By Jordyn Harrison for Yes! Media.
Broadcast version by Jordyn Harrison and Jonah Chester for Illinois News Connection reporting for the YES! Media-Public News Service Collaboration
From 100 feet in the air, the parcel at 500 N. Waller Ave. in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago looks like the center of a donut. Surrounded by two churches, a fire station, a senior home, a town hall, a library, and a high school is a rectangular green space the size of five city lots. The land once stood empty and desolate, like many vacant lots in Chicago, but today, it houses beds of vegetables and fruits soaking in the sun and goats from a nearby farm resting under the shade of a tree. In the middle of the green space sits a gazebo with a hand-painted sign that reads, "Harambee! Gardens."
"From the start, it was something big enough that people would know about [it], partially because of the sheer size of it," says Seamus Ford, co-founder of the garden, as he gives a tour on a cool October day, picking raspberries and pointing out tomatoes along the way.
Ford, a Chicago-born outdoorsman, casually walks through the garden with humble familiarity. Every now and then, he pauses, looking over the expanse of green in wonder, and recounts a detail about the garden's beginnings.
In 2008, Ford, a special project manager for an educational company and a resident of the Austin neighborhood, became concerned about fossil fuel inputs and how food is grown.
"When fuel prices were going through the roof, it started to get really clear to me that there's a change underway, and it could be a bad one if we don't have answers to this," Ford recalls. And that's when he got into gardening. "I basically got rid of any grass, almost all the grass where I live, and built raised beds."
Around the same time, he often drove by a vacant lot and began to feel a "siren call" to build a community garden. According to the DePaul Institute for Housing Studies, there are nearly 32,000 vacant lots in Chicago. Though many contain debris and trash, they can be an ecological and social opportunity. Planting a garden amid an otherwise empty lot is an opportunity that an increasing number of communities are choosing to pursue, but it is also one that requires hard work to sustain.
Ford learned that the land belonged to a neighbor and got permission to transform the grass lot into a garden. He then co-founded Root-Riot, an organization with the goal of creating a network of urban gardens "growing local food, fostering resilience, and reweaving the fabric of our community, one planting bed at a time."
Now, 12 years in, the Harambee Community Garden can provide lessons about how it was able to last this long and where it's headed from here.
Sowing Seeds of Change
In late spring of 2010, Ford was mowing the lot's overgrown grass when Deandre Robinson, then a junior at Frederick Douglass Academy High School, walked across the street to ask Ford what he was doing. Robinson was thrilled with Ford's answer, because students and teachers at Frederick Douglass had been discussing what could be done with that very lot, which had stood empty for more than 25 years.
"His face lit up so bright," Ford says, recalling meeting Robinson 11 years ago. The resulting collaboration ultimately became the Harambee Community Garden, named for the Swahili word meaning "all pull together."
Austin residents and members of surrounding communities organized workdays to begin transforming the vacant lot. Eager student volunteers from Frederick Douglass, like Robinson, helped with mowing, preparing the soil, and building the initial 30 garden beds-which grew to 58 the second year.
Interested gardeners, experienced or not, could rent a 4-by-8-foot raised garden bed for $40 a year or $100 for three years (which remains the price to this day). The cost covers materials needed for the garden, such as soil, compost, tools, and the beds themselves. People take home the food that is grown or give it away to the firehouse, the senior home, or other neighbors.
The garden has brought people from all walks of life together across the road dividing the Austin neighborhood from its more affluent neighbor, Oak Park. "Everybody was able to link up together and find common ground and make a new friend, find mentors," Robinson says. A jobs program called Youth Guidance even got youth who were involved with local gangs to participate in the garden.
In the heat of Chicago summers, adults worked alongside youth to pull weeds and tend to crops. During the school year, they worked to make sure youth stayed on top of their studies and found other opportunities to add to their résumés. Adult gardeners helped Robinson study for the SAT and get an internship with local elected official U.S. Rep. Danny K. Davis. Ford even took Robinson shopping to get his first suit and tie.
Though Robinson doesn't currently garden-he's now a petty officer 1st class in the Navy and an entrepreneur-he credits his work ethic and consciousness of how food is grown to his time spent at Harambee.
"When people talk about Chicago, when they ask where I'm from, I'm never embarrassed. I'm very prideful, because a lot of the time, they don't know us. ... They don't know our situation, our struggles," Robinson says.
