We are an urban farm on the West End of Providence, RI. We sell food at the Armory Park Farmers Market, to Providence restaurants, and to our small CSA. These are pictures of urban agriculture in Providence, and the ideas it inspires.
We are so excited to kick off the CSA season a week earlier than last year. It is a late spring share this week including all of the following:
- herb choice between cilantro, lemon balm, and mint
- choice between radishes and scallions
- a bag of spinach
and of course, as always
- a bag of our salad mix!
See you tomorrow at Sidewalk Ends between 4 and 7.
47 Harrison Street
Providence, RI 02909
City Farm hoophouse pre-Plant Sale
Today was our first in-ground planting of the season: carrots, spinach, mâché, an baby kale.
Last weekend the National Young Farmer Coalition and RISD’s Respond Design co-sponsored a FarmHack event. We visited Red Planet in Johnston and City Farm on the South Side of Providence in order to identify systems that could be improved upon, tools that could be scaled to our landscape and production methods, and other infrastructural needs. The idea is to open source any products of the collaborations between farmers and designers, and we came up with some good stuff! We’ll be prototyping the mobile wash station we designed with a furniture maker from RISD in April; be in touch if you want to come help (or steal our blueprints!).
Hit the post title to see an EcoRI video covering the event!
For more information on FarmHack and NYFC, go here: http://www.youngfarmers.org/practical/farm-hack/
For the past few months, we have thought a lot about the various objectives of our work as city farmers. At various Farm Bill related events— including a recent round table with Congressman Langevin, New England and National Farmers Union meetings, and other more local discussions—we have realized that it would be valuable to articulate these thoughts in terms of broader conversations about agriculture in this country. Food security, economic security, nutrition, environmental concerns, and community development are all part of current agricultural discourse in this country. All of these issues are integral to any conversation about urban farming.
After a great meeting pulled together by Leo of the South Side Community Land Trust with a diverse crowd— including urban farmers, farm and environmental advocates, an NRCS representative, urban and rural land trust folks, etc.— Sidewalk Ends composed this list of Urban Agriculture Talking Points. We hope they can be used to align our goals (and our struggle for supportive policy) with those of beginning farmers from all different backgrounds, in all sorts of communities.
Providence Urban Agriculture Talking Points
Who we are:
Sidewalk Ends Farm: A 4300 sq. feet garden on Harrison St. in Providence (a vacant residential-zoned space), run by Tess Brown-Lavoie, Fay Strongin, and Laura Brown-Lavoie. We also have a garden in Olneyville.
The Little City Grower’s Cooperative: A direct-marketing cooperative of four urban farms in Providence and two peri-urban farms (in Johnston and Cranston).
Some reasons we think Urban Agriculture is important:
FARMER RECRUITMENT
- Urban farms are incubators for future agriculturalists. For people who do not grow up in an agricultural setting, urban farms can be the first experience of growing food. All of us (Tess, Laura, and Fay) had early experiences on urban farms which inspired us to pursue this work. If we want a new generation of farmers, urban agriculture is an important aspect of recruitment and training.
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT:
- Urban farms create local jobs and promote the local economy: Sidewalk Ends Farm alone generated three jobs, and grossed around $7300 this season. Especially now, when Providence is in a dire economic situation, our work is an example of urban entrepreneurship and creative economic development.
- Urban farms promote mutually beneficial local economic relationships between growers, chefs, and consumers. At the farmers markets, in CSAs, and through partnerships with restaurants, urban farms keep our food dollars in Providence.
NUTRITION:
- Urban farms are a source of healthy food for low-income city residents. The Armory Park Farmer’s Market, where we sell our produce, sold almost $8000 worth of food in EBT credit (as well as significant sales through WIC and Senior Voucher programs). Urban nutrition is a hot-button issue right now, and urban agriculture should be a integral part of future nutrition policy.
- Urban farms can produce A LOT of food: on 4300 sq. ft., in our first year at Sidewalk Ends., we sold over 1000 pounds of food.
