The Feeding the City series is profiling several cities with thriving urban-agriculture and alt-food scenes.

In the land of gumbo and beignets and crawfish and rabbit-n-dumplings, of Haitians and French and Anglos and Africans, life moves at a slower pace, with more color and spice than most of America. There’s time for food and music, and for parties to celebrate both.

New Orleanians have always taken pride in all things local, but since Katrina and now the oil spill creeping in from that blessed and cursed Gulf of Mexico, that pride has swelled immeasurably from Gulf shrimp to Ninth Ward greens to edible schoolyards.

Things grow here. And people know how to grow and how to cook. Hard-core foodies could take a week to sample the white-table-cloth restaurants relying on serious local sourcing. The chefs from Bayona, Coquette Bistro, Dante’s Kitchen, Cochon, M Bistro, Herbsaint, and Patois are becoming regulars at city farmers markets. Emery Von Hook, director of markets for the organization Market Umbrella, sees chefs all over the produce stands.

“It’s certainly picked up after Katrina,” she says. “There’s an accelerated sense of pride in local cuisine, local ingredients. It’s like an act of solidarity.”

Chef Susan Spicer has founded several restaurants that feature not just New Orleans food, but locally grown and caught ingredients — which is why she is suing BP over the oil spill’s effect on local seafood. (Photo by asante_mag.)

The chefs are joined by local residents, and not just Uptowners, either. Thanks to a new Market Match program, shoppers with food stamps get matched dollar-for-dollar, up to $25 per market visit (there are three markets per week, and they can receive funds for each). Last year’s pilot program matched $10,000 in stamps.

This is a land of opportunivores, however — it’s not all squash and okra and tomatoes down here. Seafood has always been a centerpiece of a southern New Orleans meal. But prices have risen. Gulf shrimp used to cost $3 per pound, but in recent years it’s gone up to $17 per pound. That was even beforethe oil spill, which has finally reached its greasy fingers into Lake Ponchartrain, the last major outpost for shrimp and crabs.

“Usually we have three seafood vendors at our Crescent City Farmer’s Market,” says Von Hook. “They sell Louisiana shrimp, crawfish, brim, crabs. One has stopped coming — they’re having a hard time finding help to run their traps since people are taking BP clean-up jobs. Another vendor, who’d been coming until a few weeks ago, went west to Cameron to try to pull shrimp out of there.” The third is still coming, she says, “but who knows; it depends on all the openings and closings in the different fishing areas.” (Led by New Orleans culinary icon Susan Spicer, a group of restaurant owners is suing BP over the spill’s effect on their local-seafood business.)

A lot of fishermen live in east New Orleans’ Village de l’Est neighborhood, a community of 6,000 Vietnamese who arrived here with the Catholic Church following the Vietnam War. Their backyards and canal-sides overflow with greens, fruits, and root vegetables brought from their homeland. Elderly residents grow produce for their families and for sale at the local markets. (For a closer look, see my post in the Breaking Through Concrete series on Grist.) No one knows that the city’s best pho — and a serious national contender for best food-security model — live here, between the pavement of Highway 90 leading out of New Orleans and the wetlands that drain Lake Ponchartrain. And all this despite the fact that the wetlands have been soured by an emergency post-Katrina landfill that illegally accommodated highly toxic waste, which, of course, leaked into the shallow groundwater system and canals. It’s all documented in the film A Village Called Versailles.

Knowing is half the battle. One of the common problems with all these new food projects spread throughout the micro-worlds of cities is awareness of who’s what and where, and how to get there. To help, the New Orleans Food and Farm Network (NOFFN) has been putting together a book to be published this fall. Growing Back to Our Roots will be a collection of essays, maps, and photographs of the backyard gardens, community gardens, grocery stores, and markets growing and/or selling New Orleans-grown food. It will be both a celebration of this city’s rich food and garden tradition and a resource to find all the varied projects like the Edible Schoolyard, where chef April Neujean is using two gardens at two public charter schools to drive a national discussion on food policy and schools. Or NOFFN’s own Holly Grove farm and market, or the Midcity community garden.

Like Detroit, New Orleans has the sense of a wild laboratory, the open-sided, free-air market for food security discussions and, above all, action. It’s partly because of Katrina’s ruin, but it’s also just part of the culture.

Three of the city’s most interesting experiments:

From mid-May through July, Grist readers followed along as a writer, photographer, filmmaker, and farmer hit the highway to visit a couple dozen urban farms across America. The Breaking Through Concrete team are back to sum up their trip and share some of Michael Hanson’s most indelible images from it for our Feeding the City series.

Months before we actually left Seattle in our grease-powered short bus, Edwin Marty, cofounder of Jones Valley Urban Farm in Birmingham, Ala., and I, a Seattle-based writer, had proposed a book idea. We wanted to tell the stories of the American urban farm — documenting the best, often under-publicized examples of people and organizations growing food and providing services to their communities by way of the city farm plot.

We put together a list of 15 farms from Seattle to New Orleans to Detroit. A publisher bit: University of California Press. Uh oh. As often happens with big ideas, when they actually become real, things get scary.

The Breaking Through Concrete traveling team (l-r): Michael Hanson, Charlie Hoxie, David Hanson, and Louis Louis, the short bus.Photographer Michael Hanson is very good at shooting people and landscapes, and he happens to be my brother and housemate. So I asked him to come along — two months on the road total, with two days at each farm location. We’d have to go bare-bones, as we have often have on our collaborative projects. He agreed, as usual. A few weeks later I remembered our friend Charlie, whom we’d met in Ethiopia during a project in 2009. He was in his first year of graduate-level documentary film school at NYU. I asked if he’d join us as videographer. He agreed.

Finally, though we had the book deal, we needed more funding for the trip. Edwin had recently met Brooke Smith of WhyHunger at a food-security conference. WhyHunger is a New York-based nonprofit supporting efforts to cure hunger around the world. Brooke was looking for new-media ways to tell the story of “food deserts” – urban areas with little or no access to fresh food — and grassroots community solutions. WhyHunger became the core sponsor of the Breaking Through Concrete tour.

Road-tripping in my car, a 1987 faded-sky-blue Subaru wagon, would not be sexy. So, while traveling for work in Chile and Bolivia during March, I spent many coins at Internet cafés in order to scan Craigslist for vegetable-grease-powered vehicles that could sleep three grown men and provide desk space for editing while traveling interstates. A 1997 Chevy short schoolbus, converted to the Frybrid vegetable oil fuel system and remodeled to sleep three plus kitchen, appeared. It was located in my neighborhood of Ballard, Seattle. Five days after my return flight from Bolivia, I was the proud owner/operator of a Blue Bird school bus/RV eventually christened Lewis Lewis.

We hit the road May 19, south on Interstate 5. We had breakdowns, cheap fixes, and expensive fixes, and met really nice mechanics. We slept beside Highway 1 overlooking Pacific rollers, beside urban farms, in parking lots of real-estate offices, and in the truck side of rest areas. We were woken by a mall cop named Mike Jordan who told us to leave the 24-Hour Fitness lot, and the lead singer and guitarist from a Clarksdale, Miss. blues band came aboard between sets.