He believes the way in which the garden exposed him to new experiences as a teen can also influence the current generation of youth for the better.
"Why not give them the opportunity to appreciate something by growing it, raising it, by having a sense of ownership?" he says. "You treat things different when you have a sense of ownership."
Lessons From Another Generation
In addition to attracting students from the high school, Harambee pulled together people from other surrounding buildings. The churches started doing Sunday school classes in the garden, the firehouse supplied water, and the local library got a bed and started doing after-school programming.
Senior home residents, who had a full view of the garden from their apartment windows, gradually made their way outside to get involved. Ford says a number of the neighborhood's older residents grew up in the rural South with a basic knowledge of how to grow food. Many of them came north during the Great Migration, when, between 1916 and 1970, millions of African Americans left the rural South and landed in Midwestern cities like Chicago in search of economic opportunities and to escape from racial violence and Jim Crow segregation.
Once they landed in the city, many of these new Chicagoans sought ways to remain connected to parts of their agricultural history and reap the benefits of spending time outdoors amid an industrialized urban environment, according to Brian McCammack, author of Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago.
"Migrants' 'kinship with the soil' was never completely severed in Chicago," McCammack writes. Instead, relationships with nature were actively reshaped, recast, and reimagined in the city's landscapes of hope."
Accessing green spaces wasn't always easy though.
"Low-paying jobs and racially discriminatory housing policies had the effect of clustering Black Chicago's working classes in the most impoverished and segregated neighborhoods, so building connections with nature in their own private green spaces was virtually out of the question.
At the same time, the parks and beaches most easily accessible to them were small, ill-equipped, and even hazardous-landscapes that could inspire more disillusionment than hope," McCammack writes.
So when the Harambee garden opened in Austin, a neighborhood that has endured decades of disinvestment, residents old and young latched on to the opportunity to sow seeds of change.
"Suddenly, [senior residents] were able to come out and teach people about how to do so many different things: growing a tomato plant to growing okra, how to manage your soil," Ford says. "Some people couldn't walk, and they'd just sit in motorized scooters on the sidewalk giving instructions to the kids."
Growing Through the Gravel
To be sure, sustaining the garden has been an ongoing challenge. The original wooden beds fell apart and were replaced with cinder block beds that are nestled on a plot of gravel. The gravel, too, was a response to the problem of invasive bindweed, which required constant mowing and removal. The weed almost choked the life out of the garden at one point, but a core group of gardeners devoted themselves to keeping the garden alive. In 2019, NeighborSpace, an urban land trust, purchased and protected the land and installed gravel to help prevent the bindweed from taking over.
Community gardens like Harambee are becoming increasingly popular, with more than 29,000 garden plots in city parks in the 100 largest U.S. cities. However, a national survey by the American Community Gardening Association reports that only 32.3% of community gardens last for more than 10 years. The most commonly cited reason for gardens dissolving was "lack of interest by gardeners."
While the Harambee garden is embraced by the community, the number of Austin residents who rent garden beds fluctuates year to year. Still, the commitment of the garden's most active members have held it together during its most difficult times. One of them, Maria Sorrell, was walking through the neighborhood in 2010 when she saw banners advertising the garden.
"Originally, I was just going to make a donation, because I wasn't into gardening," Sorrell says. But as a retiree with lots of free time, she decided to rent a bed in the garden's very first year and has been making connections and learning to grow vegetables ever since.
Over the years, volunteers have traveled from various parts of the city and western suburbs to help in the garden, including high school students and others seeking volunteer hours as part of their community service.
"The people that tend to come to volunteer days often are people from outside the community," Ford says, "and the active people participating are not always necessarily reflective of the community." Ford sees this as a challenge and an opportunity.
Participating gardeners, about 30 currently, are considering building a steering committee for the garden to decide how they might get more Austin residents to rent beds and increase the number of gardeners involved in events and planning.
"The space belongs to everybody," says Ford, who still resides in Austin and actively participates in the garden. "This isn't a club. This is just a facility for the community."
Expanding the Garden's Reach
Over time, the garden has become increasingly self-supporting. While Harambee once relied on the generosity of the senior home and firehouse for its water, NeighborSpace has since installed an underground water system and aboveground watering stations.
