Urban farms in Harambee became a vital food option
Black and Latinx neighborhoods already limited in healthy options hit hardest by empty shelves during disruption from pandemic
When COVID-19 began developing last year, Victory Garden Initiative, an urban farm in the Harambee neighborhood, pivoted.
The 11⁄2-acre farm nestled between Concordia Avenue and Townsend Street went from being for members only to allowing access to anyone who wants fresh vegetables that are grown on the site.
It has operated as a community supported agriculture farm since 2017 when the initiative acquired the land. People pay a yearly fee to receive a share or box of the farm’s harvest.
“We pivoted on that with COVID and decided to give it to our neighbors,” said Michelle Dobbs, who became executive director of the 12-year-old organization in 2020. “Part of it is keeping food in the neighborhood. It didn’t feel right to export the very best away from the neighborhood when people around us were hungry.”
During the pandemic, Dobbs said shelves at the few stores serving Harambee went empty. And compounding the community’s food access is a lack of affordable healthy food options, a plight shared by many Black neighborhoods. Corner stores that sell more liquor and canned foods, instead of fresh produce, proliferate Black and Latinx neighborhoods.
Urban gardens or farms like Victory Garden Initiative have increasingly stepped up to fill the food access void, providing fresh fruits and vegetables as the pandemic drags on. They’ve become pivotal in countering food insecurity.
The nonprofit Feeding America describes food insecurity as a lack of consistent access to enough food for everyone in a household to live an active and healthy life. In 2020, the projected food insecurity rate for Milwaukee County is 14.9%, according to the nonprofit’s Map the Meal Gap. For children, the rate is 26.6% compared with 19.9% nationally. “Good food is a privilege,” Dobbs said.
That privilege is based on whether people can afford it and have a quality grocery store in their community, she said. That is often not the case for lowincome communities of color, Dobbs added.
In some cases, having a reliable car to get to a quality grocery store is also a challenge.
And in areas like Harambee, which Dobbs
described as a “food swamp,” a lack of food isn’t the problem. The issue is the food that’s available here is more processed and less nutritious.
“The food system is flawed, and we’re left out of it,” she said. “But there are people who are lobbying and legislating and fighting to get that gap closed. But in the meantime, the people of the neighborhood still deserve nutritious food.”
The answer for Dobbs is self-sufficiency by teaching individuals to grow food in their own backyards until the gaps in the food system are corrected. On a small piece of land, she said, people can feed their entire family for the summer or for the year.
She is not advocating seceding from the food system, but using urban farming or “agrihood” to serve as backups.
Her organization created several services to ensure neighboring residents have access to nutritious food.
Last year, it established a farm stand, a 10foot table filled with crops harvested from the farm where residents can choose what they want at no cost. Last weekend, the farm stand gave out 200 pounds of food, which Dobbs said was gone within a matter of hours.
The farm’s crops are grown based on resident surveys and are culturally specific like collards, turnips, mustards, carrots, beans, and corn. Residents can pick their own vegetables. They also are taught canning and preserving apples, pears, peaches, plums and raspberries that are grown in the farm’s “food forest.”
Since many neighborhood residents, especially senior citizens living on fixed incomes, don’t eat regular meals, the organization began serving garden-inspired hot meals from its “to-go-window.”
The free meals are served on Wednesdays and are prepared by a volunteer retired chef. The meals are Southern comfort dishes like chicken and waffles or oxtails and gravy. They also provide snacks for kids leaving school.
“If we are putting out hot and nutritious food, people are going to have a taste for it,” she said.
Susan Holty holds a bucket of freshly picked produce from the hoop house at a garden stand at the corner of North 2nd and West Clarke streets in Milwaukee.
“That might be a lever we could push in moving that needle in terms of the health disparities in our neighborhood.”
“People in my neighborhood are three times more likely to die of a COVID-19 infection because of the co-morbidities. We got the high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes,” Dobbs added.
Reducing those health disparities begins with access to nutritious and affordable foods, something urban farms and gardens can provide, she said.
A similar effort is being repeated nearly a mile and a half away at an urban garden operated by All People’s Church. They too operate a free farm stand three times a week stocked with items harvested from its garden as well as donated produce and dry goods from local grocery stores.
“Before Pete’s (Produce) came, we were absolutely a food desert which means it is more than two miles to any grocery store where you can get fresh produce,” said Susan Holty, the church’s garden educator. “The exception is these mom and pop [stores] but they tend to have really old produce so the vitamins are basically not there anymore.”
Located at Second and Clarke streets, the garden occupies two city lots and grows a variety of greens, beans, melons, squash, snow peas and cherry tomatoes.
The garden’s goal is not only to provide fresh vegetables but introduce residents to new foods, like kiwi, eggplants or pattypan squash and the different ways to use them. She relies on generational knowledge from older residents on how to cook or use certain foods.
“When you start doing that you get a lot of them start telling you how they were raised rhubarb or eggplant or kiwi,” Holty said, noting that a lot of people remember growing up on these foods. “So, it is almost more reminding people that they have this in their histories. I don’t ever want to be the white woman troubadour that comes in to fix your eating habits.”
Holty said she just wants people to get comfortable with the idea of trying different foods. Since it is free, she said, it is a better gamble than paying a lot of money for something that someone may not like. The hope is to break the cycle of popping something in the microwave or pouring something from the can, especially for the younger generation, who are filling up on junk food, Holty said.
“It gives people a sense of being full but provides no nutrition,” she added.
The garden’s mission has evolved since it started 25 years ago with 10-12 raised beds or boxes. It now has 40 raised beds, nine accessible boxes, 2 hoop houses and grow room. It first started to serve church members and to introduce gardening to youth so they can gain employable skills. But in 2014, the church opened the garden to the neighborhood because they were growing more food than the congregation needed.
“We saw a need,” Holty said.
That need has increased since the pandemic. Holty has reached out to local grocers to provide additional produce to meet the demand. One of their Lutheran sister churches coordinated with garners and smaller farmers in Oconomowoc to bring in crops to help supplement their food give-a-ways.
This year, the garden has served about 2,500 individuals, as well as providing cases of produce to two elementary schools. The farm stand on average serves about 120 families a week.
“When you garden with your family and see something go from seed to fruit, it is really exciting for children and people of all ages,” Holty said. “They are much more like to try food from their own garden than any produce that’s picked way too early in order to make it to store shelves.”