Farm Urbanity Awakes

 A trend has taken hold in California and our local communities that brings our culture closer to that of Europe's traditions. Urban farming, taking the form of fruit and vegetable produce as well as bees, chickens and goats, has started to blossom. The idea has gone beyond the P-patch communal urban plot originally out of Seattle, Washington. The "P" stood for "Picardo", after the family who owned Picardo Farm in Seattle's Wedgwood neighborhood, part of which became the first P-Patch.

Locally, Los Angeles County has reversed its position on excluding urban farming, mostly because of its outdated rigid zoning ordinances, and is developing guidelines for this practice. The City of Los Angeles is drafting ordinances, as well. Eric Garcetti, a councilmember and gardener, pushed for the amendment to the city's General Plan that allows these urban gardens to flourish.

In San Gabriel, Jennifer Little is now farming on her property:

Little’s business model is so rare in Los Angeles that the coordinator for a study she’s participating in on urban agriculture through the UC Extension Program often tells her that there’s hardly anyone else in the city doing what she does. She wonders if that might mean she’s “crazy, or revolutionary.” “There are lots of great things about being an urban farmer,” she said. “For one, it's really nice to be home together all the time. Also it feels really good to work hard all day in the dirt with the sun beating down on you, and even though we don't make much money, we know we earn every penny.”

Even very small communities are getting into the act. San Marino has started an ordinance to allow raising chickens on property in a very exclusive residential community. The precedent here, however, is embodied in the Huntington Library in San Marino, which goes back to the local agricultural heritage in Southern California. It celebrates its food production in The Ranch, which is part of the estate grounds, and there is still a small section of orange groves around the Huntington mausoleum that was part of the citrus fruit industry that was established all over Southern California in the last century.

Pasadena's contribution to the local garden movement is Arlington Garden, a public garden on leased Cal Trans property. It was the site of the opulent, 17,000-square-foot Durand Mansion built in 1901 and demolished in the early 1960s. After Cal Trans acquired the property, it stood vacant for 40 years. In 2003 Councilmember Steve Madison and former city manager Cynthia Kurtz approached Caltrans about the possibility of leasing the property for city purposes. Madison hosted several community meetings in 2004 during which residents gave input on potential uses ranging from active recreation, such as soccer fields, to passive use, such as a park. The Mediterranean garden eventually arose as the final citizen concept, and is open to the public.

The trend, spurred by public rejection of corporate farming, imported foods and GMO crops, is an example of citizens taking back control of the renewal of their public and urban spaces for the common good. It also provides a future hedge against the looming food shortages of climate change. Forward-looking cities and regions are discussing strategies for adaptation to a hotter and more crowded planet.

Goat Reprise

Urban Goats are an expanding movement, as I noted about a year ago. They're being used again at Bunker Hill in Los Angeles to clear weeds and shrubs on a steep vacant lot. Becoming more popular and economical, besides being eco-friendly, these critters are a very sustainable solution when they're managed correctly. Environmental Land Management in San Diego will rent them to you for a fee.

In other areas of the country, they become a source of meat, as well. The USDA has an entire program devoted to critters and urban agriculture.

The Vegetable Patch

The idea of merging nonprofit community service with providing local food supplies has a long history in cities. Even as cities urbanized, some programs have taken advantage of "discarded space" to grow fresh vegetables as well as manage a distribution network of food banks from local businesses. The well-known Urban Ecology organization started out as a vegetable patch, incorporating local food, changes in lifestyle to reduce dependence on the automobile, all the way to their "Blueprint for a Sustainable Bay Area" in 1996.

Many cities have established community gardens for this purpose, mainly to create neighborhoods in urban areas that are cared for by residents. Seattle has its P-Patch program and Vancouver has recently started up a Green City program that provides fresh foods from local farmers and provides them to low-income residents.

These kinds of programs are the classic people-planet-profit strategies of microfinance that create productive enterprises and provide food security that are familiar the world over. It's the antithesis of corporate farming that produces food with tremendous amounts of pesticides and fertilizers, and ships this food over long distances which creates a pollution source, all of these being oil-based practices. Acting locally with the help of nonprofits and with the assistance of local city programs is a very efficient methodology that reduces food waste, preserves open space and reinforces community. This social web is a surprising answer to the often overwhelming difficulties of living in dense urban areas, especially as the economic safety net deteriorates.

When you have people sharing their recipes as well as their stories and their food, living in the city suddenly turns out to be a great place to be.

Urban Agriculture

The City of Detroit, once the center of technology and steel production, is now famously part of the "rust belt" of dying industries and decimated landscape that was formerly a farming region. It is facing this issue with a program of implementing a regenerative strategy through urban agriculture. The concept has been roughly presented as urban villages with connections across large areas of agriculture.

