Showing posts with label food security. Show all posts
Showing posts with label food security. Show all posts

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Threatened Honeybees and Urban Sanctuaries

On the 20th of March, I attended a beekeeping workshop at Zenger Farm in Southeast Portland. The class was taught by Tom Lea, one of the founders of Zenger Farm's Community Bee Group.

The workshop was a good introduction to the practice of urban beekeeping as an element of “home economics,” or the set of skills by which households can meet their own needs. There were also a couple of facts mentioned that have a huge bearing on agriculture in general and the relationship of Americans to the food they eat. First, it was said that a majority of Americans kept bees from the time of the Revolution until just after World War Two. Beekeeping was an art handed down through the oral transmission of “bee lore” and through apprenticeship. Then modern industrial factory farming arose and wiped out the large-scale practice of keeping bees, as people traded their skills for the convenience of the supermarket. Only in recent years, as the weaknesses of the industrial food system have become widely reported, have people begun to revive their interest in things like beekeeping.

And that brings up the second point. Mr. Lea mentioned the threat of colony collapse syndrome, and placed the blame for this syndrome squarely on the large-scale agribusiness practice of shipping bees hundreds to thousands of miles each year to pollinate crops at various farms. (This is also mentioned in a Wikipedia article that describes the practice of “migratory beekeeping” and the fact that it artificially boosts crop production on farms.) In his words,

When you're dealing with smaller scale agriculture, you don't have the pests that you have with agribusiness, because you don't travel as much. With beekeeping, the bees are being transferred down to, for instance, orchards in California for almond pollination, and all the diseases are transferred from one hive to another, and then they're taken back to their homes. So diseases are spread around like nobody's business...But this [colony collapse] is just the canary in the coal mine. All agribusiness is like this; everything is moved around much more, and on such a large scale that the pests, viruses, diseases and stress that we see in honeybees are now being experienced in every area of agriculture.

It's not something that can go on forever. At some point, different areas of agriculture will collapse as we are seeing with honeybees. It's a perfect storm... [Emphasis added]

In other words, the very practices of industrial agribusiness generate consequences that threaten the very existence of industrial agribusiness. And colony collapse, along with the rapid spread of plant and animal disease, are consequences of large-scale, fossil fuel-driven industrial agriculture and the transport of plants, animals and insects over thousands of miles.

Mr. Lea held out hope that small-scale agricultural practitioners can provide a defense and remedy for the dangers posed by industrial agribusiness. Toward that end, his workshop offered a number of resources for people who want to get into urban beekeeping. Some of these are:

I also made a video of excerpts from the workshop. You can watch it on YouTube at this address.

Saturday, March 27, 2010

Leaving the Cubicle for the Farm (In The City)

One of the greatest needs of First World society (particularly in the United States) over the next several decades is for a great reskilling, as wealth and concentrated supplies of energy and raw materials dwindle and occupations connected with an energy-intensive society become useless. Farming is a skill that many of us will have to re-learn as the energy required for modern industrial farming becomes unavailable. At present, fewer than two percent of Americans farm for a living. We may be forced to return to a society like that which existed in 1900, in which around 41 percent of Americans were employed in agriculture.

Urban farming is a unique subset of farming in general, and where I live, there is a vibrant community of urban farmers. Urban farming was also on my mind a few weeks ago, as my (now former) office was very slow and I had time on my hands to consider other options for making an honest living. (No worries, I am now working at a different firm.) Thus it was that I found myself calling Josh Volk, urban farming consultant and proprietor of Slow Hand Farm. We got together at Stumptown Coffee in downtown Portland for an exchange of advice about urban farming, and specifically what challenges a person would face in taking up urban farming as a livelihood. Although I recorded the interview, it was very noisy due to the presence of many people and the sound of coffee and espresso makers. Therefore, instead of a podcast, I have only provided a transcript, which I have included below. Today's post is part one of the interview. My questions and comments are in bold type.

What are the first steps for someone who wants to transition into urban farming as a career?

The first thing is to ask what your goals are. In other words, why are you doing this? What do you want to be doing day by day? Second, ask yourself what you need to get out of it, both financially and otherwise. Lastly, there is learning the skills. This depends heavily on how much money and space you have to play with.

When I first started, I met with this guy named Jac Smit, and he had an organization called the Urban Agriculture Network, which I think is still going – he died last year – but he had been working on urban agriculture projects. It turned out that he was not working on things in the United States – there really wasn't much going on in the United States at the time, but in a lot of other countries, they were fairly far along, particularly in a lot of developing countries, partly out of necessity.

He said one of the problems he saw in the United States was that most of the people that were interested in urban agriculture came from an urban background and probably came from a gardening background. They didn't know a whole lot about production, and didn't have the same mindset or skill set as a farmer who is producing goods. They were just growing things for their own consumption. So he said, “If you're really interested in urban agriculture, you should go and you should learn farming – and then bring that back into the urban setting,” because it's an appropriate thing, and that was one of the things that he saw that was working in developing countries – a lot of the people coming into cities were very recent migrants and had an agricultural background already.

So I took that advice and I went and apprenticed on a farm. And I've kind of been stuck in that farming thing for more than ten years now, learning the production end, and I feel like I'm just starting to get back to it [urban farming]. In some ways I'm actually a little less excited about it now, because I know some more of the realities and some of the reasons why it doesn't work as well. But I haven't given up on it, so I'm still looking at it and trying to figure out how I think it fits in best.

