Noah Enelow

Noah is an Economist for Ecotrust and the E3 Network

Urban Farming grows up

Feb 112013
 

Until the recent growth in the popularity of urban farming, it’s unlikely that growing food on a vacant lot in the middle of an American city would be considered a serious urban planning proposal. But at a recent community meeting in Northeast Portland, City Commissioner Nick Fish was pushing for just that – an urban farm on the site of a former elementary school nearby. The food would feed into Portland Public Schools’ Farm to School program – supported by Ecotrust – which currently sources over 30% of its ingredients from local farms and food producers.

It’s a clear sign that urban agriculture has grown up. In the last decade, farming the city blocks has gone from being a fringe movement practiced guerrilla-style by hardy and rebellious post-industrial pioneers to an increasingly widely accepted urban land-use and job creation strategy. In Rust Belt cities, full of unemployed residents and unused land, urban farms and gardens have taken off. The Reimagining Cleveland project provides public and philanthropic funding to community groups to reclaim vacant lots for community gardens, orchards, market gardens and pocket parks. In Detroit, training programs such as Urban Roots and Earthworks Agriculture Training (EAT) train new generations of urban farmers and community gardeners. But urban farming’s influence extends far beyond the Rust Belt. In Seattle, for example, it’s become an increasingly popular way to source local food, with a diversity of models that range from urban CSAs to neighborhood garden and orchards called P-Patches. They’re even doing it in the nation’s capital.

Trainees planting at Earthworks Urban Farm, Detroit. Photo by Sam Beebe

Trainees planting at Earthworks Urban Farm, Detroit.
Photo by Sam Beebe

Why does urban agriculture make sense for policy makers? Let’s look at the northeast Portland proposal. It could increase the supply of fresh food for local public schools, where 85% of the schoolchildren in the community are on free or reduced price lunches. It could provide another food source for food banks and soup kitchens, and provide workforce training to aspiring local farmers and urban gardeners. The project has partnered with the Oregon State Beginning Urban Farmer Apprenticeship (BUFA) program, and made scholarships available to local residents from the Cully and Concordia neighborhoods. The farm could also supply food to Portland Parks and Recreation’s Summer Free for All program, which offered over 99,000 free lunches to children in 2012.

The proposed division of the site into separate parcels reflects the diverse group stakeholders interested in getting involved. Half of the garden plots, totaling three acres, will be managed by Oregon State (OSU) Extension and planned in coordination with Portland Public Schools. One acre will serve as a community learning garden, and the remaining two acres will be reserved for pilot projects led by different community groups. Though more top-down than Detroit’s lean and mean outfits such as Brother Nature Produce, this multi-stakeholder model promises greater stability and security than a guerrilla operation – but it also requires greater community deliberation (now underway) to ensure that the city incorporates all voices in the process.

Not everyone is convinced that urban farming is the best use of land. Clarence Larkins Sr. lives across the street from the proposed Northeast Portland farm. The founder and CEO of Straight Path Inc., a local mentoring and employment training program, he sounds a note of pessimism about the depth and diversity of community members’ participation, particularly the neighborhood children’s attitude towards the project. “These are city kids – they won’t be interested in farming,” he predicts. Rather, he argues that a community center oriented towards families with children would provide a service that the entire neighborhood could use for its benefit.

But with an increasing number of inner-city residents taking up farming (such as in Detroit and Cleveland), and growing evidence of multiple benefits at different scales, the Whitaker Farm Project has built up real momentum – as have numerous other urban farm projects across the country. As a viable urban land-use strategy, urban farming has arrived.

Building Cully Park: Social equity in America’s greenest city

Jan 082013
 

It is a sunny afternoon in northeast Portland, and I am walking through a 25-acre open field, scattering seeds. The Cascade Mountains and the Columbia Gorge rise up behind me; the sun streams through billowing clouds as chains of wild geese fly in a V formation across the sky. All around me, nearly a hundred other Portlanders walk, scattering the seeds of a mix of Willamette Valley wildflowers from the Bosky Dell native plant nursery.

Verde organizer Tony DeFalco at the future Cully Park.

