Interesting article about farming in the City or Detroit

[Peter Hines]

Whiskey & Gunpowder
By Mark Dowie
November 3, 2009
Originally Published in Guernica

Will There Be Food Among America’s Ruins?

Were I an aspiring farmer in search of fertile land to buy and
plow, I would seriously consider moving to Detroit. There is
open land, fertile soil, ample water, willing labor, and a
desperate demand for decent food. And there is plenty of
community will behind the idea of turning the capital of
American industry into an agrarian paradise. In fact, of all the
cities in the world, Detroit may be best positioned to become
the world’s first one hundred percent food self-sufficient city.

Right now, Detroit is as close as any city in America to
becoming a food desert, not just another metropolis like
Chicago, Philadelphia, or Cleveland with a bunch of small- and
medium-sized food deserts scattered about, but nearly a
full-scale, citywide food desert. (A food desert is defined by
those who study them as a locality from which healthy food is
more than twice as far away as unhealthy food, or where the
distance to a bag of potato chips is half the distance to a head
of lettuce.) About 80 percent of the residents of Detroit buy
their food at the one thousand convenience stores, party stores,
liquor stores, and gas stations in the city. There is such a
dire shortage of protein in the city that Glemie Dean Beasley, a
seventy-year-old retired truck driver, is able to augment his
Social Security by selling raccoon carcasses (twelve dollars
apiece, serves a family of four) from animals he has treed and
shot at undisclosed hunting grounds around the city. Pelts are
ten dollars each. Pheasants are also abundant in the city and
are occasionally harvested for dinner.

Detroiters who live close enough to suburban borders to find
nearby groceries carrying fresh fruit, meat, and vegetables are
a small minority of the population. The health consequences of
food deserts are obvious and dire. Diabetes, heart failure,
hypertension, and obesity are chronic in Detroit, and life
expectancy is measurably lower than in any American city.

Not so long ago, there were five produce-carrying grocery chains
— Kroger, A&P, Farmer Jack, Wrigley, and Meijer — competing
vigorously for the Detroit food market. Today there are none.
Nor is there a single WalMart or Costco in the city. Specialty
grocer Trader Joe’s just turned down an attractive offer to
open an outlet in relatively safe and prosperous midtown
Detroit; a rapidly declining population of chronically poor
consumers is not what any retailer is after. High employee
turnover, loss from theft, and cost of security are also cited
by chains as reasons to leave or avoid Detroit. So it is
unlikely grocers will ever return, despite the tireless
flirtations of City Hall, the Chamber of Commerce, and the
Michigan Food and Beverage Association. There is a fabulous
once-a-week market, the largest of its kind in the country, on
the east side that offers a wide array of fresh meat, eggs,
fruit, and vegetables. But most people I saw there on an early
April Saturday arrived in well polished SUVs from the suburbs.
So despite the Eastern Market, in-city Detroiters are still left
with the challenge of finding new ways to feed themselves a
healthy meal.

One obvious solution is to grow their own, and the urban
backyard garden boom that is sweeping the nation has caught hold
in Detroit, particularly in neighborhoods recently settled by
immigrants from agrarian cultures of Laos and Bangladesh, who
are almost certain to become major players in an agrarian
Detroit. Add to that the five hundred or so
twenty-by-twenty-foot community plots and a handful of three- to
ten-acre farms cultured by church and non-profit groups, and
during its four-month growing season, Detroit is producing
somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of its food supply inside
city limits — more than most American cities, but nowhere near
enough to allay the food desert problem. About 3 percent of the
groceries sold at the Eastern Market are homegrown; the rest are
brought into Detroit by a handful of peri-urban farmers and
about one hundred and fifty freelance food dealers who buy their
produce from Michigan farms between thirty and one hundred miles
from the city and truck it into the market.

There are more visionaries in Detroit than in most Rust-Belt
cities, and thus more visions of a community rising from the
ashes of a moribund industry to become, if not an urban
paradise, something close to it. The most intriguing visionaries
in Detroit, at least the ones who drew me to the city, were
those who imagine growing food among the ruins — chard and
tomatoes on vacant lots (there are over 103,000 in the city,
sixty thousand owned by the city), orchards on former school
grounds, mushrooms in open basements, fish in abandoned
factories, hydroponics in bankrupt department stores, livestock
grazing on former golf courses, high-rise farms in old hotels,
vermiculture, permaculture, hydroponics, aquaponics, waving
wheat where cars were once test-driven, and winter greens
sprouting inside the frames of single-story bungalows stripped
of their skin and re-sided with Plexiglas — a homemade
greenhouse. Those are just a few of the agricultural
technologies envisioned for the urban prairie Detroit has become.