It's been about fifteen years since I talked to Jac Smit, and I think in that time period, the landscape has changed a lot, and there are a lot more people who are looking at urban farming, and there are more people coming in and doing urban agriculture projects with a production background, but there are still a lot of people doing it without that background. So that's one place where you could start – go to some production farms, whether in the city or outside the city, and just learn the techniques they're using and try to apply that to a smaller scale.

What were some of the difficulties you encountered that made you less enthusiastic as time passed?

One thing is that I'm excited about growing a lot of different things. If you are trying to do production in an urban environment, land is very expensive – space is very expensive – and water is expensive. There's a very limited subset of crops, I think, that make sense for a limited space. There's a lot of crops that take up a lot of space, so there are some things where I'm not sure how they fit into the urban setting, and I wasn't aware before that there were those differences, or maybe how big those differences were.

For example, the urban agriculture projects that I've seen that have been the most successful generally concentrate on something like salad greens, because you can grow a lot of salad greens in a very small space. And people don't eat as much by pound of salad greens as they eat of something like wheat. In 100 square feet you might be able to get a couple hundred servings of salad greens, whereas with wheat you could get something on the order of ten servings. That's a big difference, and the price of salad greens is probably at least five if not ten or twenty times as high as the price of wheat. So when you think about what you're going to do with an expensive, limited amount of space, there are some limitations there.

What does it take to get access to land in the city? Say Portland, for example?

There's a bunch of different models I see. Some people just outright buy a spot and own it. I have friends who just bought a house that sits on six tenths of an acre. I don't think there's a lot of places like that left in Portland, but there are still places like that. If they really wanted to push it, as a couple, they could certainly make a living off that amount of space. Other people might have a small yard of their own or they might have multiple small yards, and they're bartering that space, either because the people want to see things grown on it, or they want a share of the produce coming from it. And that's questionably legal right now, although the zoning will probably change in the near future to make it legal.

Why is it not quite legal right now?

It's questionable whether the zoning allows you to grow something and sell it on your property. You can probably argue that you can grow it and sell it, but the way that you sell it would have to be off the property. So if you were trying to distribute it directly on the property, that would probably make it illegal. It could probably be argued – although I'm not sure anyone would do this – that it's not even really legal to grow it on your property. Certainly if your neighbors were complaining, they would have a case, although they would probably not win, advocating that you shouldn't be doing what you're doing.

That you shouldn't be growing things on your property?

Not that you shouldn't be growing things, but that you shouldn't be growing them commercially. It's the commercial designation that makes it legal or not legal, because the space is zoned residential; it's not zoned commercial or agricultural. The same thing goes for commercial spaces, because they're zoned for a particular type of commercial use and they're not zoned for agriculture. Contamination is another issue you have to look at, because there are a lot of contaminated soils in urban areas and concentrations of different kinds of chemicals, particularly lead paint.

So another way people get land is more temporary – but land owned by a developer or even publicly owned land has a designated use, yet isn't going to be put to that use for a few years. So the owners may allow that land to be used for a period of time to grow things until they're ready to build their project on the land. I know a few people who are farming on such land; one group in North Portland is doing that with a church property where the church is going to expand, but they're probably not going to do it for another four or five years, so in the interim they're letting folks grow crops on the land.

And the County has a certain amount of tax-foreclosed land, and they make some of that available to organizations that want to do urban agriculture projects. Typically, these are non-profit – but a food production “business” (for lack of a better word) wouldn't necessarily have to be for profit; you could run it in some sense as a non-profit, and in an urban setting, that might actually make more sense, especially as you're not likely to make much of a profit anyway.

How do you find this land? Do you go on real estate websites to find properties like this that people aren't intending to use for a while?

I think one of the things that's an important distinction between urban agriculture and other types of agriculture is that there's a community aspect to it, and I think networking is important. Networking is how those lands and spaces get identified. It's probably more word-of-mouth than anything else. Once you get connected into a community of people that are talking about that and you start putting it out there that you're looking for space or that you have a project you want to do, you start running into people that say, “Oh, I know a spot. You can check with this person,...” or, “I have a spot. How could we work something out?” That's what makes urban agriculture work in a way that rural agriculture isn't working right now.

I think there probably are efforts – I can't recall any off the top of my head – but I think there are people who want to make clearing houses and create lists of available land. There was an effort through the City – I'm forgetting the name – I think it was the “Diggable City” project that tried to identify land a few years ago. But as far as the people I know who are actually doing urban agriculture projects, it's been more word-of-mouth, or people finding each other through existing networks.

You say that rural agriculture is not working that way – is rural agriculture failing in the United States?

In general, I think that it is, because I think what's happened is that the consolidation that's happened in terms of family-scale farms being consolidated into larger and larger industrial corporate factory farms has torn apart the rural community. So there's not a whole lot of “community” in rural communities anymore. That's a big issue, because it has switched the population base in the U.S. from a rural one to an urban population. This has gutted rural communities. It has also disconnected rural communities from urban markets – it has put a couple more layers of distribution systems between the two, because consolidation makes those operations so large that they have to distribute over a wider area in order to make their business work. That has lengthened ties and broken ties in a lot of communities.

If I were to look at the whole picture, I would say that strengthening the rural communities and going back to a rural agriculture that makes more sense is in most ways more important than thinking about how to do urban agriculture appropriately – because there is land there, and it's inexpensive land. If instead of trying to concentrate everybody into a few large urban centers, and figuring out how to make that urban land produce intensively for those people, we could spread those people out more so that the resulting population centers had more of a land base and didn't have to work so intensively, I think that would be ecologically a better model.

