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SANDHILL ORGANICS AND PRAIRIE CROSSING, GRAYSLAKE, ILLINOIS

THE PERI-URBAN FARM

Peg Sheaffer with some of her chickens. Planned communities like Prairie Crossing can offer cage-free chickens plenty of space to roam.

From the beginning, Vicky and George Ranney Jr. believed in having a farm. So, in 1987, when they bought 677 acres of prairie farmland north of Chicago for a mixed-use development, they dedicated 100 acres to growing food. “This land was always farmland,” says Vicky, “so we considered what people would like to live next to. We realized that sooner or later there’d be a conflict between big agriculture and residential developments. People wouldn’t find it comfortable to live next to pesticides and other chemicals.”

Their investment paid off. The development, known as Prairie Crossing, sold all of its homes (about four hundred), and at a rate 34 percent above the market for similarly sized homes in the area. The one hundred acres of farmland is thriving, too. Sandhill Organics, run by husband-and-wife team Matt and Peg Sheaffer, operates on forty-five acres as a for-profit business farm. The majority of the remaining fifty-five acres is used by new, entrepreneurial farmers who are trying to start a business.

But the farmland is just one of many distinguishing factors of the project. A charter school, open land, trails, a swimming lake and beach, and a light-rail city connection contribute to the project’s success in selling homes and creating a community. The large-scale intensive, integrated produce farm designed into the mixed-use residential development marks a huge leap for the peri-urban zone. The term peri-urban can be ambiguous, changing from city to city, but, generally, it refers to the land between the dense urban zone and the rural transect, often with a public transport connection such as light-rail, subway, or bus. Just a few years earlier, even the country’s most progressive residential and mixed-use urban and peri-urban projects looked at small playscapes or raised-bed community garden plots as radical forms of green space. One hundred acres of organic production farmland distinguishes Prairie Crossing and connects it to the urban farm puzzle.

It takes almost an hour to drive from downtown Chicago north on I-94 to the town of Grayslake. The billboards, office “parks,” and standard interstate commerce of gas stations and strip-mall retail dominate the corridor out of Chicago, but they eventually give way to the tall, mixed prairie grasses native to the Great Lakes plains. At the exit for Grayslake, the scene regains many of its original, rural characteristics.

The approach from the interstate to Grayslake and Prairie Crossing, however, travels down modern America’s fuzzy middle ground between suburban and rural worlds. It’s the classic peri-urban zone. A natural lake with tree snags and lily pads and marsh grasses covers a depression between a rim of trees and wild, hip-high grasses. A mile down the road, a fresh slab of pavement holds a large parking lot and a shopping center with chain stores. Beyond the pavement in Grayslake, more open land presents itself, along with expansive cornfields and a walled development of cookie-cutter homes with multiple pitched roofs, garages like the entrance to an Epcot cul-de-sac tunnel ride, and uniform yards of mowed green nonnative grasses.

The scene of retail, office park, and walled-off housing developments physically defines the food system we’ve developed in the last half century. It’s a network of trucked and flown-in goods that consumers use their cars to gather and transport home. The only marginally “local”—and twenty-first century—piece of the equation is the ethanol in the gasoline. But it has become widely apparent how the corn ethanol industry is ruining the farmland and the American family farms that can be seen from the Grayslake gas station. This land between city and farm is the battleground. Prairie Crossing’s combination of residential and farm in the prairie marks a unique strategy in the shifting sands of agriculture and food systems.

Matt and Peg Sheaffer in front of their silos. Instead of storing commodity crops, as they would on many of Illinois’s large farms, these silos hold the tools and equipment used to produce the wide range of crops grown at Prairie Crossing.

A discussion of urban farms is compelled to migrate into the peri-urban world of low-density, single-family homes spread across vast acres of undeveloped land adjacent to a city. The most pressing question for the urban farm movement is how it will evolve. A common hope among urban farmers, from Fairview Gardens in California (page 39) to Jones Valley Urban Farm in Alabama (page 91) to Annie Novak and her rooftop patch in Brooklyn (page 117), is that their projects will reach a broad audience and propel an awareness of the importance of fresh, healthy local food. To truly transform our food system and create an industry of healthy food via a spectrum of micro- to macroproducers, as Katherine Kelly of Cultivate Kansas City (page 67) insists we must do, we need the farmland that lies just outside our cities. That’s where the acreage exists to produce the volume of sustainably grown food required to feed us. Many Americans live in peri-urban environments. It’s easy to condemn the development of an automobile-dependent infrastructure of roads, services, and house farms that often replace the food farms, or to critique the definition of “success” to which many Americans subscribe: ownership of a single-family home with a double-vaulted ceiling, a two-car garage, a lawn to mow, and safety in community homogeny. But the peri-urban farm world, with its availability of land, is learning from the urban farms’ ideas of high-yield planting patterns, social service benefits, and for-profit business opportunities.