There are also proposals on the mayor’s desk to rezone vast
sections A-something (“A” for agriculture), and a proposed
master plan that would move the few people residing in lonely,
besotted neighborhoods into Detroit’s nine loosely defined
villages and turn the rest of the city into open farmland. An
American Institute of Architects panel concludes that all
Detroit’s residents could fit comfortably in fifty square
miles of land. Much of the remaining ninety square miles could
be farmed. Were that to happen, and a substantial investment was
made in greenhouses, vertical farms, and aquaponic systems,
Detroit could be producing protein and fibre 365 days a year and
soon become the first and only city in the world to produce
close to 100 percent of its food supply within its city limits.
No semis hauling groceries, no out-of-town truck farmers, no
food dealers. And no chain stores need move back. Everything
eaten in the city could be grown in the city and distributed to
locally owned and operated stores and co-ops. I met no one in
Detroit who believed that was impossible, but only a few who
believed it would happen. It could, but not without a lot of
political and community will.

There are a few cities in the world that grow and provide about
half their total food supply within their urban and peri-urban
regions — Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Havana, Cuba; Hanoi,
Vietnam; Dakar, Senegal; Rosario, Argentina; Cagayan de Oro in
the Philippines; and, my personal favorite, Cuenca, Equador —
all of which have much longer growing seasons than Detroit.
However, those cities evolved that way, almost unintentionally.
They are, in fact, about where Detroit was agriculturally around
one hundred and fifty years ago. Half of them will almost surely
drop under 50 percent sufficiency within the next two decades as
industry subsumes cultivated land to build factories (à la
China). Because of its unique situation, Detroit could come
close to being 100 percent self-sufficient.

First, the city lies on one hundred and forty square miles of
former farmland. Manhattan, Boston, and San Francisco could be
placed inside the borders of Detroit with room to spare, and the
population is about the same as the smallest of those cities,
San Francisco: eight hundred thousand. And that number is still
declining from a high of two million in the mid-nineteen
fifties. Demographers expect Detroit’s population to level off
somewhere between five hundred thousand and six hundred thousand
by 2025. Right now there is about forty square miles of
unoccupied open land in the city, the area of San Francisco, and
that landmass could be doubled by moving a few thousand people
out of hazardous firetraps into affordable housing in the eight
villages. As I drove around the city, I saw many full-sized
blocks with one, two, or three houses on them, many already
burned out and abandoned. The ones that weren’t would make
splendid farmhouses.

As Detroit was built on rich agricultural land, the soil beneath
the city is fertile and arable. Certainly some of it is
contaminated with the wastes of heavy industry, but not so badly
that it’s beyond remediation. In fact, phyto-remediation,
using certain plants to remove toxic chemicals permanently from
the soil, is already practiced in parts of the city. And some of
the plants used for remediation can be readily converted to
biofuels. Others can be safely fed to livestock.

Leading the way in Detroit’s soil remediation is Malik Yakini,
owner of the Black Star Community Book Store and founder of the
Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. Yakini and his
colleagues begin the remediation process by removing abandoned
house foundations and toxic debris from vacated industrial
sites. Often that is all that need be done to begin farming.
Throw a little compost on the ground, turn it in, sow some
seeds, and water it. Water in Detroit is remarkably clean and plentiful.

Although Detroiters have been growing produce in the city since
its days as an eighteenth-century French trading outpost, urban
farming was given a major boost in the nineteen eighties by a
network of African-American elders calling themselves the
“Gardening Angels.” As migrants from the rural South, where
many had worked as small farmers and field hands, they brought
agrarian skills to vacant lots and abandoned industrial sites of
the city, and set out to reconnect their descendants, children
of asphalt, to the Earth, and teach them that useful work
doesn’t necessarily mean getting a job in a factory.

Thirty years later, Detroit has an eclectic mix of agricultural
systems, ranging from three-foot window boxes growing a few
heads of lettuce to a large-scale farm run by The Catherine
Ferguson Academy, a home and school for pregnant girls that not
only produces a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, but also
raises chickens, geese, ducks, bees, rabbits, and milk goats.

