Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (17 page)

Since 2006, the South Central Farmers have continued to grow and bring fresh, organic food into the communities that need it most in the inner city. But they've had to lease land as far as a four-hour drive north of the city in Shafter. Despite the commute, the farmers service eleven
farmers’ markets, eight of which are in Los Angeles. Ironically, they have also started selling at farmers’ markets in the largely commercial agricultural communities of Bakersfield, where it's often just as difficult to access fresh, organic produce as it is in the city. The South Central Farmers are now selling food in two counties with their CSA program.

At the urging of Tezozomoc, I remained in the Los Angeles area for a few more days to attend a dedication celebration of new farmland, a private donation of a scrub-brush-covered eighty-five-acre piece of land in Buttonwillow, two hours north of the city. Tezozomoc hinted at “a big announcement” he was planning on making at the event, which was also timed to mark the four-year anniversary of the eviction from the inner-city farm.

The permanent Buttonwillow farm means that the farmers will never be forced off their land again. It's right in the heart of Kern County agricultural heartland, where massive monoculture plantings of cotton, almonds, potatoes, and other commodity crops are grown. Despite the overwhelmingly “conventional” feel of Buttonwillow, the South Central Farmers, and their CSA model of organic farming, have found themselves welcomed into this community. Several local businesses pulled together to give this cooperative the essential operating component that it was missing. A well and irrigation system worth over $200,000 was donated. This will provide organic produce at affordable prices in the heart of California's agricultural heartland.

Native American elders and dancers of all ages from the Chumash Nation had begun drumming, dancing, and blessing the land at 5:45 a.m. By noon, when I arrived, the wind was already unpleasantly hot, and the only shade was the tent city that ringed a flat piece of field where the dancing, drumming, and singing continued despite the heat. When the dancing ended in mid-afternoon, this signaled the time when the well would be turned on.

Congresswoman Maxine Waters, an outspoken and long-time supporter of the South Central Farmers, gave a fiery speech about “land that transformed a whole area from simply a ghetto to a productive piece of property. And then because of greed, and a lack of humanity, the struggle to hold onto that land was a struggle like many of us have not seen for a long time.”
¹¹
With that, she marched across the dusty field in her high heels, cut the ribbon on the well, and flipped the switch, starting the pump. Everyone cheered as the first sputterings of murky water shot out from pipes. The very next day, the farmers could begin to plant.

“I don't think you can really do a book about the global food movement without talking about the South Central Farmer,” John Quigley told me, over his plate of beans, rice, cilantro and a grilled, stuffed flour tortilla, as we waited out the heat of the day under the tents.
¹²
Quigley is an environmental activist who specializes in “tree-sits,” an act of environmental awareness and civil disobedience carried out by occupying a platform on a tree that is scheduled for destruction. He spent twenty-three days living at South Central Farm and coordinated a rotating roster of Los Angeles celebrities who lent their time and media-grabbing power to the farm. Quigley's role was to bring the celebrity power and media attention to make sure either that the farm was allowed to stay and function or that its destruction did not go unnoticed.

Los Angeles, according to Quigley, has the least amount of green space of any city in the United States. “In the early 90s, we flew in the Goodyear Blimp over LA. Over fifty percent of it is concretized. That's what made ‘the farm’ even that much more special.

“On a hot day like today on the street corner of 41st and Alameda, you'd cross the street and walk into the farm. It was ten degrees cooler. And you had a situation where little kids in a heavy gang zone could run freely among the plants and feel safe.”

Tezozomoc then took the stage, and in front of the eighty-or-so people squinting in the now baking sun, he announced that the struggle for the land at 41st and Alameda was back on the agenda. Eighty-five acres of land in a rural farming community is nice, but being able to grow food right in the communities that need it most is still the ultimate goal.

My conversation with Quigley rang in my ears as I careened along Highway 101, back into the tangle of shopping malls, twenty-four-hour gyms, and fast-food outlets that dominate the streetscape of North Los Angeles's San Fernando Valley, once a great wheat-growing area. “At some point, this industrial tack that we've been on, we're going to fondly remember the end point of that and realize ‘you can't eat that.’ And that little green square, as seen from the air, to me is the first space, the first move. As soon as we can get that back to green, that's going to have a huge ripple effect. When we get it back green, it's going to accelerate everything.”
¹³

P
AVING
E
DEN

These are just two stories about the deeper issues at play with land use in the United States. The prevailing rule is that private ownership is still more important than public good, and this governs what type of ownership and use policy is allowable and what is not.