ENVIRONMENT:
- Urban farms have a low carbon footprint. Our scale makes heavy machinery unnecessary, and we don’t use petroleum-based chemical fertilizers or pesticides. Our food is grown in the neighborhoods where it is sold and we transport it by bicycle. Fewer food-miles, fresher food!
- Urban farms divert and repurpose materials from the urban waste stream: we pick up hundreds of pounds of food scraps from local restaurants and soup kitchens for compost, horse manure from the police stables, and scraps of lumber and metal which we recycle for infrastructural projects.
COMMUNITY:
- Urban farms are beautiful. They reclaim wasted space in cities and remediate lead soil. The presence of gardens in a neighborhood improves property values. City farmers are land stewards.
- Urban farms transform city blocks into neighborhoods. A garden communicates care of a space far more than a vacant lot with a “For Sale” sign. A city farm is an informal educational space for their neighbors, and offer many city dwellers a first experience of interacting with the land.
- Urban farms are cooperative. The UN declared 2012 “The International Year of Cooperatives.” Here in Providence, the Little City Growers Cooperative has been producing and marketing food as a coalition of small farms since 2005, with increased production and sales every year.
For more information about Sidewalk Ends Farm or the Little City Grower’s Co-op, contact us: sidewalkendsfarm@gmail.com
Sleepy farm!
NEFU Annual Meeting, 9 December 2011
The following is a speech introducing our farm, our background, and some of our hopes and inspirations as farmers. It was delivered by Tess as an introduction to our urban community for the folks at the New England Farmers Union annual meeting in Concord, NH. We hope that by working with organizations like the union, we can integrate urban agricultural interests into current policy work that will influence the future of the Farm Bill.
Thanks to Annie [Cheatham, President of the New England Farmers Union] for inviting me to speak. I am a new voice, and it takes enormous confidence and trust for her to bring me here. I say I am new, and I am. In many ways. I am new to farming, new to the farmers union, and new to agricultural discourse. This is only my third year working on the land, and my first owning a small farm operation. I grew up in a large town bordering Boston, and my parents are school-teachers. When I was little, my experiences with agriculture were limited to trips to apple orchards in the country, and the farm stands we visited on the way home. I went to petting zoos, and planted tulips in the strip of soil between my house and the sidewalk. But mine was not a farm family. Even the title “beginning farmer” is one that feels almost too proud. I cultivate less than an acre, and I can’t remember when I chose this vocation in earnest. Maybe when I registered for my last library card, and filled in the occupation as farmer. Even after that great victory, I address you with the humility of a greenhorn, and the joy of person who found a life that she believes in, in a place that she didn’t expect: the land.
I grow food in vacant lots in the city of Providence, Rhode Island. One of the lots that comprises Sidewalk Ends Farm was filled with lead soil as recently as March, and my sisters and I excavated it, and brought in clean compost. As the act of importing soil to grow good food suggests, the life of a city farmer is one filled with incongruity; my roommates work at schools and non-profits, and in mid-season I have the dirtiest knees and messiest hair of anyone in the post-office, library or bar. The other farmers in the Little City Growers Co-op—the 8-year-old urban/suburban co-op under whose banner I sell produce at market and to Providence restaurants— are the only ones who look like me as they sneak in the back doors of the fanciest restaurants in their Carhartts, carrying sacks of green beans, herbs, and watermelons. My neighbors see me ride past on my bike with a pitchfork on the handlebars and trailing a cart filled with tomato starts. My family didn’t see this coming for me, and neither did I, so when aunts and uncles ask what’s next at our Thanksgiving dinner, its hard to explain to them what this life means.
What I should tell them is that I learned to love this country through farming. I grew up with what I think is a typical American cynicism in a post-9-11 world. When my seventh grade class was learning about civics, it seemed that the Founding Fathers’ ideals were obscured by the degradation of the environment, the moral opacity I saw in my government, and what looked to me less like cultural diversity then cultural confusion and discordance. So in this cynical time, the question of patriotism was a difficult one to answer. Ultimately, I found it not in the Constitution, or our nation’s political ideals, but in the land itself. I learned to love this country on the farm. I learned to love this country as I dug my shovel into its dark earth. I sewed seeds into my country, and harvested the abundances that grew from it. My stewardship of land is my greatest act of patriotism.
