CULTIVATE KANSAS CITY, KANSAS CITY, KANSAS AND MISSOURI
THE FARM FOR PROFIT
Zawadi Daniel, a Burundi American, has been in the New Roots for Refugees farm training program since 2009.
Seven women in ankle-length floral dresses bend at the waist in rows of kale, arugula, or kohlrabi. Their dark-chocolate hands effortlessly pull weeds and cut stems. The soft pink rising sun is already hot coming through the hazy white sky, making the distant Kansas City downtown look like a mirage. With the low-slung brick buildings of the Juniper Gardens public housing site on one side of the seven-acre farm, it’s hard to know which is more out of place, more of an illusion: the city, the verdant farm, the parched yards of the apartments, or the farmer women from Burundi, Somalia, Myanmar (Burma), Bhutan, and Sudan.
Under a covered space between an office trailer and a walk-in refrigerator, a dozen more men and women, some of them young adults, wash and bundle the produce for Saturday’s market. The vibrant colors of the vegetables and fruits, the fast pace of the washing and the moving of boxes, and the multiple languages being spoken could be a scene from a market in a dozen countries around the world. The setting is decidedly more authentic and real than the produce aisle of a typical grocery store.
The farm is called Juniper Gardens and the program for the women farmers is New Roots for Refugees. It is a joint project of the Catholic Charities of Northeast Kansas City and the Cultivate Kansas City (CKC). The refugee women who work individual farm lots sell their produce at the city’s network of farmer’s markets, many of which have been created by CKC. The rest of Juniper Gardens has been given over to community plots for residents of the low-income and subsidized-housing neighborhood of northeast Kansas City, Kansas.
Kansas City straddles two states, Missouri and Kansas, and it is surrounded by the quintessential American heartland, the most agriculturally focused culture, political scene, and economy in our country. Driving east through Kansas from Colorado reveals almost no evidence of actual food production, however. The state imports 97 percent of its produce. During the past one hundred years, fruit and vegetable farms have declined from 140,000 production acres to 7,700 acres. Fields of corn, soybeans, rice, cotton, and wheat extend to the horizons like a green sea broken by lighthouses of grain silos. And the small towns that punctuate the monocultures of commodity crops off Interstate 70—places like Evans, Russell, Bunker Hill—are approaching ghost-town status. They can’t even support the icon of the rural American town, a mom-and-pop diner.
So, you must go into the core of the metropolis to see and understand the new ideas that might save farming in this state and be a model for the creation of the next step in the urban farm movement: development of an industry of sustainable food. That industry will embrace a healthy spectrum of food producers, ranging from large-scale peri-urban production farms (operations located at the edge of city and rural environments) to medium-sized urban parcels to vacant-lot city farms to neighbors selling one another tomatoes from their front yards.
Katherine Kelly is executive director and cofounder of CKC, and she’s seen her neighbors begin selling tomatoes like kids selling curbside lemonade. Katherine believes in profitability; even such a tiny blip of urban agriculture as a front-yard tomato stand must happen to create an industry of healthy food production that can survive over the long term.
Katherine grew up working on her neighbors’ for-profit farms in Kansas. While living in Boston as an adult, she noticed a few nonprofit gardens in and around town. “Part of me felt that making the farm a nonprofit announces that it isn’t viable,” she says. “It acts like a museum and it’s run like a museum sometimes. Farming shouldn’t be like that. In a way, that says you’ve given up.
A New Roots farmer looks out over the crops she’ll eventually sell at a farmer’s market.
“I have to say there is a particularly midwestern emphasis on the free market as the solution. I don’t like a lot of that—the idea that capitalism is the solution to everything. But I believe in small businesses, and I know and see how proud the owners are of their businesses.”
At the Brookside Farmers’ Market, in an upper-middle-class neighborhood of Kansas City, the CKC farm stand has the first tomatoes of the season. CKC grows on a prolific two acres in a suburban section of the city characterized by modest middle-income homes arranged in moderate density. Their for-profit farm sales have contributed over twenty-two thousand dollars to the organization over the last three years. CKC also supports, through services, expertise, and land-use access, farm projects like New Roots for Refugees.
Rachel Bonar was director of women’s programs at Catholic Charities in 2005. The women in the Catholic Charities relief program are natives of Somalia, Sudan, Burundi, and Myanmar. All but one of them had grown up in agricultural communities that relied on small-scale farms for household sustenance. In their new home of Kansas City, the women had no access to land for planting. They began asking Rachel about the opportunity to grow food. So Rachel and some of the women started a community garden at the organization’s office.
“Almost immediately we realized that these women are really good at growing food,” says Rachel. “So the next year we partnered with CKC and began the New Roots farm.”
The New Roots for Refugees farm includes seven acres behind the Juniper Gardens public housing site, where some of the refugee families live.
The New Roots for Refugees farm is part community farm and part farm business program. The business program acts as an incubator farm for fourteen women. Once accepted into the program (and after at least one year with a community garden plot), the farmers receive a quarter-acre plot for their own small business. During the first year, everything—seeds, tools, water, marketing—is paid for. Rachel even sets up two CSA members for each plot. Gradually, the farmers take on more responsibility.
In the winter, the trainees take planning, production, and marketing courses and English instruction that focuses on farming and marketing needs. In their second and third years, they begin paying for things like seeds (purchased on-site from the seed store), marketing, and tools. They organize their own CSA member shares (between three and seven, normally). Rachel and the organization shuttle the farmers to and from the markets on the weekend, but the women are on their own selling the produce.