Most are residents of the surrounding Cully neighborhood, gathered to commemorate the restoration of this field and its future use as a neighborhood park. Our seed-scattering is just one piece of an afternoon-long Cully Park Land Blessing Ceremony – including prayers, songs, dances, and speeches by members of the community.

As it stands, there’s not much to see here at the future Cully Park, soon to emerge on this former construction waste landfill and sand-and-gravel pit mine. But the Land Blessing Ceremony represents a watershed moment in a long, participatory process of ecological restoration and greenspace development. It’s a sign that a relatively invisible community in one of America’s model cities is finally coming into its own.

Restoration has become a household word here in Portland, which New York Times columnist and Oregon native son Nicholas Kristof has called America’s environmental laboratory. But it’s relatively new to the Cully neighborhood, one of the poorest and most diverse in Oregon. Until recently, living conditions in Cully have been closer to the seldom-mentioned underbelly coined the “Other Portland” – poor, underserved and disconnected to the strong central city and revitalized core neighborhoods, and the green economy that has grown up around both.

According to the Regional Equity Atlas of the Coalition for a Livable Future, Cully suffers from poverty, lack of open space, and lack of food access. Cully is also more racially and ethnically diverse than Portland as a whole: 44.7% of Cully residents are people of color, compared to the regional average of 20.2%. The neighborhood has undergone rapid demographic change in the last several years, with a large influx of Latino immigrants. Access to public and private-sector services has not kept pace with the rest of the city.

But thanks to a strong neighborhood association and a cluster of robust community development organizations, the Cully community is now reversing its fortune through its own initiative, bolstered by innovative partnerships with city agencies, private sector firms and nonprofits.

“The energy is powerful,” relates community organizer Tony DeFalco of local social venture organization Verde. “People are fired up. Finally, something’s happening here.”

First guests: Geese have already taken to the Cully Park site.

Through collaborative efforts to develop the park, improve the local housing stock, and rezone the commercial corridor for walkability and access to services, the neighborhood’s residents are creating opportunities for themselves, and expanding the definition of a green city by making sure social equity, fairness and community participation are part of the mix.

The Living Cully Ecodistrict brings together a group of community partners including Verde, NAYA, the Native American Youth and Family Center, whose Portland headquarters are located right here in the Cully neighborhood, and Hacienda, a local community development corporation (CDC) that provides affordable housing, small business services, and family support. Housing redevelopment, ecological restoration, green street improvements, and more open space acquisition are equally important items on the neighborhood agenda. With schoolchildren, homeless residents, and other community groups actively planning, restoring and building new spaces in the neighborhood, landscape architect Randolph Hester would call this process ecological democracy — participatory urban design that nourishes both people and place.

A veteran of the environmental movement who’s worked in marine conservation and land trust sectors, DeFalco has teamed with his colleagues at Verde, who run landscaping, energy retrofitting and nursery operations — all in the name of bringing economic opportunity and environmental justice to the neighborhood. Yet, to build upon this sense of community will require anticipating and responding to challenges. As Cully grows more attractive, gentrification will loom large on the horizon, as recent patterns of displacement in Portland attest.

Anticipating the threat, DeFalco and his colleagues have built local contracting, hiring and business development into the bedrock of their strategy; as the amenities multiply, so will jobs and incomes. “We need to own the park,” he asserts. “If there’s restoration, we want to put local people to work doing that. If there’s a new community center, we want to build it.”

Verde and partners are now setting their sights on a recent golf course purchase by the Trust for Public Land at the edge of the neighborhood. If some of the 100-plus acres become public space, Cully could suddenly become a park-rich community. And local residents could find opportunities for employment and small business development through restoration and other green building contracts as part of the site transformation. It’s all part of evolving shape of green in places like the Other Portland. “This is where the action is now,” says DeFalco.

Have cellulosic biofuels arrived?

Nov 302012
 

“Our bugs are the best in the business,” Dean Kegler of ZeaChem declares proudly.

I’m touring one of the country’s first experiments in cellulosic biofuel production, a demonstration-scale refinery in the small industrial port town of Boardman, Oregon. The bugs in question are high-powered naturally occurring bacteria whose sole mission in life is to ferment sugar into acetic acid — on the way to becoming fuel-grade ethanol. The bugs’ sources of sugar: woody biomass from locally farmed poplar trees and wheat straw from area farms. The facility is expected to start production utilizing wood chips by the end of 2012. The fuel’s ultimate destination: passenger vehicles. I glance around the facility with curiosity, wonder, and a bit of skepticism. Am I looking at the future?