I learned to love my city by digging into it too. My vacant lot farm produced lead poisoned weeds last season, but I love my city so much that I excavated the contaminated soil, and brought in compost, and now my neighbors eat tomatoes grown in their backyards. My city isn’t always lovable. It is dirty, and my neighborhood is peppered with abandoned houses, sometimes with their contents pouring out the door as if blown by a powerful wind: mattresses, broken shelves, and clothing littering the front step and the street. The “for sale” sign in a vacant lot can read like a dark joke, and investing in this space is crazy, or it sometimes feels that way. But it is also a crucial labor of love. In occupying unwanted city land, and cleaning, and planting it, we have shown our neighbors what it means to us to love our city. It means making it beautiful, productive, and alive.
I especially love my farm, even though it is small, and used to have poisonous soil. Still I love the land, this land, as ardently as one who calls herself a patriot. I have given to the ground, and it gives back to me. I depend on its fertility, and so I put down roots and invest. I love my tools so I keep them clean. I love my seeds so I keep them dry. I love my sisters, so we keep each other well-fed and strong. Farming is a vocation of care, and from it is born an expansive love: for my country, for New England, for the people who grow food in situations very much like mine, or very different, and for the people in all of our communities who are sustained by our work.
This love is the source of a very real desire to be partners with people who grow food in any circumstance. That’s what brought me to the farmers union as a first generation city farmer. And as of yet I have only benefited from my membership. The Beginning Farmer Institute presented me with the opportunity to learn about the logistics of running a farm: management and leadership skills, and financial planning. It has made me interrogate the role of the farmer as an advocate and educator in my urban community, and more broadly as a resource for my representatives in office. I have met a number of wonderful and hardworking people through the Institute, and I share with them many struggles and aspirations, even with those outside of New England—those with nth generation wheat farms in Colorado or cattle ranches in Montana. Meeting these people encourages me to clarify my place within the landscape of American agriculture, as an urban farmer with access to urban markets and populations. It also compels me to articulate and advocate for urban production interests in national and New England ag policy. We too are rebuilding local economies. We too are working towards greater food safety, food security, and the health of our communities.
As a city farmer, I work to fight the same food ignorance that damages our businesses, our economy, and our environment. For many city people, the farm is generations away, and even the image of a pumpkin hanging on a vine is unfamiliar and abstract, or even cartoonish. Neighbors have come upon my garden in wonderment, as if it had never occurred to them to look to the earth for food, and suddenly it is alive and real. My greatest hope is that they leave with the desire to learn more, plant something, eat well and locally, and realize that farmers give themselves to the land and its people like the most zealous patriots. City farms provide people— some of whom have never been outside of city limits— with the opportunity to know our land as we growers do.
When I began picking leaves and fruits at my first farm job in Johnston, Rhode Island, I began the slow process of reinvesting myself in my food system, and relearning the importance of physical work. For those who do not grow up driving tractors before they drive cars, urban farms are a crucial link that can instill people with a sense of value for the work that farmers do as producers, land stewards, and advocates. We need support, help, and protection, and without community, and community awareness, we will be alone in this struggle.
Through the union, I hope to reach out to rural farmers. I want to learn from you, and with you, about how we will survive in this world. I am grateful to the union for selecting me to participate in the Beginning Farmer Institute; my learning curve has been steep and exciting, and I have left every session with the sense that there is much to yet to do, on my farm, in my business, in my community, and as an agricultural advocate. It is meaningful that we are here, as New England farmers and friends of farmers, as Americans who enact their sense of duty and care on the land every day. It is valuable to me to see you all as allies. So thank you.
Leaf pile
Roofers
