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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A diverse group of Southwest Wisconsin farmers are using federally funded conservation programs to help improve their farms' soil health and resiliency to extreme weather, from droughts to floods.

Joe Stapleton, farmer-leader for the Iowa County Uplands Watershed Group and owner of Stapleton Farms, a 535-acre mixed crop and livestock farm in Spring Green, said implementing practices like no-till and cover crops have made a significant difference in his crop outcomes.

"When you get the droughts, the dry times, they don't to seem to be as serious," Stapleton explained. "Because land that isn't tilled holds more water and '23 was a really dry year, and we had respectable crops."

A fourth-generation farmer, Stapleton pointed out the outcomes are very different from previous droughts. Erosion is also a big issue in hilly Southwestern Wisconsin, where soil is especially susceptible to it. Stapleton acknowledged while erosion cannot completely be prevented, it can be minimized. Conservation practices are allowing him, and other farmers, to do that while maximizing their efforts.

The Uplands Watershed Group was created by a group of farmers in the Dodgeville-Spring Green area. The group focuses on priorities like protecting soil and nutrients lost through polluted farm runoff, increasing water filtration into the soil, keeping water on farmland and decreasing the damage costs associated with heavy rainfalls. Stapleton added when there's too much rainfall -- as was the case this year -- the effects are also not as damaging.

"A lot of water got into the ground on these dry ridges and we produced more crops, whereas in a lot of years it would kind of drown them out, or it would run off," Stapleton outlined. "With no-till, it actually gets in the ground better, and I've never had better corn."

He learned his beans, on the other hand, do better in dryer seasons. However, he is finding that any year, no matter the weather, is still a good year for crops on Stapleton Farms because of the conservation practices he is implementing.


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A new president will move into the White House in less than a month and Illinois farmers are questioning whether Donald Trump's tough talk on tariffs will become a reality, and how his decision will affect their livelihood.

The National Corn Growers Association said a trade war with China could reduce corn and soybean exports nationwide by millions of tons. The projection could harm Illinois farmers, in a state that is second in the nation for corn acreage.

Ben Palen, co-owner and manager of Ag Management Partners, a Denver-based sustainable agriculture advisory firm, said increased political instability on the global front and greater export competition are creating some anxiety.

"I just don't think that you can have a coherent and consistent policy for agriculture if you go from one crisis to another," Palen argued.

Last weekend's last-minute spending bill in Congress to keep the government running through mid-March includes $10 billion in one-time payments to farmers, and another $20 billion for those affected by natural disasters in the last two years.

During Trump's first term, emergency aid was sent to farmers affected by the initial trade war. But the emphasis now is a push for budget cuts, which could include rolling back billions in unspent funds from the Inflation Reduction Act.

Palen looks to legislators to identify new markets for farmers to sell their crops and thinks it is not the time to dwell on trade disputes.

"I think farmers are very good at production," Palen pointed out. "It's just part of our DNA; we want to produce, produce, produce."

The most recent U.S. Census of Agriculture data for 2022, showed Illinois farms and ranches produced almost $27 billion in products, a 55% increase from 2017.


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By Jessica Scott-Reid for Sentient Climate.
Broadcast version by Danielle Smith for Keystone State News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

American consumers spend roughly $11.6 billion on candy each Halloween, but even at that rate, candy companies end up with a surplus. Those leftovers end up in some interesting places, including farms, where some farmers end up feeding candy to their animals. Chocolate and other treats that can’t be sold, or candy bits leftover from production, are being sold to some meat and dairy producers to add to their animal feed. While the practice has been going on for years, more recently, the agriculture and candy industries have been framing the practice as “sustainable” — a way to curb waste that would otherwise go to landfills. Major meat producer Cargill, for example, deems it “upcycling” and a “win-win” for the animals and the environment.

A deeper dive reveals that both meat and candy companies also benefit financially from feeding candy waste to farm animals. And some food waste experts say consumers should be questioning why there is so much of this waste to begin with.

Where the Practice Originated, and Whether It’s Healthy

Feeding candy to farm animals was initially motivated by rising corn prices during times of drought, making the practice a way for producers to reduce feed cost. Candy can apparently fill in for corn as a required sugar source. As one former cattle nutritionist turned dairy farmer, Laura Daniels, claims via social media, sugar is needed to feed bacteria in the stomach of cattle that breaks down the fiber in plant foods they consume.

However, at least one farmer doesn’t see the benefit. “Empty, nutritionally void, chemical laden sugars are being foisted on cattle and their rumens,” writes Minnesota farmer Lauren Kiesz,“all in the name of the conventional food system’s four horsemen: bigger, fatter, faster, cheaper.” Kiesz, who says she farms animals exclusively on pasture, notes, “a mouthful of grass and a mouthful of Mounds are extraordinarily different.”

The debate doesn’t end there. While some advocacy groups for pigs kept as pets urge owners not to feed candy to their animals, there are hog farmers who also add candy waste to their feed.

And it continues. “Candy of all forms is unhealthy for pigs,” says the North America Pet Pig Association. Yet, according to National Hog Farmer, “Waste chocolate can also be added up to 30 percent of finishing pig diets to support optimal growth performance without affecting carcass composition or pork quality.”

Feed is the greatest expense for most animal farmers, so cheap candy waste offers an economical solution. “When producers find a way to blend in other, cheaper ingredients into the standard cow meal, they frequently will,” reports The Counter. “As long as the stuff doesn’t hurt milk and meat output, they’re going to make more money.