ZeaChem will use wood chips to create biofuel. Photo courtesy of ZeaChem.

Biofuels stand as one of the most promising, though controversial, alternatives to fossil fuels such as petroleum, coal and natural gas. The question of dependence on fossil fuels sits at the crossroads of environment, land use, and national security concerns. Everybody knows that the United States’s consumption of ever-greater quantities of fossil fuels for energy – in other words, our addiction to oil – is a major factor in global climate change. But our need for ever-growing volumes of imported fuels from politically unstable or totalitarian countries is also destabilizing: our purchases at the pump prop up unfriendly regimes with disastrous human rights records.

However, the potential for increased food-based ethanol production presents two important environmental and social challenges. First, the use of valuable agricultural land for fuel crops leads to the potential for increased food prices. Second, the land use conversions that arise from increased food-based ethanol production leaves open the possibility of increased international total greenhouse gas emissions, despite the lower emissions coming from vehicles’ tailpipes.

Cellulosic biofuels appear to be a different beast than those based on corn. Raw material for the fuel comes mostly from wood chips and agricultural waste, rather than from food sources. And the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that the fuel generates 70% to 90% emissions reductions compared to gasoline. However, the technology for refining wood and farm waste into energy has proven difficult to develop.

To make cellulosic ethanol, the cell walls in plants must first be untangled, and sugars must be extracted from the cellulose through a multi-stage fermentation process. Here’s where ZeaChem’s world-class bugs come in: the little guys are enlisted to ferment the sugars into acetic acid, an intermediate chemical, which can be converted into ethyl acetate and then into ethanol in the final step of the process.

Despite ample government grants, mandates, and loan guarantees, ZeaChem and its counterparts elsewhere in the country have yet to produce commercial scale fuel-grade cellulosic ethanol. But the company remains optimistic. “We will produce ethanol by the end of 2012,” Kegler told me on our tour earlier this fall. Standing in the midst of the factory’s elaborate array of production equipment, surrounded by the buzz of construction and the enthusiastic operating staff, it was difficult not to believe him. (Full disclosure: Ecotrust is a minority investor in ZeaChem.)

ZeaChem’s biorefinery in Boardman, Oregon. Courtesy of ZeaChem.

Still,there are some bigger questions that ZeaChem and the cellulosic ethanol sector have to answer on their march to independence from fossil fuel.

The first is stability of inputs. Will the feedstock supply be disrupted due to climate change, natural disasters such as droughts and hurricanes, or even economic fluctuations such as recessions?

Second, the question of scale arises: due to economies of scale in the refining process, the future of biofuels seems to lie in large-scale, relatively centralized production and distribution. Will the large-scale nature of the production process leave dreams of a widely distributed, autonomous energy system in the dust? In any case, what’s clear from the evidence – and my own experience at ZeaChem – is that the rapidly developing field of biofuel technology is worthy of any social change advocate’s rapt attention.

 

Carrie Atiyeh, ZeaChem’s Director of Public Affairs, responds:

On question #1: ZeaChem’s feedstock strategy focuses on risk mitigation, which reduces the dangers raised in the first question. ZeaChem’s refining process can use multiple types of feedstock, allowing the company to source biomass sustainably and locally, within a 25-50 mile radius of the refineries. This feature of the refining process keeps transportation costs low and thus makes production costs competitive. It also reduces the company’s exposure to price fluctuations: if the price of one feedstock spikes, we can switch to an alternative feedstock. Dedicated energy crops, such as poplar trees, will supply the majority of ZeaChem’s feedstock, with locally available agricultural waste acting as a supplement. ZeaChem has secured a long-term, fixed-price contract for its feedstock with GreenWood Resources, owner and operator of a local poplar tree farm. The contract will provide ZeaChem with feedstock through the demonstration scale and 1st commercial biorefineries in Boardman. ZeaChem’s long-term contract with GreenWood Resources will reduce the potential for disruptive price fluctuations to impact ZeaChem’s operations.