Roaming hens at the home of Matt and Peg Sheaffer, owners of Prairie Crossing’s Sandhill Organics.

Prairie Crossing has its place in the suburbanization of the rural world. It is a planned community of large homes that are affordable to only a certain economic stratum, and the development had to plow over many acres of prairie land to make it happen. But within the border of wild grasses that fringes the Prairie Crossing community (rather than the stucco wall that surrounds most planned developments), good ideas are shifting the paradigm of suburban and peri-urban development. With all the innovative farms and enterprising social-service programs sprouting in city farms throughout America, like the urban farms throughout this book, the success of Sandhill Organics farm marks a shining example of a potentially major resource for achieving food security.

Sandhill Organics grows vegetables in rows on seventeen acres, yielding enough marketable produce to make the farm profitable.

Prairie Crossing was developed as a conservation community. Vicky and George Ranney Jr. set aside 60 percent of the 677 acres in a land-conservation easement, and an additional 3,200 acres are protected within the Liberty Prairie Reserve, a conglomeration of public and private land connected to the community.

The development is one of the earliest examples of what architect and planner Andrés Duany and others call agricultural urbanism. Duany and his colleagues have created a movement in the planning, developing, and architectural world with their New Urbanism model for sustainable design on a big-picture level that connects dense urban centers to farmland and wilderness via a series of progressively less dense “transects.” New Urbanism wants to create a new language for coding, zoning, and design practices so that the builders of communities, cities, and even regions can employ the smart ideas of traditional communities that were less about the automobile and more about living smaller, more densely, more neighborly, closer to food sources, and, subsequently, incurring less societal and environmental impact.

Duany differentiates agricultural urbanism from urban agriculture in simple terms: agricultural urbanism creates the walkable urban form surrounded by agriculture, whereas urban agriculture is growing food on vacant lots and in backyards. He cites Detroit as a hub of urban agriculture, and he would call Prairie Crossing an example of agricultural urbanism, like Hampstead, in Montgomery, Alabama, and Mt Laurel, outside of Birmingham, Alabama.

Matt and Peg Sheaffer grow most of the food at Prairie Crossing. They came into the community early, as the original farmers for Sandhill Organics. They had been farming in Wisconsin, but when the Ranneys offered to lease them forty-five acres of certified organic farmland, they accepted. The Sheaffers moved into the farmhouse and they’ve made the operation a thriving business, thanks to CSA membership and sales at Chicago farmer’s markets. They make a lot more money per acre (roughly $20,000 per acre) than the monocrop farmers (roughly $800 per acre) who dominate rural Illinois.

As noted earlier, Prairie Crossing has an additional fifty-five acres of farmland. The Learning Farm project uses some of the certified organic soil for youth programs that serve both elementary-school students and a diverse corps of high-school students from all over the county who work under the guidance of staff and college interns.

In the property’s Back Forty, young farmers operate four “incubator farms” on which they grow produce and raise pigs and chickens. Participants in the Farm Business Development Center, these novices get the chance to create a viable, profitable farm business. When they’re ready, they leave to create their own independent farms. It’s a farm that grows farms and farmers.

So how does this work? And why doesn’t it happen more often? Mike Sands is the executive director of the Liberty Prairie Foundation, a small private operating foundation within the Prairie Crossing community that supports land and resource conservation, civic management, food production (including the farms), and health-related education. Prior to coming to Prairie Crossing, Mike was the managing director of the Rodale Institute, a sixty-three-year-old organization that focuses on organic agriculture, both research and education. Sands has insight into the urban agriculture world that echoes the thoughts of Katherine Kelly in Kansas City, Annie Novak in Brooklyn, and other urban farmers who advocate a broad approach to food productivity and who recognize their own urban farms as a means to educate the larger, less urban population.

“The way to feed a city is through this peri-urban model,” Mike says. “We’re forty miles from the city loop, so we’re there but we can deal in acres, not square footage.

