Agricultural Phenomenon

What happens when idealists, entrepreneurs and bureaucrats all latch onto the same trend?

by Isaiah Thompson

Thomas Pitilli

A few weeks ago, at a community meeting in North Philadelphia, I witnessed a scene that seemed somehow symbolic, prophetic, even. The meeting — an energized rally by the Eastern North Philadelphia Coalition, a group trying to acquire vacant land for a neighborhood-managed land trust — had just ended, and community members were filing out.

At the door was a young, bearded white guy, passing out seeds.

"Free seeds!" he shouted jubilantly. "Take them home, plant them, have better food, save money!"

It seemed to embody in a single moment all the hope, passion —and, frankly, dubiousness — of the urban agriculture movement that is sweeping Philadelphia.

There's nothing radical about the idea of raising edible crops in the city: It's been done for ages. And Philadelphia, it cannot be denied, has plenty of land — including thousands of vacant lots.

What is a little more dubious is the sheer distance between what urban agriculture's most idealistic proponents want it to mean to Philadelphia — a self-sufficient means of food production for the poor, a source of jobs, a cure for the ills of urban obesity and malnutrition —and its reality on the ground so far.

Whether that distance can be breached may be put to the test soon. In recent years, urban agriculture has had the luxury of defining itself in opposition: to a culture of cheap, pesticide-dependent produce; to a society increasingly isolated from and ignorant of the origin of its food; and to a city which has sometimes seen vegetable gardens on vacant lots as impeding development —rather than vice versa.

But about a year ago, something surprising happened: The city itself began to get all ... urban aggy, with various city agencies coming up with proposals to sponsor new inner-city farms. Urban agriculture, all of a sudden, is in. The problem, quickly becoming apparent, is that no one quite agrees on what, exactly, it's supposed to be.

Alyssa Grenning

If the idea of Philadelphia — half-blighted, post-industrial, faded-glory Philly — as an urban gardening mecca seems wildly optimistic, it's worth noting that, not long ago, it was already well on its way. The 1970s marked a heyday of Philadelphia urban farming. As industrial jobs left and vacant lots sprang up around the city, urban gardens took off —tilled largely by Southern-born black and immigrant communities, many of whom had grown up raising vegetables. They had support, too. The Philadelphia Horticultural Society's "Philadelphia Green" program helped prospective farmers get access to land. Penn State's newly formed Urban Gardening program made Philadelphia a centerpiece of a six-city pilot program later adopted and funded by the USDA.

These gardens, according to research by University of Pennsylvania planning professor Domenic Vitiello, thrived into the 1990s. In 1994, he notes in a 2008 report, Penn State's program knew of 501 area gardens maintained by an estimated 2,800 families that produced nearly $2 million worth of fruits and vegetables.

But within the span of 10 years, many vanished. In 1996, the USDA cut funding for urban gardening. Penn State and the Horticultural Society began to redirect their efforts away from urban agriculture. Gardeners themselves got older or passed away. And — good news to many — property values began to rise. Some gardens were replaced with development; others, according to Vitiello's research team, were quietly shut down by city officials.

Many are still alive and kicking — and the nonprofit Neighborhood Gardens Association has made its mission the preservation of these places by placing them in its land trust.

"At this point we have 30 gardens," says executive director Terry Mushovic, "and about 96 percent of that is food production."

Some of the biggest and most active gardens, she says, are powered by immigrants from Southeast Asia and Latin America:"They are growing massively," she says. "It's no hobby."

But there's no question such gardens have declined overall. Of the 600-odd former program-supported garden sites surveyed by Vitiello's team, 255 were inactive, and more than half of those are now vacant lots.

To Vitiello and many others, the story's moral is clear: With support from Philadelphia institutions, and from the city itself, urban agriculture in Philadelphia can thrive again — it just needs a hand up, and maybe a handout, too.