* * *

That concludes part one of the interview. Stay tuned for part two, which will be posted next weekend, God willing. And if you want to check out some other sources of information on urban farming, see these links:

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Managing Trees, Stormwater and Hunger in the City

As I mentioned in a recent post, I recently participated in a community tree planting effort. The mass planting took place on the 13th of March, and was hosted by Friends of Trees, a non-profit group that seeks to revitalize urban environments through planting trees in urban neighborhoods.

This mass planting was part of a larger effort by the City of Portland, known as the “Gray to Green Initiative,” an effort to reduce City stormwater runoff and associated sewage infrastructure costs by the use of natural, living methods. This is an important priority for the City government, which has faced both regulatory requirements and fines from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency because of inadequate treatment of sewage flows into the Willamette River. The regulatory requirements and lack of adequate treatment led to the “Big Pipe” project and other recent sewage infrastructure modernization efforts.

But the City's Bureau of Environmental Services realizes that technology-heavy infrastructure upgrades are expensive, and that sooner or later the capacity of even an upgraded sewage system can be exceeded through population growth, aging infrastructure and continued urban construction. Thus they have begun to promote living, natural methods of reducing stormwater runoff, and resulting sewage overflows. These living, natural methods include tree plantings and “eco-roofs” – living, literally green roofs whose plants intercept stormwater before it can flow into City gutters and storm drains. The promotion of natural, living methods of dealing with stormwater runoff and sewage will become increasingly important in the near future, as cities lose tax revenue and the ability to maintain expensive sewage treatment systems due to our ongoing economic collapse.

As far as the planting day went, I had a lot of fun. It was a good experience for neighbors to meet each other in the process of doing something that benefited the common good. Also, Friends of Trees were able to address not only stormwater issues, but the issue of local, community-based food production, as this year they began offering low-cost fruit and nut trees to interested homeowners. (I got my very own apple tree!) The fruit trees were so popular that most of them sold out long before the planting day.

For those who want to see what a planting day looks like, I also shot some video of the event, which can be found on Vimeo under this link. Or you can watch it here:


Managing Trees, Stormwater and Hunger in the City from TH in SoC on Vimeo.

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Brownfields and Urban Agriculture - Assessing The Challenges (Part 2)

This is the second part of a transcript of an interview I conducted last week with Clark Henry of the Portland Brownfield Program. In this interview, we discussed the prevalence of brownfields (areas of land polluted by commercial or industrial activity) in urban environments, and the implications for urban agriculture and food gardening. Today's post contains the remainder of that interview, in which solutions to brownfields are discussed. For the sake of continuity, I have also included all of the transcription from last week's post. My questions are in bold type, and Mr. Henry's answers are in normal type.

People talk about adapting to Peak Oil, economic collapse and resource constraints...and there are all sorts of responses, including trying to make things work where we live. Food systems are a big part of this, including urban gardening and urban farming. But some have pointed out the pollution of the urban environment, including pollution of soil due to lead. Telling people, “Don't grow food in the city; it's too dangerous,” won't fly as people find that they can't afford to rely on our present food systems. Yet the issue of pollution is valid. Can you comment on the scope of the problem, starting with lead pollution?

Sure, and just to qualify my statements, I am not a scientist, but an urban planner. I've been working with this [Portland Brownfield Program] project for eight years, so I have developed some understanding of levels and pervasiveness of contaminants. My wife, however, is director of the Josiah Hill III Clinic, a community-based nonprofit organization that does blood lead level testing for pregnant women and children in lower income neighborhoods and among communities of color.

The #1 source of lead contamination in Portland is lead paint, from older construction and older houses. The problem of lead contamination grows more severe as one moves eastward across the United States and as one goes into older neighborhoods. Scraping and sanding paint, or chipping and flaking of paint is the source of soil contamination in the home environment. In commercial and industrial areas, shipbuilding and shipbreaking, bulk oil terminals, old gas stations and old storage sites for leaded gasoline are sources of lead contamination.

Lead is a background element in nature, and agencies like the EPA and HUD publish environmental lead level figures that, in their view, “do not pose a driving risk to human life.” However, they also say that there is no safe level of lead in the human body. And there are documented detrimental effects to small children up to the age of 7 from exposure to lead. The City and County Health Departments partner with the State to publish guidelines for lead exposure, and there is a “Lead Hotline” available to City residents.

What other contaminants are a concern (including organic contaminants like organic compounds from leaking underground tanks)?

Petroleum of all varieties – gasoline, heating oil, motor oil, diesel fuel, bulk oil, and so forth. Former gas stations occupy a large portion of America's commercial corridors, and they were usually situated on corners where people drive by. Many sites of these former stations show few or no signs of such previous use; yet when people look into the records for such sites, they discover that, “Oh, a gas station was here!”

Modern gas stations operate under rigorous oversight by state regulators, but these older sites represent a mystery, an unquantifiable risk, and available databases don't do justice to this risk. Verifiable sites are maintained in two State (Oregon) Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) databases: the Leaky Underground Storage Tanks (LUSTS) database, and the Environmental Cleanup Site Inventory. Some of the sites on this list have been cleaned up and re-used. All of these sites are candidates for State involvement in assessment and/or clean-up.

There are two stages of State environmental assessment. First is the Phase 1 assessment in which a consultant determines the history of the site, using sources such as the County library, building records, the Polk Directories and the Sanborn Fire Insurance maps. (In the 1950's, the Sanborn Fire Insurance company made very detailed maps of underground tanks for underwriting purposes.) Also, the consultant will visit the site to do a visual inspection, where he may notice old concrete pump islands or old gas station structures or fill ports for underground tanks.