“True urban farms are incredibly important, but if you consider food-productivity potential, it’s limited. I do think we’re ready for that next generation of urban farming: using waste heat to power year-round production. The urban farm can provide supplemental production, but its real value is as an entry point to food quality and why that matters. And it improves its immediate community, aesthetically and psychologically.

“The challenge with what we’re doing here at Sandhill—not only diverse, integrated growing, but the marketing and financial planning involved—is that we don’t have those farmers. If you offered twenty-thousand dollars an acre to an average farmer, he’d likely say he couldn’t handle that. These [the Sheaffers and the incubator farmers] are entrepreneurs who pick farming as their business, not people who say they want to be farmers.”

Mike sees successful farmers coming from four groups: liberal arts graduates, people going through a career change, recent immigrants, and the conventional farmer who has failed because of economic or personal constraints.

And so maybe this is the best place to end. A recurring question throughout an exploration of American urban farms in 2010 has been, which came first, the city or the farm? It is perhaps a rhetorical question, more like a riddle with a few answers. Prairie Crossing sits in the middle of the two, a mile from modern-American farmland and all its flaws and a half-hour train ride from one of the country’s biggest cities. The land is here, but the knowledge and fervor for the new age of farming seem to be creeping out of the city, looking for more acres and new ways to make an independent living off the land. Fortunately, it looks and sounds like the good ole American way.

ESTABLISHED: 1994.

SIZE: The Prairie Crossing community comprises 677 acres, with 100 acres of certified organic farmland and 25 acres of pasture. Sandhill Organics leases 45 acres of the farmland.

MISSION: Liberty Prairie Foundation works to promote the integration of healthy ecosystems and the vibrant human communities throughout Lake County, Illinois. The foundation is particularly interested in projects that result in people acting in substantive ways to improve the environment and their communities. The Farm Business Development Center at Prairie Crossing supports the development of successful family farms by focusing on the production and marketing of organic foods for local and regional food systems.

WHO’S IN CHARGE: The nonprofit Liberty Prairie Foundation. Matt and Peg Sheaffer own and operate Sandhill Organics and employ a staff of six.

SURROUNDING NEIGHBORHOOD: Prairie Crossing community has 398 homes. The village of Grayslake has 23,000 people.

ZONING: Permitted as a planned unit development; underlying zoning is residential.

FUNDING: Land cost was amortized over all of the 398 residences in the Prairie Crossing community and incorporated into the price paid by home purchasers. Liberty Prairie Foundation is funded by transaction fees, grants, and contracts. Sandhill Organics is a private, for-profit family farm dependent on the sale of its produce.

WHO EATS IT: Food is purchased at farmer’s markets, through CSAs, and at farm stands. Every Friday the fields are gleaned for a local food pantry.

HOW TO START AN URBAN FARM

Tucked behind a short prairie hill, beyond the windmill that provides some power to Sandhill Organics farm (and disguises a cell tower), hides the Back Forty of Prairie Crossing. It’s actually fifty-five acres of certified organic soil where fruits, vegetables, and flowers aren’t the only crops. The acreage holds a new generation of farmer entrepreneurs who are also setting roots in the rich soil.

The Liberty Prairie Foundation offers cheap leases of the development’s land to newcomers who want to start their own farm businesses. It’s a great scenario: available, fertile land, a sense of a safety net from the foundation, and the expertise of the Sheaffers at Sandhill Organics a few hundred yards away. The farmers can test their growing and, more important, their marketing and business skills before moving onto their own land. It’s a wonderful progression of urban farm motivations and intensive farming skills into the larger-scale peri-urban and rural settings. But starting an urban or peri-urban farm business is daunting.

A similar program is unfolding at the Kansas City Center for Urban Agriculture, where the staff matches available land in the city with immigrants interested in starting a small farm-based business. After a two-year apprenticeship and participation in a matched-savings program, the new farmers are ready to scale their operation up and make a living.

Planning

Follow a few basic steps to make getting started go smoothly.

MISSION STATEMENT. Answer this question: What do you want to see changed as a result of your actions? This will become your mission statement.

RESOURCES. Now work backward. What resources do you have to make this change? Do you have access to land, to money, to people power?

OBJECTIVES. List the activities you want to do with the resources you have to achieve your desired change.

OUTCOMES. How will you know if you’ve been successful? Come up with a list of measurable goals that could result from your actions.

ACTION. Now, go make it happen!

