Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Urban farmers find new ground
Forced off land, they seek spaces for growing
CHICAGO — The windwhipped rooftop of a converted warehouse in the Kinzie Industrial Corridor might be the last place you’d expect to find fertile farmland, unless you’re Jen Rosenthal, founder and owner of Planted Chicago.
“I got my start in farming on the rooftop at Uncommon Ground, the restaurant up in Edgewater,” Rosenthal said. It was the first certified organic rooftop farm in the nation.
These days, urban farming is increasingly common, but the burgeoning business sector is not without its challenges, namely space and literal room to grow.
From her rooftop endeavors, Rosenthal began her own business installing and maintaining on-site gardens for chefs and restaurants across the city, including Lula Cafe in Logan Square.
“Three years ago, I took advantage of an opportunity on a little plot of land on the South Side to start also growing crops outright for some of the chefs that were looking for really specific niche ingredients,” she added.
What were among the custom crops she has grown?
“One of my favorites and unusual were crosnes,” Rosenthal said. “They look like little tiny grubs, but they’re tubers.
“They’re amazing and have this really crunchy, juicy texture, kind of like a raw almond meets a water chestnut.”
But this growing season she’s back on rooftops as a consultant and not on her own farm in North Kenwood.
“I lost the lease,” Rosenthal said. “It was an incubator system, and I aged out. I think there’s this notion that people think urban farming is so easy. There’s so many empty lots. Like how difficult can it be? It’s not quite as straightforward as one might think. And I have been looking for good alternative land access for the three years.”
Erika Allen is the cofounder and chief executive officer of Urban Growers Collective, previously Growing Power.
Allen’s father, Will Allen, is the retired professional basketball player turned urban farmer who founded the original organization in Milwaukee. He won a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 2008. In November 2017, Growing Power closed.
“My dad was retiring, and the organization in Milwaukee had been financially challenged for a while,” Erika Allen said. “It had shifted to less programming and more urban farming, which is very difficult to do without capital.”
Urban Growers Collective is a nonprofit that works to
develop urban farms, but not just for food, although crops include a number of mustard green varieties, as well as herbs for culinary, aromatic and medicinal use.
“We use urban farming as a way to heal communities in terms of trauma and the violence that a lot of our youth and their families experience,” Allen said. “Also as a recovery from the historic impact of structural racism that manifested through the agriculture system.
“So we’re taking this really broken system of agriculture that exploited labor first through slavery and then through sharecropping and then migrant workers. Now we’re taking that and reclaiming that and using it to create sustainable communities.”
But even a pioneer like Erika Allen faces land access problems.
“Our primary farm is our South Chicago farm, 90th (Street) and Lake Shore Drive, right across from the old U.S. Steel site. That’s a 7-acre farm that replaced Iron Street, which used to be our biggest, but we lost that farm. The owner wanted $14 million for the site, and we could not afford that.
“Luckily we had a funder who’s incredibly generous and believes in us, so we had the resources to do it, but it was really emotional, after 10 years of building, taking an industrial site to a prosperous farm, to have to walk away from that. We were able to relocate all the soil, animals and hoop houses to South Chicago. Now it’s on public land.”
The public land is critical to each farmer’s permanence, but new administrations can change policy, perhaps forcing them off land as Rosenthal experienced with Planted Chicago.
“The South Chicago farm is an important model because it’s publicly held land. The farmers we are ‘incubating’ — our incubator is not a two-year incubator, it’s a permanent incubator, meaning those farmers never have to leave the site — they’re in a training program. Once the training wheels are off, they maintain and continue to grow on the farm.
“It’s our job to replicate the program on other land.”
From hundreds of growing farmers to the other end of the urban farm spectrum you get a one-woman operation, The Pie Patch, a half-acre strawberry farm in the Back of the Yards neighborhood. “I think it’s the only pick-yourown farm in the county,” said owner and farmer Breanne Heath.
“I am a for-profit, but I’ve never actually made a profit,” Heath said. “I don’t think any for-profit farm in the city has yet.”
As with most urban farmers in Chicago, she does not own the land.
“There is a lot of vacant land, and it should be used for growing food, but I don’t know if it all needs to (solely) be these urban farms,” she added. “That should be decided by the communities themselves.”
Back on the rooftop, Rosenthal, a friend of Heath’s, agreed. “It’s hard. People sometimes have a romantic notion. But people connect with farming too. And the more they can and the more they can see a future with it, whether in an urban space or not, means everything right now.”
Despite her experience and expertise, rooftops are not her favorite place.
“I feel a little more comfortable with my two feet planted firmly on the earth.”