In the early 20th century, if residents of America’s burgeoning cities didn’t feel like going dancing or to the theater, they had another option for live entertainment: bike racing. Now, thanks to some ambitious bike activists, the pastime has returned to some of the nation’s roughest neighborhoods via crowdfunded, volunteer-built velodromes.

What’s a velodrome, you ask? Picture a wooden Nascar track with high, banked turns. They offer riders dizzying, X-Games-style thrills, as seen in this bike-cam video – and some pretty spectacular spills to boot. They used to be commonplace in the U.S. According to bicycle historian David Herlihy, America’s first velodrome was built in Brooklyn in 1869, and many hockey stadiums doubled as velodromes for epic, six-day endurance races.

But although track racing has remained popular in Europe — it’s been an Olympic sport since 1896 — stateside, velodromes went the way of the icebox after World War II. Recently, however, these tracks have begun to reappear. A 166-meter velodrome opened in Chicago in 2011. That was joined, in August 2012, by a similar one in Cleveland. Yet another velodrome will soon go up in Pittsburgh.

And here’s the kicker (or kickstand, if you prefer): These velodromes occupy previously vacant land in struggling parts of town. Think $3,000 bikes zipping through neighborhoods of $3,000 houses.

Why would anyone build an elite, European-style athletic facility in the rustiest precincts of the Rust Belt? The answer comes from the convergence of two renaissance movements — one aimed at reinvigorating cycling, the other America’s inner cities.

The architect of these tracks — literally — is Dale Hughes of Rochester Hills, Mich., a lifelong cyclist and designer of world-class velodromes via his company V-Worldwide. The Chicago, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh tracks are his designs.

“The reality is that cycling is small sport,” Hughes explains. “We cyclists have to win over one rider at a time.” Better to do that in the city than the ’burbs, he says. “It’s harder to get kids to bike in the suburbs because they are booked 24/7 all summer long.” So why not bring a little bit of Europe to the ’hood?

From the outside, the Cleveland velodrome looks like a Noah’s ark of modern materials, with high, sloping sides cradled in scaffolding. Its floor is of marine plywood bolted to sections of steel roof trusses — the kind that support the ceiling in big-box stores. It took 250 people more than 3,000 hours to build. (Here’s a YouTube video of the work.) More than 100 people made donations of $1,000 or more toward the $300,000 cost.

On a recent Sunday afternoon, two guys in spandex pulled into the Cleveland track for a few friendly races. Gary Burkholder, an IT guy who lives in suburban Parma, and a friend started by circling the bottom of the track. Their thin wheels made a pulsing rumble as they circled. As they gained speed, they ascended toward the upper rim, and as they did, the surrounding neighborhood hove into view: rows of boarded-up, empty houses.

This is Slavic Village, and hints of its proud past remain, including the athletic center of Cleveland’s Czech Cultural Association right across the street. But the neighborhood had slowly deteriorated before the Great Recession KOed it. “When the housing crisis first hit, this neighborhood had one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country,” Burkholder told me between heats.

There was once a hospital where the velodrome now stands, but the land was vacant for 10 years. Now the city owns and leases it to Fast Track Cycling, the nonprofit that operates the velodrome, for $1 a year. Burkholder serves on its board.

To bridge the cultural divide between riders and nearby residents, Fast Track has provided urgently needed youth programs. The group has a trailer of racing bikes and helmets for kids to borrow. In 2012, Fast Track sent several kids from the neighborhood to the Ohio State Track Championships.

“The velodrome complements our community’s commitment to get people biking,” says Marlane Weslian of the nonprofit Slavic Village Development.

“We genuinely hope kids fall in love with cycling,” Weslian says. But there’s a more practical motive, too: One-third of neighborhood residents don’t have cars, according to Weslian, so the velodrome’s organizers are teaching kids cycling skills that they will use for years to come.

The location does have some drawbacks, however. In this neighborhood, everything has to be locked down. I was told that a nearby community center has had its manhole covers stolen and sold for scrap — twice.

And in some respects, cycling seems to be a hard sell, and not just because of the expensive gear. In Chicago, when volunteers organized a fix-to-own bike program for local kids, only a handful signed up. Maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise — a velodrome is a curious thing to put in a long-suffering neighborhood. What’s next, a yachting club or inner-city polo ground?

But maybe it’s not just the cultural divide that keeps kids away. The Chicago track, built on the site of a former steel mill, is “aggressively banked,” which is cyclese for damn steep. “It’s terrifying at first,” says Dana Kotler, a Chicago physician and bike enthusiast.

Also, track bikes are fixies with no brakes, a fact not lost on the neighborhood youth. As one kid told me enthusiastically, “My friend rode on it. He fell. But he said it was fun.”

Ultimately, these tracks are about something more than thrills, however. “The velodrome is one more element of building a vibrant, city-wide bike culture,” says Ethan Spotts of Chicago’s Active Transportation Alliance. It’s a culture that Chicago and other cities once had in spades — and with a little luck and a lot of elbow grease, they’ll someday have again.

Travel for this article was supported by a grant from the Fund for Environmental Journalism.

Bartlett Durand is the rare local-food entrepreneur who has no trouble turning a profit: Durand’s Black Earth Meats processes and sells grass-fed beef, and these days grass-fed beef sells like crazy.

Located near Madison, Wis., Black Earth is an abattoir, an old-fashioned butchery containing everything from a slaughterhouse to a retail store. Its sales have doubled in four out of the last five years. Durand expects them to jump again this year, from $6 million to $10 million. Orders have poured in so swiftly that, in addition to artisan butchers, Black Earth had to hire a “chef liaison” to translate orders into cow anatomy.

“Chefs have been trained in the box beef codes and don’t always know where the meat comes from on the animal,” Durand explains. “A chef will say, ‘I want a filet de round.’ My butcher will say, ‘What the hell is that?’”