And if Vitiello has become the academic voice of that argument in Philadelphia, a new wave of urban ag enthusiasts — mostly young, white and educated — have become its arms and legs, lobbying the city to hand over what they see as the missing piece of the puzzle: "The biggest road block people like us have is access to land," says Matt McFarland, who owns a burgeoning half-acre urban farm with his wife, Amanda, in Germantown. "It's not really viable for us to be buying land in competition with regular development."

Until recently, the city hadn't shown much interest in handing over land for gardening. But the aggies are dangling a new carrot before the city. They want to make urban agriculture a business; they want to make money doing this.

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It seems to be this new orientation that finally caught the city's interest. Giving away developable land for private gardening is one thing,but supporting "green business," maybe even creating "green jobs"? Hello, Zeitgeist!

The city Redevelopment Authority (RDA) was the first agency to reach for the torch, announcing last year it would be issuing a Request for Proposal to do commercial greenhouse gardening on a long-vacant parcel it held. A few months later, Mayor Michael Nutter announced his ambitious Greenworks Philadelphia plan that was supposed to make Philadelphia "the greenest city in America." Among its many goals: establishing 12 new urban farms and 15 new farmers markets by 2015.

But not long after the RDA's request for proposals was issued, it was withdrawn, and the RDA backed off abruptly.

Terry Gillen, RDA's executive director, characterizes the misstep as a simple need for more time, more planning, more research: "What we found is it was way more complicated than we thought," says Gillen. "We realized there was a lot we didn't know, and we wanted to go back to the drawing board."

But urban aggers counter that the RDA was dipping its toes where it feared to swim, blaming an institutional nervousness when it comes to giving up control of any land.

"[Gillen] really wanted to develop an interim land-usage program — and it's an open debate as to whether you can build something and operate something in the three- to five-year period the RDA wanted to lease the land for," points out Mary Seton Corboy, co-founder of Greensgrow Farm, which was itself built 13 years ago on RDA-leased land, and represents one of the only economically successful urban "farms" in the city.

"Gillen saw it as a way the RDA could get land off its hands but still manage long-term control over it," Corboy explains. "Other people said, that's ridiculous, you need to give someone a minimum of 10 years."

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The next city agency to give urban agriculture a shot is the Department of Parks and Recreation, which has unveiled a plan to lease out park land in the Manatawna Farms area — much easier to farm than vacant lots and brownfields — for for-profit commercial farming. The department has issued a Request for Information, to be followed by a Request for Proposal, to lease out 10 half-acre plots to willing farmers at a nominal price.

"What we're hoping to demonstrate is you don't need large parcels of land, that this is a viable economic process," says Environment, Stewardship and Education director Joan Blaustein. This ideahas met with a warmer reception from urban ag gurus.

"Farming is generally a business and it has to be treated like a business," says Greensgrow's Corboy, "and when you don't treat it as a business, it fails."

Roxanne Christensen, co-founder of Somerton Tanks Farm, a now-finished demonstration project which also used public land to create a for-profit urban farm, agrees. She says the distinction between profitable and nonprofit farming is everything: "It's a distinction I harp on, and that I think is important," says Christensen. "It's the only way urban agriculture is going to be established on any scale."

But the profitable end of urban gardening has so far catered largely to the recent, and decidedly upper-end, market for higher-priced local food — which puts a few holes in the sails of those who tout it as a solution to the needs of poor city residents.

The nonprofit Mill Creek Farm, for example, serves a largely educational function for low-income neighbors, according to co-director Jade Walker (although they do donate to the local food bank). She sees the city's best role as preserving existing community farms, rather than actively pursuing new ones.

"I'd like to say it's not a separate issue," admits Christensen, referring to the lofty goals of inner-city low-income food access and nutrition,"but how urban agriculture can address that, when farmers have to make a living, I don't know. I think we'll see how — maybe that sounds like a cop-out, but I really think so.

"See if there's any interest in people becoming farmers in those [low-income] areas," she adds. "They'll figure out how to serve their markets."

(isaiah.thompson@citypaper.net)