poverty. “I wasn’t finding anything within the church,” he recalls. “But when I found The Resource Center, I realized that though it was outside the church, their core values were compatible. This is my dream job.”
Rozendaal runs daily operations at City Farm, overseeing the more than eight hundred annual volunteers and visitors, and the small crew of three to four full-time employees. “We don’t have electricity, so we do everything by hand, which means we need a lot of help,” he explains. The reason the farm is not electrified is not so much a matter of principle as practicality. City Farm does not buy or lease the land for the crops, its use is at the discretion of developers and city officials, with the promise that if the land sells and a building can be erected, the farm will find new accommodations. This fits nicely with Dunn’s view of urban agriculture as a treatment for ailing land and communities. The way he sees it, if a developer can successfully sell the land and build new housing and businesses, that’s a sign of urban recovery.
Because of this unique arrangement with the city, the farm is designed to be fully mobile. The small office, work shed, and even the wood chips and compost in the ground can be picked up and moved for less than half the cost of establishing a new farm from scratch. The mobile model also supports sustainability, not just in terms of the reuse of farming equipment and materials, but also by ensuring that the city can prioritize density over sprawl.
“I’d like to see all vacant spaces being used as farms,” Dunn says. “But you don’t want to permanently have farms because then if there’s a need for more housing, the alternative is to go outside the city and build suburbs. We don’t want to take up areas of the city where infrastructure already exists and force development into virgin areas.” In the meantime, of course, they improve the soil and beautify the landscape, so it’s a win-win all around.