Grass-fed beef, like “filet de round,” is a concept that eludes people outside the beef industry. So a little background is in order.

In the months after birth, a calf drinks the rich milk of its mother. Once weaned, it might be lucky enough to follow mom around the pasture for a little while, munching grass — but sooner or later, it is customarily sent to a feedlot to be fattened on grain, a process somewhat like tossing an animal on a full-tilt assembly line. Cows left to fatten in the field are the ones that become “grass-fed beef.” They gain the same weight, but more slowly, taking up to 14 months more, and yield a leaner beef. Some farmers of grass-fed beef are purists and leave the cow in the pasture till the day it dies. Others “cheat” by giving the cow a month or two of grain at the end, but in the comfort of the barnyard, not a 10,000-head feedlot. Durand sells both kinds.

Durand is a trim 45-year-old who has deep roots in agriculture. His grandfather was a geographer who studied milksheds. “I was a vegetarian in college because of how meat was raised and handled,” Durand recalls. When he married into a farm family, he started helping out and ultimately quit his job as a lawyer to pursue food full time.

In the $79-billion beef industry, his company is miniscule. Four giant companies control 80 percent of the beef market. “A really big kill for us would be 50 cows in one day,” says Durand. “A small packinghouse processes 1,500 to 3,000 a day.”

Yet his business has the customers to grow. Black Earth buys cows from 78 farmers. To keep up with demand, Durand must convince them to raise more cows on grass alone. He must also lure new farmers to the field. And farmers, though intrigued, are justifiably wary. Is grass-fed beef a fad among chefs and yuppies destined to peter out, or a major new market?

Folks like Durand are betting on the latter. They believe that grass-fed beef — which cuts out both feedlots and the resource-intensive practice of raising grain just to feed cows — can catalyze a great change in American agriculture.

As Fred Kirschenmann, a sustainable farmer and noted agricultural scholar, says: “Putting cattle back on pasture will be the beginning of more resilient, less energy-intensive farming systems that are more likely to survive in our future of higher energy costs, unstable climates, and depleted fresh water and mineral resources.”

Risky business

Because of the farmer’s extra time and investment, grass-fed beef is intrinsically more expensive than feedlot beef. That extra cost gets passed along to consumers. In my neighborhood supermarket, I found conventional round steak on offer for $5.49 a pound. The same cut of steak from Black Earth went for $13 a pound.

Such premium prices represent an economic opportunity for farmers, but only if they survive a risky transition to what remains a rarified, niche market. Tom Martin of Mountain Lane Farm in Wauzeka, Wis., switched to grass-feeding in 2001. More than a decade later, he is still learning its finer points. He has a herd of 125 cows and sells his beef at farmers markets and out of his home freezer.

For Martin, both farming and marketing grass-fed beef have proven difficult. “It’s a work in progress and a learning process,” he explains. “With grass-feeding, there’s a lot of science, but there’s some art to it, too.” For instance, grass-fed farmers must learn to “listen” for the cows to tell them when it’s time to rotate to a fresh pasture.

“Not knowing where the next check is coming from is a little dicey,” he continues. “It’s been a struggle to make the relationships. I feel like locally, people still look at the price and say, ‘That’s too much.’”

Greener pastures

Like other farmers I talked to, Martin made this economic gamble in part because he values the environmental benefits of grass-feeding.

Grazing pastures provide habitat for lots of creatures, not just cows, from big bluestem to prairie chickens. When managed properly, they can store carbon [PDF] in much the same way that a forest does. Finishing cows on the range eliminates the need for concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, which sully water quality from little creeks all the way down the Mississippi River and into the Gulf of Mexico.

Moreover, a well-managed, ecologically diverse rangeland holds up in drought conditions, according to Greg Judy, a farmer who grass-feeds 300 cows in Rucker, Mo. “We’re going to have enough grass in the fields to graze all winter long,” he says, “even though we had no rain for 130 days this past summer.”

Some folks will protest that the U.S. lacks the land area to switch the beef industry to grass-finishing. While there’s some truth in this critique, it misses the larger point: The beef industry and American agriculture as a whole have a lot to gain from rethinking their approach to land use, according to Fred Kirschenmann.

“We have to remember that raising animals in confinement means we have to raise lots of corn and soybeans to feed them,” says Kirschenmann. “A lot of that land could be used for grazing on perennials and raising alfalfa for forages, which would have significant ecological benefits.”

To hear some apostles of grass tell it, though, grass-fed beef begins and ends with taste. Todd Churchill, a farmer who owns Thousand Hills Cattle Company in Cannon Falls, Minn., and dresses like an extra from The Magnificent Seven, is emphatic on this point. “All the intellectual arguments about grass-fed beef, animal welfare, and environmental impacts — those are great stories, and they’re true. But the only purpose they serve is to get someone to try our product for the first time.”

“This is about producing an eating experience that is so incredible that people will pay more for it,” Churchill says.

But by that logic, even the most immaculately cultivated grass-fed steak becomes an all-or-nothing taste-test that hordes of Americans will fail because they grew up on the uniform, greasy taste of feedlot burgers.

The cows that become those burgers taste the same because, from one feedlot to another, they eat the same thing: industrial feed made from grains and soy. On the other hand, the grasses on rangeland can vary quite a bit, making grass-fed beef much more heterogeneous and thus something of an acquired taste.

“Some people will say it tastes a little gamey,” says Durand. “You may get an occasional wild flavor in there, a little extra flavor. This is what beef was prior to 1960. Once people understand that’s what it tastes like, they love it.”

Beefing up production

No one keeps reliable statistics on the production of the grass-fed beef. One agricultural consultant estimates that in 2009, grass-fed netted $380 million — or 0.005 percent of the total U.S. beef industry.