Across town, Capuchin Brother Rick Samyn manages a garden that
not only provides fresh fruits and vegetables to city soup
kitchens, but also education to neighborhood children. There are
about eighty smaller community gardens scattered about the city,
more and more of them raising farm animals alongside the
veggies. At the moment, domestic livestock is forbidden in the
city, as are beehives. But the ordinance against them is
generally ignored and the mayor’s office assures me that
repeal of the bans are imminent.

About five hundred small plots have been created by an
international organization called Urban Farming, founded by
acclaimed songwriter Taja Sevelle. Realizing that Detroit was
the most agriculturally promising of the fourteen cities in five
countries where Urban Farming now exists, Sevelle moved herself
and her organization’s headquarters there last year. Her goal
is to triple the amount of land under cultivation in Detroit
every year. All food grown by Urban Farming is given free to the
poor. According to Urban Farming’s Detroit manager, Michael
Travis, that won’t change.

Larger scale, for-profit farming is also on the drawing board.
Financial services entrepreneur John Hantz has asked the city to
let him farm a seventy-acre parcel he owns close to the Eastern
Market. If that is approved and succeeds in producing food for
the market, and profit for Hantz Farms, Hantz hopes to create
more large-scale commercial farms around the city. Not everyone
in Detroit’s agricultural community is happy with the scale or
intentions of Hantz’s vision, but it seems certain to become
part of the mix. And unemployed people will be put to work.

Any agro-economist will tell you that urban farming creates
jobs. Even without local production, the food industry creates
three dollars of job growth for every dollar spent on food — a
larger multiplier effect than almost any other product or
industry. Farm a city, and that figure jumps over five dollars.
To a community with persistent two-digit unemployment, that
number is manna. But that’s only one economic advantage of
farming a city.

The average food product purchased in a U.S. chain store has
traveled thirteen hundred miles, and about half of it has
spoiled en route, despite the fact that it was bioengineered to
withstand transport. The total mileage in a three-course
American meal approaches twenty-five thousand. The food seems
fresh because it has been refrigerated in transit, adding great
expense and a huge carbon footprint to each item, and
subtracting most of the minerals and vitamins that would still
be there were the food grown close by.

I drove around the city one day with Dwight Vaughter and Gary
Wozniak. A soft-spoken African American, Vaughter is CEO of
SHAR, a self-help drug rehab program with about two hundred
residents recovering from various addictions in an abandoned
hospital. Wozniak, a bright, gregarious Polish American, who,
unlike most of his fellow Poles, has stayed in Detroit, is the
program’s financial director. Vaughter and Wozniak are trying
to create a labor-intensive economic base for their program,
with the conviction that farming and gardening are therapeutic.
They have their eyes on two thousand acres in one of the worst
sections of the city, not far from the Eastern Market. They
estimate that there are about four thousand people still living
in the area, most of them in houses that should have been
condemned and razed years ago. There are also six churches in
the section, offering some of the best ecclesiastical
architecture in the city.

I tried to imagine what this weedy, decrepit, trash-ridden urban
dead zone would look like under cultivation. First, I removed
the overhead utilities and opened the sky a little. Then I tore
up the useless grid of potholed streets and sidewalks and
replaced them with a long winding road that would take
vegetables to market and bring parishioners to church. I wrecked
and removed most of the houses I saw, leaving a few that somehow
held some charm and utility. Of course, I left the churches
standing, as I did a solid red brick school, boarded up a decade
ago when the student body dropped to a dozen or so bored and
unstimulated deadbeats. It could be reopened as an urban
ag-school, or SHAR’s residents could live there. I plowed and
planted rows of every imaginable vegetable, created orchards and
raised beds, set up beehives and built chicken coops, rabbit
warrens, barns, and corrals for sheep, goats, and horses. And of
course, I built sturdy hoop houses, rows of them, heated by
burning methane from composting manure and ag-waste to keep
frost from winter crops. The harvest was tended by former drug
addicts who like so many before them found salvation in growing
things that keep their brethren alive.

That afternoon I visited Grace Lee Boggs, a
ninety-three-year-old Chinese-American widow who has been
envisioning farms in Detroit for decades. Widow of legendary
civil rights activist Jimmy Boggs, Grace preserves his legacy
with the energy of ten activists. The main question on my mind
as I climbed the steps to her modest east side home, now a
center for community organizers, was whether or not Detroit
possesses the community and political will to scale its
agriculture up to 100 percent food self-sufficiency. Yes, Grace
said to the former, and no to the latter. But she really
didn’t believe that political will was that essential.