The Phase 2 assessment follows once the consultant has determined that a site is a former gas station or dry cleaners' facility or metal plating facility or so forth. Phase 2 consists of taking soil samples or groundwater samples, or taking samples of the contents of barrels if there are barrels on the site, or taking samples of the materials of any existing buildings or structures on the site.

Once the assessment is finished, the level and type of contamination is compared to the desired future use of the site. The DEQ is concerned with limiting exposure to contaminants. Thus, a site that meets regulatory approval isn't necessarily cleaned up, but is configured in a way that limits exposure – via placing a parking lot or building foundation on top of contaminated soil so that people are prevented from coming in contact with the bare soil. This is called an engineering control. Another form of control, called an institutional control, consists of placing restrictions on the title and permitted uses of the site.

So then, it is possible that there are sites that would be under institutional controls that forbid their use for urban agriculture?

Absolutely. Unless you worked through a new way of getting the site cleaned up. And the City is working with some groups who are researching how to make brownfields both safe and functional for urban agriculture, whether it's small-scale community gardens or something larger. We're working with a group called Groundwork Portland, which is just a year and a few months old. It's part of a network called Groundwork USA, whose mission is to identify brownfields within environmental justice communities, and to have them assessed and cleaned up and re-used in a way that reflects the surrounding community. Not necessarily to eyeball these sites for condominium development or Starbucks, but to make sure that they are doing something for the people who live there – by protecting their health first, and then by insuring that these sites are used in a way that meets the needs of the people around them.

Groundwork Portland has a board of directors whose members come from several local organizations: Organizing People, Activating Leaders (OPAL); the Oregon Tradeswomen; and the Oregon Sustainable Agriculture Land Trust (OSALT). The Oregon Tradeswomen provide training in hazardous waste handling for brownfield work. OSALT owns property for agricultural use and they are doing research on appropriate agricultural development of urban properties. There is a project on 8th and Emerson in NE Portland, the “Emerson Garden Project,” now being undertaken by OSALT, and it is a 4000 square foot lot that was donated by the County through foreclosure.

The Portland Brownfield Program tested the lot and found that there were really high lead levels in a couple of spots. We (Groundwork Portland, OSALT and the City) are now trying to clean up the soil using phytoremediation (decontamination via plants), in order to turn this lot into a community garden. OSALT will test native plants on this lot, to determine their phytoremedial qualities with lead, in order that we can turn this into a site for food production and education at the same time.

What are the available remediation strategies, starting from the most expensive strategies down to those that are within reach of communities and non-profits?

That's a good question, and the answer is not obvious. Soil removal is one option. But this is very expensive compared to trucking dirt to a regular landfill. Dirt at regular landfills is simply used as a cover. But contaminated dirt requires removal to a toxic waste landfill. Fortunately, there is such a landfill in eastern Oregon, but the cost of trucking dirt there is over $700 a ton, compared to $70 a ton for removal to a regular landfill. And a ton of dirt is not that bulky. So soil removal quickly becomes very expensive, not to mention the cost of finding virgin, clean dirt and trucking it in to your urban agriculture site.

Another strategy is groundwater treatment, but this is an ongoing process that may last several years, and it too is expensive. When dealing with petroleum products, oxygenation and breakdown of compounds using bacteria and/or mushrooms is sometimes used. But this requires continual monitoring. The big questions for bioremediation, and indeed for all remediation, are “How long will this take?”, “How much will this cost?”, and “Who will pay for this?” These are often unknown until one gets into a project. Those who undertake such projects therefore take on a significant risk. Private developers must take this risk on themselves, but communities and tax-exempt non-profits can get help.

The Portland Brownfield Program focuses most of its efforts on helping community-based revitalization efforts, and I think we've achieved some good successes. But we also help private markets figure out remediation, as even large private firms who specialize in brownfield redevelopment sometimes get in trouble.

As far as nonprofits, there's a group, Southeast Uplift, that owns a former gas station on southeast 57th and Division. This land was given to them by the U.S. Marshal. This site was known to have underground storage tanks that had leaked. We helped them deal with the environmental liability issues and obtain the resources to deal with regulatory requirements for dealing with the site's past use. Our approach was straightforward – “dig it up and haul it away.” Fortunately, when we started digging out the tanks, we found very little contamination. But a site with identical usage and identical tanks might have had monstrous contamination – you just doesn't know until you start digging. We can test all we want, but the reality is that we drill a series of holes spaced a certain distance apart, and we make assumptions about what lies between those holes. If we find contamination, we will drill more holes until we don't find any more. This helps us determine the zone to be cleaned up. But the testing is expensive, and it is not fast. We can make educated assumptions about what we hope to find, and then have a plan B – a healthy contingency. Private developers have the luxury of having a large investment pool for cleaning up land for large projects, such as the Pearl District and South Waterfront. Things get tighter as the project size shrinks, though there are State and Federal grants available to tax-exempt organizations and nonprofits.

It sounds like there really needs to be a partnership with city governments in order to promote urban agriculture. The extent of urban pollution is fairly widespread. Are you saying then that people should not rush in blindly and grow vegetables in any bare patch of land?

Yes, that's a fair assumption. But it depends on what you're growing – does your tomato plant take lead out of the soil and store it in the fruit? It's questionable. Look at the literature to see what contaminants plants actually take up. The more serious threat comes not from eating the vegetables, but from working the soil – digging, planting, then bringing contaminated soil into your home.

