Also this issue: Cover Story Recipes from Phoenix Farms

October 3- 9, 2002

cover story

Phoenix rising: Phoenix Foods uses two acres off Parkside Avenue for its urban farm project.

Lance Haver, the man who threw stones, is now trying to make a living in a greenhouse.

From Pest to Pesto

How did Lance Haver end up here? In a greenhouse on a brownfield. Along the train tracks, in a part of West Philly that is undeniably hurting.

Haver used to be on center stage, his mouth ablaze. (“Rabble-rousing” and “fiery” were the Inquirer’s favored descriptors.) For well over a decade, Haver was the sometimes whining, sometimes roaring voice of CEPA -- the Consumer Education and Protective Association.

On the news, Haver was the one with the red, round, animated face. With the droopy mustache, dressed like a schlub, yelling through a bullhorn. He lambasted anything that looked like a monopoly. Private or public, government or authority, any entity to whom monthly dues must be paid. SEPTA, PECO, telcoms, healthcare, insurance, banks. He slammed, sued often and sometimes won. He was the consumer's everyman, the white knight who represented everyone.

"What I did best was raise hell and ask questions," says Haver of his 20-year tenure at CEPA.

That was four years ago. Today, Lance Haver is two dead-ends away from Parkside Avenue, on a two-acre, high-tech, hydroponic urban farm hemmed by weeds and razor wire. The farm is part of a company called Phoenix Foods, and for the moment Haver mostly owns it. And the question vexing him now is whether the consumers for whom he once fought will buy what he's selling: fresh basil and fresh fish, raised together in an innovative symbiotic system.

"I miss the rush of the demonstrations, the excitement of the fight," says Haver. But he admits now to a thrill of a different sort. "Now," he says, "I'm scared a lot of the time."

Still, despite the terrors of a new business, he insists, "It's a privilege to do something that I'm passionate about."

It’s 6 a.m., still dark. Two smells fill the late summer air: a hint of basil, along with the tarry smell of creosote.

The Phoenix Foods greenhouse sits atop reclaimed industrial land. Literally on top, because nothing grown here can come in contact with soil that still has faint traces of its past.

Haver's hothouse looks like a big bright crystal floating on alien terrain. The half-acre interior view from the door is like a scene from Cocoon. Twelve hundred bright blue water rafts, each about the size of a boogie board, bob gently in tanks of bubbling water. Each raft is sprouting a little forest, several rows of leafy green plants, mostly basil, that are plugged into the styrofoam rafts.

The technical centerpiece of Phoenix Foods is this free-standing, almost transparent, hothouse. Under the floating blue polystyrene, in a score of huge cement ponds, fish dart through the percolating water.

Why this, a polycarbonate palace on a wasteland?

"I'm probably guilty of being a true believer," says Haver of his quest to be the model urban farmer.

As a true believer, Haver says he's also trying to be politically and ecologically diligent -- if not perfectly correct -- in this endeavor. In its funding, construction, operation and staffing, this is meant to be the epitome of an enlightened urban industry for the new millennium.

"I lost more battles than I won, but I won a lot," he says of his tenure at CEPA, where he still serves in a volunteer position as president of the board. "And now I've got a responsibility for those victories."

Reaping the rewards: Haver plucks bunches of basil from water rafts after their incubation in the hothouse.

In 1998, in a Senate resolution that followed his departure from public life, Haver was honored for his "integrity and public-spirited focus" that, the senators said, helped the city meet "the challenge of the 21st century."

"Mr. Haver," the resolution continued, "earned the respect of local government and business leaders for his principles and effective advocacy on behalf of consumers."

That respect did not include the Inquirer, which marked Haver's departure with a declaration of its own. "Poor Advocacy," an unsigned editorial, noted with relief that "Philadelphia's loudest advocate for the city's poor is moving on."

The editorial slammed him for promoting a "living wage" that would "add one more reason to employees to steer clear of a jobs-needy city." And while they credit Haver with victories against banking interests and the establishment of a public advocate for gas consumers, the Inky editorial board slashed him for the way he did things. "Any evaluation, though, has to look at style as well as substance," they wrote, condemning what they call "guerrilla theater."

The piece alluded to his plans to go into business, and sent him off with, "The city today probably needs Lance Haver, businessman, more than it does Lance Haver, consumer rabble-rouser."

In the four years since he put down his bullhorn, the businessman Haver has raised $1.7 million to start this ideal urban farm. And for the past two years he's been trying to find the perfect balance to keep his ideal environment from crashing.

“Engineering on the edge,” he calls it, which apparently is not as glamorous as it sounds.

