Urban Agriculture

Gardening of edible plants occurs in many different circumstances. Home gardening will be most familiar to most people, including gardeners of edibles, gardeners of ornamental plants and those rare people who don’t garden at all.

Next most familiar might be farming. Residents of the Monterey Bay area will at least drive by acres of many kinds of edible plants, and a significant number of our neighbors have spent time in the fields.

Then we have community gardens. Some fortunate people have direct experience with managing a small allotment of space within a community garden, to grow a personal preference of vegetables or, in some cases, ornamental plants. These small parcels often are borrowed spaces within urban surroundings, making good but temporary uses of the soil for a few people to enjoy the cultivation of plants and benefit from bringing the produce to their own tables or the tables of friends.

Too often, we hear about such gardens in our communities when the landowner decides to build on the land and requires the gardeners to abandon the soil they have been improving, perhaps for years.

My early exposure to such events was in Berkeley, in May of 1969. During a work-related visit to that city, in a multistory building with oversight of what was called the People’s Park, I observed a confrontation between armed police officials and peaceful people who wanted to maintain their occupancy of a small parcel of land. Using helicopters and tear gas, the officials won that day, but today, part of that parcel contains community gardens. This history perhaps demonstrates the dedication and persistence of gardeners.

A more organized approach to making productive use of otherwise idle urban lands is being demonstrated in Santa Clara County. The Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority recently awarded substantial grants to community organizations for projects with goals in selected areas:

  • Environmental Stewardship and Restoration
  • Parks, Trails, and Public Access
  • Environmental Education
  • Urban Agriculture/Food Systems

This program represents a positive move toward protecting the natural environment and humanizing the urban environment.

Some communities have adopted policies to encourage and support community gardens. Good examples can be found in the western cities of Washington and Oregon. In many areas, however, community gardens are authorized and managed ad hoc, without a long-term perspective. The status of local ordinances in the Monterey Bay area would be an interesting study.

Street Farm coverA recent book inspires interest in a constructive approach to community gardens. The book is Street Farm: Growing Food, Jobs, and Hope on the Urban Frontier, by Michael Abelman (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2016. 239 pages).

In this book, Abelman describes his several years of developing small farms (up to two acres) in urban areas in California and Vancouver, Canada. He and his colleagues managed to gain access to underutilized parcels in urban areas, often after considerable effort to secure permissions and meet local ordinances. The parcels typically were either paved parking lot or contaminated land, so these prospective farmers constructed raised beds to make agriculture possible.

Raised-bed gardening is a better strategy than attempting to improve native soils with an excess of clay or sand.

Abelman approached his street farming adventures by assembling crews of workers from the community’s homeless populations, including people who were distressed for various reasons. In this respect, his projects have a constructive social purpose as well as the goal of producing organic food of good quality for sale. Their sales were typically through farmers markets, but have also included direct sales to restaurants, including Alice Waters’ the highly regarded Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley.

Abelman’s operating model generated enough income to pay his workers and meet the day-to-day expenses of urban farming. It also produced good will for the cooperating landowners and demonstrated the value of the persistent pursuit of a creative vision. Street Farm includes impressive photographs of highly productive farms in urban settings.

The stories in Street Farm culminate in Abelman’s “Urban Food Manifesto,” in which he expresses his visions, both “radical and terribly obvious,” of how we feed ourselves. He offers good and solid ideas that could be pursued in every community.

This book brings to mind Santa Cruz’s Homeless Garden Project, which will be a future topic.

California’s Healthy Soils Initiative

This week, California’s Department of Food and Agriculture reported progress in implementing the state’s Healthy Soils Initiative. This matter might seem esoteric for home gardeners, but it’s worth our attention for several reasons that are listed below.

First, by way of definition, let’s review the initiative’s goals, as stated by the CDFA:

  • Improve plant health and yields —contain important nutrients that improve plant growth and yields.
  • Improve biological diversity and wildlife habitat — at least a quarter of the world’s biodiversity lives in the soil; healthy soils improve habitats and other natural resources.
  • Reduce sediment erosion and dust — improve aeration, water infiltration, flood management and resistance to erosion and dust control.
  • Sequester and reduce greenhouse gasses — carbon stored in soil reduces overall greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture.
  • Improve water and air quality —affects the persistence and biodegradability of pesticides and other inputs.
  • Increase water retention — healthy soil has the ability to hold up to 20 times its weight in water.

These goals encompass a “basket” of interconnected issues: agriculture, an important part of California’s economy; biodiversity; erosion; climate change; water & air quality; and drought. These issues are concerns of several state agencies, all of which are engaged in the operation of this initiative. Promoting interagency coordination and collaboration, which is never easy, is among the principal actions to advance this work.

The state’s 2016 budget act includes substantial funding for the Healthy Soils Program. The CDFA has defined five primary actions for carrying out its responsibilities under this program. Its recent report of progress focuses on Action #2: the identification of sustainable and integrated financing opportunities for (a) promoting greenhouse gas reductions, (b) sequestering carbon, (c) increasing water-holding capacity of the soil, and (d) increasing crop yields. The CDFA has drafted a framework for this program and will be inviting public comments beginning in January 2017.

The Healthy Soils Initiative and Program clearly target California’s agriculture industry. Why should home gardeners find this work interesting?

  1. It addresses issues that are important for every resident of the state, and that require long-term, comprehensive strategies for effective action.
  2. Home gardeners could (and should) adopt their own Healthy Soil goals and action plan to pursue within their respective gardens.
  3. By adopting the Healthy Soils Initiative, California both acts constructively to improve the quality of life within the state and provides a practical model for other states and indeed for the world. Everyone has a stake in this program’s success.

The CDFA has recently updated its website for the Healthy Soils Initiative. This site offers complete and succinct information on this program. Gardeners should visit the site and consider how they could pursue an equivalent program in their own gardens. Unless the CDFA quickly produces a “Healthy Soil Initiative for Home Gardeners,” watch for it in this column. Your ideas will be welcome!