Food deserts are seen as a symptom of lost or missing local community, as seen throught the eyes of James Grevious and Fatima Oné, BIPOC urban farmers in the Denver area. They know the urban farm food they’ve worked hard to grow, and to inspire others to grow, is crucial for rebuilding that healthy local community.
Local food connections once held city neighborhoods together, with family gardens, neighborhood grocery stores, and dairy home delivery providing neighbors a wide variety of produce, milk and meats from their region’s family farms.
In turn, back then, rural farms were diversified in their dairy, grains, poultry, vegetable, fruit, pork and beef production. Both there and in the cities, much of the food was processed at the family or local level.
Now, about six decades since, those local farming, food production, processing and retail businesses have been replaced with widespread rural and urban food deserts, and lots of mass-produced, lower quality food.
“The food systems and their problems are so huge,” James observes. “To get started, we have to take the first bite of the elephant.”
In 2015, James, an Air Force fighter jet mechanic in Aurora, Colorado, found himself inspired by the soil-based philosophy and ‘guerilla gardening’ work of Ron Finley with South Central L.A.’s youth. James started working with his own kids and their friends in the center city food desert where they lived.
James, kids and friends all learned how to create a soil-based community by raising healthy vegetables together for their own meals and snacks. The kids enjoyed the work with their peers. James stated wondering whether they could make some money from their produce, all raised by the kids who started calling themselves ‘Rebel Gardeners.’
Returning from a 2017 Spain deployment, he found a home with a one-acre lot perfect for an urban farm. The kids painted its fence and started to plant lettuce, radishes, beets and other vegetables into its soils.
“It grew into a commercial operation which we named Rebel Marketplace,” James tells me. Taking advantage of Colorado’s 300+ days of sunshine, the Rebel Gardeners leased a spot in Del Mar Park for an outdoor neighborhood market. They reached out to outside gardeners within a six-mile radius of the Marketplace to become “Production Gardeners” and to bring their produce for sale.
Local artisans were invited to bring their wares, and James’ vision for Rebel Marketplace events began. The Marketplace expanded rapidly, with more and more neighbors growing and selling produce there.
It didn’t take long for the Rebel Gardeners to be confronted by the same grower cost-price squeeze that Fatima Oné, a fan of James’ work, had learned when she analyzed her years managing a five-acre urban farm. Her farm work yielded her $4.36 per hour for growing, marketing and distributing excellent local produce.
Our national agricultural “elephant” is a heavily federally subsidized food system for large producers, yet its cost/price squeeze cramps smaller rural farms, and urban ones like Fatima’s.
“Local urban farming has to be subsidized to be viable,” James tells me. “We founded Urban Symbiosis to protect local urban agriculture that provides affordable, quality food access.”
Urban Symbiosis a non-profit founded to fund recruiting, training and empowering growers within the six-mile radius of his Rebel Marketplace. We encourage constant improvement in their choices and methods for growing produce to sell. Urban Symbiosis also pre-pays Marketplace sellers’ booth fees.
“We have to think creatively, for funds to sustain and expand this kind of local food production. We’re careful not to take on anything beyond our six-mile turf. I think of things like the churches in our area that may take on a tithing support program, to create a local, healthy food system for their members and neighborhoods. Colorado State University Extension is looking us over for data and soils assistance.”
One reason James gives for beginning all this is “to decrease the geographic gap between rural producers and urban eaters.” That means neighbors getting to know each other growing, selling, and buying food from their own neighborhood soil.
This pushed me to ask, “James, what suggestions would you offer to my friend Jim and his wife Freda, family farmers next to the farm I grew up on in northeast Kansas? They now live in what is called a food desert.”
“That’s a good one.” He thought for a moment. “Well. To take the first bite of the elephant — Likely that means finding an eighteen or nineteen-year-old with a passion, who might find a future in this kind of work. Then working with that kid to recruit others, to take on farming or gardening and grow the kind of food their neighbors need. Creating ways to get the produce to them, and to make some money from it so you can do it again even bigger and better. Learning together how to get more people involved at each step, solving problems together.”
Restoring community through soil, plants, ingenuity. Getting yourself dirty doing that hard work. Drawn from the most basic early skills of urban farming, the values sure sound like those of traditional rural family farming. Out there, the elephant has even more drastically restructured local communities and economies. Amid it all, as I go to press, Rebel Marketplace in Del Mar Park, expanding, has announced that for the first time it will be open each week this season.
Join me next time for Kansas farmers Jim and Freda’s thoughts on James’ suggestions, and on their own local farm community’s future.