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Oct 29, 2024

It takes a village to sell a raised bed of produce - Chicago Reader

Back in 2020, Nick Davis was a restaurant cook at the Black-owned Urban Grill when disruptions in the farm-to-restaurant supply chain made it difficult to acquire foods like lettuce, tomatoes, and

Back in 2020, Nick Davis was a restaurant cook at the Black-owned Urban Grill when disruptions in the farm-to-restaurant supply chain made it difficult to acquire foods like lettuce, tomatoes, and dairy products. The pandemic lockdown caused growers and eateries alike to shut down, leaving the remaining farms to lose contracts with restaurants they serviced and the remaining eateries with no way to access produce from growers whose farms went under.

While he wasn’t involved in Urban Grill’s direct procurement, Davis found himself helping to draw connections between farms and restaurants that had hit dead ends. He ended up leaving the grill for COVID safety reasons, but Davis then started working in an unofficial capacity for the slowly forming nonprofit Community Food Navigator (CFN), which sought to become the connective tissue between a broad range of independent local food workers who agreed they would fare better if they intentionally collaborated. The early CFN cohort started listening and collecting the direct concerns of a broad category of people who Davis calls food mobilizers. This runs the gamut of food educators, community organizers, leaders of cooking courses, restaurant workers, restaurant owners, mutual aid folks, farmers, chefs, and more. Those are the players the organization feels accountable to.

They talked to “anyone who has an influence in their community over how that community thinks about and consumes food,” says Davis, now managing director of communication and engagement at CFN. “People who get food from point A to point B. You could be a delivery person . . . or someone who is running a Meals on Wheels program. You could be someone who runs a farm stand—all of the types of people who do production and distribution.”

Part of what inspired the formation of the group was growers of color in Chicago saying that they wished they had an organization that centers them, the land stewards, the people who have their hands in the dirt.

There has long been a gap in resources for growers of color. Black farmers in the United States have faced more than a century of discrimination from public and private institutions; the number of Black farmers has dwindled because farming is seen as no longer economically viable. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund details how Black farmers were long denied benefits from federal programs like the Great Depression’s Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 and were the victims of discrimination from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s new Farm Security Administration under the New Deal. In the 80s and 90s, the federal government admitted that the United States Department of Agriculture was a culprit of discriminatory practices but did not investigate the claims brought to them. Black farmers, who in 1920 operated about 14 percent of all farms, now represent under 2 percent of growers nationally.

In recent decades, local farmer training programs like Windy City Harvest and Urban Growers Collective have ushered in a wave of new farmers. But when they try to sell food to grocery stores or schools, Davis says, they’ve run into problems and legal gray areas. Only as recently as 2023, the Chicago Food Equity Council (co-operated by Chicago Food Policy Action Council, the City of Chicago, and the Greater Chicago Food Depository) passed the Urban Agriculture Business License Enhancement Ordinance, which makes it easier for businesses to connect with local farms and for farms to sell to local institutions.

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Still, an urban agricultural license is only one of a long list of things that will help put local independent Black and Brown growers and food mobilizers on an even playing field. Today, CFN is connected with more than 340 growers and 500 different organizations that have engaged with them in some capacity. CFN works with a group of 13 local leaders, called the stewardship pod, who directly informed their original mission and still inform their ongoing strategy by providing feedback on what’s happening in their respective organizations and what the stewards are observing broadly in the local food system.

For example, a lot of people struggle to access refrigeration for their produce, which would help extend the number of days they can keep it off the vine. CFN might ask their stewards, “How can we be more strategic about setting up more cold storage throughout the food apparatus?” One of the stewards is Pastor Reshorna Fitzpatrick, who runs a church and a robust food distribution program on the west side—churches are one of the biggest movers of free food in Chicago. Another steward is Howard Rosing, a researcher at DePaul University, who’s spent decades looking at how racism operates within food systems and pursuing community-informed research projects. People like Fitzpatrick and Rosing might be able to help those in the CFN network learn about the underlying causes of this problem and find a solution.

Overall, CFN works to help information flow through the local food system with more ease. “A lot of my day-to-day is just receiving and making phone calls between people,” Davis says, “trying to make sure the nervous system of the food [web] is sparking in the right way.”