Many consumers learned of the practice of feeding candy to cows in 2017, when a truckload of red Skittles spilled onto a highway in Dodge County, Wisconsin. The story went viral, making news across the country. Those particular candies were reportedly defective, lacking the signature “S” due to a power outage at the factory. Interestingly, while the truck was reportedly on its way to a nearby dairy farm, Mars (the owner of Skittles) later denied that it had sold the candy to be fed to cattle.

Questioning Candy Waste

The Hershey Company has been selling candy waste to Cargill since 2011; which the chocolate maker describes as an “innovative” “sustainability partnership.”

“Today we have an entire plant in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania (U.S.), dedicated to this environmentally, economically, nutritionally friendly effort,” states Cargill on its site. “There, our team turns tens of thousands of pounds of Hershey’s chocolate waste per year into feed ingredients for cows, pigs and other species of livestock.”

As the farmer Kiesz notes, though, claiming that feeding castoff candy to cows is a net positive to the environment, is, “on closer inspection […] completely misleading.” She explains that with all steps considered, “middle-men, inputs, and expended resources” — including the added transport of the candy — “there is no way anyone can make the argument that our environmental system is better off.”

Dr. Kathryn Bender, assistant professor of economics at the University of Delaware, seems to agree. Bender says that while “it’s always great to see these innovative solutions,” meaning the diverting of candy waste to livestock, “the most ideal thing would be if we just didn’t have that waste in the first place.”

She says that programs such as the one employed by Hershey and Cargill should be there to aid companies in measuring and subsequently cutting their waste. “Oftentimes, there’s just a lot of food waste that’s not measured, and so programs like this can allow companies to start tracking what that waste is, and then we would hope that companies would say, ‘Okay, what can we do to decrease that waste?’”

But that doesn’t seem to be happening. According to news reports, candy companies have been selling their waste to animal farmers for over a decade, at least. It turns out that having such a fallback may be quelling the motivation of a company to cut their waste, says Bender. A similar example of these perverse incentives played out in a study she worked on regarding consumer food waste that showed waste increased when consumers believed it was being composted rather than going to a landfill.

Inside the U.S. Corn Surplus

While both Hersey and Cargill tout the benefits of the partnership, Dr. Tammara Soma, associate professor and research director of the Food Systems Lab at Simon Fraser University, says consumers should be questioning why so much candy is being produced to begin with. The reason, she tells Sentient, “is because we’ve commodified corn,” and we have so much high fructose corn syrup being produced as a result.

As Soma explains, because corn is “produced in such excess and is highly subsidized in the U.S., high fructose corn syrup —- which became a cheap sweetener in lieu of sugar cane or beet sugar — got put into everything.” She says this is what spurred the production of many corn syrup based items, “like all of the candies we see for Halloween.”

Corn (and, for the record, this is dent corn not the sweet corn you eat off the cob) is considered the most valuable commodity in American agriculture, with the U.S. being the largest producer and consumer of corn in the world. Though dent corn, also called field corn, is grown mostly for feed for livestock and for ethanol, it also plays a massive role in processed food. “Corn is in the sodas Americans drink and the potato chips they snack on,” writes Roberto A. Ferdman for the Washington Post. “It’s in hamburgers and french fries, sauces and salad dressings, baked goods, breakfast cereals, virtually all poultry, and even most fish.” It’s also in candy.

Tom Philpott, a researcher at John Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, and former food and agriculture correspondent for Mother Jones and Grist, tells Sentient that the agri-food industry, “is just always looking for another profitable way to get rid of this overproduction of corn.” He adds that “someone’s going to find a use for that and a way to make a buck off of it. Selling high fructose corn syrup to the candy industry is just one way.” And because corn syrup is so cheap, he says there is little risk to candy companies to overproduce, especially when livestock farmers are there, ready to pay for it.

Hershey’s classic chocolate bar contains sugar — another product Soma explains is produced in surplus — but many of the brand’s other products, such as Twizzlers licorice, Almond Joys and York Peppermint Patties, contain corn syrup.

Soma says the commodification and surplus of corn and sugar results in waste, including “too many surplus candies, that are then fed to commodified animals.” Because animal farming has become so industrialized, she adds, “the large scale [of animals] can somewhat absorb the large scale of waste.” And on top of that, everyone gets paid.

Feeding candy to cows is not only done to curb waste and allow major corporations like Cargill to claim to be more sustainable. It also saves them money. Large companies like Hershey would otherwise likely have to pay private waste haulers, Soma explains, to either transport and dump the waste in landfills, or to be dealt with by anaerobic digesters that turn food waste into biogas. Instead, candy companies can charge meat and dairy producers to take the waste off their hands — producers who then save money thanks to the cheaper feed. They can also continue over-producing, rather than working to cut waste, while claiming to be sustainable.

Sentient reached out to Cargill for this story, but did not receive a reply.

The Bottom Line

Ultimately, Soma says that without the option of using commodified animals to absorb the surplus candy waste, “we would be able to question more why cows would ever need to eat highly processed candy derived foods,” as well as question why there is so much waste being produced to begin with, and be pushed to seek better solutions.

Overall, she says, “we need to critically question industrial agriculture and industrial commoditized food systems,” which she says are “very wasteful, very extractive, focused on profits alone at the expense of the environment, promotes monoculture and takes nature out of the equation.”


Jessica Scott-Reid wrote this article for Sentient.


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