“It’s hard physical work,” says Haver, yanking another plant out of a blue polystyrene raft. He is wearing black shorts and a white T-shirt, on which he copiously drips. Haver seems to sweat all the time. Inside the bubble during the day, it’s an average of 100 degrees. Humid, with no shade. A little pudgier than his CEPA days, he still has the mustache. The slicked, black hair is bordered with gray.

Haver and three others are harvesting today's order of 25 cartons of basil, which must be filled and on the road by the time the sun clears the skyline.

It's surprisingly breezy inside. The wind comes from a battery of fans that hang from a transparent ceiling. "The breezes," says Haver, "help stems grow hardy."

It's surprisingly noisy, too. The whining and the whooshing is the sound of turbines cramming oxygen into the water that feeds the ponds where the plants and fish live. Water foams out of the mouths of nearly 400 wide, white PVC pipes.

Haver points at the foam and then pulls another basil out of a raft. "See these roots?" They are long and hairy. "You're not supposed to be able to do this. Roots dangling in water are supposed to rot. Except we figured out how to get more air into the water."

It's been an expensive road to this Oz on a wasteland. The high-tech greenhouse, its edgy engineering, the battles over licenses and zoning, the waivers, and the cost of the actual construction itself consumed over a million dollars.

With $700,000 of the original $1.7 million left, and two years gone, Haver hired the rest of his five employees, and started to experiment. For the past two years he has been fiddling with the delicate ecology of this urban farm, trying to keep it from coming apart.

"A learning curve?" says Haver. "More like a learning cliff."

As a concept, this farm is utopian. Phoenix Foods is essentially a closed but natural system that even the most ardent of environmentalists would consider to be ecologically correct. The farm is designed to raise basil and tilapia with no antibiotics, herbicides, fungicides or pesticides. Nothing is added, little is wasted. The farm recovers and recycles its heat and energy, selling excess electricity back to the utilities.

"We essentially get our electricity for free," he says of a co-generation agreement with PECO, which he calls, a bit ironically, a "partner." At CEPA, Haver sued PECO "many times."

At the heart of this farm, though, is another kind of partnership: a curious biological affinity, one which Haver calls "a weird symbiotic relationship between fish waste and plants. The fish live off the bugs that attack the roots of the basil. The poop fish produce is used in turn to nourish and further protect the plants.

"The fish waste has an antibiotic quality to it," he says, gesturing to a half-acre pond of apparently healthy plants, dotted with dragonflies.

The farm is beginning to yield crops, but the business itself is still bleeding. The research and development phase has burned most of the remaining $700,000, with scant income coming in. At this point, to get his greenhouse out of the red, Haver says they will have to sell 85 cases of basil a day -- more than three times the amount they currently pick.

Lance Haver is currently losing his perspiration-soaked shirt.

Instead of sweating a payroll, the 47-year-old father of three says he could now be cooling his heels in the corridors of power. Around the time he left CEPA four years ago, Haver claims, he was offered several lucrative opportunities that would have made him far more materially comfortable.

Haver remembers, for instance, the ministrations of a company called Enron. Enron, he says, was getting ready to rig the local electrical power market by gorging themselves on PECO energy. Haver, who generally attacked local utilities, found himself coming to PECO's defense with some success.

"I was offered Œresources' by Enron -- these guys never mention the word Œmoney' -- to help me Œunderstand' a thick and complicated proposal that was frankly inexplicable." The company wanted to force PECO to sell electricity to Enron at rates that would have been ruinously low. Haver argued no, and said no thanks to the "resources."

After that, Haver says he heard potentially lucrative overtures from PECO itself, who wanted the consumer advocate to continue defending them. He turned them down, too.

And Haver also lists what he termed another "buy-off" job, this one from a councilman he names, who is currently in office. In a follow-up interview with me a week later, on further reflection, Haver asks that the name not be printed, explaining, "It would hurt me."

Life is different on the other side of the bullhorn. The questions are now being asked of him.

In fact, says Haver, it was a tough question four years ago, posed from the back of an audience he was lecturing, that kick-started him on his way here.

In addition to a good income from being a TV commentator, Haver used to make decent money through speaking engagements. In 1998, he remembers lecturing at the Jewish Y in the Northeast, which he called "friendly ground, even though I'd get attacked from both right and the left."

Haver was talking about raising the minimum wage, which he then and now believes is grossly inadequate. The minimum wage, he informed the audience, is "little more than a form of servitude. Businesses can do better than just the minimum. Even small business can afford to pay a livable wage."

"And how would you know?" piped up a voice at the back, from a man he had never met. "If you're so sure, why don't you do it yourself?" he taunted.