Community Food Navigator@communityfoodnavigatorcommunityfoodnavigator.org

CFN created a digital tool for farmers that acts like Facebook Marketplace or LinkedIn for organizations in their sphere, a “needs and offers” market for growers.

Melanie Carter, farmer, chef, community activist, and founder of Sunflower Soule Farm, was part of the “seed” or starter group that helped determine what the CFN app mightbe useful for.

Carter and other growers recommended that the app include a farm locator, listings of activities and food education events, and a method for users to communicate between one another. All of the suggestions were adopted.

Carter’s farm in Back of the Yards began as a concept during her urban agricultural apprenticeship program at Windy City Harvest in 2020. Today, her lot flourishes with collards, turnips, mustard greens, hot and sweet peppers, eggplants, potatoes, cabbage, fruits, and more. “I love getting my hands in the dirt,” Carter says. She leans toward regenerative processes that nurture and restore soil health, using compost and natural floral pesticides like marigolds, nasturtium, and alyssum.

Carter runs a farm stand every Saturday on 51st Street on a sliding scale basis, with products that can range from free to $5. She brings a bag of potatoes and cabbage to give away for free.

“When people say, ‘Well, I ain’t got no money,’ I say, ‘I ain’t asked you about your money.’ I say, ‘You’re hungry, you just hungry.’ And that’s the bottom line,” Carter says.

Right now she has one full-time worker on the farm—the neighborhood handyman. She has two other people who come and help around harvest times.

“Nobody’s getting rich doing this,” Carter says. “More than anything, [I want] the people [who] know about us to put the word out about us.”

CFN has also worked with Chicago Grows Food, an organization that tries to nurture the local food ecosystem by sending people home with “grow kits.” They try to reduce barriers to gardening by providing a tomato plant or a chard plant, for example, in a light, moveable, and porous fabric grow bag (made by west-coast company Root Pouch), filled with healthy soil and compost. Their smallest garden kit can fit on a windowsill and is typically distributed at schools and community events. The bigger the kit, the more outdoor space it needs. One of their most popular setups includes 12 five-gallon fabric bags, each with its own plant in a medium-sized pot that one can grow in a front yard, backyard, balcony, or on stairs.

“It can be moved around depending on where the sunlight comes,” says Elizabeth Berkeley, director of Chicago Grows Food. “It’s great for renters, because you can take them with you.”

The organization has distributed more than 4,000 grow kits per year for the last four they’ve been in operation. They also have more than 150 partners—spaces like public schools, private schools, libraries, churches, day cares, and “anywhere that is passionate about gardening and wants to start incorporating it into their educational system,” Berkeley says.

Chicago Grows Food partnered with CFN in 2022 to help build out this partner network. Berkeley is grateful for the CFN digital app, where she says gardeners can build relationships with like-minded growers without being data-mined. Chicago Grows Food promotes the app to their participants as a place to exchange ideas about container gardening specifically, which might involve different tips and tricks than growing in the ground. It’s helpful to mulch your garden when it’s hot outside, for example, and they encourage participants to use the app to inquire locally, “Hey, who’s got extra mulch? Where can I pick it up?”

Their kits are all over Chicago, but they try to prioritize neighborhoods with contaminated soil as a result of years of redlining and environmental racism. Back of the Yards, for example, is located next to shuttered factories, which took a toll on the local ecosystem.

State and city policies have a massive impact on how and if the local food system flourishes, and CFN has to meet these challenges. For example, schools, hospitals, universities, and prisons are institutions that move tremendous amounts of food, making decisions about where they purchase it from using public money. The recently created Urban Agriculture Business License Enhancement Ordinance enables farms that are, for example, down the street from an elementary school, to demonstrate to that school that they’ve achieved the necessary safety certifications to sell locally grown food. Each farm’s business license and individualized city contract clarify that their produce, grown within Chicago city limits, is acceptable to consume.

Policy also impacted farmers in February 2020, when Lori Lightfoot’s administration released a new hydrant permit policy that made accessing the water for their urban farms, as they all had prior, prohibitively expensive—from $25 to over $500.

“Within like a week and a half, half of these farms went under,” Davis says. “They were no longer able to water their food. Fruit was withering on the vine, and we had no idea why she did [it], but there was absolutely zero transparency.”

