Community Voices # 4: Urban Farming and Agriculture
Sunday, April 11, 2010
The community voices common event I attended featured two guest speakers: Abby Youngblood from Just Food and Liz Carlo from the Greenmarket Program. Both speakers discussed their program’s mission of making healthy, fresh local produce available to all New Yorkers. Their presentations were informative as well as interesting because the agricultural issues they discussed directly impact the lives of New Yorkers daily.
According to their representative, Just Food is a small, non-profit organization that addresses challenges in the food system in New York City. This company works with many programs to increase access to fresh foods from local farms into soup kitchens and food pantries and support local farmers. Another challenge that this company strives to overcome is the decreasing farmland availability. Two acres of farmland are lost every minute. The necessity for farms is increasing drastically because farms serve many purposes. Some of the benefits of farms are environmental and public health improvement, economic development and job attainment for farmers, local food processors and distributors. Just Food also operates to mobilize citizens to actively participate in agricultural policy issues.
Some of the programs that Just Food works with are (1) The City Farm, (2) Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), (3) Fresh Food For All, (4) Community Food Education and (5) Food Justice. The City Farm program grows food in the neighborhood as opposed to obtaining it from other places by the “training of trainers” process in which people who know how to grow food are taught to share their knowledge with others. Workshops are held in food preservation, canning, medicinal herb and seed growing, composting, raising crops, raising chickens legally in New York, building chicken coops and obtaining eggs, selling farm goods grown in personal markets and more. CSA is a partnership between a group of people in a city and a group of farmers who are paid upfront for weekly, freshly produced, organic, in-season crops. This program directly supports local farmers and helps them stay in business by planning better so as not to create waste or under produce. Fresh Food For All, Community Food Education and Food Justice increase financial and physical access to local produce as well as enhance knowledge of the availability of these goods.
The second representative from the Greenmarket Program, a program of GrowNYC, explained that their creation of 49 greenmarkets around New York City was a direct result of the belief that all of New York City is a food desert. This program possesses a dual mission in providing New Yorkers with access to fresh local foods while also conserving farmland. The Farmer Development Project, a plan undertaken by the Greenmarket Program, supplies socially disadvantaged groups with a farmer that mentors them on equipment obtainment and lectures about the art of raising crops so as to allow the mentees to sell at the market and improve their economic standing through the farming business.
Some of the most intriguing aspects of these presentations were the discussion of the obesity epidemic, food deserts and the statistics of the programs up-to-date success. For the first time in thirty years, the life expectancy age for children has declined due to diseases linked to obesity. According to the Center for Disease Control Study, one in three (one in two for African American and Latino) children are expected to develop Type II Diabetes. Some of the reasons for this epidemic are convenience and low-cost of unhealthy, processed, inorganic foods, technological advances that decreased people’s mobility and the unavailability of fresh foods in local neighborhoods. About 300 million people in the United States are currently living in food deserts, neighborhoods with limited access to fresh, healthy foods but are served by plenty of fast food restaurants. The two companies represented at this event aspire to improve these statistics. The City Farm Program sponsored by Just Food has grown 170,00 pounds over crops over the course of only one year. The Greenmarket Program was created in the 1970’s and continues to grow until this day.
As I was reading this summary, I was wondering what your personal perspective is? Do you agree with the presenters? I am not sure how you can argue that all of NYC is a food desert – yes, people are not growing food, but food is accessible rather easily. Is it realistic to promote urban agriculture in densely populated communities?