In Birmingham, Al., in mid-June, in the middle of the tour, Lewis Lewis was unresponsive, parked by the curb of a residential street. A curious neighbor came to investigate, in slippers. He read the white sticky letters we’d used to spell www.breakingthroughconcrete.com on Lewis’s back windshield. We explained the project. He looked confused.

“But, where are you breaking the concrete? Do you remove it completely?”

To clarify, we do not do demo work. The project is a celebration of the visionaries who are transforming our ideas of food and doing so within the confines of the urban environment.

We couldn’t revive Lewis in time, so we left him at Edwin’s farm and rented a shiny white Limited Edition Chrysler minivan with automatic sliding doors and air-conditioning. It made us weak in the knees, but we loaded her up, named her Barbara, and continued on our way, north toward D.C., Brooklyn, Philly, Detroit, and Chicago.

Hybrid models

The American urban-farm movement is seeing its biggest resurgence since its heyday during World War II, when Victory Gardens provided food for a rationed market, offered work, and educated children about agriculture. They’re a shining example of what we as a country can grow in small spaces if pushed to the brink.

But today’s urban farm projects go a step further. In a postmodern symbiosis, they offer new ideals of social innovation with a return to traditional farming practices, and — gasp! — a preference for old-fashioned capitalism. Today’s urban farmers want to grow honest food, and they want to provide social services and new opportunities for underserved populations. But they also have the savvy entrepreneurial spirit that might actually propel this movement beyond the feel-good corner farm into a business model that has the staying power to reshape our food systems.

Next: Images from the trip

Matt and Peg Sheaffer run Sandhill Organics in Prairie Crossing.(Michael Hanson)

For the final stop on the Breaking Through Concrete tour, we’re gettin’ all peri-urban on y’all.

It takes almost an hour to drive from downtown Chicago north on I-94 to the town of Grayslake, Ill., home of the Prairie Crossing residential development — “A Conservation Community” — and its core farm, Sandhill Organics. Though billboards, office “parks,” and standard Interstate culture dot the highway, the tall, mixed prairie grasses native to these Great Lake Plains become increasingly expansive.

The approach from the interstate to Prairie Crossing tells a modern American story. A natural lake with tree snags, lily pads, and marsh grasses covers a depression between a rim of trees and wild, hip-high grasses. A mile down the road, a fresh slab of pavement holds a large parking lot and a shopping center with chain stores. Then more open land, some large cornfields, and a walled development of cookie-cutter homes with multiple pitched roofs, elaborate garages, and lots of short, non-native grass to mow.

If you’ve been following this series, you’re surely familiar with the lament over lost farmland replaced by shoddily designed and developed, uniformly average orgies of square-footage known as the modern American house. It sounds elitist — probably is — but it’s true and, unfortunately, it’s happening and it will continue happening for a while, at least, because the American dream for many people remains cars that get driven all day, double-vaulted ceilings in the foyer, your own lawn to mow, and safety in homogeny.

As long as we’re critiquing, Prairie Crossing has its place in this suburbanization of the rural world. It is a planned community of large homes that only a certain economic strata can afford, and it plowed over some prairie land to make it happen.

But now the good part.

Prairie Crossing was developed to conserve prairie, and it’s not just a marketing slogan. Vicky and George Ranney, the developers, set aside 60 percent of the 677 acres in a land conservation easement; another 3,200 acres are protected within the Liberty Prairie Reserve, a conglomeration of public and private land connected to the community.

From the beginning, the Ranneys believed in agriculture as an essential component, so they established 100 acres strictly for growing food. “This land was always farmland,” says Vicky. “So we considered what people would like to live next to. We realized that sooner or later, there’d be a conflict between big agriculture and residential developments. People wouldn’t find it comfortable to live next to pesticides and chemicals.”

(Michael Hanson)

The Sheaffers are entrepreneurs as much as they are farmers.The mixture worked. They sold all the homes (about 400), and at a rate 34 percent above the market for the similarly sized developments and homes in the area. The farm is one of Prairie Crossing’s many differentiating factors — native grasses encouraged to grow wild in front yards, a charter school with an experiential curriculum located on-site and open to the entire county, geothermal heating, open land, trails, a swimming lake, and a light-rail city connection make good selling points as well. It also has large-scale, intensive, integrated produce and livestock farm that marks a huge leap for peri-urban growth. Just a few years ago, even the most progressive projects looked at small “playscapes” or raised-bed community garden plots as radical green space. A hundred acres of organic, production farmland distinguishes Prairie Crossing and gives it a place in the urban farm puzzle — albeit as a variation.

Prairie Crossing is one of the earliest examples of what architect and planner Andrés Duany calls “Agricultural Urbanism.” Duany, along with others, has created a movement in the planning, developing, and architectural world with his New Urbanism model for sustainable design on a wildly big-picture level. New Urbanism wants to create a new language for coding and zoning and design practices, so that the builders of communities, cities, even regions can look more like traditional communities that were less about the automobile and more about living smaller, more densely, more neighborly, and with less societal and environmental impact.

A new chapter in the discussion is this idea of Agricultural Urbanism. Duany differentiates agricultural urbanism from urban agriculture in simple terms: agricultural urbanism creates the walkable urban form surrounded by agriculture, whereas urban agriculture is simply growing food on vacant lots and in backyards. He cites Detroit as a hub of urban agriculture but not Agricultural Urbanism, but he’d call Prairie Crossing the latter.

Peg and Matt Sheaffer grow most of the food. They came into Prairie Crossing early, as the original farmers for Sandhill Organics. The Ranneys offered to lease them 45 acres of certified organic farmland. The Sheaffers moved into the farmhouse and they’ve made it a thriving business, thanks to CSA membership and Chicago farmers market sales. They make a lot more money per acre — roughly $20,000 per acre — than the mono-crop farmers who dominate the rest of Illinois, who average  roughly $800 per acre.

The Sheaffers want other Prairie Crossing residents to consider them their neighbors and friends first, the community farmers second.There’s an additional 50 acres of farmland at Prairie Crossing, some of which is used by the Learning Farm project for youth programs, from elementary students to a diverse corps of high schoolers from all over the county who work under the guidance of staff and a few college interns. And in the “back 40″ of the property, four “incubator farms” grow produce and raise pigs and chickens. Part of the Farm Business Development Center, these young farmers get the chance to take a stab at creating a viable, profitable farm business. When they’re ready, they leave to create their own independent farms.

Prairie Crossing is a farm that grows farms and farmers.

So how does this work? And why doesn’t it happen more often?

Mike Sands, executive director for the Liberty Prairie Foundation, has some insight. He was previously the managing director of the Rodale Institute, a 63-year-old organization dedicated to organic agriculture research and education.

