Pashon Murray
Detroit Dirt
Detroit, Mich.
You might recognize Murray from a fantastic Ford commercial that spat in the face of our consumption-glorifying culture. Now she’s on a mission to reclaim the estimated 20 to 40 square miles of vacant land in the Motor City by using it to grow food.
Why we chose this urban farming operation:
Detroit Dirt collects food scraps from restaurants, organizations, and corporations, as well as manure from the Detroit Zoo, and uses the waste to make compost. That compost is then distributed to urban farms and gardens across the city. “I wanted to focus on how I could make a big impact on food systems locally,” says Murray.
When you rebuild a city, start from the ground up:
“Everybody was trying to figure out, ‘How do we recover Detroit?’” she says. “The urban farming movement was one of the solutions that people really embraced. And once a lot of those farms got started, people in neighborhoods started their own little farmers markets, too. It created more than just jobs within the movement — it created more entrepreneurs.”
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