I’m pleased to be starting a regular column for Growing for Market on urban agriculture.  GFM has been a critical source of information for me over the years, providing me with inspiration, concrete information, and a real sense of community; I think everyone who market gardens should read it!

I’m going to be writing each month about urban agriculture, an approach to food production that is emerging as an essential part of our local food movement.  My stories will cover production issues (for example, urban farms almost universally struggle with highly degraded and nutrient-deficient soils), different models of urban farming (for-profit farms, social service farms/gardens, educational farms), and different demographics of urban farming (immigrants and refugees, socially disenfranchised groups, etc.).  I’ll explore with you our growing understanding of how this phenomenon of urban agriculture is a meaningful part of our efforts to build a sustainable and productive local food system.  I’m looking forward to sharing with you this rapidly growing and changing part of American agriculture.

I’ve been part of city-based food production for nearly 30 years, as a backyard gardener, a community gardener, and an urban dweller who commuted out to suburban farms to learn the farming business.  Now, I’m an urban farmer and farmer-educator in Kansas City; I started and ran my own farm, Full Circle Farm, in 1997 and then in 2005 transitioned my farm over to a non-profit organization I co-founded, the Kansas City Center for Urban Agriculture.

My work as an urban farmer and farm educator didn’t start from any conscious idea that urban agriculture would offer a particular set of benefits to urban communities or to agriculture, it started from the simple fact that I liked living in the city and I liked growing and selling vegetables.  Like other urban farmers, I found land close to where I lived and I started growing.  It was only in the last eight years or so that I found the phrase “urban agriculture” and learned that I was part of a national and international form of food production.
I want to start by offering a short definition of “urban agriculture” so we have a common understanding of what it is that we’re talking about.

Urban agriculture is the production (and consumption) of farm products in neighborhoods where people live, work, shop, and play.

The neighborhoods where urban agriculture takes place may be dense, highly developed landscapes, with the agriculture taking place on rooftops, on tiny pockets of land sandwiched in between buildings or roadways, or, more recently, on vertical walls or even inside buildings.  More typically, the neighborhoods are residential communities, where people farm on empty lots, large backyards, odd bits of open space, or sometimes larger acreages that may be privately owned or that may be part of city parks or public lands.  The land in cultivation may be small – I know a woman who had a thriving culinary herb business based in her backyard – or it may be a bit larger – the largest urban farm I know of today has about 5 acres in cultivation.  The neighborhoods may be part of a central city or they may be suburban.

When I first started using the phrase Urban Agriculture, I meant only agriculture that was commercial in nature, where someone was producing food or livestock as a for-profit business.  Lately, my definition has expanded to include activities that don’t necessarily involve the exchange of cash; I’m seeing urban agriculture as the full continuum that goes from a pot of tomatoes growing on a porch to community gardens to non-profit gardens serving a social mission to the farm where someone grows and sells their products.  It includes urban homesteading, something we’re seeing more and more of.  It includes the Food Not Lawns movement, where people are mostly growing for their own consumption.  It includes cities planting fruit trees along boulevards and in parks.  This wider definition makes grappling with the concept of urban agriculture more complicated, but I think it is a more accurate way to look at and understand the activities and impacts of agricultural activities in neighborhoods.

Part of what is interesting to me about urban agriculture and what I want to share with GFM readers is its essential liveliness, its capacity for diversifying and hybridizing and evolving.  Like the best organic farm, it is complex, varied, and both integrated and highly individuated.  It has multiple participants, multiple benefits, and multiple approaches.  It is relational- there is very little that an urban farmer does that somebody nearby doesn’t have an opinion about.  It is diverse; I’ve found more variety in urban agriculture meetings than just about anywhere I’ve ever been.  If someone were to look at the demographics of who is involved in urban agriculture, they would find no single dominant profile- instead they’d find a mix of people that pretty genuinely represents the “tossed salad” of America:  young people, middle aged, seniors, Asians, Africans, African Americans, Latinos, white people, doctors, teachers, janitors, poor people, middle-class people, the wealthy, and more.  It is a remarkable group of people who bring a wide range of experiences, knowledge, and production strategies.

Another thing that is interesting to me is how urban development and population movements have impacted our relationship to agriculture.  It is only in the last 50 years or so that we’ve evolved into an urban population that is so isolated from food production and farming.

I was at a meeting last year of the Kansas City Kansas Housing Authority, the entity that manages all KCK public housing.  One of the board members, an older black woman who had grown up in northeast Kansas City, KS and a long-time activist and leader in that community, said that when she was growing up, every house on the block had a garden.  Her family rarely bought produce from the grocery store; they grew it all on their small city lot.  And then, at some point “somebody decided we weren’t supposed to grow our own food anymore” and the gardens began to disappear.  Now, in that neighborhood, it is tough even to find basic gardening supplies.

At another time, I was privileged to be driven around the western part of the city by Joe Steineger, a former mayor of Kansas City, KS, a man who grew up in a “truck farming” family and who now farms at a small scale and sells at a local farmers’ market.  He drove me around KCK’s river bottom area to show me some of the changes he’d seen in the last 60 years.  We passed a warehouse surrounded by a massive parking lot and Joe told me “That used to be the best potato farm in the state of Kansas, they shipped potatoes all over the country.” And, as we crossed on a bridge over I-70, he pointed to the highway and said “That used to be our asparagus field.”  This was probably no more than 15 minutes from downtown Kansas City, KS, in what is very much a city neighborhood.

Starting sometime in the 1950s, we began to create a model of agriculture that placed farms “out in the country” (and out of the country entirely).  We started raising children who never got to see a tomato growing or who don’t know that rain is necessary to grow the wheat that goes into our bread. We started believing that canned beets were what beets really taste like and that we and our children don’t much like vegetables.  We turned food production into something to delegate to other people, who we don’t have any relationship to and consequently don’t much value or respect. We began to believe that this is how food production has always happened and that this is the most efficient and profitable way to feed the world’s population.

Recently, we’ve begun to reject this ahistorical model of separating where we live from where we grow food.  As our local agriculture movement matures, urban agriculture is developing as part of an increasingly complex industry that is producing and distributing food on acreages large and small and using all kinds of strategies to get food from the farmer to the eater.  We’re beginning to see that it offers some unique benefits for eaters and for farmers.  It reconnects people to food production—75% of America’s population lives in cities and suburbs, so urban ag has a marketing and educational value that no farmer or food activist should underestimate.  While the acreages in cities are smaller and the volume potential for production is less, the more intensively managed plots can produce meaningful amounts of food.  It is increasingly becoming a useful strategy for urban communities struggling with hunger, poverty, and food access issues.  It transforms the urban landscape, creating productive green space and supporting a more diversified ecosystem in amongst the buildings.  And, as our urban ag movement develops, we’ll begin to see other benefits and possibilities we haven’t even imagined yet!  I look forward to writing and learning about it with the readers of GFM.

Katherine Kelly’s title is Executive Director/Farmer for the Kansas City Center for Urban Agriculture. She is eager to hear from GFM readers about urban agriculture elsewhere. Email her at  katherine@kccua.org.