“True urban farms are incredibly important,” says Mike. “But if you consider food productivity potential, they’re limited. I do think we’re ready for that next generation of urban farming — using waste heat to power year-round production. The urban farm can provide supplemental production, but its real value is as an entry point to food quality and why that matters. And it improves its immediate community — aesthetically and psychologically.

The challenge presented by Sandhill Organics, he says, is not only the diverse, integrated growing, but the marketing and financial planning involved: “We don’t have those farmers. If you offered $20,000 per acre to an average farmer, they’d likely say they couldn’t handle that. [Matt and Peg and the incubator farmers] are entrepreneurs who pick farming as their business, not people who say they want to be a farmer.”

He sees successful farmers coming from four groups: Liberal arts grads, people in mid-career changes, recent immigrants, and the conventional farmer who has failed — whose farm is in foreclosure or close to it, who’s been forced by a catastrophic event in the system to look at alternatives.

Here’s Mike discussing the peri-urban model and its role in the scheme for feeding cities.

And so maybe this is the best place to end. A recurring question throughout our exploration of American urban farms has been “Which came first, the City or the Farm?” It is perhaps a rhetorical question, more like a riddle with a few answers. But here we are in the middle of the two, a mile from hard-core modern-American farmland and all its flaws, and an hour from one of the country’s biggest cities.

The land is here, and the knowledge and fervor for the new age of farming seems to be creeping out of the city toward it, looking for more acres and new ways to make an independent living off the land. Sounds like the good ole American way.

January 2011 update: Many of the photos have been removed from this series so they can be published in a Breaking Through Concrete book, forthcoming this year from UC Press.

The real estate market dealt Melvin Price a double whammy. The 45-year-old builder and carpenter had been making a living in Chicago for years before he bought a house in the New City neighborhood of Chicago. It had had a fire, so he got it for $4,000, put in about $15,000 worth of repairs, and hoped to sell or rent it. An appraiser quoted the new value at $145,000. He couldn’t believe it, not in that neighborhood, but he was convinced enough to reject an offer of $85,000 for the house.

Then he turned his sights to Camden, N.J., where he’d visited and seen the glut of dirt-cheap homes that could easily be fixed up. He refinanced his New City property and bought two adjoining Camden homes for $20,000. He intended to rehab them for a quick turnaround with his buddy who’d just returned from the Army. But when Melvin showed up to Camden a month or so after the online purchase, the houses had been demolished by the city and he was left with the $30,000 demo fee.

It gets worse. Spiking interest rates on the shoddy mortgage he’d signed for the house back in New City (up to $1,700 a month) forced Melvin into foreclosure. One too many hard knocks, and Melvin was back in Chicago where the carpentry work had dried up and he had a dumpster of debt.

We meet Melvin as he gently cuts rainbow chard in an open-sided greenhouse. He and a dozen other interns work at Growing Home‘s Wood Street farm, in the West Englewood neighborhood of south Chicago. Ten years ago, Melvin used to rebuild houses here, and he remembers having to hire men to watch his house projects at night so vagrants wouldn’t steal the new windows or doors or plumbing he had installed.

He heard about Growing Home on the Internet, and he couldn’t believe there was a farm in this neighborhood. Growing Home offers a paid internship. So Melvin and 19 other interns began this growing season together in April. (Five have since moved into other jobs.) The men and women come from diverse backgrounds — some are directed here by mental health workers, social workers, or their parole officers (70 percent of this year’s class).

‘Our program has seen a 5 percent recidivism rate. It shows that when people are given a chance to work and change their lives, they will do everything they can to stay out of prison.’

Growing Home offers jobs, but it’s also a training program. The interns work three hours in the greenhouses each morning, Tuesday to Friday. After lunch they participate in classroom workshops on job-training skills. The results are layered. For one, the neighborhood benefits from the adaptive reuse of an abandoned lot into a beautiful, productive farm that can operate year-round thanks to the greenhouses. Second, the interns learn gardening and job skills, receive direction into full-time work, and get to eat healthy food. And Chicago gets another source of fresh produce: the vegetables are sold at the Green City market in Lincoln Park and at the Englewood market, offering a new food option in Englewood, a community of 70,000 with only one major grocery store.

Harry Rhodes helped start Growing Home in 2002. He’s seen it ascend from an idea into a successful project. Growing Home recently won a Harry Chapin Self-Reliance Award from WhyHunger. But the numbers tell the story.

“Over 150 people have gone through the program,” says Harry. “Sixty-five percent move into employment or educational training, and 90 percent find stable housing. The recidivism rate in Illinois is over 50 percent [within three years of release]. Our program has seen a 5 percent recidivism rate. It shows that when people are given a chance to work and change their lives, they will do everything they can to stay out of prison.”

We meet another intern — William Harris, 40 — at the Green City market on Saturday morning. It’s bustling with people, and the market stands are piled high with carrots, beets, chard, arugula, truckloads of tomatoes, and cheeses, breads, jams, and meats from farmers based on the outskirts of Chicago and deep in farm country. William is one of two interns working Growing Home’s market today. The staff rotates each Saturday. William’s parole officer directed him to Growing Home, and he didn’t know what to think. He’d spent seven years in prison and didn’t have a clue about gardening.

“I didn’t come into this program with the idea of liking gardening, but I really do now,” he says. “I’m in dental assistant school beginning in the fall, but I plan to own a small business on the side of that career. I’ll do landscaping and make gardens in people’s backyards.”

Melvin has ideas, too. He’s talked about starting a catfish farm to sell in Englewood and elsewhere. He thinks they’d go like hotcakes here. He also wants to get back into the business he knows — home building and carpentry. “Now I’m just trying to save enough money to get a house here,” he says. “They’re selling for $7,000. I want to get something and sit on it for five to seven years. Fix it and rent it. This housing market will come back.”

In the meantime, he likes what he’s doing. “I wish there were more jobs like this (farm) in the city. It’s relaxing — you gotta be dedicated to this,” he says. “I’m not in it for the money, but the people out here are so at ease, they love what they’re doing.”

On this video, intern Latoya Wiseman talks about how working the land affects her spirit:

Avram Rodgers, 6, says he and I are secret agents. He takes my hand and pulls me to the rabbit pens in the back of a fenced-in, grassy area at the Catherine Ferguson Academy farm in Detroit. A handful of ducks waddle in a little pool in the center of the enclosure. Goats chew grass in their separate pen 30 feet away, and a group of young women students build a small greenhouse 50 feet away.

Avram points out an eviscerated rabbit in the thick grass and informs me that we must find its killer. The young bunny likely escaped its cage, and my hunch is hawk or raccoon. Avram is less certain. But we investigate the crime scene for only another 30 seconds until Avram’s imagination takes a turn, and we veer out of the duck and rabbit area and toward the greenhouse.

We don’t find the culprit, but Avram has just revealed something far more interesting. His backyard mystery personifies the collision of raw life/death and wide-open imagination that has come to define Detroit in a much deeper way than the job-loss headlines and banal images of windowless buildings that have become far too popular in European art magazines.