The dare at the Y was a turning point for Haver, but the way to the commercial world also came, he says, from his mentor in the advocacy world, Max Weiner.

Philadelphia's Primal Warrior, Max Weiner, who founded CEPA in 1966, had for decades enjoyed a national reputation. Weiner attracted Haver right out of college. In 1978, at the age of 22, Haver left his native New England to become Weiner's first lieutenant, and eventually his successor at CEPA.

In strategizing to do battle, says Haver, "Max would always insist that you couldn't ŒJust Say No.' Show them an alternative." That, says Haver, was Max's First Law.

Max himself tried to follow that law when he offered himself as a political alternative in his bid for City Council, a race he lost in 1987. After Weiner died in 1989, Haver created a visible role at CEPA for himself, consolidating his reputation as a savvy battler.

But, he now admits, his public enthusiasm at the time was being gnawed from within by private doubts.

Haver began to wonder if he was indeed doing anything more than just saying no. Was he actually offering an alternative -- for instance, in forcing a gas or telcom or other monopoly to lower its rates?

Or, as Haver now puts it, was he in effect "forcing the working poor to subsidize the desperately poor"?

This was no alternative. But good jobs were.

"Unless I did something to create new and good jobs in the city, I would have done little more than creating a sales tax for the working poor."

Haver wanted to create a business that would provide jobs which paid significantly more than minimum wage. Beyond that, a business that would also offer something other than the usual sort of work for those living in bad neighborhoods. Not a cleaning or security agency, or a factory that recycled tires or processed mail.

But what to do? For all his adult life, Haver had been an activist, an environmentalist, not an entrepreneur. But as a child growing up in various factory towns in western Massachusetts, he watched his family earn a little extra money every spring by growing geraniums, mums and lilies. This was pleasing: his Jewish family helped put him through college by selling Easter plants. So why couldn't he also be a farmer?

"My mother is probably thrilled that I'm producing something other than picket lines," he says.

Among those who work for Haver now are a few faces from his days on the picket lines.

"I know how to use a bullhorn and paint a sign," says Pat McNamara, as she counts out hundreds of tiny arugula seeds with a manicure tool.

McNamara, 53, came to CEPA in 1976, and now heads what's left of the consumer organization -- which, she admits, is not much. "We are not fishing for new business."

"I used to organize advocacy groups around issues. Now I organize seeds around little holes," she says. The plugs of rock wool, which hold the seeds, will be arranged in neat rows in the 1,200 blue floating styrofoam rafts.

Like everyone else on the startup farm, McNamara does what needs doing, and says, deadpan, that this arugula planting "is not really tedious, it's more... meditative."

From CEPA as well came Dwayne Carson. A graduate of Germantown High, Carson, 39, did a stint in the Air Force -- guarding nuclear weapons, he snorts. He now lives with his wife and three children in Mt. Airy, and happens to be a dead ringer for Allen Iverson, whose jersey he is wearing.

Carson met Haver in '87, working on Weiner's failed campaign. He went on to be a union organizer in a lingerie factory, which he says eventually got him fired. Now, he says, "I'm right under Lance, as operations manager."

Carson, in turn, hired Kenneth Hill, who sports a pencil-thin beard, and at 35 still gets carded. Married with five kids, his last job was sorting coins for the Philadelphia Mint as a temporary contractor. "I've done it all," says Hill, listing carpentry, construction and security. "But this is different. It's new, it's exciting. In terms of punching a clock -- everyday work -- this is the longest job I've been in."

Hill has been working for Phoenix Foods for just under two years. "I've been here when there was nothing but a lot of big holes in the ground. Every day we're one step closer to getting this basil growing, and in another month or two, we'll be the only [farm in the area] growing it. I like that a lot. It's the first time I'm actually growing something."

Rounding out the current roster is Hill's uncle, Darnell Hill, 40, who also worked in construction. And Will Maus, who met Haver on the Nader campaign, who once ran his own package delivery service, and whose uncle and grandfather worked in this very railyard when it was owned by the Budd Company.

Haver says he is doing more than providing employees good jobs, paying them a living wage with good benefits. His employees are slated to displace Haver as owners. Should Phoenix Foods start to rise, its employees will initially own a third of its stock. And should the company really fly, they'll buy Haver's portion. Ownership, with no personal risk. Such was part of the terms demanded by a progressive investment fund for which Haver has raised money, called Capital to People, which furnished much of the capital to start the farm and will also own part of the company. In time, Haver will own nothing.

The employees will take much of the ownership and the profits, though in fact, all the financial risk is riding on Haver and his family. Haver's wife, Lisa, is a public school teacher. They have two children in college.