Finding Land

Securing land is usually the first challenge when starting an urban farm project, though a growing number of residential and mixed-use developments, such as Prairie Crossing, are making this process easier than ever before. But even if a development isn’t offering land to potential urban farms, good options still exist. For example, Detroit quite literally has too much land to manage efficiently, so it is seeking ways to put farmers on previously occupied property. And Detroit is not the only city looking for urban farmers.

The founders of Jones Valley Urban Farm (JVUF) have started asking people in Birmingham if there is any available land for farming. The responses are often incredulous: ”What do you mean you want to farm in the city?” “Why would you want to farm in the city?” But it takes only one person to understand. One day the JVUF founders were meeting with an accountant who was helping them apply for nonprofit status. After listening to what they wanted to do, the accountant looked out the window of his office and said, “What about that property?” He owned a few pieces of property across the street from his office that he had purchased years before as a long-term investment. The investment was still a long way from paying off, and he’d been stuck mowing the grass for years. The idea of someone else taking care of the property while he waited for an improved real-estate market seemed perfect. Jones Valley Urban Farm began that day. The cofounders walked out of the office, crossed the alley to the property, saw that there was some “workable” soil and sunlight, and said, “Let’s start.”

Where to Look for Urban Farmland

GOVERNMENT. It costs a lot of money to maintain unused land. Most municipalities will be eager to negotiate the idea of “less grass to mow.” The city of Baltimore is soliciting urban farm business plans from the general public. It will lease city-owned land for free to anyone with a viable plan.

PRIVATE COMPANIES. Some cities are passing new taxation on storm-water drainage. A rooftop garden can actually save a company that has a large rooftop some money! If less water pours off the roof of a warehouse as a result of vegetation on the roof, the tax on that storm water will be less. So paying someone to farm the roof would actually be economically beneficial.

CHURCHES. Most congregations have a grass lawn that costs money to maintain. Check to see if there’s interest in turning that lawn into a garden to feed the congregation—or the world.

SCHOOLS. Nearly every school in the country has some extra space for a garden. Try to partner with a school to provide space for students to grow food during the school year and for the community to grow food during the summer.

Picking the Right Spot

PROPERTY OWNERSHIP. Many urban gardeners squat on vacant land, but there’s a serious risk of losing the land if property values increase and the owner (or city) suddenly wants to sell. Can you get a written lease for use of the property? You’d be surprised who will ask for back rent if they see you’ve been successful after using what was originally “donated” land.

SITE SECURITY. Fences can make a site seem secure, but a supportive community is a much better solution. Jones Valley Urban Farm provides neighbors with a portion of the farm to grow their own food. The neighbors get access to great affordable food, and JVUF gets a community looking after its property.

CLEAN SOIL. A land-use history can help you decide if you need further testing (see page 116).

SUNLIGHT. Most edible plants need a minimum of six hours of direct light to grow. Pruning trees can help, but consider finding a different location if trees need to be removed. It’s expensive and there are never enough urban trees.

ACCESS TO WATER. Consistent access to water for irrigating plants is nonnegotiable for an urban farm. The harder it is to get water to the plants, the less likely it is the plants will get the water they need. Many cities will give urban farmers a discounted rate on water if they are not hooked up to the sewer. Los Angeles has created an urban agriculture water rate to give producers a discounted price on irrigation water. Wells in cities are often polluted or illegal. Rain catchment systems can be effective but need to be large enough to work well. For example, a three-hundred-gallon tank will run dry in an hour of regular watering.

Becoming Profitable

Financially successful farms all have one thing in common: they have matched a potential market for their products with the right scale of farming so that products are produced for less than they are sold for. Urban farmers face a unique challenge with this formula because the land available to farm is almost always small. To make a small operation profitable, urban farms have to take advantage of their unique characteristics to do the following two things.

Reduce Production Cost

• Access free land by extolling the benefits of converting unused land into something productive, beautiful, and healthy.

• Sell to local markets to reduce transportation costs. Or, even better, encourage customers to come to the farm for on-site sales.

• Utilize vegetable scraps from local restaurants to make compost for free.

• Develop relationships with local volunteer groups or alternative-sentencing programs to access free labor.

Increase Revenue

• Identify niche crops that are in high demand and need to be delivered frequently, such as microgreens. This almost always guarantees a high price.

• Develop a “brand name” that increases the value of products by tying the nontangible benefits of the farm to the name of the farm.

• Process produce into after-market products, such as salsa or pesto, to increase its value. Check with local health department codes to ensure compliance.

CONCLUSION

Edwin Marty

Americans are beginnning to understand that they have the potential to control where their food comes from and how they get it. The impacts will ripple widely.