The gardeners still collaborate with organizations in the community to educate people on growing their own food and serve as a location for gathering and connecting. For instance, this past summer, a group of youth in the Park District's TRACE (Teens Reimagining Arts, Culture, and Environment) program worked with alt Space Chicago, an Austin art organization, to build seating for the garden with repurposed wood. Future plans include adding a play area for children, installed with the help of the West Side Nature Play Network, a group of community partners dedicated to creating accessible and safe opportunities for children and caregivers to explore the outdoors on Chicago's West Side.
The goats that graze on the other side of Harambee belong to GlennArt Farm, a small goat farm down the street from the garden that opened around the same time as Harambee. Seeing goats lounging in the middle of a city neighborhood often evokes curiosity from people walking by.
"They're just so interesting to people that people stop along the fence, and they'll pull up some grass and feed it to the goats," Ford says. "And a weird thing happens when you're standing next to a stranger observing something that's kind of wondrous.
"If you're there long enough, you feel obliged to introduce yourself. And the introduction is like a threshold ... it's a subtle form of connection," Ford says. "The garden is a place where individual human connections get made."
Jordyn Harrison wrote this article for YES! Magazine.
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Ocean advocates are hailing a federal judge's decision that deemed a nationwide permit for industrial aquaculture structures unlawful.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' approval of the permit for finfish nets and cages was found to violate several environmental laws.
Center for Food Safety Legal Director George Kimbrell called that a win against corporate interests pushing to industrialize the open ocean.
"It's an important victory protecting our oceans," said Kimbrell, "their native ecosystems, and the communities that rely on them."
Still, Kimbrell said the court ordered both sides to return to court later this month with a plan on how to remedy the matter.
The ruling comes as an increasing number of Maine communities adopt emergency aquaculture moratoriums, but backers of large-scale aquaculture say it's needed to meet a growing seafood demand.
Maine's abundant coastline and working waterfronts make it an ideal place for an aquaculture business, and numerous small-scale shellfish and marine plant farms are boosting local economies.
But commercial fishermen say the growth of large, foreign-owned fish farms endangers both the ocean and their livelihoods. Kimbrell said a battle to privatize the ocean is underway.
"Taking parts of the ocean and saying, 'you can't fish here, and instead this is going to be an area we're going to allow a corporation to use exclusively for a certain number of years,'" said Kimbrell. "In this case, these are 10-year permits that would have been established."
Kimbrell said federal courts covering the Gulf of Mexico previously struck down efforts to establish industrial aquaculture there.
He said despite intense lobbying efforts by proponents, Congress has never passed a law authorizing large-scale aquaculture in federal waters.
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By Lauren Kobley for Cronkite News.
Broadcast version by Alex Gonzalez for Arizona News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration
Jesse Garcia was first introduced to farming in his grandmother’s garden. As a child, he recalls not quite understanding the true purpose of growing and how important it is.
It was in high school that he first started taking an interest in farming and agriculture. After graduating, he had a number of jobs, but he did not feel passionate about any of them. It was then that he found the Ajo Center for Sustainable Agriculture.
Arizona farmers are aging. With a hope to sustain farming practices in the state, particularly within Indigenous communities, the co-executive directors of Ajo CSA, Sterling Johnson and Nina Sajovec, are training the next generation of growers through their beginning farmer apprenticeship program.
As of the 2017 Census of Agriculture from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 59% of farmers in Arizona were Indigenous, more than any other state. The vast majority of farmers in the U.S. are over the age of 35, with an average age 57.5. With the average age of farmers increasing, advocates say it is important to train the next generation of farmers to maintain the state’s agriculture industry.
“Arizona did things backwards. We became a state. We created a job force. But, we didn’t include farming,” Johnson said. “The wrong assumption was that farming was going to stay within the family, but things have changed. The ways of thinking have changed, the way we do things have changed and there’s no one else to take over.”
The Ajo CSA program trains three to five aspiring farmers like Garcia each cycle in Ajo and on the Tohono O’odham Nation. The eight- to 11-month program allows apprentices to visit local farms, establish their own growing space and attend workshops to learn about local sustainable farming techniques.
The apprentices practice growing and harvesting different varieties of crops each season, including lettuce, tomatoes, chiles, squash, beans and corn. Because the farm is a teaching farm, the produce is not sold, but the organization saves the seeds to distribute throughout the community and use for later growing periods.