Six of the New Roots for Refugees farmers bring their produce to Brookside Farmers’ Market, which has the trappings of a high-end Saturday farmer’s market: grass-fed beef, artisanal cheeses, handmade yogurts, and booths overflowing with fresh, organic fruits and vegetables. The women who’ve recently arrived from Africa and Asia look elegant and proud in their vibrant dresses and evening shoes. Their produce is immaculate and sometimes exotic, native to their homelands but capable of cultivation here. Some of the refugee farmers have made up to three hundred dollars in a market day. Although not a large amount, it is a good supplement to their household incomes.
“I really have seen these women’s disposition change,” says Rachel. “They move to America from completely different worlds, and they often don’t find anything they’re good at. The language, the systems, the customs are all challenges. They aren’t really eligible for other employment. Some go to the meat-processing plant to work, but it’s so difficult there and worker laws so restrictive. Here they have the ownership. The work is all about self-determination, so they get out what they put in.
“Everyone needs something to be good at, and these women have found it. They’re proud to provide ethnic food to their community. Some weekends Dena Tu, a Karen from Myanmar, drives hours to Omaha to bring ethnic vegetables to the Karen population up there.”
A Bhutanese refugee checks her plot prior to market day.
The goal of the Farm Business Development Program is that after three years, the farmers, who have been saving two hundred dollars of their annual sales, will be able to start their own independent farm on a vacant lot within the neighborhood. Although it is a long shot that the farms will generate enough income for the farmers to single-handedly support their families—most have husbands with full-time work—they do provide an invaluable monetary supplement, as well as putting healthy food on the farmers’ tables and satisfying the essential human hunger for productivity and worthiness.
To Katherine Kelly, at CKC, the development of new farmers like the refugee women fits into the larger picture of the urban farm movement and even the overall national and global progression toward a more vibrant, sustainable food system. CKC also supports people like Sherri Harvel, an independent “rogue” city farmer.
Sherri works a vacant lot in southeast Kansas City, Missouri. Growing up, she spent a lot of time in the neighborhood visiting her grandmother. She holds a part-time job at Target, amounting to roughly twenty-five hours a week in the summer, when she spends much of her time tending the small farm. Sherri sells her produce at city farmer’s markets and through a CSA of around ten members. One year she made ten thousand dollars in a single growing season from produce sales, though she values the emotional and physical benefits of the small farm, what she calls her sanctuary, as much as the profits.
Kansas is basically one state-sized farm, and it’s hard to miss the irony at play in the state. America’s breadbasket can’t grow its own fruit and vegetables on some of the most fertile land in the world and subsidized by one of the world’s largest economies, yet a few independent growers working the poor city soils and supported by a nonprofit umbrella organization stand at the forefront of the state’s and the country’s new agricultural revolution.
“I look at what we do,” says Katherine, “and to me, a healthy industry has small-small, small, medium, medium-large, and large forms. All of them are seeking to make profit and provide jobs. And the overall industry also includes nonprofits that provide social services and education. We need a lot of players at every level. It’s ironic to hear these industrial and capitalist words come out of my mouth, but I really believe agriculture needs to be something people make a living from in order for it to be taken seriously.”
Katherine is taking a giant evolutionary step in the urban farm movement. And yet it’s not idealism that sits around the corner in this movement’s progression forward. Rather, it’s stone-cold practicality, the American way of supplying a demand and making a profit by selling valuable goods to consumers. It’s a big-picture approach with its hands in the Kansas City soil. On the whole, Katherine believes that a new food industry must be created.
“We need home gardeners, community gardeners, commercial gardeners. When you’ve got that mix, you’ve got resilience and sustainability. You’ve got knowledge that passes along and a support infrastructure with the necessary tools, supplies, and services. Then you’ve got an industry, a really healthy community of industry.
“In Kansas and in general, we’re land abundant and farmer poor,” she says. “I’ve had so many people call me with one hundred acres and no one to farm it. People live in cities, so at some level we have to deal with that.”
Turning our gaze into America’s cities, then, proves to be one of the best ways to decipher the next steps in the food revolution, which are basically concepts and solutions that can be employed on a small scale within a dense environment. But Kansas City represents a crucial opportunity for expansion. The ideas and entrepreneurial spirit of the young farmers, immigrants, and part-time vacant-lot growers in Kansas City must move out of the heartland’s big city and into the heartland itself. In Kansas City, perhaps more than any other city, the urban farm movement’s possibilities for systemic change are inching closer to expanding into America’s breadbasket.
ESTABLISHED: 2004.
SIZE: 2 acres at the CKC farm, 7 acres at Juniper Gardens.
MISSION: To promote the production and consumption of fresh, local produce by urban farmers who are active members of healthy neighborhoods in greater Kansas City.
WHO’S IN CHARGE: Board of directors, executive director (Katherine Kelly), associate director (Dan Dermitzel), and three staff.
SURROUNDING NEIGHBORHOOD: New Roots for Refugees is in a low-income neighborhood and adjacent to a subsidized housing project. The CKC Farm is in a middle-income neighborhood with mid-density single-family homes.
ZONING: Residential.
FUNDING: Foundation grants, corporate and individual donations, produce sales, contracted services.
WHO EATS IT: CSA members and farmer’s market buyers that include food-stamp holders who receive dollar-for-dollar matching grants from local foundations.