The hot sales of grass-fed have piqued the interest of cash-starved farmers. Cheap corn is part of what makes feedlots so profitable, and right now, because of the drought, corn prices are sky high. As Churchill notes, “I’ve had several farmers in the last month call and say, ‘I’m tired of losing $100 a head putting my cattle in a feedlot. Tell me about your model.’”

Farmers are drawn to small, boutique beef companies like Thousand Hills or Black Earth because of their established brand and clients. Yet they must make significant changes in their operations for the partnership to succeed.

Black Earth, for instance, refers prospective farmers to an agricultural consultant to help them through the transition. The consultant may recommend fortifying pastures with native grasses, reducing the herd size, adopting new grazing patterns, moving fences, or all of the above.

Durand offers tutorials as needed. “We had a farmer come in who had been growing conventional steers with corn,” he recalls. “He brought us his first grass-fed steers, and they were poor quality. He took them out of the pasture too early. We had to really work with him on different types of forage crops he could grow for the cows. It takes a farmer who will listen and respond.”

“They have to think differently,” says Greg Judy. “There has to be some education teaching them how to stockpile forages and plan through a drought. There’s a lot of management to it.”

Farmers are expert managers — but as such, they tend to eschew big risks. And this is the conundrum that haunts the grass-fed beef industry: Do farmers believe in grass-fed enough to bet the farm?

If someone told you that you smelled like Chicago, chances are that you’d dash home to bathe. But what if the remark implied not “You smell like raw sewage,” but instead “You smell like something grown in Chicago.” That compliment is now possible due to an unlikely new product: A locally sourced, city-grown perfume. Think of it as a CSA in a bottle. That you wear on a date. Or something like that.

The fragrance, called Tru Blooms Chicago, hit stores this fall. It is the brainchild of Monte Henige, CEO and owner of Tru Fragrance, a manufacturer located in the Chicago suburb of Willowbrook.

In January, Henige found himself in a brainstorming meeting. The subject of urban agriculture came up. Nothing is hotter these days than locally grown produce, right? So Henige began to play with the idea. What about a farm-to-table beauty product? Voila! Tru Blooms Chicago was born.

Henige collaborated with many of Chicago’s city agencies to grow key ingredients for the perfume —  roses, lavender, and violets — in 22 local gardens. Everyone from the park district to the planning department to the office of tourism got involved. So did the Chicago Botanic Garden and urban-ag stalwarts such as Growing Power and Growing Home. The city loved the idea, especially because Tru Fragrance paid for everything, investing more than $1 million in the process.

A little more than two acres were rented and planted, spread across the city. Some flowers took root in prominent locations — Grant Park and Water Tower Place, for instance — while others were sown in neighborhood gardens and urban farms. You can locate the gardens using this nifty online map.

Countless perfumes have been inspired by cities like Paris, but according to Henige, none have actually come from those cities. “We believe the product is the first of its kind in terms of how it’s integrated into the city,” he says.

After looking around, I’d have to say he is probably right. Anyone can cook up homemade fragrances in the smallest of studio apartments, of course. And lots of perfumes brand themselves as urban. But the only other urban-made scent I could find was by Keith Urban.

“This is about being authentic,” says Henige. “There’s sophistication in the diversity of gardens and gardeners who contributed.”

Fortunately, the sophistication involves something more than tired old green-is-good marketing. Henige says about 100 local workers were hired for the project. That number presumably did not include the inmates tending the perfume-destined flowers at the Cook County Sheriff’s Boot Camp.

Once the flowers were harvested, they were used to derive essential oils for the perfume. (Click here for an explanation of the process.) Henige couldn’t explain the chemistry involved, but given the, ahem, unique composition of Chicago’s soil and the vagaries of the local climate, one can argue that Tru Blooms must in some way smell like the Windy City. I wasn’t able to get a sample, but based on the ingredients, I suspect that the roses and lavender come through strongest.

If the perfume sells well — and it already seems to be doing so — Tru Fragrance wants to make new city-grown scents. Perhaps an eau de prairie in tribute to the Midwest’s natural heritage?

Then there are the myriad theme fragrances awaiting an olfactory evocation. What about a powerful man’s cologne, in reference to Chicago’s iron-fisted political bosses?

The possibilities, like the city’s smells, are endless.

Environmentalists have grown used to thinking of urban agriculture as something that occurs on pinched vacant lots in former industrial towns. But as farms of 20 acres or more start appearing in more cities, their owners are reworking the definition of “urban farm,” and causing some agtivists to question whether bigger really is better.

In San Diego, there’s the 140-acre Suzie’s Farm. In Albuquerque, there is 40-acre Skarsgard Farms. Not only are both located within the city limits, they both grew more than $1 million in organic produce this season.

The success of such farms, combined with urban agriculture’s broad appeal, is inspiring city officials to consider dedicating large chunks of vacant land to farming.

In San Francisco, redevelopment plans for the former Navy base on Treasure Island include an “urban agriculture park” of more than 20 acres, according to Michael Tymoff, the project director. In Cleveland, a 26-acre farming district has taken root where houses once stood. In Kansas City, Mo., leaders are considering turning a 420-acre former prison, or some portion thereof, into a farm.

“We believe that there is room for both food system-related uses as well as more ‘traditional’ types of development” at the site, says Gerald Williams, a planner with the City of Kansas City. Depending on how much land Williams and his colleagues ultimately dedicate to agriculture, they may be building the biggest urban farm in the country.

The average American farm covers 418 acres, far more than the largest of its city counterparts. Yet the expanding footprint of farms in the urban core underscores people’s interest in the aesthetic of farming, as well as the rising market for local products and the abundance of vacant urban land.