On question #2: Biorefineries will be located where there is market demand for the biofuel. A benefit of ZeaChem’s location for its demonstration and 1st commercial biorefinery in Boardman is that there are multiple transportation options for cellulosic ethanol to be transported to market. The sites at the Port of Morrow are located on the Columbia River and an existing ethanol barge load-out dock is already in place. Barge transportation is a very efficient and economical way to transport goods to market. From Boardman, ZeaChem’s cellulosic ethanol can go to refineries up and down the west coast to be blended into the gasoline pool. The sites are also located inside of a Union Pacific rail loop and Interstate I-84 passes just to the south.

Resilience on the Brightmoor Farmway

Aug 232012
 

In Spencer Beebe’s recent post “Confluence,” he mentioned Earthworks Urban Farm as an example of the regeneration of Detroit. It’s far from the only example. Ten miles away on the other side of the city, Sam and I saw urban gardening transform an entire neighborhood: the Brightmoor Farmway, part of a larger district called Brightmoor. While much of Brightmoor languishes under the burdens of foreclosure, unemployment and blight, the Farmway stands out for its active community organization. While the city of Detroit struggles to meet the needs of its citizens, the residents of the Farmway are creating resilience from the bottom up, through gardening, arts, and community-based business.

Sam and I spent one sunny morning in June driving around Brightmoor with one of its leading lights: Kirk Mayes, executive director of the Brightmoor Alliance, a community development corporation (CDC) that brings together about 50 smaller organizations to coordinate diverse community projects, from leadership training courses to arts programs.

Mayes began our tour by showing us some of Brightmoor’s most blighted areas. Parts of Brightmoor felt like a ghost town: blocks full of abandoned houses, some partially burnt down with others simply collapsing from disrepair. We turned from the narrow commercial thoroughfare, dotted with boarded-up retail buildings, onto an abandoned side street strewn with rubble. A young father pushed a stroller along a crumbling sidewalk littered with broken glass. “When those kids start walking, you’re telling me this is what they’ve got to walk through?” Mayes asked us pointedly.

 

An abandoned house in Brightmoor

A few blocks away, we entered another world, in which blight had been carefully transformed into beauty. Abandoned houses were no longer left to rot, but boarded up neatly, and in many cases redecorated. An unused garage had been transformed into a community performance space. A corner lot had been cultivated as an edible community garden with raised beds. We’d left the ghost town behind, and entered the Brightmoor Farmway.

A repurposed house on the Brightmoor Farmway

The Farmway has its own neighborhood association, founded by community leader Riet Schumack and now made up of 350 residents. The association has built over 30 community gardens and pocket parks, as well as publishing a newsletter and offering a variety of programs in gardening and the arts for neighborhood children and youth. For Mayes, a veteran community organizer, the close relationships forged by these projects are the keys to the Farmway’s transformation. “The byproduct of these relationships is a physical change in the neighborhood,” he notes. “They’re doing more than just gardening: they are literally building community.”

As we passed one boarded-up house, we noticed that the window had been painted with an inspirational message: “Resilience: the power to return to original form after being stressed, compressed, or beaten down.” A remarkable parallel to the guiding vision of Ecotrust!

 

Message written on abandoned house, Brightmoor Farmway

In addition to successes in gardening and neighborhood beautification, the Farmway has spawned two successful youth-led businesses. Under Schumack’s direction, a group of youth began selling their homegrown produce at the Northwest Detroit Farmer’s Market, soon reaching over $3000 of revenue in a summer. Following that success, a group of teenagers began to learn woodcarving from high school teacher Bart Eddy, and started a business called the the Brightmoor Woodworkers, whose growing client list includes key neighborhood institutions such as a pre-school, a newspaper, and the Alliance itself.

In our visit to the Brightmoor Farmway, Sam and I got a taste of what it might mean to create resilience in an urban context. Mayes, our guide, emphasized the importance of the community gardens to this process, building relationships through shared commitment. “If we initiate together and we plant the seed,” he noted, “we’re implicitly together until the harvest.”

The Brightmoor Farmway, like Earthworks, is just one of many examples of the green shoots of Detroit’s revival. In future posts, we’ll continue to explore the themes of urban regeneration and resilience in the context of Detroit.