The National Brownfield Conference was recently held in New Orleans. My co-worker Jen was there, and spoke at an urban agriculture session. There was also a woman named Anne Carroll of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency who is working with city groups to help accurately communicate the risk – there really aren't a lot of regulatory standards that people can follow to determine what's safe; most of it is perception.

At that Conference, one researcher from the University of Washington said, “There's a very scientific approach to this; there's very little risk, so why address it? We haven't seen plants take up contaminants; all you're doing by applying this stigma to areas of land is stopping people from growing food. There's no risk; just go ahead and do it.” To me such a statement sends up a red flag – because people don't necessarily respond well to purely scientific reasoning. Even if that reasoning is communicated clearly, people don't always respond well. For instance, if you were told, “That soil is safe for you to garden in so long as you and your children aren't consuming more than 18 percent of your annual broccoli intake from that plot,” how would you feel? Perception of risk – perception of contamination is everything. Perception that a site is too dangerous to use may cause it to lie fallow, unused for anything- along with the perception that any assessment or remediation is too costly to undertake.

This is why partnership with a city government or other group that understands these issues can help in reusing sites. This is why we have been working with OSALT on the 8th and Emerson site, and why we have been working with Anne Carroll on accurately communicating the risk, and what to do to manage the risk. Not everyone who wants to start a community garden has a few hundred thousand dollars to remove the existing soil and bring in verified clean, composted new soil – that's unrealistic. So what's the alternative? To not use land? To use only the most pristine land? The vast majority of this world exists right in the middle, and if we want to use urban land for agricultural uses, we will be walking with some risk. That's okay, as long as we understand the risk and we take reasonable steps to limit it.

There are some obvious no-no's – you don't plant directly in extremely contaminated soil, for instance. And composting has been shown to bind contaminants in soil so that they are not mobile and can't be absorbed by plants. But some of this is subjective. And one size doesn't fit all. What's needed is an arsenal of many tools to deal with contamination in many situations.

One question is “What does sustainable cleanup really mean?” Does sustainable brownfield redevelopment consist of digging up contaminated soil and hauling it to a landfill? That just makes it someone else's problem. These landfills don't remain landfills forever. We're already dealing with the problem of closed landfills, and the big voids they leave in the urban environment. Landfills are big. Once they get closed, normally nothing happens on them. Will we try technologies and products that clean soil and groundwater? Do these products really do what they're supposed to do? Or do they actually make the contaminants more toxic?

Are there other cities throughout the U.S. and the world whose city governments are working to reclaim brownfield sites in their city limits for use in urban agriculture?

Yeah, absolutely. Philadelphia has been receiving national attention for their “Philadelphia Green” efforts. There's a group in Milwaukee, Wisconsin – I feel bad because I can't remember the man's name – but there's a gentleman who has done a tremendous job with aquaculture and urban agriculture, and he's doing it in a way that's educating tons of people, while generating enough funds to support itself; it's economically viable. There's also the Groundwork USA network. New York City is also looking at this as far as urban gardening, and they recently launched a very ambitious Brownfield Revitalization office.

Germany has a very interesting “Interim Use” philosophy. If a site is not being used, the government asks, “What can we use this for?” They don't have the same “property rights” gusto found in the USA, so the German government has a lot more statutory authority to put sites to use when their owners leave them fenced off and contaminated. Urban agriculture is one of the uses Germany has looked at for these sites, particularly in Leipzig.

In Indianapolis, my counterpart is Christopher Harrell, and he's looking at this as well. We're definitely not unique, but we like to think we're doing good work.

So here we are and someone wakes up to the insecurity of our economy and our industrial food system, and as he thinks of the need to start building local economic systems and systems of food production, he looks out his apartment window at the vacant lot across the street. Where does this person start?

Talk to the property owner if you're thinking of using some vacant land. Then, do your research on the site's history. In Portland, the Polk Directories are a good resource. Then, if you find that the site has a history that might have generated contamination, do some testing. Call the Portland Brownfield program. Also, talk to neighbors who know the history of the site.

But should you find that the site is contaminated, what do you do with that knowledge? You can compare your findings against the DEQ standards for agricultural use. Also, HUD and the City of Portland's Building Department have guidelines. But you have to be able in the end to look your neighbor in the eye and say, “Yes, this site is safe for use.”

* * *

Debrief: Mr. Henry provided some very useful information, which I am sure is greatly appreciated. Three things stand out: first, that pollution of the urban environment is a widespread and serious problem; secondly, that functioning in the urban environment therefore involves intelligently managing the risk from urban pollution; and thirdly, that providing sustainable and viable local economic systems – especially, local systems of food production – in urban areas will require us to learn to live differently. If we care about relocalizing our food, we will have to stop polluting our land, and we will have to stop supporting those businesses and activities of the present official economy that continue to ruin our cities. I know there are cities in China and on the African continent that are learning this the hard way.

One other note: The City of Portland's Bureau of Planning and Sustainability is hosting its “Urban Growth Bounty 2010” series of classes on urban agriculture and self-sufficiency. There will be 82 classes, covering topics such as urban farming, keeping chickens and bees, food preservation, and cheesemaking. Those who live in Portland and who are interested can go to http://www.portlandonline.com/bps/ugb for class descriptions and online registration links.

Lastly, here are links to the organizations mentioned in this interview:

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Community-Managed Safety Nets, Food Security and Zenger Farm

It should be fairly obvious by now that the last few decades have seen the tearing apart of government-backed social safety nets in much of the world, and especially in the United States. While it is true that America now has a Democratic president and a Congress controlled by Democrats, their actions to date have not inspired overwhelming confidence that these safety nets might be repaired. (Just look at the present health-care “reform” debate and how our politicians and mainstream media define this in terms of health “insurance” reform. Forcing all Americans to buy private health insurance is not the same as providing universal health care at a cost that our rapidly expanding poor class can afford.)