Detroit’s Hantz Farms is still a modest operation, but its outsized ambition has created a controversy of equal proportions. Businessman John Hantz originally proposed a for-profit urban farm of 10,000 acres. But local outcry about the plan — including its size and Hantz’s low-ball offer for the land — forced him to downsize to a still-expansive 200 acres, which will be planted as a tree farm. The project’s website proclaims it both “the world’s largest urban farm” and “Detroit’s saving grace.”

The Hantz controversy highlights one of the most vexing questions about urban agriculture: How much land should cities properly devote to farming?

City halls nationwide find themselves emerging from the Great Recession with a lot of land to maintain. Urban farms and community gardens have become one of the most popular options.

The problem is, many small urban farmers are tired of being told their work is symbolic and are eager to grow the amount of food that will bring in a profit. That’s the idea behind Cleveland’s Urban Agriculture Innovation Zone, which shelters not one large farm but many small ones: 15 half-acre incubator plots — fostering 15 new businesses — plus five “anchor” farms ranging from half an acre to four acres.

“If we had another 20 spots, we could fill them,” says Marie Barni, who oversees the zone on behalf of the Ohio State University Extension. Barni and her team are reviewing applications from would-be farmers, with the hope that, after a few years in the incubator, they will grow up and move out like fledged chicks. Logically, the project is funded in part by the USDA’s Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program.

Small urban farms can quickly become enormous ones. As Monte Skarsgard says of his capacious Albuquerque range: “Besides the machinery, what we do isn’t much different than a scaled-up one-acre farm. The key is to finding the right combination of intensive crops to make the higher land costs in the city worth it.”

Yet more than a few environmentalists have argued that urban farms must remain small or risk suburbanizing the city. One of the most prominent is Kaid Benfield, a smart-growth guru with the Natural Resources Defense Council. Benfield worries that urban farming, if practiced on a large scale, will dilute the walkability and density that defines cities.

“I support the growing of food in cities, and have even done it myself,” Benfield cautions. “But it should be done in ways that support urbanism and not displace it.”

“I’m not sure we’re talking about a city any more if we’re going to have fields of 20 acres and more.”

By seeding large farms in the city, he says, “we risk locking in long-term environmental problems in terms of not having a healthy urban core. Central cities are starting to revive.”

One problem is that most of the best para-urban land (or land just outside cities) — which was once seen as ideal for growing food without huge transportation costs — has already been swallowed up by suburban development.

Some would argue that there’s no way these large farms can last, given our nation’s history of boom and bust economic cycles. On a related note, Robin Shulman, author of Eat the City, said in a recent Grist interview, “… even in New York and San Francisco, [land availability] has crested and fallen again in direct relation to the economy. It’s a pattern that has happened repeatedly since the late 1800s. Whenever there’s an economic fall, people use the space where other buildings were to produce food to feed those who are hungry.”

According to Benfield, “once urban land is made green, it’s going to become loved as green rather than loved as city.” Not that we can blame anyone for loving green space. But that’s where sticking to smaller, truly sustainably sized farms in cities — and leaving the bulk of our food production to rural areas — might make the most sense. It will also save us all the heartbreak of seeing our favorite crops plowed under too soon.

Research for this article was supported by a grant from the Fund for Environmental Journalism.

It’s a long drive from Florida to Denver, but Leonel Perez and his colleagues at the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) don’t mind. In fact, they arrived in the Mile High City three weeks early for Cultivate, a food, beer, and music festival sponsored by Chipotle Mexican Grill.

They were not drawn by a love of burritos. In the days leading up to Cultivate, Perez, Jake Ratner, an organizer for Just Harvest USA, and several other CIW organizers will hold dozens of community events, speak at many churches, and give classroom presentations at all Denver’s major universities. Then, on Oct. 6, the day of the festival, Perez will build a giant stack of tomato buckets just outside the festival to represent the daily toil of 30,000 impoverished tomato workers.

Over the last decade, Perez and others at CIW have pressured major food companies like McDonald’s, Whole Foods, and Sodexho to join something called the Fair Food Program. Now, they’re ratcheting up pressure on the burrito giant in hopes of a similar deal.

“We’ll continue these demonstrations until Chipotle signs,” says Ratner.

Ordering at Chipotle is famously simple: Select one of four meats, then black beans or pinto, then salsas. The company’s politics, on the other hand, are maddeningly complex. Why won’t Chipotle — a company that has gone to great lengths to broadcast its high-quality, “ethical” food — shake hands with tomato workers?

Just as important, why aren’t more people upset with Chipotle’s intransigence?

What the Ells is going on?

The impoverished Florida village of Immokalee is the epicenter of the U.S. tomato industry. From December to May, 90 percent of the nation’s tomatoes come out of these fields. They’re picked by a fluid workforce of more than 30,000 migrant laborers who have suffered beatings, sexual assault, wage theft, and slavery [PDF]. If that weren’t enough, the pay is poor and the conditions subhuman.

A number of nonprofits have rallied to the CIW’s cause: Rater’s Just Harvest, plus the Student/Farmworker Alliance, Interfaith Action of Southwest Florida, the Alliance for Fair Food, and Rabbis for Human Rights – North America. The campaign began with a boycott of Taco Bell in 2001. Since then, it and nine leading companies have committed to the Fair Food Program.

Food companies that join the program enter binding contracts with the CIW. They agree to pay a penny more per pound directly to the workers, which doesn’t sound like much but significantly raises their take-home pay. The program also requires shade tents and ice water in the fields, health and safety monitors, sessions to educate workers about their rights, and a confidential enforcement program run by the Fair Food Standards Council in nearby Sarasota. A grower who doesn’t stick to the agreement risks losing his ability to sell to the 10 big fast food and grocery retailers who have signed on.

Over the last 18 months, organizers like Ratner and Perez have intensified their efforts to get Chipotle to sign. In May 2011, University of Colorado students protested the commencement address given by Chipotle CEO Steve Ells. On May 1 of this year, protesters affiliated with the Occupy movement condemned Chipotle during a march through New York City. On July 27, CIW and Just Harvest coordinated protests at Chipotle restaurants in 25 cities.