“The food riots erupting around the world challenge us to
rethink our whole approach to food,” she said, but as
communities, not as bodies politic. “Today’s hunger crisis
is rooted in the industrialized food system which destroys local
food production and forces nations like Kenya, which only
twenty-five years ago was food self-sufficient, to import 80
percent of its food because its productive land is being used by
global corporations to grow flowers and luxury foods for
export.” The same thing happened to Detroit, she says, which
was once before a food self-sufficient community.

I asked her whether the city government would support
large-scale urban agriculture. “City government is
irrelevant,” she answered. “Positive change, leaps forward
in the evolution of humankind do not start with governments.
They start right here in our living rooms and kitchens. We are
the leaders we are looking for.”

All the decaying Rust-Belt cities in the American heartland have
at one time or another imagined themselves transformed into some
sort of exciting new post-industrial urban model. And some have
begun the process of transformation. Now it’s Detroit’s
turn, Boggs believes. It could follow the examples of
Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Buffalo, and become a slightly
recovered metropolis, another pathetic industrial has-been still
addicted to federal stimulus, marginal jobs, and the corporate
food system. Or it could make a complete break and become, if
not a paradise, well, at least a pretty good place to live.

Not everyone in Detroit is enthusiastic about farming. Many
urbanites believe that structures of some sort or another belong
on urban land. And a lot of those people just elected David Bing
mayor of the city. Bing’s opponent, acting mayor Ken Cockrel,
was committed to expanding urban agriculture in Detroit. Bing
has not said he’s opposed to it, but his background as a
successful automotive parts manufacturer will likely have him
favoring a future that maintains the city’s primary nickname:
Motor City.

And there remains a lasting sense of urbanity in Detroit.
“This is a city, not a farm,” remarked one skeptic of urban
farming. She’s right, of course. A city is more than a farm.
But that’s what makes Detroit’s rural future exciting. Where
else in the world can one find a
one-hundred-and-forty-square-mile agricultural community with
four major league sports teams, two good universities, the fifth
largest art museum in the country, a world-class hospital, and
headquarters of a now-global industry, that while faltering,
stands ready to green their products and keep three million
people in the rest of the country employed?

Despite big auto’s crash, “Detroit” is still synonymous
with the industry. When people ask, “What will become of
Detroit?” most of them still mean, “What will become of GM,
Ford, and Chrysler?” If Detroit the city is to survive in any
form, it should probably get past that question and begin
searching for ways to put its most promising assets, land and
people, to productive use again by becoming America’s first
modern agrarian metropolis.

Contemporary Detroit gave new meaning to the word
“wasteland.” It still stands as a monument to a form of land
abuse that became endemic to industrial America —
once-productive farmland, teaming with wildlife, was paved and
poisoned for corporate imperatives. Now the city offers itself
as an opportunity to restore some of its agrarian tradition, not
fifty miles from downtown in the countryside where most of us
believe that tradition was originally established, but a short
bicycle ride away. American cities once grew much of their food
within walking distance of most of their residents. In fact, in
the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most early
American cities, Detroit included, looked more like the English
countryside, with a cluster of small villages interspersed with
green open space. Eventually, farmers of the open space sold
their land to developers and either retired or moved their farms
out of cities, which were cut into grids and plastered with
factories, shopping malls, and identical row houses.

Detroit now offers America a perfect place to redefine urban
economics, moving away from the totally paved, heavy-industrial
factory-town model to a resilient, holistic, economically
diverse, self-sufficient, intensely green, rural/urban community
— and in doing so become the first modern American city where
agriculture, while perhaps not the largest, is the most vital industry.

Sincerely,
Mark Dowie

Mark Dowie is a former publisher and editor of Mother Jones
magazine. He has authored five books, including Losing Ground:
American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century
and American Foundations: An Investigative History and has
received sixteen journalism awards.
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George Vye
gm...@me.com
http://dieoff.org/
http://www.vhemt.org/

What becomes of the surplus of human life It is either: 1st.
destroyed by infanticide, as among the Chinese and
Lacedemonians; or 2nd. it is stifled or starved, as among other
nations whose population is commensurate to its food; or 3d. it
is consumed by wars and endemic diseases; or 4th. it overflows,
by emigration, to places where a surplus of food is attainable.
~ James Madison, 1791