It is therefore necessary for communities to create their own safety nets. Volunteers must arise to begin building community connections for meeting community needs, often without expecting much help from large government or corporate institutions (though there are cases where communities are pleasantly surprised by offers of government help). A key safety net is the provision of community food security, defined by the World Health Organization as “existing when all people at all times have access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life.” (Source: WHO | Food Security)

In the United States, as the standard of living of many people has been eroded over the years, community-based volunteer organizations have arisen to address the growing lack of access to adequate food, and to build systems of community food security. There are the usual food pantries and canned-goods collection drives. But in recent years there have also arisen many urban farming/gardening organizations that promote and teach the growing of food and raising of suitable livestock within urban communities.

I knew nothing about such organizations when I was living in Southern California. But over the last couple of years I have enjoyed getting to know a few of the several community-based, nonprofit urban agriculture organizations here in Portland, and watching some of their extraordinary staff. Many of these people are young, either college students or recent college graduates who have chosen to spend two or more years of their lives as full-time volunteers in these organizations. There is a touch of the otherworldly about them – their education and career paths clearly show that they didn't go to school to get big bucks and a BMW, but they are concerned about larger issues and social justice.

I've interviewed some of these staffers in the past. You can read the interviews here: A Safety Net Of Alternative Systems - Places To Live, in which the Portland Fruit Tree Project was mentioned; and Volunteer Groups And Community Food Security, which featured Growing Gardens. This week's post is another interview, this time featuring Zenger Farm in outer southeast Portland.

Zenger Farm (www.zengerfarm.org) is a century-old working farm that was once owned by Ulrich Zenger, a Swiss dairy farmer, and later by his son, Ulrich Zenger Jr, who protected the farmland from commercial development. In 1994, after the death of Ulrich Jr., the City of Portland's Bureau of Environmental Services purchased the farm. In the years since then, the farm has been leased by concerned citizens who incorporated as Friends of Zenger Farm, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the farm as a public space and community resource for sustainable urban food production. Friends of Zenger Farm also works in partnership with the City to oversee a 10-acre wetland adjoining the farm.

On a pleasant, sunny October morning, I had the opportunity to meet with Prairie Hale, Community Involvement Coordinator for Zenger Farm. I was primarily interested in trying to quantify the impact of the farm in building local safety nets and contributing to a resilient community, although there were other things that I wanted to explore. Below are my questions (in bold type), and Prairie's answers.

Has anyone tried to measure or quantify the impact of Zenger Farm on the surrounding community? There has not been a lot of measurement. However, there are general observable impacts. Zenger Farm serves as a place for field trips and educational and volunteer opportunities to learn about the natural world and develop a connection to that world; and to learn about growing, cooking and preserving food, thus fostering self-sufficiency.

The farm is known as a positive place and a good neighbor in the community. The farm staff are aware of what is happening in the neighborhood and are contributing to neighborhood goals. Not only does the farm grow food for the neighborhood, but it forms partnerships with neighbors to run egg co-operatives and farmers markets with the goal of providing culturally appropriate, fresh affordable food for the community. (However, the egg co-op has not yet attracted many members from the surrounding neighborhoods.)

The farmers market is a joint venture with the Lents Food Group, and the market has an “international” flavor. The market has provisions for accepting WIC (Women, Infants and Children) coupons, food stamps and senior coupons, and has a food-stamp matching program.

Field trips to the farm are conducted by local schools and teachers from public, private and alternative schools in the Lents and Powellhurst-Gilbert neighborhoods. The farm also serves as a gathering place to build a sense of community among residents.

The farm is part of a larger urban agriculture “community of knowledge,” both in the Portland metro area and worldwide.

On a related note, what contribution does Zenger Farm make toward building a “resilient community”? (A resilient community is able to survive economic shocks without its members being dislocated by those shocks.) The farm contributes toward increasing food security – that is, a stable supply of affordable healthy food in the neighborhood, as well as generating increasing numbers of people with skills to grow, cook and eat on a tight budget. The farm has offered a very popular class in local schools, named “How to Buy Food On A Budget.” This class has been taught in both English and Spanish, and has attracted both children and their parents.

What are the demographics of the neighborhoods surrounding Zenger Farm? The farm is adjoined by the Lents and Powellhurst-Gilbert neighborhoods. Much of this area is poor, yet many of the residents are actively trying to better their neighborhoods. Twenty-five percent of the population can be classified as “food-insecure.” The area was ranked “last in livability” according to a recent survey. The poor population is also being squeezed by gentrification (the encroachment of wealthy buyers of real estate into the neighborhoods), resulting in rising rents and real estate prices.

For the majority of schoolchildren, English is a second language. Only 30 percent are native English speakers. Spanish is the first language for another thirty percent; then the remainder are from Russian, Vietnamese or Laotian backgrounds. Zenger Farm is actively seeking translators for its classes and workshops.

How would you rate the ability of non-profit groups to make up for the dismantling of social safety nets formerly provided by local governments? There is some uncertainty regarding that question. For residents under stress in a disadvantaged urban neighborhood, worries about personal and family needs might take away energy from community organizing. Also, there is a lot of anonymity in cities, whereas small rural communities tend to be much more tightly-knit, and much more willing to pull together in times of crisis.