Considering the appalling conditions and the worthy alternative offered by the Fair Food Program, why won’t Chipotle sign on? It’s a mystery complicated by the company’s refusal to take a consistent position. As Leonel Perez, a CIW organizer, explains, “Every time [CIW approaches Chipotle], they seem to have another excuse.” (CIW has even issued a point-by-point rebuttal of Chipotle’s “explanations.”)

It’s hard to be sure, but some organizers believe the resistance has come from the highest levels of Chipotle, perhaps even from CEO and chair Steve Ells himself. Ells is different from a lot of food executives because he started the company and rolled its first burritos. He loves to tell an I-saw-the-light story about visiting a farm and realizing that most pigs don’t have great lives, and has often championed the values behind Chipotle.

But those values get complicated fast when you’re talking about an enormous mobile workforce, and it’s not clear that Ells gets that. Says Ratner, “You can’t take the same top-down approach that you might use for humane treatment of animals and just apply it to farmworkers. It takes the recognition of those workers as equal partners every bit as important as Chipotle’s customers.”

Other organizers believe that Ells hasn’t bothered to read the many reputable reports (not to mention the award-winning book Tomatoland) that have come out of Florida’s abominable tomato fields.

“That’s why time and time again the CIW has invited Ells to Immokalee,” Ratner says.

Whose integrity — Chipotle’s or its customers’?

Organizers set up a row of the buckets used in the tomato harvest to engage festival attendees in conversation about the conditions of workers.

The Cultivate festival provides a high-visibility opportunity for organizers — who stack tomato buckets, talk about the harsh realities of workers’ lives, and encourage people to get involved in the campaign. The festival also demonstrates Chipotle’s phenomenal success. At the Chicago edition of Cultivate, held in September, thousands of festivalgoers — mostly young and white — crowded before the main stage to hear a lineup anchored by G Love. They sipped local microbrews and watched cooking demos by star chefs like Richard Blais and Paul Kamen featuring ingredients from area farms. They bought tofu tacos and sampled the fare at Chipotle’s new Asian concept restaurant. Want to learn about Chipotle’s wonderful relationship with avocado farmers or test out an iPad game called Pig2Pasture? There were booths for that, too. At each, Chipotle staff stamped your festival program. Collect four stamps and you landed a coupon for a free burrito.

If the festival sounds like a roaring success, try reading Chipotle’s annual report. The company’s revenue has tripled since 2006. In 2011, it earned a staggering $2.24 billion.

That suggests two things. First, a burrito boycott is not going to work. Second, the deplorable conditions in Immokalee have not yet dented Chipotle’s reputation.

Why not? Usually, the specter of human slavery at least makes consumers think twice.

It turns out that Chipotle’s vaunted “Food with Integrity” campaign — as illustrated by its pasture-raised, rBGH-free sour cream, for instance — probably helps insulate the company from whatever outrage people feel at its underwhelming human rights record.

I talked to Marc LiVecche, an ethicist at the University of Chicago, about how a huge concern like slavery could fail to affect people’s buying habits.

“There’s definitely a feeling of moral exhaustion that sets in,” LiVecche explained. “Folks begin to wonder how many issues they might possibly need to keep track of when shopping. The tacit perception sets in that it’s too hard to walk around in modern life and have integrity 100 percent of the time. When facing questions about a particular company, people look for trustworthy authorities. If they’ve heard good reports about that company, that can counterbalance the issue that’s being raised.”

In other words, sour cream can trump slavery, given the right circumstances.

That does not deter organizers like Ratner and Perez. “Chipotle is symbolic of the divisions between the food movement and the food justice movement,” says Ratner. “It threatens the Fair Food Agreement. If corporations go it alone, as Chipotle wants to, it undermines the whole system of market consequences protecting the workers.”

Food-justice organization Growing Power — with its now-iconic greenhouses, composting worms, fishponds, and multiple generations of graduates — is well-known as a model worth replicating. Now, Growing Power has announced a bountiful $5 million grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to fund “community food centers” aimed at relieving hunger in five of the nation’s poorest areas.

Modeled on Growing Power’s Milwaukee farm-headquarters, the centers will be located in Detroit; New Orleans; Forest City, Ark.; Shelby, Miss.; and Taos, N.M.

“It’s all wrapped around providing healthy, sustainable, local food to folks, especially our youth,” explains Will Allen, founder and director of Growing Power. “Many of the young people in those communities go to bed hungry every night.”

The grant was actually awarded in January 2011, but wasn’t formally announced till Growing Power’s annual conference last week. Hence the project is already well under way. In fact, 40 people from the Detroit site attended the conference to learn the ins and outs of methods like closed-loop aquaponics and large-scale composting.

Like Growing Power, the partner organizations that will host the centers have long-standing records of connecting food issues with racial and social justice. With support and training, they will scale up their own trainings, production, and food distribution.

“Our partnership with Growing Power has helped us to start our large-scale composting operation and with the construction and maintenance of hoop houses,” says Malik Yakini, chair of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. “It’s a tremendous way for us to develop those opportunities, and to share them with others in Detroit.”

In New Mexico, the Taos County Economic Development Corporation will host the community food center. In Forest City and Shelby — both in the Mississippi Delta – Seven Harvest and Mississippians Engaged in Greener Agriculture will take the lead.

“The project will build the capacity of these organizations,” says Linda Jo Doctor, national food program officer for the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

When describing the grant, people often used that word: “capacity.”

“The grant gives us more capacity,” echoed Nat Turner, director of Our School at Blair Grocery, home to the community food center in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward. For his organization, more “capacity” means more staff. “We’ll bring on six or seven ex-offenders from the neighborhood and give them training around urban agriculture.”