There are 20,000 acres of open land in Birmingham, 70,000 acres of open land in Philadelphia, and 100,000 vacant lots in Detroit. Yet farmland is being lost to urbanization at a staggering rate. Some 8 million acres of prime farmland has been covered with concrete in the last twenty years.

Today in America, we are three generations removed from the land. Most children growing up in cities have grandparents who had no connection to agriculture. Our lineage to an agriculturally based society has been completely severed. The knowledge accumulated over countless of generations of how to produce food and how to protect the natural resources that enable us to live off the land is being lost. Farming, as an occupation, doesn’t even appear on the most common census forms.

There’s a need for a major agricultural shift in our nation. Ironically, the first stages of that change are happening in our cities, where the potential (vacant land) and the expertise (passionate, good-intentioned entrepreneurs) have become a sort of laboratory for ideas for new food systems. The next steps in this transformation will have to respond to the broader political, social, and economic changes occurring in our country.

Shifting Cities

America is facing tremendous changes as the twenty-first century unfolds, from the demographic makeup of the population to the resources available to perpetuate our lifestyles. All of these changes will have an impact on urban farming and whether or not it can continue to have a positive effect on our food system and the health of our populations and our environment. But what exactly are these changes, and are they permanent shifts or temporary fluctuations?

It’s now a fact that more people live in cities than in rural areas, both in America and throughout the world. Urban areas occupy only 2 percent of the land in the United States yet consume 75 percent of the energy. Unless something dramatic occurs, the trend toward greater density and energy consumption can be expected to continue.

While there is a steady trend toward urbanization in the United States, this shift is happening much faster in the developing world. Increasing urbanity inevitably leads to a greater demand for energy, consequently increasing energy costs. The United States is already feeling this pressure. As oil prices rise, our food system, which has relied on cheap fuel for the distribution of products, will not be able to continue without passing the increased costs on to the consumer. Americans will have to face the fact that spending less than 10 percent of household income on food will not be possible.

Urban areas in the United States will continue to reflect the overall trend toward an aging population, at least for the first half of the twenty-first century. Immigration could have an effect on that, depending on what policies (if any) are implemented. Gentrification of urban areas will shuffle certain demographics around cities, but probably won’t affect their overall makeup.

An aging urban population is likely to increase the growing discrepancy in wealth, putting greater burdens on a shrinking workforce to provide for an expanding retirement population. Poverty rates will rise, causing increases in crime and the worsening of health indicators. Without significant intervention, urban obesity rates will continue to climb, directly impacting rates of diabetes and other diet-related diseases. Research clearly shows two trends being responsible for these increasing disease rates: poor dietary choices and limited opportunities for physical activity. Both of these issues are preventable with better planning and community engagement.

While these basic assumptions about the future of American cities are decidedly bleak, there are some potentially positive trends on the horizon, too. The demand for local, sustainably produced food may increase with the aging urban population. An interest in purchasing locally produced products directly from farmers, at farmer’s markets, through CSAs, and at farm-to-plate restaurants has exploded in urban areas in the last decade and shows no sign of decreasing. Simultaneously, this same population is likely to demand increased green space, reduced sprawl, and better use of existing urban space generally.

Cities are also beginning to recognize and respond to gaps in low-income communities’ access to fresh, local foods. “Food desert” studies across the country have clearly linked the prevalence of fast food to poor-health indicators. Farmer’s markets, which have often only served outlying, wealthier consumers, are popping up in inner cities and quickly becoming a community’s best outlet for healthy produce. Many of these markets are beginning to use electronic card-swipe machines to serve recipients of food stamps and of Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) food packages, often coupled with incentives like dollar-for-dollar matching for farmer’s market purchases. This marks a major step toward food justice and urban farmers’ capacity to reach a broad spectrum of their communities.

Urban Farm Response

These demographic trends and shifts are coupled with three distinct changes already under way in the urban farming movement. The first is a move toward for-profit urban farming. The last century of urban farming in America has focused almost exclusively on philanthropic urban farm projects that have “soft” outcomes, such as community development, job training, or food security. Only recently has the move toward farming in the city had a business focus, but this will undoubtedly increase as the following shifts unfold:

• The cost of food will increase due to rising fuel costs. Local food will soon become an economic necessity.

• Governments will recognize that a highly centralized food system is much more vulnerable to attack than a diversified food system. Urban farming will become part of a broader homeland security initiative.