However, there are good examples of urban and neighborhood groups meeting neighborhood needs. One example is “Generous Ventures” on southeast 111th Street, a group that salvages food that might otherwise go to waste, and distributes it to the poor.

What sort of lifestyle adjustments are required of a member of a non-profit organization? (In other words, most of the people I've met from groups like Growing Gardens or the Portland Fruit Tree Project did not go to school in order to get rich!) If someone is going to commit himself or herself to this kind of service, what should their expectations be? Not surprisingly, don't expect to get rich. Seek to gain satisfaction from developing a strong social network so we can take care of one another and provide for our needs.

(At this point, Prairie told me more of the personal events that had led her down this path. She related her family's Quaker background and how she spent most of her life in a small rural Oregon farm community. But as a result of an injury of a family member and loss of income, she and her family found themselves in Ecuador for a year when she was around eleven. That experience, and seeing the drastic difference between American life and the standard of living of the Ecuadoran population, was the catalyst of her interest in social justice.

As a result of that experience, she went to Earlham College, a Quaker institution of higher learning, and obtained a degree in Peace and Global Studies, a field of study which teaches nonviolent ways of bringing peace and social justice where it is lacking. One lesson she remembers is summed up in this saying: “Create the change that the community is ready for.”)

Regarding “closing the loop”: farming tends to deplete soils unless all organic wastes are properly composted and returned to the soil. Zenger Farm does not do humanure composting at this time, but have you ever thought about it? If you tried it, would you do so as part of a larger study of the feasibilty of this sort of composting in an urban environment? Humanure composting is feasible, but it requires a level of expertise and management that Zenger Farm does not yet possess. It seems to be more feasible on the scale of individual homes. As far as composting in general, Zenger buys compost now, but is looking to cut expenses by recycling more of its own plant matter into compost.

Are there any other general research projects being undertaken by Zenger Farm? The farm has not traditionally been involved in research, although a new focus is starting this year, with two farmers who want to try experimental organic techniques. The farm would like to explore other areas of research, such as adding more rainwater catchment and measuring the decrease in use of City water for irrigation when stored rainwater is used. They also want to do more water testing and measurement of sedimentation in the adjacent wetland, and want to explore various furrow and plowing arrangements to limit sediment runoff and erosion.

Do you have any thoughts on remediating urban sites that have been contaminated by industrial pollutants, in order to prepare these sites for urban agriculture? Research has been done on the use of fungi and mushrooms to rehabilitate sites. One prominent worker in this field is Paul Stamitz, a mycologist.

That concluded my interview with Prairie. As I was leaving, I remarked that it was refreshing to see younger people looking for more than a life of materialism and creature comfort (as opposed to my generation, who went to school solely to acquire big houses and BMW's), and that maybe we were witnessing a revival of something that had not been seen in the U.S. since the 1960's. She agreed, and said that it's not just young people who are waking up. Many older people are seeing that the American dream doesn't work, and are starting to want something more meaningful. Maybe there's hope for us after all.

Sunday, May 24, 2009

Brownfield Remediation For Urban Homesteaders

Urban homesteading is a very valuable skill set for the times we now face. One of the most important aspects of urban homesteading is for city dwellers to learn to grow their own food. A unique challenge of growing food in an urban or suburban environment is dealing with pre-existing pollution or contamination of an urban garden site. Such sites are known as “brownfields” as opposed to uncontaminated virgin lands called “greenfields.” Brownfields are common in urban areas and we must learn to deal with them, because as the existing “official” food economy deteriorates, we won't be able to just keep going to the store rather face this challenge. Knowing how to garden successfully on brownfields may soon mean the difference between surviving and starving.

Our Endangered “Official” Food System

The food production and distribution system that now exists in the industrial world is becoming increasingly endangered. This system depends on the concentration of control of vast amounts of farmland, labor, machinery, storehouses, distribution facilities and farm “inputs” in the hands of a few large corporations. These corporations distribute food through a vast global network of supply chains that lead to points of sale at local supermarkets. The whole system depends heavily on artificial means of forcing increased production from the ground that is farmed – means such as mechanized farming, pesticides, fertilizers and long-haul transport. All of these artificial means depend on fossil fuels and the cheap credit that a fossil-fueled economy provides.

Now that fossil fuels are becoming scarce, the entire system is beginning to break down. During the last oil price spike, the prices of petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides also spiked. During the economic collapse that occurred afterward, lines of credit to farmers were wiped out, just as lines of credit for other businesses also dried up. Farmers have come to depend on credit in order to buy the seeds, fertilizers and other amendments, and machinery for each year's harvest. The reduction in availability of credit is causing farmers to cut back on planting. Several news reports predicted in 2008 that this could result in decreased harvests in 2009, leading to price spikes for food, and possible shortages.

This story will play itself out repeatedly and with ever-increasing severity as oil becomes scarcer and the official economy continues to deteriorate as a result. Under such circumstances, city dwellers will need to farm whatever pieces of ground they can get their hands on. Telling such people that it's safer to get their food from the store is a non-starter. Yet it is important to know how to garden safely in urban soils, and how to deal with contamination. In this post, I will focus mainly on dealing with lead contamination. Future posts may delve into how to deal with other kinds of contamination.

Dealing with lead contamination is a multi-pronged strategy consisting of the following elements: appropriate plants, separation techniques, and remediation tools.