Avram is a city kid, but he walks around here like a country kid. He basically grew up on this urban produce and livestock farm that takes up roughly half of the school lot for the Catherine Ferguson Academy. CFA is a Detroit public school for teenage mothers; Avram’s mom, Ashley Rodgers, entered in ninth grade after becoming pregnant with Avram.

Ashley, now 21, leads the crew of students as they wrap the small greenhouse in plastic. The group of girls will travel to South Africa at the end of July for an international youth conference on food security and farming. They’ll teach a workshop in greenhouse construction, among other things. Crazy thing is, it’s not so crazy that inner-city Detroit youth will be teaching farming to the world.

Everyone knows about the economic woes of Detroit. The city’s unemployment and foreclosure rates lead the nation. It has become the national emblem of industrial failure, just as Wall Street has become the symbol for soft, pasty, and greedy semi-men. But Wayne County and Detroit have been somewhat of a void — a gritty blank slate for decades, traced back to the race riots of the ’40s and ’60s. The population peaked around 2 million in 1950 and now hovers at 850,000. The exodus has left an estimated 17,000 acres of vacant lots.

There’s an odd undercurrent of tension amongst some of these groups. It’s a little bit Lord of the Flies out here in this wilderness of vacancy.

While the rest of the cities we’ve seen throughout this trip have their share of unused land, Detroit’s sea of potential has created a sense of Manifest Destiny among the urban farm pioneers. Just like artists who can experiment at the fringe of their crafts when they move into huge, unwanted warehouse spaces in empty downtowns, Detroit farmers are at the cutting edge of urban agriculture.

Marilyn Nefer Ra Barber, head of D Town farm

Wild Wild Wayne

In the course of our three days in Detroit, we weave through a fraction of the network of projects and organizations. We see D Town, a two-acre model farm begun at west Detroit’s Rouge Park. They grow vegetables and mushrooms, raise bees, and sell honey at a few of the city’s markets, specifically Eastern Market, the 120-year-old outdoor farmers market in downtown.

We see some projects associated with The Greening of Detroit, an expansive organization begun in 1989 with, initially, a mission to re-tree Detroit in response to a half-decade of massive tree loss (500,000 lost between 1950 and 1980). The Greening now has its hands in hundreds of community gardens and small plots throughout the city, in addition to the large tree-planting projects like the 105 acres they just bought at Rouge Park adjacent to D Town. Marilyn Nefer Ra Barber (right) runs D Town farm. A native of South Carolina, of Gullah-Geechee descent, she talks of how the agriculturalists who moved to Detroit from the South — partly to replace the unjust farm life with promising factory jobs — are now returning to the land in their backyards and neighborhoods. “Before, we had all the jobs and the money and we could buy what we needed. Now we can plant a seed and have control through our food,” she says.

We visit the Capuchin Soup Kitchen’s Earthworks Farm where a group of neighborhood youth tend to a garden and sell the produce at the markets. Earthworks also aids neighborhood residents with their own backyard food gardens, working on a hyper-local scale.

Urban Farm, Incorporated?

Finally, we speak with Mike Scroll, president of Hantz Farms, the massive, multi-million-dollar urban farm project that could become the largest urban growing initiative in the country. Mike says that Hantz now has three projects in the works, comprising three acres, five acres, and a hundred-plus. He said they plan to grow hardwoods, Christmas trees, fruit and nut trees, and hydroponic and aeroponic vegetables. He said they’ll stay away from the existing markets so as not to impede on the current growers’ market share. But that means they’ll be shipping all over the country rather than feeding Detroit.

Mike was a nice man, and his ambitious project sounds potentially great as far as developing a profitable model for urban farming on a large scale and for job creation in Detroit. But they’re getting somewhat beat up in the press by the smaller grassroots projects who’ve been doing this for decades. Mike says that while the public voice sounds critical, in private, these same urban farm organizations are asking to partner with Hantz via employment opportunities for the organizations’ trainees and interns.

I must say, there’s an odd undercurrent of tension amongst some of these groups. It’s a little bit Lord of the Flies out here in this wilderness of vacancy.

Back to the barn

After so much running around, we find our safe place back at Catherine Ferguson Academy’s farm. This one’s been operating under the radar and out of the fray for 20 years. It did not begin with a mission to save the city or to be a model for the world. It began because Paul Weertz, the science teacher, did not want his students — teenage mothers and mothers-to-be — to inhale formaldehyde during dissections. So Paul, now 56, began keeping a couple live rabbits and chickens in pens out back so he could practice “fresh dissections” without the need for toxic preservatives. Soon he had more chickens and rabbits and a few goats. Within years, they plowed over the playground soil, planted food, and the students helped him build a barn.

Weertz spends about half his classtime in the classroom and half at the farm, overseeing the students as they milk the goats, feed the chickens or the horse, or water and weed and seed the vegetable plots. They seed, collect, and bale hay from 10 acres of vacant city lots and store it in the barn.

And they love it, says Weertz:

“The farm is a great way to teach parenting skills,” he says. “If you don’t water and feed the plants, they wither up and die. Milking the goats is the same as breast-feeding. And training the goats, too. We teach kids how training works — you gotta be smarter than the animal. I let the goats run wild for the first milking and then I teach the girls that you have to outthink them and train them to do what you want them to do.”

Watch the students milk a goat and ask questions:

A while ago I read an article in Atlantic Monthly titled “Cultivating Failure.” Writer Caitlin Flanagan argued that the en vogue school farms act as a distraction from the book-learning that must occur to get our underserved students into college (and a higher economic strata). While I could dismiss the author’s palpable, almost personal distaste for all things Alice Waters, the critique of school farms as a wasteful, feel-good hobby fad of yuppie educators has been bothering me for months.

“If I said to a farm kid, ‘You don’t need computers, you just need to know farm equipment,’ that’d be discriminating. You can’t do the inverse with the city kids and tell them all they need to know is on a computer.”

Paul gets that occasionally as well, even in Detroit where growing your own food is becoming a powerful symbol of autonomy. “Some people say I just have them out there working on the farm, but I think they’re getting smarter. Many kids are just not moving (these days) and scientists are learning that we’re pretty smart when we use our hands. I think when we’re out there working with our hands we’re recharging our brains.

“If I said to a farm kid, ‘You don’t need computers, you just need to know farm equipment,’ that’d be discriminating. You can’t do the inverse with the city kids and tell them all they need to know is on a computer.”

Sure, the way testing is currently set up relies heavily on classroom skills, but the farm, via feeding schedules, planting plans, chicken coop measurements, puts those skills to real tests. Paul knows he and CFA have a unique situation working with a population of students largely rejected from the mainstream. They’re in the system, but at the fringe, sort of how Detroit is in the national sense. Only now people are starting to watch Detroit. The mayor’s talking about consolidating neighborhoods and big capital is moving in via Hantz. CFA is old-school in that they still operate and create in their own gap, that edge space of reality and imagination.

Detroit has a glut of space. That can be a blessing and a curse, even among the most well-meaning organizations. Seeing the city as a study in the growth and interaction of grassroots organizations could be as informative as viewing it as a test in the growth of food and jobs.