Johnson was born and raised on the Tohono O’odham Nation in a ranching and rodeo family. He has overseen more than 40 apprentices and youth interns, 70% of whom are Tohono O’odham.
“I’m very excited that we get to teach them (the apprentices) our ways, and we get to promote our ways. Not just to the outside, but to our people. They should be proud of who they are and where they come from,” Johnson said.
On the Tohono O’odham Nation, the apprentices practice climate-smart agriculture and dryland farming. The three main objectives of climate-smart agriculture are to sustainably increase productivity, adapt to climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Dryland farming is the practice of producing sustainably by using the soil’s own moisture and limited irrigation to plant and grow.
“The soils are the key factor in order to have a good nutritious crop. If you overtax those soils, you lose all the nutrients and all the natural things that are in the soils that would be healthy for us as people,” said Michael Kotutwa Johnson, a Hopi farmer and professor at the University of Arizona.
Indigenous farmers have developed and practiced these sustainable farming techniques for generations and they were almost lost, he said. One of the reasons they are successful is because of the adaptation seeds have undergone through the years to grow in desert-like climates.
“Our seeds are like us. They are human beings to the same extent that they also need to be out and adapt to these different environmental conditions. You have organizations … and they’re just holding on to those seeds. They’re also not raising them in the places where they’re from, so they’re losing their chance to adapt,” UArizona’s Johnson said.
Opportunities like the Ajo CSA apprenticeship program give young farmers the chance to get hands-on experience to develop climate-smart agricultural skills and get in touch with Indigenous culture.
“Farming’s a tradition, just like Grandma’s recipe. You don’t want Grandma’s recipe to die out and go away. You got to pass it on,” Gilbert Villegas Jr., an Ajo CSA apprentice, said.
Not only does the apprenticeship build their skills, it prepares them to farm their own land and grow on a larger scale.
Since finding Ajo CSA seven years ago, Garcia said he has learned invaluable information about farming that he has been able to apply to his own farm on the Tohono O’odham Nation.
“Working with Ajo kind of gives you the whole insight of how to run the business: How to apply for grants, how to get partners, how to use those partners, how to organize events – anything that can kind of help your business grow,” he said.
He said building his roots in farming has been a challenge, but he has had incredible mentors like Sterling Johnson that have helped guide him along the way. Garcia now comes back to Ajo CSA as a volunteer and mentor. He hopes to have an impact on those who are in the program now.
“It starts with you as a person. You have to want to change and try to bring everything (the farming techniques) back. If you don’t see the big picture then what’s the point of you trying to spread it?” Garcia asked. “There’s always somebody out there you can go and keep passing it on … hopefully somebody hears.”
Looking toward the future of the program, Sterling Johnson hopes that Native American traditional agricultural practices are given their proper recognition, acknowledgement and respect.
“This is our way of keeping our traditions alive. … We pray for those who are on the ground and those who are on top guiding in this modern world as we need agriculture to have a future for all of us,” Johnson said.
Lauren Kobley wrote this article for Cronkite News.
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By Lena Beck for Modern Farmer.
Broadcast version by Eric Tegethoff for Washington News Service reporting for the Modern Farmer-Public News Service Collaboration.
Walking through the fields of Viva Farms in Washington State's Skagit Valley, the smell of strawberries is strong in the air. The rain that came down hard the week earlier spells the end of strawberry season, says farmer Francisco Farias, but he still has raspberries, one of his favorite crops to grow.
Farias explains all this in Spanish, while Viva Farms farm viability director Anna Chotzen translates.
Farias has farmed a parcel of land here at Viva Farms since 2017-as do dozens of other farmers. Viva Farms is a farm business incubator and training program. It educates beginning farmers on sustainable practices, and provides them with land to start their business. Farias completed the program in 2016, and together with his brothers started Farias Farm in 2017.
In recent years, Viva Farms realized it needed to expand its land access work to help more mature businesses launch beyond Viva Farms. Not only is land access a critical barrier to new farmers, it's also something that has been exacerbated by patterns of discrimination by the USDA and agricultural lenders. Access to land is an even higher barrier for communities that are statistically underserved or denied loans.
"We see that the system is not working for farmers, and we're really committed to pushing the envelope so that it can [work]," says Chotzen.
Farias, who now operates his farm in partnership with his wife, wanted to pursue this goal as well. And this summer, that dream became a reality.