• The industrialized food system will become increasingly less capable of providing the public with safe food. Consumers will value knowing their local farmers more than in the past.

• Urban planners will begin to include urban farms in urban in-fill and New Urbanist communities. Community development projects with an urban farm component, such as Prairie Crossing, will likely become far more common. Urban in-fill developments with food-growing components are also likely to become more widespread.

The second trend in American urban farming will be a growing acknowledgment of the urban farm’s effectiveness at addressing real food security and food justice issues. The realities of these continuing successes will dictate which projects get the bulk of future funding and, therefore, what will prosper. The best programs will then become models for future urban farm entrepreneurs.

Strategies that actually make an impact in decreasing hunger and obesity will prosper, while strategies that simply “look” good won’t. This may initially create tensions in the urban farm community, but will ultimately improve the efficiency of investments made in urban areas. While organizations such as the Community Food Security Coalition are working hard to provide urban farm projects with tools to evaluate their successes and plan for long-term sustainability, these efforts must be expanded to provide a much greater network of support. Evaluation will focus on the following criteria:

• What programs or components are most effective for an urban farm project to address local health outcomes?

• What are the best methods for evaluating and demonstrating the long-term impacts of these changes?

• What are the best means to “quantify” the nontangible benefits of urban farming, such as community engagement and beautification?

• Which urban farms provide the most replicable models for impacting a community’s health while ensuring the project’s long-term economic viability?

The third major trend will see urban farms as lightning rods that attract awareness and promote the taste for good, healthy food. This awareness is a natural consequence of a community’s stronger connection to its food sources. Perhaps the biggest obstacle to growing awareness, however, is agriculture’s lack of appeal to the next generation.

As the average age of the American farmer continues to rise, who will grow our food in the future? Can agriculture begin to attract the best and brightest of the next generation to contribute to vital discussion around food system issues? When was the last time a child said he or she wanted to grow up to be a farmer?

The declining interest in agriculture is probably due primarily to urban children not knowing any farmers or seeing images of farming in popular culture apart from stereotypes. Food production has been moved to a factory or a warehouse, and forgotten. We’ve been told that our food is plentiful and cheap and that we should not worry about it and get back to more important things, such as solving unemployment or health problems—health problems that are often directly related to our poor diets or the unintended negative impacts of agriculture on our environment.

Urban farms have the potential to change the way youth perceive agriculture and its potential. As more urban farms sprout up around the country, driven by bright and capable entrepreneurs, children will see that farming can be a viable career and not just a last option. The appeal of urban farming is very different from that of traditional agriculture. Urban farmers don’t have to make the same sacrifices as a farmer living in the country. All of the appealing social aspects of urban life that draw youth to the city are available to an urban farmer. The stereotype of toiling in the hot sun day in and day out while living in isolation is reversed for farmers growing viable crops in their backyards or on vacant lots down the street. Many of these farmers have part-time jobs in other industries, such as technology, and choose to spend part of their time working with their hands and cultivating something beautiful and healthy.

The message, then, being communicated to youth in inner-city, low-income communities with urban farms is especially potent. The idea that you can transform the negative aspects of your community by simply planting seeds is empowering. Since urban farms don’t require much start-up capital, this vision is an approachable one for many communities.

Unlike a more traditional business such as a restaurant or grocery store that requires convincing someone to loan you money, an urban farm can be started with no more than recognition of a potential market for produce and acquisition of the technical skills to grow a product. Urban farmers, such as Mary Corboy in Philladelphia and Harry Rhodes in Chicago, are working hard to provide concrete examples of successful urban farms. Others are actively training low-income minority communities to take control over their food systems and grasp the power to decide for themselves what is available and affordable.

The Future of Urban Farms

Access to Capital

For urban farms’ influence to continue to expand, such projects must be seen as economically viable. When urban youth see that urban farming can make money, a profound shift in participation will occur. For this to happen, the farms themselves must be scaled up to become profitable. Unfortunately, urban farms have a difficult time accessing capital for a number of reasons. Most traditional rural farms simply leverage their land for operational capital to expand. Few urban farmers own their own land and therefore can’t use it as collateral.

Examples from Breaking Through Concrete point to some successful models for addressing this challenge, such as the small-farm-business training program at the Kansas City Center for Urban Agriculture and New Roots for Refugees Farm. At Prairie Crossing, a fee added to the purchase price of a new home helped the development’s Sandhill Organics farm access start-up capital and move faster toward profitability—a clear benefit to the homeowners in their community.

