Farming in the city
The Bay Area has lost much of its farmland to urban uses. Little City Gardens, the last commercial farm in San Francisco, recently lost a battle for its land but there are still farms in adjacent counties. San Francisco does have some food-growing nonprofits, the largest of which is the 4-plus acre Alemany Farm. West Oakland has City Slicker Farms, one of the Bay Area’s most ambitious educational efforts, with a 1.4acre Farm Park and assistance for backyard gardeners who want to grow food at home.
Michael Ableman, author of the new book “Street Farm: Growing Food, Jobs and Hope on the Urban Frontier,” (Chelsea Green, 2016) has had a lot to say about farming, urban and otherwise, since his first book in 1993. At that time, he was raising a family on a 3-acre farm in the middle of a Los Angeles suburb. That first book, “From the Good Earth: A Celebration of Growing Food Around the World,” describes that farm but is primarily a written and photographic record of his travels to observe farming in five continents. On his journey, he writes, he was seeking “examples of hope” for farming that renew rather than mine the earth. In 1998, Ableman published “On Good Land: An Autobiography of an Urban Farm,” a more thorough description of his suburban farm experience.
Ableman went on to create high-profile urban farms in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles and in Goleta (Santa Barbara County), as well as advising on dozens of other projects. In 2009, he began to farm on Salt Spring Island off the coast of British Columbia. He was not planning to start another urban farm, but he was drawn into the project. His new book, “Street Farm,” is the story of Sole Food Street Farms, four farms in downtown Vancouver that exist to train and employ people. The employees include “the poor and homeless, the drug-addicted and mentally ill,” he writes.
Long experience in farming and creating nonprofit farms and working with populations of urban poor have given Ableman the skills to make the Vancouver farms succeed. The clear writing and appealing photography in this book create an inspiring and practical guide for anyone who is organizing or managing a nonprofit farming effort. Ableman discusses the funding, the soil, the weeds, and selling the produce in a farmers’ market. But he also writes about the neighborhoods and the people, and does so in ways that will help others farm more successfully with this population.
The Vancouver farms make a small contribution to the future of small-scale farming (and the use of environmentally sound farming methods), as well as to the lives of people who are desperate for basic support. The book is a guide to positive intervention that produces healthful food while making many lives more livable. Goals worth working for.