Davis says that Lightfoot eventually revealed that the more expensive access was to filter contaminated water from the hydrant, but the city didn’t make it financially easy for farmers.

“That was a policy that was intended to help from a public health standpoint but really deteriorated the actual infrastructure,” Davis says. “Farms went under and they were just abandoned.”

Today, CFN is connected with more than 340 growers and 500 different organizations that have engaged with them in some capacity.

The work being done at the Street Vendors Association of Chicago (SVAC) is another good example of how local policies can create or tear down barriers for members of the independent food ecosystem.

The majority of street vendors in Chicago are low-income elderly immigrants; the highest concentration of vendors are in the 22nd, 24th, and 25th wards. These shops get set up “out of necessity,” says Rozanna Rivera, economic developer for SVAC. “What do most of our elders do? They cook. So they provide these cultural delicacies out of necessity to be able to provide for their families, because a lot of them [are] not able to participate in the local economy.” Many of these shop owners also watch children and can’t work a nine-to-five.

SVAC seeks to create and find resources for these vendors, such as ushering them through the licensing processes, finding capital to start their business, and encouraging cooperative ownership of shared kitchens, as the city requires their food be prepared in commercial kitchens.

Rivera shared that the sum of licensing alone for street vending ranges from $7,000 to $10,000. Insurance for a cart can be up to $1,000, and a permit from the Chicago Park District is $2,000. A cart, which can be wood or steel, costs between $1,200 to $5,000. Total costs to start street vending reach upwards of $20,000, and vendors only average $1,000-$1,500 in income per week.

One policy challenge that vendors face is that the city of Chicago prohibits preparing fresh cut fruit on the street—it’s supposed to be prepackaged like in a grocery store. But that limits how many cultural hallmarks patrons can experience.

“You’d have to prepare [elotes] fresh for the butter to melt on the corn,” Rivera says. “Some of the processes don’t allow for this.”

Being connected with CFN, at least, has helped these vendors—especially those living and working in areas without grocery stores nearby—get in touch with farmers to access locally grown produce.

A major component of CFN is creating spaces where growers can convene and be paid to give advice and input to the organization. CFN partners are paid to attend events and do on-site food education. They’re paid to purchase produce directly from growers and have chefs prepare it on the spot. CFN hosts monthly volunteer days at different farms, where community members are invited to visit a farm “open house” style and help the owner complete any work they might need.

Natasha Nichols is a first-generation farmer on the south side who built her house with her husband ten years ago in a vacant lot in West Pullman. They transformed a quarter acre of neighboring lots into an educational farm; it’s one small part of a green corridor in the making.

Her farm, We Sow We Grow, houses 50 chickens, and it draws curious neighbors and passersby to their work. In 2023, CFN hosted a volunteer day at We Sow We Grow.

“We had to dig up our farm . . . they were helping us literally rebuild,” Nichols says. “We were working from a blank slate, building all of our raised [soil] beds and making sure that they were [properly] placed for the season.”

Nichols says that Black folks can do “magical things” with food, making it stretch farther than you’d expect. Her investment in food sovereignty began a few years into the farm, when West Pullman went from having multiple groceries stores in a one-mile radius to having none. For her, food has always been the center of family, of traditions, of celebrations and funerals. The goal of her garden, which provides an array of classes, is the same as CFN’s: to try to get as many people as possible to start growing fruits and vegetables in their own spaces.

“I know that it won’t take the place of larger farms and grocery stores,” says Nichols, “but it’s just nice overall, for mental health, for community greening, for the ecosystem, for everybody to be growing something in their backyard.”

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D-MB (D-M Brown) (he/him) is a Black trans-masculine journalist employed as the social justice reporter at the Chicago Reader.

His work centers on protests, queer nightlife, labor/tenant unions, music, and looking broadly at how marginalized racial and gender groups create community services (spiritual/economic/leisure) to support one another.

Before coming to the Reader, Brown spent a year reporting on local reparations and the local Black population in Evanston, IL, at the Evanston Roundtable.

He was also a Chicago Journalists Association 2023 Sarah Brown Boyden awards breaking news finalist.

Brown lives in Chicago and can be reached at [email protected].