Future We Want: Local food sovereignty, not land grabs

Apr 252012
 

As Ecotrust promotes a natural model of development, one that builds upon principles of healthy ecosystems, we’re paying close attention to global trends that affect the management of ecosystems and the services they provide – water, food, clean air.  One hot topic lately is the issue of land rights.

Arable land the world over is becoming an increasingly contested resource. In response to high food prices and relatively low land prices, an increasing number of investors and corporations have been buying up agricultural land in developing countries concentrated in Africa, but spanning the globe: Uganda, Sudan, and Ethiopia as well as Brazil, Cambodia, and Pakistan.

Land grabbing in Uganda

Land being cleared for a palm oil plantation in the Kalangala Islands in the Ugandan section of Lake Victoria. Jason Taylor/FOEI via Flickr.

 

Meanwhile, local, small-scale farmers and herders, who have customary rights but lack legal title to their land, are being pushed off their ancestral lands, often coercively, deceitfully, or through intimidation by the agribusiness companies themselves, the state police, or the local elites who benefit from the deals. Land grabbing has become a global issue: since 2001, an estimated 227 million hectares of large-scale land deals have occurred or are currently under negotiation.

Large-scale investments in agriculture promise to expand the global food supply and increase production of biofuels, which stand as an important, though flawed, alternative energy source. But can such investments accomplish these goals without trampling the rights of local smallholders or degrading other local services of nature – such as clean water, forest-filtered air, and biodiversity? Not as long as current systems of land tenure prevail.

Most international land transactions today occur between national governments who possess formal title to large tracts of land, and investors and agribusiness corporations from the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. However, due to the legacy of colonialism that pervades the legal systems of large parts of Africa and Asia, formal legal rights and customary land tenure patterns are often completely disconnected from one another.  From the perspective of the local people who live, farm and herd in these regions, agribusiness corporations have simply stolen their land.

In the short run, the increased world food supply will be used to feed growing populations in rapidly developing countries such as China and to bolster the food security of countries with fragile agricultural systems, such as Saudi Arabia. However, social and economic inequities will rise sharply as a result of these deals, as land becomes concentrated in fewer hands across the globe. In the countries that receive the investment, a growing proportion of land will be both foreign-owned and cultivated for export, undermining local food sovereignty.

So far, none of the proposed large-scale solutions to this problem have made a dent. United Nations human rights policy mandates that governments seeking to implement eminent domain on behalf of business seek free, prior and informed consent of affected local residents. However, this provision has not been enforced in most (if any) large-scale land deals. The World Bank, meanwhile, has proposed a set of guidelines for responsible agricultural investment, but its provisions have been weak.

The inadequate response of the multilateral agencies has sparked increasing involvement by NGOs and activists. Oxfam has recently released an influential – and controversial – report on the topic of land grabbing, and the global peasants’ movement, La Via Campesina, has been organizing protest events calling for the abolition of land grabs.

The International Land Coalition, an umbrella civil society organization, has most recently contributed to the ongoing effort by releasing its own report that draws from three years of research and analysis. Will the new attention given to this problem lead to adequate solutions that respect smallholders’ rights? Time will tell.

The most successful means of resistance to land grabbing have been local initiatives for sustainable land use, such as the community protected area in Cambodia profiled by Ecotrust’s Astrid Scholz in a recent blog post. In Rwanda, new and locally designed technologies for drying fruit and vegetables hold out the potential to expand small farmers’ access to export markets. These initiatives offer hope, but the question remains: are they scalable?

As we head to the global environment conference in Rio in June, are there sustainable, socially just, and scalable alternatives to land grabbing that respect farming and herding communities, increasing resilience while preserving biodiversity and traditional knowledge? We’ll continue to explore the themes of land rights and sustainability in the posts that follow.

How will we build the future we want? What are your ideas for radical institutional change? These are the questions the UN is asking in preparation for the Rio+20 Earth Summit in late June. In response to their Future We Want campaign, we’re curating transformative ideas for building a more resilient world. We’ll share some of the ideas we’re cooking up here at Ecotrust, but most of all, we want to hear from you. Email obrooks (at) ecotrust (dot) org.

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