One of the many ironies of our human population explosion is that we are paving over the land that feeds us. Cities have, for the most part, sprung up on or near the most fertile, productive food-growing land. According to the American Farmland Trust, 91 percent of fruit and 78 percent of vegetables grown in the United States are in urban-influenced
areas. You cannot talk about agriculture anymore without talking about urbanism.

We mistakenly assume that we can simply move our food-growing away from our cities and onto other farmland that exists out there just beyond the city limits. At some point, we will have paved over and contaminated the outer edges of our region's viable farmland. One day, we may find that we have paved ourselves into a corner.

I
n 2009, the City of Vancouver, British Columbia, issued a document called “Vancouver 2020—A Bright Green Future.”
¹
Three full pages out of the seventy-four-page report detail the city's commitments to supporting local food and urban-agriculture initiatives. According to the report, there would be an edible landscaping policy that obliged all city facilities to incorporate 25 percent edible landscaping, including green roofs. There would be collaboration with other alternative food enterprises in the city—urban farming outfits, small-scale food producers, a café, community food educators—to create a food hub as the heart of a local food system. And the city would support urban farming through favorable tax rates for property owners and developers who would convert unused land to urban growing space. Overall, Vancouver would aim to reduce the carbon footprint of its food by 33 percent. To achieve its
goal of being the greenest city in the world by 2020, Vancouver will have to out-green London, Sydney, Copenhagen, New York, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, Toronto, Berlin, Paris, and Stockholm—just a few other cities with this goal in mind.

Unlike in many cities, this is not just bluster from the public relations machine at city hall. Vancouver actually takes being a green city
very seriously, and its efforts are having an impact.
Economist
magazine has ranked Vancouver, Canada, at the top of its World's Most Livable Cities for several years running. In 2011, Vancouver again took top spot, followed closely by two other Canadian cities that are discussed in this book, Toronto and Calgary.

C
ITY
F
ARMER:
M
ICHAEL
L
EVENSTON

The irony that I was not able to find Michael Levenston's demonstration garden and office because of all of the
other
community gardens that surround it was not lost on me as I wandered from garden to garden asking directions. I quite literally couldn't see Levenston's City Farmer's head office—“Canada's Ministry of Urban Agriculture”—for all the flowers and food.

In other cities, I had grown accustomed to creeping along streets looking for a square of green that would let me know that I had finally found the urban food garden I was looking for. In Vancouver, I often had to confirm that I was in the
right
community garden, on that block! A 2007 survey by the City of Vancouver showed that 50 percent of Vancouver households with personal yard space grew some food there.
²
The city's website lists fifty-five registered community gardens with 2,200 plots available to Vancouverites who don't have a yard. So it's not really much of an exaggeration to say that urban food growing in Vancouver is more the rule than the exception.

This comes as no surprise. Vancouver is one of the rare Canadian cities that has a year-round growing season. In terms of plant hardiness zones, which are used to determine where various types of trees, shrubs, and plants are likely survive, Vancouver is a Zone 8, based on its average climatic conditions, as are London, Seattle, Portland, and even Atlanta, Georgia. Vancouver also has a well-worn rebellious streak with founders’ status in both social activism and environmentalism that oozes beyond the national border. Vancouver is the birthplace of Canada's environmental movement that took place in the 1970s, and Greenpeace was founded in Vancouver's Kitsilano neighborhood, where Levenston's world headquarters and famous demonstration garden is located.

With the help of a couple of gardeners puttering away in their community garden plot along an old railway right-of-way turned strip of
gardens, I finally found City Farmer—not an official embassy-like building emblazoned with maple leaves but a cobalt-blue house on a tranquil residential street.

C
ANADA'S
O
FFICE OF
U
RBAN
A
GRICULTURE

Levenston first tackled the idea of urban food production as a means of energy conservation as part of a self-directed summer job in his late twenties for the Vancouver Energy Conservation Centre in 1978. The summer job didn't last, but the idea of raising the awareness of the environmental benefits of urban food production stuck.

Growing food in the city was a radical idea in those days, even in the nonconformist Vancouver of the 1970s. It was even a counter-counterculture move, as many of Levenston's contemporaries were leaving city life behind to go back to the land to set up organic farms. But Levenston knew rural farming wasn't for him. He'd spent two summers in his youth tree planting, a potentially lucrative but backbreaking seasonal job that entails dawn-to-dusk digging and planting of tree saplings in remote locations. The heat, the bugs, the isolation, and the extreme physical demands were unbearable. In short, he found the experience excruciatingly unpleasant.

“I was a city boy from Toronto. I wanted to go ‘back to the land,’
in the city
!” Levenston laughed as we sat on the shaded porch between his narrow, galley-like office looking out over City Farmer's garden in full midsummer production.
³
Urban agriculture was Levenston's way to scratch his environmental, agricultural activism itch without having to give up the creature comforts of city life.