To get the loans to start Phoenix Foods, Haver says he is personally guaranteeing notes for $650,000. "But," he insists. "I'm risking only money. That's nothing compared to those who risk their lives for political change."

There are others, including a couple of powerful politicians, who are sharing some of the risk, betting in effect with public funds, for which Haver says he's grateful.

A dog's life: Harvey the guard dog keeps watch on the grounds of Phoenix Foods.

"Vince gets it," says Haver of state Sen. Vincent J. Fumo. Haver says Fumo, with U.S. Congressman Chaka Fattah, helped point the way to myriad tax breaks and a government loan: a loan of $200,000 at two percent. No city or state taxes for a decade. No city business taxes, more reductions for hiring local workers. Two acres of land valued at $130,000 for $24,000, purchased from the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC).

"Sure," says Haver, "we used to beat up PIDC. Many times."

If they succeed, Phoenix Foods could become an industrial redevelopment poster-child, creating good jobs with workers themselves at the helm.

"But worker ownership and profit-sharing has no meaning if we're not making a profit," says Haver. He stands to lose more than his house and savings. "I would lose credibility, and lose ability to talk about issues of social justice."

To make all this work financially, Haver and his crew will have to sell approximately 30,000 pounds of basil and about the same weight of fish annually. At the moment, they are moving about 10,000 pounds of basil. They are selling no fish, and trying to figure out how to troll for customers.

The sun is just about to clear the horizon, and Lance Haver is shoving the last of today's load of 25 cases into a blue minivan. He's being watched by a couple of (seemingly) friendly guard dogs, Harvey the rottweiler and Zelda, a shepherd/husky mix who howls like a wolf.

Now the two are whining. They want to ride with Haver, who's off on his daily trip to the Food Distribution Center.

We pass an abandoned factory alongside I-95 on the way down to South Philadelphia. "It'd make an interesting tour of Philadelphia, of all the abandoned industrial sites that nobody knows what to do with."

Which prompts him to wonder why the city is focusing on developing tourism, instead of helping out advanced entrepreneurial technology.

Being PIDC's newest potential poster-child apparently didn't help Haver much with licensing and zoning from the city, whose inspectors looked askance at the building plans for his polycarbonate palace. Permits took forever.

"I knew that I was going to have to get papers stamped by the very same people who I'd once picketed. I made a decision to eat some crow."

It went beyond that. He says it was horrible. Like trying to describe a crystal palace to people who have always lived in caves. "Why doesn't the city do what it should," he asks, "which is to make it easier for smaller, innovative industries? Why isn't there a one-stop shop for small, high-tech alternatives? Why will the city grease the wheels for outside corporations to do tourist projects? Why, since those jobs pay so little and their profits flow out of the city?"

I'm half expecting him to pull out a bullhorn.

"We have to be able to prove it possible that small business can pay a living wage and that large corporations setting up franchises will not create real wealth," he says, turning into the Food Distribution Center.

The docks of the Food Center are perilous, forklifts whizzing by with cartons of food, missing us by inches. It's a cornucopia on speed. There go tomatoes from New Jersey, melons from California, mangos from Brazil. Produce from everywhere.

Why sell basil, I ask. Why not tomatoes?

"Tomatoes are a commodity crop," Haver replies. "They ship well and are bought mostly on price."

Basil is delicate, it's got a short shelf life. It's precious and very profitable. "Twenty-five cents of raw material will yield about a pound of basil," says Haver, "and a pound of basil will bring in $45." It's a markup that's better than cocaine.

Haver checks in with Eddie Rodgers, who's standing in the middle of the circling trucks. He's tracking them on a clipboard. Rodgers is a wholesale buyer for a chain of local greengrocers called Produce Junction, and they are Haver's chief customer.

He opens a box of Haver's basil, and rifles through the leaves with seeming casualness, but only seeming. For if this produce goes bad too fast, his company have to eat the loss.

By mid-winter, Rodgers confirms, almost none of the other produce around us will be locally grown. "I handle this basil," he says, "because it's fresh and good." I ask Rodgers if he knows about Haver's past, how this basil is produced. He says he doesn't, and goes back to his clipboard to accept today's load.

To get to 85 cases daily, Haver says he's going to have to crack the Acme or Fresh Fields account. But he's adamant that this will happen "only when consumers ask for us because they care about we're doing."

"We will only be successful if they make a conscious decision," he says of consumers whose pocketbooks he used to guard and whose hearts, he says, he must and will win.

And if Phoenix flies, says Haver, "I'll get to do this again."