It’s an experiment and a bust and a success and an opportunity and the reason people are watching is that it’s as real and visceral as a dissection.

All content ©Breaking Through Concrete, adapted with permission. For information regarding use of images, video, or text, please contact btctour@mail.com.

Mary Seton Corboy sweating in her bee suit on the living roof of the Greensgrow farm’s storage trailer.(Photos ©Michael Hanson)

It’s sunny and 94 degrees, and the pavement’s steaming after a thunderstorm rolled sideways through north Philly. Mary Seton Corboy wears a full-body, white bee suit. She stands atop a small trailer’s grassy roof on a vacant city lot. Smoke puffs from the antique-looking box in her hand, and the bees calm down.

“We put these up here originally just for security,” she says. “Figured no one would bother the equipment with a bunch of bees around.”

Mary has created a small world, called Greensgrow, here on one block. The trailer under the beehives holds farm tools. Beside the trailer, tanks for the biodiesel conversion operation transform used cooking oil into fuel for Big Yellow, the delivery truck that collects fresh produce and meat and dairy products from farms within 75 miles of this square of green in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood. That food goes into the homes of 400 CSA members, some of them low-income, and for sale at the farm’s market. That is to say, the Greensgrow farm and nursery is a little bit of everything, and all of it connected, somehow, like any good old city.

Farming in Kensington, now a low-income neighborhood largely populated by Russian and Polish immigrants, is no more new than it is throughout Philadelphia. Community gardens, backyard gardens, and “guerrilla” gardens on vacant lots have been producing thousands of pounds of fresh food annually for over a century. The Vacant Lot Cultivation Association, begun in 1897, helps people access land and start market gardens. War rationing during WWI and II spurred Victory Gardens, as they did in many cities. And the early-to-mid-century exodus of African-American farmers from the sharecropper South brought a new agrarian population to the city.

There weren’t meetings or board members or conference calls. Just a need for food, empty land, and people who knew how to dig in with a shovel and hoe.

Then the community vacant-lot gardens took off in the ’70s, just as the industrial boom imploded. More than 100,000 people lost their jobs, industries ran screaming, and many people bolted for the hills, or somewhere not-Philly.

At the same time, another wave of southern African-Americans moved north, this time in conjunction with a Puerto Rican migration and Southeast Asians escaping the poisonous aftermath of the Vietnam War. Having grown their own food in their homelands, the newcomers brought that knowledge and ethic with them.[1]

The city, meanwhile, took little interest in its agencies’ land holdings, so they barely blinked at signing multi-year leases to neighborhood farmers on empty city lots. The 1970s made inner-city blightification as American as apple pie. In Philly, pirate farmers built soils, and fed families and communities. The common-sense food production continued into the ’90s. There weren’t meetings or board members or conference calls. Just a need for food, empty land, and people who knew how to dig in with a shovel and hoe.

Mary calls a shovel “the idiot stick,” and she holds it in high regard. She came onto the scene at the tail end of that mini-urban-ag revolution. Plenty of vacant-lot and community farms still exist in Philly, but not on the scale they did 30 years ago. The decline is partly due to older farmers passing away, and partly due to increased real-estate values, the subsequent interest of developers, and city agencies’ reluctance to continue signing those multi-year leases on the empty lots. The rogue farmers have had to abandon soils they’d developed over a decade or more.

Many of Greenpoint’s market customers come on bike.

Mary doesn’t like meetings, and she looks far more comfortable in the bee suit and mask than I imagine she would in a pantsuit or dress. She’s a gritty farmer with a helluva business sense. When she takes off the bee suit, she reveals a dusty, wrinkled Subaru farm shirt. Two Subaru wagons sit along the curb between the bee and tool lot, and the larger farm and nursery — the socially progressive Subaru company financially sponsors Greensgrow.

Tom Sereduk, cofounder of Greensgrow, and Mary starting digging into Kensington in 1998. The two had restaurant experience and they saw a market for salad greens. Since they knew hydroponic growing methods (growing in water, rather than soil, with mineral supplements), they could bypass the immediate concerns over the lot’s EPA brownfield status. They opened during the growing season and sold to white-table cloth restaurants for a profit.

But Mary and Tom were like energetic hippies rolling in for half the year to grow fancy lettuce for fancy restaurants, and kids threw rocks at them over the fence. Though Tom opted out of the depressing situation, Mary stuck with it and she kept her vision open.

“Over time, we never really invested in any one thing, so when the winds of change moved in — more and more interest in local foods — we shifted. We started growing more heirloom tomatoes and micro-greens. Then we built the greenhouse, grew flowers, stayed year-round, and the neighbors got interested,” she says. “We saw what people grew in their pots here in the neighborhood and we offered them in the nursery. As we’ve grown, we’ve tried to keep one foot in this community and one in the greater city.”

At the corner of the farm, the chickens peck at the soil on one side of the chain-link fence, while neighbors cruise on bikes or stroll the sidewalk a foot away. It’s an easy symbol of the urban farm, but it actually does what you’d think it would. A few women sit on the steps of their row-houses a block away; their young kids bump Razor scooters over the sidewalk cracks, and they love the chickens.

An afternoon thunderstorm ripped through Kensington neighborhood but only partially slowed down Greenpoint’s Thursday market.

Janice Teague has lived here for 25 years. She likes the farm. She goes every week to the Thursday market for fruit and vegetables, and she buys tomato plants to grow in her backyard garden, a 6-foot-by-2-foot sliver of soil in the tiny concrete-floor-and-cinder-block-walled back patio. She doesn’t have a car, so she can’t get to Home Depot to buy potted plants. Greensgrow lets her use the wagon to roll her purchases home, and the nursery prices are no more than Home Depot’s or Lowe’s.

“I’m not into the butter and milk and cheese stuff,” Janice says. “I get that from the regular grocery store. My daughter gets her soap from the farm. I get fruit and bread, and I get flowers that I plant in my backyard. I get peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes. They’re fresher and they’re a little more money, but I like Jersey tomatoes from the farm market better than the supermarket ones.”

Janice doesn’t see many neighbors at the Greensgrow market. The people she sees there are from elsewhere. They’re nice, but she can tell that they’re “uppy.”

I see that, I guess, as I look at the Thursday market shoppers: young folks with mustaches on their faces and baskets on their bikes, a double date popping out of a Prius, a mom with a stroller the size of a Peugeot. But there’s also a policeman and the owner of the auto-detail shop across the street.

“When you become an asset to your community or neighborhood then you’ve done something. I don’t do this just to be tan.”

Mary has always intended for Greensgrow to be profitable. She wants it to be a model for sustainable profitability, in fact. All 19 staff members are paid by the for-profit side of the business, from nursery and farm sales, which grossed $1 million last year. The Community Supported Agriculture program has 400 members. That’s enormous for a city-block-size farm, but Greensgrow has created a 75-mile web of farms and producers with the Greensgrow CSA as the mothership distribution point. It’s so big that they’ve achieved the holy grail of the CSA model — a low-income option.