Appropriate Plants

All plants accumulate lead to some extent; however, not all plants concentrate accumulated lead in their edible parts. A study performed by the Argonne National Laboratory examined lead accumulation in edible parts of food plants, the results of which showed that lead generally does not concentrate in the “fruit” of fruiting edible plants. These plants include things like fruit trees, corn, cucumbers, peppers, squash, tomatoes, watermelon and zucchini. Therefore, when dealing with heavily contaminated soils (soils that test over 400 parts per million for lead) that cannot be remediated due to cost or lack of access to resources, plants such as these should be cultivated, along with legumes such as beans and peas. Quite a lot of plants can be safely harvested and eaten, even when grown in heavily contaminated soils.

Once the fruiting parts of these plants are harvested, the crop should be washed thoroughly before use. Some sources recommend washing with both water and detergent. Afterward, these crops are quite safe for human consumption. However, it is generally not safe to eat root vegetables, leafy greens or herbs grown in soil contaminated to 400 parts per million or above. Safe utilization of these vegetables requires appropriate separation techniques.

Separation Techniques

When raising root vegetables and other crops susceptible to lead contamination, it is essential to keep these vegetables away from the source of contamination. Therefore, when gardening on a contaminated site, one must not plant these vegetables directly in the soil. Instead, raised beds or containers should be used. Clean soil should be placed in the beds or containers, and the soil should be monitored every season to insure that it does not become contaminated by windblown dust from adjacent contaminated areas. Wind-caused cross-contamination can also be reduced by planting a cover crop of grass in areas of bare dirt to immobilize the soil, as well as by mulch or weed tarps.

Suitable containers for container gardening are easy to come by, free of charge. One can find used five-gallon food-grade plastic buckets at many restaurants and supermarkets. Empty plastic detergent buckets are also good. As far as raised beds, some sources recommend placing a semi-permeable barrier at the bottom of the bed to separate the contaminated soil from the new clean soil added to the bed. The beds must be deep enough that any root vegetables grown in them will not contact the contaminated soil underneath even when they have grown to their full extent.

Gardening in raised beds or containers limits the size of the harvest available to an urban household. In order have the freedom to grow anything anywhere at any time on an urban homestead, soil remediation techniques must be employed where contamination exists.

Remediation Tools

Techniques of remediation of lead contamination have been studied extensively by non-profit urban gardening groups, non-governmental organizations (NGO's), universities and researchers affiliated with the governments of the United States and several other nations. Interest in lead remediation has risen as governments and others have come to grips with some of the negative effects of massive industrialization. The techniques studied have varied in complexity, reliance on advanced technology and cost, with the governments of First World nations tending to favor study of the most costly and complex techniques. These techniques include things like soil removal and replacement, soil washing, electrokinetic methods, and other costly remedies.

Such techniques are beyond the reach of most residents of the Third World, as well as most poor and middle-class people in the First World. I will therefore focus mainly on those techniques which have been studied for use in poor settings by people of limited means.

First, there are techniques of binding lead in soil to reduce its bioavailability to plants. One method, studied in China and in the U.S., involves adding rock phosphate and/or phosphate fertilizers to contaminated soil. The phosphates bind to the lead to form insoluble lead phosphate compounds that are not taken up by plants. Another method is simply to add compost to contaminated soil, as the organic compounds in the compost accomplish the same goal of immobilizing and binding lead in soil.

Then there is phytoremediation, which consists of growing plants that are known lead accumulators in order to reduce the total concentration of lead in soil. Some phytoremediation strategies promise a reduction of 100 parts per million per growing season. Reduction of soil lead levels to an acceptable range by this technique takes from two to over five years. It should be viewed as part of a long-range strategy for healing urban areas.

Final Thoughts: The Correct Way To Assess Contamination Risks

This week's post is a follow-up to my earlier post, “The Chicken That Laid Leaden Eggs, And Other Horror Stories.” In this week's post, I seek to drive home an additional point that I may not have made in the earlier post. That point is the fact that urban homesteading, and particularly urban agriculture, have a disruptive effect on the official global food system, because they result in people breaking free of that system. Therefore it is no surprise that the masters of that system might find it advantageous to try to arouse fear of potential “dangers” of urban food gardening, in order to keep people dependent on the official system.

A recent case in point involves keeping urban chickens for the purpose of eating their eggs. An article appeared in a local newspaper warning urban chicken-keepers of the danger of eating eggs from chickens that have ingested lead-based paint from older buildings. That concern is valid, yet the article went on to imply that because of the ubiquitousness of lead in urban environments, it is largely unsafe for people to raise chickens for food in the city. While the article caused many people to get their property and their children tested for lead contamination, these people then concluded that if there were elevated lead levels on their property and elevated blood lead levels in their children, it had to be due to the children eating eggs from contaminated urban chickens.

Now I believe that the writer of the news article had the best interests of readers at heart. Yet the conclusion of that article and the conclusions drawn by some of its readers seem like “fuzzy” logic to me. I think that before we start blaming urban chickens for childhood lead poisoning, we need to conduct some rigorous experiments, including measuring the lead content of random samples of store-bought eggs, double-blind experiments in which blood lead levels of urban gardeners/chicken keepers are measured against levels of non-gardening urban dwellers, and tissue/egg lead levels of chickens who do not ingest lead paint chips, yet are raised in urban environments. Only after such experiments are performed will we be able to blame or exonerate urban chicken-keeping as a source of lead poisoning. In the meantime, I'm still working on my coop. My plan is to get some chicks in July.

As to the problem of reclaiming brownfields for urban agriculture, I applaud all who are tackling this problem – including the solitary backyard tinkerers doing homegrown research. In finding solutions, you are proving yourselves to be true heroes and heroines.

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