Salt Spring Island farmer reaps dreams of urban agriculture
Salt Spring islander Michael Ableman realizes dream of urban production
Salt Spring Island farmer Michael Ableman always believed inner-city farming could reach commercial levels of production and dreamt that it could provide hope for society’s most desperate people. Ableman is a founder of Sole Food Street Farms in Vancouver. After eight years, it produces an annual 25 tonnes of vegetables and tree fruit worth $300,000 to $350,000.
The produce is grown on about five acres spread around downtown Vancouver — including one patch near B.C. Place Stadium — with staff drawn from the city’s Downtown Eastside.
“We always had a goal of creating credible scales of food production,” said Ableman, author of Street Farm: Growing Food, Jobs and Hope on the Urban Frontier “Certainly, the scale we achieve is truly agricultural.”
Ableman was also determined that his inner-city agriculture would provide a purpose for people dealing with poverty, addictions or mental illnesses — to him, jobs were even more important than harvest levels.
“We wanted to provide a meaningful engagement for people to get out of bed each day,” Ableman said.
Sole Farms now has about 20 employees and supplies 50 restaurants in the Lower Mainland with fresh produce.
Its produce is also sold at five farmers’ markets, and $20,000 worth of food is donated every year to community kitchens.
“We are having, in many ways, a greater impact than the employment models used, at least historically, by a lot of the social service agencies,” Ableman said.
Ableman and Sole Foods are part of a wider movement to bring food production into urban settings. It can be orchards in urban parks, fruit trees planted along streets, or backyard garden produce sold at the roadside.
Victoria, for example, has two commercial-level urban farms, Top Soil and Mason Street Farms.
Michael Kemshaw, executive director of LifeCycles Project Society, said much of the urban agriculture in Victoria is smallscale.
“People are growing vegetables in their backyards to feed their families and share a fair bit over the fence,” said Kemshaw.
But he said LifeCycles has shown just how productive these small-scale plots can be.
The society supplies volunteers to pick unwanted fruit from trees on behalf of agencies such as the Mustard Seed Church food bank and take away unwanted produce.
Last year alone, it recovered 60,000 pounds of fruit from Victoria’s backyards and redistributed it in the community.
Victoria Coun. Jeremy Loveday is fully behind the notion of Victoria’s urban spaces producing food, even small scale-livestock efforts such as keeping chickens for eggs.
The city has brought in policies to encourage urban farming — Victoria residents can now sell their backyard produce, even eggs, at roadside stands, and building codes have been altered to allow rooftop gardens and greenhouses.
Loveday said even city-owned boulevards, previously used to grow vegetables in “guerrillafashion” garden plots, can now be openly planted.
The city supplies brochures on urban agriculture and its website is full of information on how to start.
“The city is finally catching on and recognizing that we can support food production,” Loveday said.
Ableman said Victoria is in many ways far ahead of most cities — its planning, parks and engineering departments are all coming on board with imaginative new initiatives to support food production.
“Let’s face it — if cities are going to talk about going green, they should also address how they obtain their food,” said Ableman, who acknowledges that Sole Foods in Vancouver is unique and survives because it’s a charity.
“It couldn’t make it as a forprofit business and must raise about $300,000 in donations each year.
Because it draws employees from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, Sole Food must doublestaff at all times, as it can never tell when an employee might fail to show up for one or two days, or even weeks.
Sole Foods never demands answers when an employee reappears after an absence. But customers can’t be relied upon to be so forgiving.
“Whether someone shows up or not, we always have 50 restaurants depending on us for their orders,” said Ableman.
“So we always have extra hands to fill in.
“Most businesses could not operate that way, but our goals were never just financial.
“What we are trying to accomplish is meaningful engagement with agricultural training, employment and participation for people who are struggling.”