Another option is for a community to develop a venture capital fund that prospective urban farmers can access when starting or scaling up. Local investors would receive a percentage of future earnings while giving the urban farmer the capacity to become profitable without the ownership of the farm, or the profits leaving the community.

Access to Technical Knowledge

While access to capital is critical to the success of any business, the knowledge of what to do with the investment is what determines long-term success. There is currently a significant void in the area of technical knowledge about sustainable agriculture and urban farming in urban areas across the country. Projects profiled in Breaking Through Concrete, such as the Homeless Garden Project in Santa Cruz and Growing Home in Chicago, are good beginnings. However, vocational training in secondary education and two-year college and community college programs must be developed for any appreciable impact to occur. Also, county extension offices must be encouraged to play a bigger role in the growth of urban farming. But this will only happen when the land-grant institutes that support county extension recognize urban farming as a “legitimate” enterprise worthy of their resources.

The other side of having technical knowledge is having access to the materials to implement that knowledge. There’s simply no supply chain currently in place to get materials for urban farming. While box stores are often close by, urban farms need access to bulk supplies that these stores don’t stock. This is another excellent business opportunity that has yet to be recognized in most American cities.

Access to Successful Business Models

Money and technical farming knowledge are the first two critical parts to expanding urban farming. The right business model, however, is what will make these projects successful over time. Understanding the correlation between a potential market for farm products and the right business structure to exploit that market can be challenging, especially for anyone without a formal business background. Growing up with parents who are successful business owners is usually the single best way to ensure future success. Unfortunately, such experience is rare in an inner city. Again, this is where vocational training could be developed to complement a technical training curriculum.

It’s important is to attract bright young minds to the urban farming movement and let them develop novel systems for responding to the potential market. Projects profiled in Breaking Through Concrete, like Eagle Street Rooftop Farm in Brooklyn and Greensgrow in Philadelphia, are giving urban farming an entirely different look and will undoubtedly attract new energy.

Policy That Supports Urban Farming

Today, the United States is experiencing an undeniable surge in urban farm activity. However, for this surge to have any long-term continuity, government policy must begin to shift quickly to support these efforts. There must be a recognition that current government policy adversely impacts the “real cost” of food and, therefore, the capacity for small farmers (urban farmers) to make a living. Can we shift what gets prioritized so that urban farms are subsidized as much as cotton and corn farms? A government that proactively supports a healthy food system will inevitably support urban farming.

Cities such as Seattle are paving the way by passing sweeping changes to local policy that open doors to new urban farm possibilities. These changes need to be translated so that other municipalities can easily adopt them and create similar opportunities. It’s critical, however, to recognize that federal policy will never be able to do what local policy can. America is a diverse country with radically different forms of local government. The most powerful changes will occur when each municipality adopts good food policy based on local circumstances.

Land-Use Planning

The majority of urban farms in America are growing on less than one acre. This makes the basic economics of an operation difficult over time. With an increase in access to land that comes with a broader understanding of urban farming’s advantages, projects should be able to expand to match potential markets with production capacity.

Traditional agricultural models look at matching abundant affordable land with available labor and then transporting products to the market. Urban agriculture turns this model around and matches abundant undervalued urban land with abundant urban labor and then brings the market to the farm. Rust Belt cities, such as Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Birmingham, all have tremendous amounts of vacant land that could be made available to urban farming with the right zoning and planning. Mike Scroll, president of Hantz Farms in Detroit, is looking at hundreds of acres of vacant urban land for large-scale agricultural production, and even tree farms. While some in Detroit don’t share his vision of a big corporate urban farm, he does point to a scale that actually could make a difference in both the economics of a city and the broader food system.

For the next generation of American cities to prosper, planners have to rethink the place of agriculture in a hierarchy of uses. “The definition of ‘best use’ puts agriculture at the bottom of the heap,” says Smith, speaking about Detroit. “There’s this hope that manufacturing will somehow rise again as an engine of economic support, that all of the jobs will come back and all of the people will come back. As much as light industry and manufacturing did to build this town, we can’t rely on it anymore.” Urban farms just might be these cities’ best hope.

Development of New Markets

Urban farming’s greatest potential may lie in its ability to create interest in locally produced food. Connecting consumers with their food generates knowledge about the potential impacts of their choices. When more people vote with their fork, there will be a bigger and growing market for good food. Urban farms are not unlikely to be able to meet the demands of this market. Rural farms will benefit directly from the expansion of urban farms, as more and more customers show up at farmer’s markets and look for CSAs. Urban farms will also increasingly interact with large urban institutions, such as schools, hospitals, and churches. These markets will engender new connections with farms surrounding urban areas and create a much stronger food system.