Levenston and a group of friends decided that they'd have to forge their own path. They started City Farmer as a nonprofit society and cheekily appointed it as Canada's Office of Urban Agriculture. “It was so outrageous at the time,” Levenston admitted, “that we didn't even worry
about it.” (They had no affiliation or sanctioning from the Canadian government and probably weren't even on its radar.) City Farmer's newspaper soon followed, as Levenston had previously worked as a journalist for the student newspaper in his university days back in Ontario.

In 1981, Levenston talked his way into a piece of land from the city, rent-free, to start an urban-food-growing demonstration garden at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Maple Street. The former residential lot, near a Canadian Pacific Railway track, was so polluted that it took two years to remove the contaminated soil and replace it with viable organic compost and dirt.

He enlisted local gardeners and other volunteers as the plot took shape. The garden was open to the public, not just as proof that food could grow in the city on a residential lot, but so that people could come to the garden and learn directly from the more experienced gardeners. It was an outdoor schoolyard to instruct and inspire would-be city farmers and community gardeners to plant their own beds with everything from summer squash to winter kale.

Levenston was also consulted on the burgeoning community gardening movement that caught fire in Vancouver in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, when most municipalities in Canada and the United States were ridding themselves of derelict gardens that had fallen out of favor. In 1985, Levenston helped start the Strathcona Community Garden, a three-acre, two-hundred-plot community orchard and garden east of downtown, now a showpiece in the Vancouver urban “greenscape.”

Always on the lookout for new ways to spread and share urban-agriculture information, Levenston recognized the potential of the Internet early on. On October 15,1994, City Farmer's website went “live,” and, not surprisingly, it was the only online source of information for urban agriculture. It attracted readers from all over the world.
⁴
Within a few years, the site had a global reach, getting traffic from over 150 countries.

Levenston now mainly curates urban-agriculture stories and headlines from around the globe on his site. It is still the global “go-to” site
for news from the frontiers of urban agriculture. “I call it the CNN of urban-agriculture news,” Levenston jokes, but he's not that far from the truth. People send Levenston links, and he curates the site, usually posting a few dispatches per day, in between the daily tasks of running the City Farmer demonstration garden and other hands-on tasks. City Farmer's demonstration garden reaches a local population, and the Internet helps it reach the world. “I guess that's why I work around the clock. They're both valuable.”

The city pays Levenston to educate and direct the Compost Education Centre. (Making and using compost for urban agriculture from food and yard waste is part of the city's green vision.) And the 2,500-square-foot (230-square-meter) garden and small office, which is now worth a fortune among Vancouver's notoriously stratospheric real estate prices, is still rent-free from the city. The City Farmer gig has been his only job since 1978. The telephone rang nonstop with composting questions the mid-July day I was there. “Calls come from all over North America,” said Levenston, but the majority come from Vancouver.

Levenston is proud of the fact that he's been able to make a career out of his passion for urban agriculture and that this has been his job for over three decades. He knows he got lucky with the land from the city, and he's managed to justify his full-time salary plus the equivalent of another fulltime salary for his staff. It certainly hasn't hurt Vancouver's image as one of Canada's greenest cities, either. Levenston hosts journalists and film crews from places like South Korea and Germany. He even gets visits from Cuban delegations, the undisputed urban-agriculture heavyweights. One Cuban woman proclaimed Levenston's garden Mecca, he told me. “I'm not Mecca,” he countered. “This is just a modest garden!”

Levenston then dashed off to a corner of the garden near the new electric composter he's been experimenting with. He spent close to an hour with a local television news crew. The city has been grappling with its municipal waste problem. A proposed incinerator doesn't sit well with most Vancouverites, so Levenston was showing off this
large-capacity composter, suggesting that it might be a good option for apartment blocks or neighborhoods.

I scribbled in my notebook, taking inventory of the diversity of the garden's produce as Levenston worked with the television crew. There was a gooseberry bush, taller than me, dripping with ruby-like translucent berries. Armfuls of silvery cabbage, red-tinged lettuces floated in a carpet of violet-colored lobelia, a common ornamental flower. Alpine strawberries crept along the dirt. Huge stands of mint, sage, and other culinary herbs crowded each other. Several cardboard boxes lined with garlic bulbs were drying on the wooden porch in the shade between the garden and Levenston's narrow galley office. And I soon stopped counting the gardeners and visitors who were coming and going and grew used to the compost hotline ringing continually in the background. The place was a strange mix of constant activity and calm in the middle of a major city.