Urban Farming Takes Off In Baltimore

Baltimore’s urban farming community is gaining momentum -- with support from the city. Last Thursday, a group of urban farming advocates highlighted that momentum with a series of events at farms citywide.WYPR’s Matt Purdy attended some of those events, and brings us this report.

Most of the homes near the 3500 block of Kenyon Avenue in the Belair neighborhood are fronted by small, green lawns. But, one of the residents in the neighborhood started growing more than just grass four years ago.

“We do peppers, strawberries, a lot of brassicas, kale, collards, that kind of thing.”

That’s 36-year-old Oklahoma native Denzel Mitchell.

“We are at Five Seeds Farm in Baltimore city at the corner of Brehms Lane and Kenyon Avenue.”

Mitchell founded and manages the farm, which takes up less than an acre. He’s part of an urban agriculture community that has grown in the city in recent years. Abby Cocke is an environmental planner with the Office of Sustainability.

“There’s been a community gardening movement for many, many years which is just about encouraging self-reliance and community building and reusing of vacant spaces, building up of neighborhoods and at least as I’ve been able to see the urban agriculture movement has sort of sprung out of that, out of that energy and out of the energy of young people… to see can we make a living off of this, can we change the way that these food systems work, not just for me and my neighbors but for the whole city.”

The city’s zoning code is being extensively revised for the first time since the 1970s. Cocke says the revised code, as currently proposed, would take into account community gardeners and urban farmers.

“We’re adding things that were never in there before about community gardens, about urban agriculture, where it’s permitted, where it’s conditional. We’re trying to make it much easier for people to get into growing their own food in an entrepreneurial way.”

The city has also begun a program that selects qualified farmers to create farms on city-owned land that doesn’t have current development plans.

“We identified a total of about 35 acres of land that we thought had good potential. We expect to get just a few acres in production to start and then ramp that up to at least ten in the next couple of years.”

Jared Margulies works on the “Farming for the Future” program at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. The center’s research lies at the intersection between diet, environment, public health, and food production.

“Baltimore city has a lot of food access issues. Places where, we call them food deserts… places where supermarkets aren’t available within walking distance for instance and the food that’s available from corner stores is of really low quality. So, we’re interested in how things like community gardens and urban farms can help promote the availability of more healthy food. ”

That’s where Mitchell of Five Seeds Farm comes in.

“I sell to restaurants, I go to market on a weekly basis and I operate a small CSA.”

“CSA” stands for Community Supported Agriculture. Community residents support the farm by buying a portion of the harvest directly from the farmer. At Five Seeds Farm, one box of fruits and vegetables every week for 10 weeks costs $225 dollars, and includes a jar of honey from the five beehives also run by the farm. Urban farmers say they can’t completely solve the food issues that Baltimore city faces. But, they say they’re one step in the right direction.

I’m Matt Purdy, reporting from Baltimore, for 88-1, WYPR.