It’s been a dozen years since Mary ducked rocks while hanging plastic over the greenhouse. The bees help, but mainly she and her staff and her chickens and the nursery’s petunias have put a face on the farm and the neighborhood.

“In the short term I see a positive change. I got a Google alert last night. I don’t usually check those, but I did this time. It was from a real estate listing. It said, ‘Great house, great location right next to Greensgrow Farm!!!’ When you become an asset to your community or neighborhood then you’ve done something. I don’t do this just to be tan.”

[1] Source: the Community Gardening in Philadelphia, 2008 Harvest Report compiled by Domenic Vitiello and Michael Nairn of the Penn Planning and Urban Studies, University of Pennsylvania. October 2009

All content ©Breaking Through Concrete, adapted with permission. For information regarding use of images, video, or text, please contact btctour@mail.com.

January 2011 update: Many of the photos have been removed from this series so they can be published in a Breaking Through Concrete book, forthcoming this year from UC Press.

Karen Turner, 25, wants to farm 100 acres in Texas. Her family has lived on 10 acres in San Antonio since she was a child. She plans to start there with chickens, fruit trees, and vegetables, and eventually have a dairy farm.

Karen Turner, a farm apprentice, wants to return to Texas to farm full-time.But today she’s in Brooklyn, NY, and she just carried a five-gallon bucket of used coffee grounds from a neighborhood café on a steamy-hot Wednesday. She brought the bucket into a warehouse and climbed two flights of stairs to the roof. Aphids are attacking a row of kale; something must be done. So Karen kneels between the neat rows on the 6,000-square-foot Eagle Street Rooftop Farm and spreads old espresso grounds around the plants. The Empire State building, a few miles away, pokes out of the top of her straw hat.

We’re a long way from Texas in every way except for that hat, this soil, the sun’s Southern-style beat-down, and the agricultural culture atop this roof.

Rooftop gardens and “living roofs” are the rage, especially in foodie-hip Brooklyn. In some ways the rooftop garden is the poster child for urban farming: clean, beautiful, with views, and atop the very thing that makes a city a city — big buildings with flat roofs. Their aesthetic and conceptual efficiency make them appealing vehicles for promoting the growing of food in urban environments.

And Eagle Street is the quintessential rooftop farm. It all got off the ground in late 2008. Goode Green, a green-roof business, got together with Greenpoint, Brooklyn warehouse owner Gina Argento, and former E*Trade man Ben Flanner to build a rooftop farm. Flanner brought in Annie Novak to direct the farming and planting aspect.

Flanner has since moved on to work on the larger Brooklyn Grange rooftop project. So Annie runs the farm with the help of an intern, a few apprentices, and volunteers. They grow beautiful produce for sale at their weekly market, run a small CSA, and sell to high-end Brooklyn restaurants such as Eat, Marlow & Sons, Manducati Rustica, Anella, Paulie Gee’s, and Vesta. That part’s easy in hyper-foodie Brooklyn. And local food carries enough value in this neighborhood to support the project as a for-profit endeavor.

In some ways the rooftop garden is the poster child for urban farming: clean, beautiful, with views, and atop the very thing that makes a city a city — big buildings with flat roofs.

With the media world lurking in the skyscrapers over the East River, publicity is not a problem, either. The media page on Eagle Street’s website bosts coverage by CNN, the New York Times, New York Magazine, Martha Stewart TV, CBS Evening News, etc.

Students from the Friends summer camp in Manhattan visit the farm. Annie might rather be farming than entertaining film crews, but so it goes on a project intended to be as much about education and outreach as it is about arugula, city chickens, and tomatoes.

“We want to serve as a basis for potential,” Annie says. “Everything we do here on a small scale can be blown up in any way. It’s like a demo for everything. Because we’re in New York, we have a broad reach. If I’m doing this in a city, I want to have that connection to as many people as possible. Otherwise, I’d rather just be farming in upstate.”

Annie hopes her outreach on this rooftop with school groups from Manhattan, New Jersey, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens — and anyone who walks up the warehouse stairs to buy a bundle of radishes or four eggs — will gain an awareness of food. “The whole point of this project was to get people so excited about food that they support our upstate farms as consumers,” she says. The surprise factor — growing in the city as a surprise and growing on a roof as a bigger surprise — helps shock people into the whole agriculture thing.

Eagle Street is Karen Turner’s first experience actually growing food. She worked with livestock for a week in Arkansas via a Heifer International farm-stay. “For the first time, during that farm stay,” she says, “I felt I was where I was supposed to be. And then I really came to that conclusion a month ago.”

Karen heard of Eagle Street through her Food Studies masters program at NYU. Her father died when she was young, so the San Antonio farm, managed by her mother, grows only hay now. Karen says the land is capable of supporting the farm she wants to start after a few years.

She’s in full training mode, reading books about farming, planting at night, and practicing new skills with Annie atop this roof overlooking city. “Monday, I helped build the third pallet compost bin and that’s the system I’ll need in Texas. Everything gets me pumped right now,” she says. “I can’t wait to do that when I get home.”

All material ©Breaking Through Concrete. For questions regarding use of images, video and/or, text, please contact btctour@mail.com.

Neighbors used to avoid this area in the LeDroit Park neighborhood of Washington, DC, the site of an abandoned school, before Common Good City Farm grew there.(Photos ©Michael Hanson)

“You got any more arugula?”

A middle-aged man has just walked up to the street side of the chain-link fence. He peers through the gaps in the rusted metal and looks into the Common Good City Farm, where Murray Schmechel, 76, and Troy Coleman, 47, are laying irrigation tubing down rows of winter squash and hot peppers.

“I don’t have any right now, but come on in and work for a minute next time you come around and we’ll probably have some,” Murray says.

“Alright. I might, but later. It’s too hot right now,” says the man on the street.

He’s right. It is too hot right now. A heat wave has followed us up the east coast from New Orleans (105 degree heat index), through Birmingham, and now into Washington D.C. It’s like the sun’s getting all fired up in approach to its solstice. But Troy and Murray are out here at Common Good City Farm (CGCF), as are six or seven other volunteers and a few children. 

I can’t help but notice the mix of people on this city block. Outside the fence, on the streets and sidewalks and in the doorways of the graffiti’d brick apartments stand some of the residents. It’s cooler outside than in the air-conditioner-less rooms inside. The people out here don’t seem interested in growing food, or in what the farm stands for. I ask a few middle-aged folks on the street corner if they go into the farm or get food from it. They say they used to grow food when they were young, but not anymore, not even as an aside in the garden outside their front door. They say they mostly see kids from the neighborhood in there.

“We’ll ask people what they want to see grown and hear ‘barbeque ribs.’ But everyone likes tomatoes, okra, snap peas. When you bring that out of them, the gardening that they know, that their parents or grandparents might have grown — then they start to get it.”