Turner also plans to hire three youth from Our School’s summer program. “We’re talking about an underclass here,” Turner says. “There aren’t any other jobs for people in the neighborhood, especially without a high school diploma.” These new employees will help the organization expand its farms and programs.

By the time the money runs out in 2015, each community food center is expected to be running a robust training program without any outside help. In turn, the trainings will hopefully lead more people to go into farming. Doctor says, “We will probably see an increased number of urban farms in those locations.”

“The potential for workforce pipeline is phenomenal,” she adds. “Food access, improved health, and job opportunities are all interconnected, and they’re all part of this project.”

Growing Power’s founder, Will Allen. (Photo by Sarah Kanouse.)

It’s worth noting that the W.K. Kellogg Foundation was started by the same William Keith Kellogg who founded the breakfast-food juggernaut with the same name. According to its annual report, a substantial portion of the foundation’s funding comes from stock in the Kellogg Company. In other words, via the foundation, Froot Loops and Pop-Tarts profits are training people to eat things other than Froot Loops and Pop-Tarts.

Yet the grant is not as ironic as it might at first seem. The Kellogg Foundation has a long history of supporting urban agriculture and progressive food policy. It has, for instance, made grants to the Food Project in Massachusetts and People’s Grocery in the Bay Area. Last year, it gave $3.5 million to FoodCorps.

“The W.K. Kellogg Foundation really stands out among other foundations,” says Yakini of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. “[It] is an anti-racist organization. I have never heard any other foundation take that stance publicly.”

Growing Power’s urban projects are frequently the subject of news reports, but the rural ones are rarely described.

In the case of the Mississippi Delta, for instance, Allen says, “Most of the land has gone over to industrial agriculture. It’s devastated those towns, because most of the people used to have their own farms.” Now, he says the area is plagued by drugs, much in the way many urban areas are. And that’s all the more reason why Growing Power’s model can make a difference.

Allen and his staff will return to Mississippi and Arkansas to do trainings in October.

A couple of years ago, a community garden in my Chicago neighborhood got the boot. A university owned the land, and even a determined grassroots campaign could not stop it (cue Joni Mitchell) from turning 140 bountiful plots into a parking lot. The eviction, and similar ones taking place nationwide, highlight one of the biggest challenges facing urban agriculture: a lack of land tenure.

The story of displaced urban gardens is nothing new. Remember L.A.’s doomed South Central Community Farm? Or Rudy Giuliani’s 1999 fatwa on community gardens?

In the past, protests have coalesced around the threatened farm or garden. Now, a loose coalition of scholars and activists is taking a different tack. They’re proactively surveying gardens in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago in hopes that hard data — servings harvested, revenues earned, and more — will make landlords think twice before summoning the bulldozers.

In New York, a geographer named Mara Gittleman is completing the third year of a garden survey called Farming Concrete. Gittleman recruited volunteers, mostly gardeners, to record the weight of the harvest (using kitchen scales) and the number and type of plants being grown. In 2010, the survey’s first year, she found that 67 New York gardens yielded 87,690 pounds of food, with an estimated value of $214,060.

Of course, 67 is a relatively small percentage of the total number of community gardens in New York; one estimate puts the number at 500. Gittleman’s count, though far from comprehensive, shows that garden surveys are both possible and relevant. “Once gardeners know the monetary value of their produce,” Gittleman says, “they can leverage these figures to gain visibility, access funding, and build capacity to grow even more.” Her findings have been a jumping-off point for sophisticated advocacy efforts like a research project out of Columbia University called The Potential for Urban Agriculture in New York City.

In Philadelphia, a garden survey is being driven by hopes of connecting threatened gardeners with legal aid. This July, I spent a morning with two University of Pennsylvania students, Michael Paci and Swaroop Rao, attempting to count the city’s community gardens. They were doing it the old-fashioned way, by visiting every single garden.

A squatter’s garden in Philadelphia. (Photo by Christopher Weber.)

Squatter gardens are common in Philadelphia. On the way to the target neighborhoods for the day, we passed scores of illegal vegetable plots, sometimes six or seven to a block. Though some had been tended for decades, they had recently begun to wane. A 2008 study found that the number of community gardens in Philadelphia was declining, despite rabid interest in urban agriculture.

Paci and Rao’s job was to determine whether the drop was continuing. Paci navigated a labyrinth of alleys and narrow one-ways while Rao penciled details on a xeroxed map. “This is essential knowledge, but it’s really hard to get,” Paci said over his shoulder. “If you don’t see someone at the garden, there is no way to call them. It’s difficult to follow-up.”

Along Ridge Avenue, a thoroughfare in north Philly, we pulled over to inspect several squatter gardens tucked between storefronts. As luck would have it, one of the gardeners, a Barbadian handyman named Dale, popped up. Dale showed us where he had painstakingly dug through the asphalt of a vacant lot to create room for hot peppers, cucumbers, and sweet potatoes. After explaining the survey, Rao interviewed him. How old was his garden? Who did he share the produce with? Where did he get water? …

Paci and Rao turned their survey data over to Amy Laura Cahn, a young attorney at the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia who hopes to build a practice around gardeners like Dale. She championed the survey as part of her Garden Justice Legal Initiative, which provides pro bono representation to gardeners facing eviction.

“Gardeners are Philadelphia’s vacant land stewards,” says Cahn. “Yet from a policy perspective, the city still views urban agriculture as a temporary activity.”

“The surveys project helps tell both stories — of the resurgent interest in gardens and the continued need to preserve them.”

Specifically, the research has revealed improving conditions for Philadelphia’s community gardens. “Gardens and farms have increased by over 100 in the past four years,” Cahn says. The survey data will help her make a legal case for gardens across the city.