Working with Viva Farms and Dirt Capital Partners, an agricultural investment company, Farias now has locked in a financing deal that puts him on track to own a parcel of land a few miles away from Viva Farms, within just a few years. He has a 10-year lease and is hoping and planning to purchase it sooner than that.
"It's always been a dream and a goal of ours to find a place that we could really grow our business, and that can be a stable place where we know we can stay," says Farias.
Incubating a dream
Farias grew up farming in Mexico, and worked for a short time on a conventional farm there. When he came to the US in 1996, he worked for an organic farm in Washington state.
When he connected with Viva Farms and began its Practicum in Sustainable Agriculture, it gave him the tools to start his own business.
After his brothers completed the practicum as well, the three of them began farming together on land from Viva Farms. Farias Farm grows broccoli, cauliflower, strawberries, blueberries, carrots, and other vegetables, all organic.
"In organic production, I feel free," says Farias. "I can just be out in the field and know that everything is really healthy. I have kids, and they can come out and they can eat food off the farm, and I don't have any worries."
As they grew, they had success. They established themselves at regional farmers markets, and sold produce through Viva Farms. Farias's brothers left to pursue other careers, and his wife Lorena joined him as co-owner. They expanded from just half an acre to having 10 acres at Viva Farms and 10 acres on a nearby piece of land.
And then that nearby land went up for sale.
The final piece
The number of farms in the US decreased by 6.9 percent between 2017 and 2022, according to US Census of Agriculture Data. Washington State sees this pattern mirrored in agricultural areas such as the Skagit Valley-the state lost 3,717 farms between 2017 and 2022.
This speaks to the trend of consolidation-a rapid squeeze on small farmers across the country that shows no signs of letting up. While established farmers get forced out, new farmers struggle to take their place due to a smattering of high barriers, principle among them access to land.
Viva Farms has been operating since 2009, and provides new farmers with the tools to incubate their farm business, including capital, marketing, bilingual education, and more. One of the most important things it provides is land: Viva Farms operates more than 100 acres, and members of its incubator program can access certified organic parcels to farm.
But Viva Farms' land is not intended to be the forever home for any of the farms it incubates. "In recent years, it's become really clear that for us to be committed to farmers' success, we have to help them with this final piece," says Chotzen. "It sounds nice on paper to just say you build your business for a few years at Viva and then launch off-site, but the reality of finding a long-term home for your farm is much more challenging."
Land ownership provides individual farmers with stability and security-it gives them more freedom to make decisions about their operations and to plan long-term. Broadly, a system of diversified farms is more resilient to pests and climate shocks than monoculture operations.
And so Viva Farms worked with Farias and Dirt Capital Partners to set up terms that could result in a pathway to ownership for Farias. The model they used allows farmers to get a secure lease, with the option to purchase at a later date. This permits them to get on land right away without the requirement of an immediate down payment, and with a 10-year runway to figure out their financing.
It's a good first step, says Chotzen, and she believes it is replicable for other investment firms. Dirt Capital Partners is a leader in the space among venture capital and impact investment firms, she says, and she hopes the process evolves to further reduce interest rates and the final amount farmers owe.
"I just think that if we as the farmer support community, whether that's us at Viva or the finance space, if we really want to support the farmers who've been historically excluded, and build the food system we want using the ecological practices that we all think are essential, we have to be willing to be flexible on what we are expecting in terms of financial return," says Chotzen. "The risk can't land with the farmer all the time."
In the last two years, Viva Farms has received $6 million from the USDA to support this work. More regulatory mandates to fund this work would help, such as in the Farm Bill.
A farm stand
Having his own place to farm opens up new opportunities for Farias, and makes space for new goals. Washingtonians can find Farias Farm at regional farmers markets; he hopes to open a farm stand on the property next year. He's doing other future planning, too: He hopes to build his own cooler, so they don't have to depend on Viva Farms' refrigeration capacity anymore. There's also a house on the land they will own, and they'll be moving in soon, so they can live where they farm.
Walking back to the parking lot from the fields, Farias talks about getting to plant more blueberries now. When you rent land, you have to think short-term. Season to season. Broccoli, carrots, and other things that don't require multi-year tending. But now that he has his own land, he has the stability of getting to plan for the future.
"There are a lot of opportunities, and I'm hoping to achieve them," says Farias. "Just being able to plan for the long term is a big one."
Lena Beck wrote this article for Modern Farmer.
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