Several organizations and businesses have made a commitment to this new "local foods" movement, including Hantz Farms, which operates on the for-profit model. John Hantz has a vision of restoring Detroit with a pledge of $30 million to kick off the transformation of Detroit from a degenerated Motor City into a region of agriculture that can supply fresh food and revitalized infrastructure to the Detroit area.

A more comprehensive dialogue of how this may be implemented is occurring, through partnership with non-profits, showing how the worker-owned cooperative system could work - based upon Spain's Mondragon Corporacion Cooperativa. This initiative to regenerate Detroit with urban agriculture has become the focus of a collaborative garden resource program, with many nonprofits gearing up to educate individuals and get programs started across the region.

Specifically, the nonprofit SHAR is instituting a plan called Recovery Park, using resources provided by the Design Center of the University of Detroit Mercy. Research and development is being spearheaded by Charles Cross with a Recovery Grant.

A more detailed, and skeptical, discussion of the Recovery Park model is on this blogsite. To quote:

To be fair, I have heard about some urban farming models that seem to make more sense. They are not top-down, corporate models, but community empowerment models. Like the proposed Recovery Park, a public-private-nonprofit, 2,000-acre development headed by the Shar Foundation. A 30-acre pilot farm will be only one component of the development that will also include housing, commercial development, educational programs and green spaces.

At $220 million, the project promises 4,000 permanent jobs over the next 10 years. That number of jobs is high but hopeful, since the project isn't only about farming but also about housing demolition, soil preparation, food processing, hydroponics, indoor fish farms, an equestrian boarding operation. It will even include a for-profit clothing business, according to Crain's Detroit Business.

Urban Food Movement

Sustainability web-mag Inhabitat and modern design site Dwell have just announced the winners of the Reburbia Design Competition. The competition, which has been running for the past 6 weeks, challenged architects, designers and concerned citizens to come up with solutions that would address the problems that plague present-day suburbia by envisioning different scenarios for the future. Proposals tackled foreclosed McMansions, vacant big box stores, strip malls, parking lots and more with design fixes ranging from community agriculture and algae-based biofuels to zeppelin-based transit and pools transformed into water treatment plants. The competition drew over 400 entries from countries all over the world.

Urban Bee Movement

Along with local food comes local bees. Need that pollination! Didn't know that bees weren't native to the US, and now their numbers are way down due to a couple of mites. They go along with Farmers' Markets and Birkenstocks up in the Bay area. They're even at the White House now. Can't stop a trend like that!

Our trend is behind the Canadians however. Environment Canada has a page on protecting bees and providing a more biodiverse environment in the suburbs and the city, since their regs allow beekeeping in suburbs and cities.

Urban Goat Movement

Now it's goats. Better than a weedwhacker and no gasoline. Conveniently provides fertilizer and cheaper for the CRA to hire than people. Bunker Hill gets a weed trim curtesy some livestock. Here's the story at Curbed LA.

It seems LA is putting together a hell of a food chain here. Using actual, real food sources. The LA Farmer's Market at 3rd Street downtown is celebrating its 75th as a destination, and this trend towards local sources definitely has potential. Goat cheese stuffed chicken with wild mushrooms, anyone?

Urban Chicken Movement

It's come to this. The Local Food movement (those Farmers Markets!) gives way to mini-agriculture and gentlemen farmers. If it weren't for the current zoning laws restricting fowl of all kinds, we'd be seeing chickens, geese, and other domesticated types repopulating the suburbs. A local example is here. Many people are promoting the old suburban and semi-rural practice of domesticated fowl as local food supply, which also keeps garden pests at bay (note: snails and cockroaches!).

There's an organization that promotes this movement, however I fail to find anything about the specifics of wringing the thing's neck or plucking it for dinner. WHAT do you do with the feathers? Pillows use goosedown...

One from Newsweek. And the Urban Chicken A local ordinance video is here on the WSJ channel.

Helpful McNuggets of advice are all over the net:
"If you are hatching your own chickens, about half of them will be roosters. They can't be kept together because they'll kill each other and harm the hens as well. Likewise, if your main reason for keeping chickens is for the eggs, remember that chickens can live 8-10 years but only have a productive life (one egg every 1.5 days) of about 2-3 years. It's not easy to find homes for roosters and unproductive chickens, and usually your only option is to sell them for meat. However, keeping older chickens is often an option. They don't eat quite as much, but still produce delicious eggs. The roosters make good chicken jerky if you're ambitious. Be aware that rooster meat is pretty tough and would rarely make something like fried chicken taste good."

One thing this all leaves out are those famous peacocks roaming Arcadia and various other parts of LA, Pasadena, Glendora and Palos Verdes that drive the residents to nefarious criminal activities to be rid them, or even thrash it out in local Planning Commission meetings. When the birds screech, it sounds like a cat being strangled, can't say I blame them. That's what feral cats are for, I suppose. Or perhaps a nice roast?