These surveys add to a large body of research on the benefits of gardening on vacant land. A recent study by another University of Pennsylvania researcher found that planting gardens on empty lots reduced violence in the surrounding area. Further research is needed to tell whether it’s the gardeners themselves or their plants that are driving away gangbangers.

Like Cahn, another survey organizer sees a close tie between counting gardens and protecting them.

“We have to be able to demonstrate the power of gardeners as a constituency,” says Ben Helphand, who will lead a survey of more than 300 Chicago gardens in 2013. His team will use scales to tabulate harvest totals, as Gittleman did in New York. It will also complete in-depth studies of six representative gardens.

Helphand directs a nonprofit, NeighborSpace, whose mission is to safeguard Chicago’s community gardens. He expects the survey data will provide NeighborSpace — and agtivists in general — with a significant new tool.

“Elected officials listen to groups,” says Helphand. “We know there are thousands of community gardeners out there, but we’ve got to be able to prove it if we want to put policies that support urban ag in place.”

Twitter has been credited with everything from promoting democracy to predicting the stock market. So it’s not surprising to hear that, along with other forms of social media, Twitter is bridging the gulf between farmers and consumers — a goal of environmentalists since Henry David Thoreau went to Walden Pond.

Critically, social media has buoyed the small, non-commodity farmers suffering most from the parched conditions.

Take Harvest Moon Farms, for example. The 35-acre organic operation in southwest Wisconsin, owned by Bob and Jen Borchardt, has suffered horribly from the drought. Recent rains came too late to save the Borchardts’ greens, their principle crop.

Tweets cannot restore lost crops, of course, but they can help leverage dollars and other aid. The Borchardts are staging a string of fundraisers called “Drought Aid 2012” — beer tastings, restaurant specials, a benefit concert — to recoup some of their losses. A friend, a Chicago photographer named Grant Kessler, has assembled a social media campaign behind it. He created a webpage for a beautiful video Bob made and publicized it all via Twitter and Facebook.

“The video and the donate button on their website was immediately successful,” says Kessler. “In the first 10 days, it garnered $10,000 through the website alone. This was heavily supported by Twitter and Facebook posts that directed people to the video.”

#drought12

If you want to know the latest on the drought, one of the best places to eavesdrop is the Twitter feed “#drought12.” The unfolding conversation reads like an agricultural support group, with farmers from different regions comparing notes on how best to cope.

Here, for instance, is a sample of the #drought12 feed on August 8:

What our crop or non-crop is looking like tiny.cc/gnuqiw #drought12

— Jennifer Campbell (@plowwife) August 8, 2012

spider mites in Oxford #Soybean #drought12 pic.twitter.com/e8paDzp1

— Maurie Clayton (@maurie_c) August 8, 2012

Big hands or small cob? #drought12 pic.twitter.com/LQ5wpbwk

— James R. Briggs (‏@jimbriggs1) August 8, 2012

99* in Lincoln, NE. #drought12 pic.twitter.com/LQ5wpbwk

— Carl Horne (‏‏@CNHstar ) August 8, 2012

Hope you don’t need these tips on how to extend your hay supply. #drought12 http://ow.ly/cP5Ip
— Kathy Blocksdorf (‏‏@kblocksdorf ) August 8, 2012

Looking at a forecast of rain is like staring at a hot girl in front of your wife. You do it even though you know it’s wrong. #drought12 http://ow.ly/cP5Ip

— Matt Davis (‏‏@MDDavis89 ) August 8, 2012

‏
You might call Twitter a rain gauge, helpline, and agricultural forecast, all rolled into one.

All kinds of farmers contribute to the “conversation,” including small ones like Mark and Kristin Boe, who operate La Pryor Farms in Ottawa, Ill. They raise purebred pork on homegrown, non-GMO corn — although a recent hailstorm badly damaged their corn crop. Kristin has featured the storm and the drought in her Twitter stream:

#drought12 conditions persists in IL . . . Pic of #hail damage from Fridays storm. #Corn leaves completely shredded. pic.twitter.com/eaFtBQev

— La Pryor Farms (‏‏@lapryorfarms ) July 16, 2012

Been in IL, IN, OH, WV, VA, NC, SC, TN, KY & Southern IL…ALL #corn is tasseling & is under extreme stress. #drought12

— La Pryor Farms (‏‏@lapryorfarms ) July 12, 2012

Just announced today…LaSalle County, IL approved for emergency haying and grazing of CRP land #drought12

— La Pryor Farms (‏‏@lapryorfarms ) August 6, 2012

In another industry, Boe’s candor might be considered a questionable business practice. Tell your customers about your problems, immediately and in detail? Donald Trump has fired scores of apprentices for less.

Boe, on the other hand, sees the candid talks as a way of involving customers in day-to-day farm life.

“People get to see, hand on hand, what we’re experiencing and how it affects the livestock,” Boe says. “For instance, we bought two heifer calves. I tweeted, ‘Help me name Calf 2.’ Somebody I didn’t know suggested a name, and she started following us.

“Not everybody has the opportunity to take time off work to come up and visit the farm. Social media is a way to get them involved without being here physically.”

 “A human face”

Besides using social media to attract aid, farmers are using it to post real-time reports from the fields to educate the public about the extreme conditions so that it doesn’t abandon local farms.