Numerous examples in Breaking Through Concrete illustrate how an urban farm can help develop a market that’s greater than the urban farm’s capacity to meet it. Greensgrow, Fairview Gardens, and Jones Valley Urban Farm have all developed relationships with rural farmers who supplement the urban farms’ CSAs. This model is likely to become much more popular, especially as nonprofit urban farms recognize the potential to cover the cost of education and outreach programs through additional sales revenue.

Diggin’ In

The urban farm movement will be built on a dense existing foundation. But it’s clear the world we live in today will not be the same one we live in tomorrow. Can urban farms embrace these changes without a catastrophe that forces urban areas to alter their course?

Urban farming so far has been about demonstration. The next step will be to scale up the projects. There are some notable examples of cities, such as Havana, Cuba, producing significant amounts of an urban population’s caloric needs. In the early 1990s, Havana was forced to reorient its entire structure after the collapse of the Soviet Union left the country without access to cheap imported food and synthetic chemicals to produce its own. The Cubans responded to this catastrophe by breaking through concrete and planting every available piece of land in the city. Entire industries were created overnight to supply locally produced compost to urban farmers, and the country averted mass starvation. While food was not abundant, there was at least enough to feed the people. Could America respond in a similar way without a disaster forcing it?

Even with a tremendous increase in the number (and efficiency) of urban farms, our urban areas will likely still be heavily dependent on traditional agriculture for the bulk of their sustenance into the foreseeable future. So the real, short- to medium-term potential of urban farming lies in its capacity to educate future generations of advocates of a healthy food system.

Our country is in serious need of a shift in how we think about and relate to our food. We have been taught for generations, and come to expect, that because of our highly efficient modern agricultural techniques, food should be cheap. We’ve also been taught that because of advances in food-safety science, our food is completely safe. Both of these assumptions stem from our trust in a centralized regulatory system that, presumably, is always looking out for our best interests. With sharp increases in diet-related disease and food-safety issues, the current assumptions about our centralized food system are increasingly being called into question.

We, as citizens, as Americans, can take personal responsibility for how our food is produced, processed, and consumed. It is no longer acceptable to assume that someone else, somewhere out there, has our best interests in mind, and that they have the ability to assure us of our food’s safety. We can become “reacquainted” with our food. Good, healthy food will not simply appear in our communities without our demanding it and actively creating connections between producers and consumers. Fortunately, urban farming is the perfect vehicle for connecting those dots. Urban farms across the country will serve to train the next generation of farmers in sustainable food-production techniques will educate the next generation of consumers about why good, healthy food is critical for our survival; and will inspire individuals to seek these changes in their own communities.

Imagine a community built around urban farms producing safe, healthy food. Imagine that these urban farms are just one part of a resilient web of food producers tied together through a wide variety of markets owned by the people who live in that community. Imagine growing up in such a community, knowing that the land surrounding your home is where your sustenance comes from and, if you choose, where your livelihood comes from. Imagine the children growing up in these communities eating fresh, locally produced food and understanding the power that flows from the soil, through their bodies, and into every part of their lives. This is a world we can create. It’s waiting just underneath the concrete . . .

An old chair at Detroit’s D-Town Farm sits next to a row of vegetables. Edible mushrooms will eventually emerge from the cushions.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We did not just sit down in a library and write this book. We had to get out and see the farms. The cross-country tour would not have happened without the support of WhyHunger, a leading nonprofit advocate for innovative, community-based solutions to hunger and poverty. WhyHunger’s Brooke Smith was a constant presence throughout the project, providing vital resources and insights.

We would also like to thank good friend and videographer-filmmaker Charlie Hoxie, who took his summer break from graduate school in documentary film to sweat through two months with us on the short bus and in the minivan. Charlie recorded dozens of hours of videotape, from poignant farmer interviews to roadside bus breakdowns. His work appears on the book’s Web site and offers a vivid illustration of the people and places behind the book.

To our families and friends who supported us along the way. To the staff and board of directors at Jones Valley Urban Farm for helping to create an amazing organization that laid the foundation for much of this book. To Andrea and Edie Marty, who can now have back their father and husband, respectively.

And, of course, to all the farmers who have created these projects and who let us document them for a few days. Their passion, intention, and authenticity were inspirational throughout the process.