Inside the fence, the people pruning and watering and volunteering at Common Good have that idealistic, world-changing energy. Conclusions come easily, especially when you’ve become accustomed to swooping in, seeing a project, and getting its vibe in only a day or two. So I worried about this one for the first afternoon. Common Good City Farm is young, yes — in its second year on this plot after years growing food nearby at the 7th Street Garden — but is it a pat-on-the-back project for people who live elsewhere? One of those “museum” farms Katherine Kelly talked about in Kansas City?

Common Good sits on a former elementary school’s baseball field, which was a row of houses before that. The school, abandoned years ago, had become a dark, lurking place for trouble, the type of outpost that LeDroit did not need, considering its precipitous slide into blight that bottomed out about ten years ago. The area is cleaning up — the apartments across the street from CGCF are being gutted and rehabbed — but it’s still a food desert, with no grocery stores or easy access to fresh food. A third of the residents live in poverty, one in five is overweight, and one in ten has diabetes.

Spencer Ellsworth, Common Good City Farm farm manager and interim directorSo when the neighborhood decided to build a park on the former school property, the civic association considered including a garden project. Nearby, Liz Falk had established 7th Street Garden (video) as a thriving place of food and community growth. So they formed a partnership.

Common Good, in its second season, grows great produce. The volunteers take some of it home. Kids who work in the garden with the education program get fresh fruits and veggies and the Green Tomorrows participants, enrollees who qualify by earning less than the DC living wage, work the farm on Saturdays in return for workshop classes and fresh produce.

“Community gardens are highly concentrated in affluent Northwest D.C. – 80% of them,” says Spencer Ellsworth, 25. Spencer has recently become the farm manager and acting director as they search for a replacement for Liz. “There are also other gardens that are under-utilized. What’s lacking is folks learning how to grow, and why to grow, their own food. That’s a niche the CGCF can reach. That’s a goal — to be able to train folks and spread this. We believe you can put these projects together relatively easily. All you need is the sun, the seeds, the time, the effort, the water, and the community involvement to go with it.

“We’ve made a lot of progress, but we don’t want to just be the people inside the fence,” Spencer continues. “We’ve had to engage the civic association and sometimes even go door to door. We’ll ask people what they want to see grown and hear ‘barbeque ribs.’ But everyone likes tomatoes, okra, snap peas. When you bring that out of them, the gardening that they know, that their parents or grandparents might have grown — then they start to get it.”

Murray Schmechel and Troy Coleman are neighbors in LeDroit Park. I start to get it as I watch Murray and Troy work together. Murray grew up on a farm in Nebraska and worked in horticultural therapy for at-risk teens in Texas, as well as being a minister with the church for 24 years. He moved to DC, where his son lives, when he retired. He picked LeDroit Park because there was this farm project to work on. He’s the most knowledgeable volunteer in the history of volunteers.

Troy, meanwhile, has lived in LeDroit Park his whole life. He felt the weight of this neighborhood in his difficult childhood and subsequent dropping out of junior high school. He’s worked maintenance and labor jobs, and is now disabled. Murray and Troy live next door to each other, and one day Murray asked Troy to come help him at the farm.

“He just came and got me,” says Troy. “We’ve been doing this off and on for over a year. I got a bad back. I come out here every blue moon. This here’s the brainiac. When Murray’s got a big project to do, he comes and gets me.”

“You planted most of the tomatoes,” Murray adds. He turns to me, “You know, last year, he’d plant the tomatoes and then he’d say, ‘Grow, dammit!’ It worked. They grew, didn’t they?”

“I take some of the cabbage home, some greens,” says Troy. “I like salad. I don’t know anything about this, and he takes me out and shows me this stuff.”

Murray is a farmer, a gardener. He grows things and he knows that takes time. Watching him and Troy and the man at the fence, I see the better reality here, the one that’s hard to catch in a quick farm tour. Murray sees it, too, and, without me asking, he explains it, partly to me and partly to Troy:

“Troy, you moved in, and you and I got to talking to each other. It’s like that guy at the fence. He came over here the other day and asked me for money. I said, ‘No, but I can give you some greens.’ And he just came back here today and said he loved the greens and he wants some more. I told him to come out and work a little. So it starts slow. Maybe next time he’ll come out here and work for a bit and get some more greens.”

“We’re trying to get the neighbors involved,” says Troy. “Trying to get them to stop walking in their houses and closing their doors. We get some kids out here and when we start seeing the teenagers involved, oh man, that’s a home run.”

All content ©Breaking Through Concrete, adapted with permission. For information regarding use of images, video, or text, please contact btctour@mail.com.

January 2011 update: Many of the photos have been removed from this series so they can be published in a Breaking Through Concrete book, forthcoming this year from UC Press.

In fall 2001, Edwin Marty and Page Allison drove across the country, back home, to start a farm. That might be when the Breaking Through Concrete idea began.

Edwin and Page had been living on the West Coast, farming in Baja, Mexico, and instructing youth at Washington’s Pacific Crest Outward Bound School. The young 30-somethings belonged on the West Coast, surfing and teaching among the burgeoning, youthful tribe of educated, worldly organic farmers. But Birmingham needed them more than any of the progressive, farm-friendly towns out west.

Jones Valley Urban Farm began on a skinny vacant lot in Birmingham’s Southside neighborhood. Abandoned houses surrounded the weed-and-rubble-strewn plot. A corner convenience store across the street sold everything but wholesome food. The afternoon ice-cream truck supplied the freshest food for miles. That is to say, this food desert was not much different than most neighborhoods in downtown Birmingham and much of Southside. But, just up the street, Frank Stitt’s James Beard Award–winning restaurants were catching the first wave of the national Slow Food movement and tapping into the regional bounty of the Deep South, from Apalachicola Bay oysters to Black Belt, Alabama, produce. And every Saturday in the summer, the Pepper Place Market, about 20 blocks away, sold produce and fruit from Alabama farms to a growing consumer pool.

Now JVUF, a non-profit, sells over $100,000 a year in produce and flowers. It grows fresh food for 50 CSA members, 37 community garden-plotters, 28 local restaurants, and provides farm and food programming to 5,000 youth and adults.

By the time I met Edwin in 2004, when we both worked as editors for Time Inc. magazines based in Birmingham, JVUF was a thriving production farm with a growing sphere of influence. The original Southside plot remained the hub, with two other farms under way. I’d drop my compost off at the Southside farm in mornings. Edwin sold the produce at the farmers market and to the restaurants of Stitt, Chris Hastings, and an increasing number of others.

It was more than just food production. Though Edwin and Page went their separate ways, a farm team was building in the form of a board of directors, volunteers, and interns. Edwin drew on his education background and hired Rachel Reinhart as part-time program director (she’s now full-time). They expanded outreach to the YWCA, the Alabama School of Fine Arts, the YMCA, and other Birmingham youth projects with farm training, farm-to-plate programs, internships, and summer camps.

We had impromptu parties at the Southside plot, as well as farm-formal Sunday Suppers shared around a 60-foot-long train of folding tables resting atop mulch and covered in white tablecloths. Bowls and platters were full of salads and casseroles and baked dishes of ingredients pulled straight from the surrounding rows. The dinners raised awareness about food connections and the concept of “knowing your farmer, knowing your food” as much as they raised money for JVUF.