This season, the staff of Wellspring organic farm in West Bend, Wis., has been using social media to explain to their 110 shareholders why their CSA boxes look different than usual. Although they use Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube as their principle tools, they regularly upload videos showing conditions in their strained fields. Likewise, their Facebook posts go into extraordinary detail. Here’s one from July 11:

Drought conditions are rivaling 1988! Farmer Alissa and our crew have been turning out exceptional produce for our shareholders and farmers market but the truth is, that without rain, this may not be able to continue as it has. Several CSAs did not deliver last week — some due to the holiday, others because they couldn’t produce enough for their boxes. Farmers markets are seeing empty booths where produce farmers were … One of our ponds this year is BONE dry! The good part of this drama is that as a teaching and educational farm for future organic farmers. Our interns are getting the lesson of a lifetime that should help them in their future careers. The bad part is that the mild winter didn’t kill off pests that are now at a level we haven’t seen in a very long time! The wildlife of groundhogs and bunnies are desperate as everything is dried up in the wild. They have found our “buffet” of greens, and they are eating for their survival. Folks, the truth is that the next few months will be very trying. … Farming right now is tougher than it has been in a very long time. Keep all the farmers in your thoughts and truly appreciate every onion, squash, tomato, etc., that your farmers are intensely working to put on your table!

This is just one update of many written by Angela Rester, Wellspring’s executive director, who asks that her staff use social media as often as possible. In fact, this year she bought Flip video cameras for all of her staffers.

“When it comes to something like the drought, words alone can’t describe it. People need pictures and videos so they can see it, see what’s actually happening. So in that sense, social media has given us a human face.”

It’s tempting to parse the ironies of that statement — Twitter a human face? But Rester sees social media as a way — a fast, effective, low-cost way — of expanding her customers’ perceptions during what can only be called, in the parlance of our times, a very bad business cycle.

“We have to tell people what’s happening on the farm so they don’t make assumptions. They [may] think you got the rain they got when you got nothing!”

For non-commodity farms — a category that includes many diverse, organic, and locally supported operations — the story is about much more than maize. A month into summer, the drought has walloped small Midwestern farmers, the very same farmers already struggling to survive a weak economy, a market dominated by rapacious agribusinesses, and, oh yeah, climate change.

For one thing, the ferocious drought has exposed a great lack of irrigation equipment on small farms. In a typical year, summer rain is common in the Midwest, and many of the region’s fruit growers have never irrigated their orchards. Community-supported agriculture (CSA) farmers also tend to lack the infrastructure to water everything they grow.

“You drive around the countryside and whoever doesn’t have irrigation doesn’t have much of a crop,” says Tom Kercher, who grows tree fruit and vegetables in Goshen, Ind.

Dela Ends runs a CSA operation in Brodhead, Wis. This summer she and her husband Tony have been filling a 450-gallon tank three times a day, and towing it to the fields, where it feeds drip lines. But this system won’t cover their 50 acres. “We just don’t have enough man power or water tanks to get to the fields that are farther away,” says Ends. “We’ve never had to water those fields.”

Not that surviving the drought is a simple matter of buying new irrigation systems. The equipment must be kept operating full tilt around the clock, day after day, and in difficult conditions.

“We’ve had mechanical issues and breakdowns,” Kercher says. “A gearhead failed. It’s not a few hundred dollars to fix that. Plus there’s all the diesel fuel to run these pumps. You work yourself to death to keep the irrigation equipment running.”

The lack of irrigation ties into another pressure point: a widening scarcity of animal feed. Feed crops like alfalfa often go unirrigated in favor of more valuable crops, as do grazing pastures.

“The pasture is drying up,” says Joylene Reavis, another small Wisconsin farmer. “What the sheep have eaten down isn’t growing back. That means having to find them hay. Right now, hay is in scarce supply. Feed prices are going up every day.”

Cows on Marybeth Feutz’ farm must subsist on hay, now that the pasture has dried up.

In southern Indiana, where the drought has reached extreme proportions, Marybeth Feutz and her husband John are facing a similar predicament with their small herd of beef cattle. “Our pastures are done,” says Feutz. “There’s no new growth. We’ve turned to feeding hay already because there is not enough grass for the herd.”

The Feutzes usually harvest 10 bales of hay at this time of year, which go into the barn for winter. This year, the fields produced just two, and those may soon be eaten.

“Because we’re feeding hay so early and the hay ground isn’t producing, we’re concerned about having enough to get through the winter,” says Feutz, who has been chronicling the drought on her blog.

These two challenges — lack of irrigation and dwindling feed stocks — are compounded by the second-class status forced upon many small farmers. “Some of the larger farms do business with multiple feed sources, so if one dries up they can move on to others,” Feutz explains. “Farmers around us are already looking outside the state for hay sources. If these get bought up early by the big farms, it will be even harder for small farms to find enough hay.”

Bryn Bird runs a CSA farm in Newark, Ohio, northeast of Columbus. “We’re probably going to have 100 percent sweet corn failure this year,” she says. “That’s probably 30 percent of our income.” Bird estimates the loss of her corn at between $30,000 and $40,000.

Having 210 CSA members invested in the farm — whom Bird is providing with boxes of vegetables she’s irrigated — will help the operation survive, even if she can’t offer them the variety some would prefer. But, Bird adds, “It’s been a good chance to talk to our members about the risks of eating local.”

Despite the media’s constant coverage of their losses, commodity farmers (or those who grow less-perishable crops like corn, wheat, and soy) are eligible for government-subsidized crop insurance and do not face the same kind of lost income that “specialty crop” growers do, says Bird. “I drive around and see the fields of [commodity] field corn and know they are insured. Even if they have 100 percent failure, they’re going to get a check in the mail. We’re completely uninsured. In Ohio, we don’t have specialty crop insurance.”

Emus — like these from Joylene Reavis’ farm — adapt easily to drought and heat.

Moreover, if Congress decides to provide additional drought relief, as Illinois’s governor has urged, big commodity farms get to be first in line. “If it comes down to government help, it usually goes to large farmers instead of small ones,” Joylene Reavis explains. “We probably wouldn’t qualify because we have a small number of acres.”

In addition to sheep, Reavis raises emus for meat and oil. She currently has 100 of the Australian birds strutting around her 10 acres. Toughened by a desert habitat, the creatures long ago adapted to extreme heat and drought.

The question is: How many small farmers will survive long enough to do the same?