Urban farming movement takes root in New Orleans
16th September 2013 · 0 Comments
By Sam Tabachnik
Contributing Writer
Like the fresh kale in City Park, the carrots in the Ninth Ward, or the basil in Mid-City, the urban farming movement in New Orleans is sprouting.
New Orleans has a historically rich culinary culture, and when one looks at the food landscape in this city, one must now go beyond the fresh scallops and crawfish, beyond the exquisite shrimp etouffée and succulent oyster po-boys.
Urban farming is flourishing but a look at three local organizations shows that there is not one cookie-cutter approach to growing food in an urban environment. The post-Katrina farming landscape encompasses organizations working with youth on leadership, local residents learning garden maintenance, and college students tackling food deserts in the Ninth Ward.
A snapshot of three urban farming organizations shows three unique approaches to growing food in New Orleans. These projects all aim to address the growing issue of food justice but prove that with a multifaceted issue such as this one, there are a myriad of productive approaches.
The Youth-Centered, Leadership Approach
On the edge of City Park, nestled along the buzzing traffic of I-610 and the sun-stained fields of relentless summer heat, sits a set of green shipping containers and an acre and-a-half of fields that are changing the landscape of youth empowerment and food security in New Orleans.
The Grow Dat Youth Farm is a non-profit organization whose mission is to “nurture a diverse group of young leaders through the meaningful work of growing food.”
Founded in 2011 by a motivated visionary named Johanna Gilligan, Grow Dat accepts a small group of motivated high school students from diverse backgrounds into a five-month leadership program structured around growing local food.
It is a program, Gilligan stresses, that is not solely focused on agricultural skills.
“Kids are not necessarily coming because they want to work on a farm,” Gilligan said. “Farming is kind of a medium to address leadership skills.”
Open to kids 15 years and above, the Grow Dat Youth Program—which makes its home in a set of unused shipping containers creatively fashioned into offices and classrooms—works to teach its participants about food justice, health and wellness as well as the development of leadership skills in order to positively contribute to society.
The youth in the program spend roughly half their time in the fields, learning how to plant, seed, harvest, and sell food in the market.
The other half of their time is spent learning a four-pronged set of curriculum: agriculture, leadership, health and wellness, and food justice. The goal of Grow Dat, Gilligan says, is to create an environment where the kids can be themselves.
“It’s a place where kids can test ideas in a safe place,” Gilligan said. “And they see that they can really contribute to the place they’re living.”
At the end of each week, the youth can take home whatever food they want from the farm. This is a big deal, Gilligan says, because it gives the teens a say in what they eat and often has a tangible effect on family eating habits.
The families, however, sometimes have trouble understanding the different food that is brought home.
“One of the kids came to me one day and said her mother was like, ‘Organic? We don’t eat organic!’ “ Gilligan said with a laugh. “The girl had to explain to her mom that organic is just a lack of bad things, not anything else.”
The College Student, Food Desert Approach
Students at Tulane University in Uptown New Orleans often speak about “the Tulane bubble.” As a college kid, it’s easy to get sucked into the daily grind of school life and rarely venture out into the rest of the city—hence the “bubble.”
Three years ago, a group of forward-thinking undergrads wanted to change that.
The Hope Gardens Project is an organization on campus that exposes Tulane students to the broader New Orleans area through work in various gardens and sustainability projects.
The organization works mostly with Our School at Blair Grocery (OSBG) in the Lower Ninth Ward, an area of the city devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
Blair Grocery was an old grocery market in the neighborhood. Since Katrina, the grocery stores, along with most of the homes, were destroyed beyond repair.
The lack of fresh food in a walkable radius is referred to as a “food desert” and the Lower Ninth Ward is like the Sahara Desert of food wasteland.
This is what drew the Hope Gardens Project to the area, says Dor Haberer, one of the founding members of the organization.
“A lot of organizations have the right intentions but don’t have the manpower to do the work,” Haberer said. “Hope Garden started to help with this food desert situation, help mediate it.”
Every Saturday morning for three to four hours, a group of students head down to the Ninth Ward to help with tilling, terracing, weeding and whatever other work is needed.
The group also spends time talking about the relevant issues in a roundtable discussion: race, food deserts, sustainability and other topics in order to give the participants some context for the work they were doing.
“Sustainability is a word that gets thrown around every meeting and every outing,” says Volunteer Coordinator Wil Crary. “We’re all about sustainability.”
The Hi-Tech, Membership Approach
The Green Roots farm is tucked nonchalantly behind North Carrollton Avenue, just a block or two away from a McDonalds, Rally’s and Burger King.
On this nondescript residential street sits a plot of land with rows of neatly kempt boxes, bursting with greenery.
Executive Director Joe Brock points proudly to each box as he walks by. Arugula, aloe vera, tomatoes and jalapeno peppers poke out vibrantly on either side of the aisle.
“Everybody said jalapenos couldn’t be grown around here,” Brock said with a wry smile. “I’m growing boxes of them.”
Founded in 2009 on this once-barren plot in Mid-City, Brock runs NOLA Green Roots as a conglomeration of members who each tend to his or her own crops. Unlike some farms which struggle with overgrown boxes due to absent participants, members of the Green Roots must spend one hour each week in the garden taking care of their boxes.
“You’ve got to be committed as a member in our organization,” Brock says.
While the organization may be taking the concept of local food production back to the days of our forefathers, Brock and his team use impressive methods of technology to help them stay organized and accountable.
“We can tell you how many people live in every members’ house,” Brock said, pointing to an excel document. “We can tell you the day they got a basket of food, what’s in the basket, and how much it would have cost at Whole Foods and Rouses.
“This allows us to prove what we say we are doing.”
Green Roots works to make its food cheap by cutting out the middleman and selling—or sometimes just giving away for free—directly to community members.
“It’s not about the money,” Brock says as he points to a picture of tens of smiling faces. “It’s about these people.”
A Budding City for Food Production
While these three organizations and their leaders use different methods to address food justice issues, there is broad agreement that New Orleans is thriving as an urban farming city.
“A lot of young people are moving to the city and they’re hungry for fresh food,” Brock said. “People are gravitating towards programs like ours because they want to be a part of the community.”
According to Johanna Gilligan, the fact that people are talking about urban farming and food justice issues shows a marked transformation from just a decade ago. This simple fact, she says, proves that the future is bright for local food production.
“Ten years ago these issues weren’t on people’s radar,” she said. “There’s now a collaborative model to build a really cohesive food system.”
This article originally published in the September 16, 2013 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