In 2006, JVUF went under a sea of sunflowers. Thanks to the James Rushton One Foundation, a 3.5-acre city block on 7th Ave North and 25th St. became available for Edwin and the crew. The sunflowers, a cover crop for the poor city soils, bloomed that summer, their yellow brilliance in the largely abandoned and lethargic downtown cityscape an obvious metaphor for JVUF’s impending impact via this Gardens of Park Place Farm.

Four years later, Edwin and JVUF have become the face of fresh food in Birmingham. The crowds at JVUF Sunday Suppers and gatherings have grown from the loyal “low-hanging fruit” of the early days to people and communities who, 10 years ago, would have laughed at the idea of a farm in downtown Birmingham. Now JVUF, a non-profit, sells over $100,000 a year in produce and flowers. It grows fresh food for 50 CSA members, 37 community garden-plotters, 28 local restaurants, and provides farm and food programming to 5,000 youth and adults. JVUF manages a new 25-acre farm at the residential development, Mt. Laurel, and the growing is contagious — the West End Urban Garden project opened recently, inspired and instructed in many ways by Edwin and Jones Valley.

The Gardens of Park Place farm (top photo) is the calmest spot in downtown Birmingham. We hang out on the deck of the headquarters. Weddings happen here, including that of Edwin to his wife Andrea. People still gather at long tables to eat off the land. We jump in the cistern when it’s full of roof-collected rainwater. Perhaps most importantly, this homecoming idea that originated on a Baja farm, now supports a crop of young Birmingham farmers who are eager and skillfully equipped to follow in Edwin and Page’s footsteps and dig into their hometown.

All material ©Breaking Through Concrete. For questions regarding use of images, video and/or, text, please contact btctour@mail.com.

January 2011 update: Many of the photos have been removed from this series so they can be published in a Breaking Through Concrete book, forthcoming this year from UC Press.

East New Orleans is lush and crumbling. Sometimes it feels like the built environment — the convenience stores, sugar factories, distant oil refineries, houses, brick apartments, parking-lot pavement — is no different than the vegetation: all bloom and decay, the life cycle spinning in time lapse.

Between Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Borgne, a lagoon inlet of the Gulf of Mexico, and about 10 miles east, Chef Menteur Highway runs for almost 40 miles across the Rigolets (rig-o-lees), a wild and undeveloped tract of pine forests and swamp. Strip malls cling like painter’s tape to the side of the highway, and between the asphalt and behind it, the wetland jungle seems to breathe its hot, wet air onto everything.

On Chef Menteur clings Village de l’Est, a neighborhood of vinyl-sided or light-colored brick ranch houses in a perfectly mid-century suburban layout with sidewalks, a few main avenues, and a couple shopping centers. A low mound on the north side of town, covered in tangled weeds and shrubs, marks the levee that holds in the Pontchartrain overflow.

Six thousand Vietnamese people live in this American village. The Vietnamese moved here with the Catholic Church in 1975 following the Vietnam War. Many were fishermen, and the nearby Gulf offered a work environment similar to their homeland. They also went to work in factories, hotels, and restaurants throughout New Orleans. Everyone, especially the elderly, knew how to grow things  — that’s what they did back home. In their little square suburban backyards, they grew vegetables and fruits from seeds brought over from Vietnam. Some even crossed the levee and planted in that no-man’s-land. The wet fields, Delta soils, and thick, heavy air accommodated the same plants they grew in Vietnam.

Katrina hit Village de l’Est hard. A commitment to return to their homes following the flood and a rock-solid work ethic helped speed recovery, but it was the talent for growing their own food in community spaces and backyards that really guaranteed it.

My Tran works with the Mary Queen of Vietnam Church, the strongest entity in the community (90% Catholic, 10% Buddhist). Most of the elderly generation attend mass every morning from 6:30 to 7:30 a.m. My’s parents arrived here with the rest of the influx in ’75. They farm a plot in the community space along a black-water canal. In their conical straw hats, with banana leaves silhouetted against the hazy blue sky, water lilies choking the still canal, and a hundred shades of green surrounding them, the scene could be frozen on a Vietnam postcard. But the stories of hard work and scrappiness sound like the American Dream.

It’s just what they do. There’s soil and there’s sun and there’s water. Why wouldn’t you grow food there?

Years ago Nu and Thang Nguyen fed their family of nine children and still had enough left over to sell at the local market and to restaurants.“When we were younger, my parents grew veggies for home and for sale at market. They made over 50% of their income from the market sales,” says My. “They came here with no education, no language. Dad was a plumber and Mom cut grass for minimum wage. They tended the garden at nights and on weekends. My grandfather did the original farming — he passed it on to my parents.” All nine of the Tran kids went to college.

Since the ’70s, the food economy here has been largely a local one. Backyards produce enough for the family’s own consumption and more: they sell the excess to the local Pho restaurants and food markets. Without stringent regulations or organic certifications, the Saturday open-air farmers market still welcomes all comers. It looks and acts like a Vietnamese marketplace.

The Minh Canh grocery store off Alcee Fortier Street too could be transplanted straight from Vietnam. I can’t recognize most of the items. Fresh produce — mainly greens –- sit in boxes scattered about. There’s a buzz in here, the type of movement and noise that seems both chaotic and comfortable.

Here’s a short video we shot in the store:

After walking through some backyards overflowing with greens, potatoes, and fruits, and then eating the produce at the nearby Pho restaurant, Dong Phuong, and seeing it sold at Minh Canh, I have to say: This place feels like the model for sustainable local food — although no one here calls it that. It’s just what they do. There’s soil and there’s sun and there’s water. Why wouldn’t you grow food there?

On our final afternoon, we meet with Father Luke Nguyen. He’s an assistant to Father Nguyen (who is traveling in Vietnam), the charismatic leader of the church and community who’s credited with many of the progressive ideas coming from this community. Father Luke is an energetic man in his own right. He takes time out from his priestly duties to show us gardens and introduce us to residents. In each home we visit, we are offered cold water and sodas and invited to sit in the large, open, spotlessly clean living room with shiny, white-tiled floors and portraits of family members on the walls.

I ask Father Luke if the gardening will survive this generation of elderly. Are flat-screen TVs and fast food — the dark side of the American Dream — going to bulldoze the native knowledge and amputate the green thumbs? He doesn’t see it that way. It’s not just this elderly generation that wants to farm and enjoys being outside gardening and raising food. It’s just the elders. Period. There will always be elders. Other retirees in our culture pass the time playing bridge, tennis, golf, or volunteering at parks, etc. In the Vietnamese community, the elderly and retired stay busy growing food.

This turns all my notions of continuity and sustainability on their head. In Village de l’Est, they encourage the young’uns to be professionals, to work and raise their families. When they’ve retired, then they can dig in, connect with their heritage, and grow food.

Maybe this is a model we can learn from.