More than 280,000 people in the Tristate don’t know where their next meal is coming from, and 94,000 of them are children, according to the Freestore Foodbank. Many of these food-insecure individuals and households are located in food deserts, generally defined as impoverished areas of the city lacking grocery stores or farmers markets — devoid of fresh fruit, vegetables and other healthful food.
To help combat this statistic, the city of Cincinnati and Office of Environment & Sustainability debuted its Urban Agriculture Program in 2009, which awards grants to nonprofits and for-profits alike to facilitate the production of agriculture within city limits. The application window just closed for this year’s mini-grants. During 2016, the Urban Agriculture Program dispersed funds to 26 sites with an average grant size of approximately $800.
Larry Falkin, director of the Office of Environment & Sustainability, says the Urban Agriculture Program is part of the Green Cincinnati Plan, which the city describes as a roadmap to becoming a national leader in addressing climate change.
“The goals of the program include strengthening regional food security and increasing accessibility to fresh local produce, lowering greenhouse gases by minimizing food transportation and enhancing regional health through better nutrition and nutritional education,” Falkin says. “Vacant city-owned parcels are leased to a diverse group of individuals, and the program supports the enhancement, training and education and agricultural supplies.”
Cincinnati is following other cities, such as New York and Detroit, which provide economic incentives to organizations for the purpose of growing food in underutilized urban spaces.
An Urban Eden
Locals Domonique Peebles and Damon Lynch IV sought out People’s Liberty, a philanthropic lab that invests in individuals who are working to overcome the city’s challenges or uncover opportunities for residents. They each received a $10,000 grant from the group to undertake projects to transform neglected and underutilized indoor and outdoor urban spaces into verdant, productive food sites.
Son of Reverend Damon Lynch III, Lynch describes himself as an activist, community servant and organizer from a young age. New Prospect Baptist Church, where his father is pastor, is the home of Lynch’s Urban Orchards project.
Urban Orchards is a venture that focuses on using sustainable agricultural practices to grow crops on the church’s land. It will use these same techniques to plant fruit trees in vacant spaces in Roselawn as well as in residents’ yards.
When New Prospect Baptist Church moved from Over-the-Rhine to the former Jewish Community Center of Roselawn in the fall of 2011, the first thing Lynch noticed was the huge amount of land on the property. He has been growing crops on a portion of New Prospect’s 22 acres for two years, experimenting with different techniques and approaches using permaculture, which he describes as “building with nature, instead of building upon it.” He composts chicken manure to use as natural fertilizer, practices companion farming and avoids pesticides and herbicides.
Lynch grows crops using these techniques not only to provide access to healthy foods at New Prospect’s farmers markets, but also to educate anyone interested in the benefits of growing your own food on a local and sustainable level. Come spring and summer, Lynch and his team will hold volunteer sessions and camps for kids and adults to learn the advantages and ease of growing your own food, whether it’s in your own backyard or on a plot of land in the city.
“We’re just trying to provide different options for people to figure out where their food comes from,” Lynch says. “(You) spend the day in the dirt and then you come back in a couple of weeks and you see that some things grew — those types of opportunities are teaching lessons, and they’re life lessons. We’re just trying to provide a platform so people can expand.”
Urban Orchards will broaden that mission by planting fruit trees around New Prospect and Roselawn. Families all over the community have agreed to plant about 30-70 apple, pear and peach trees in their lawns, funded entirely through Urban Orchards. The planting will be held on a single day or over a weekend, though no date has been set yet.
The long-term goal for Urban Orchards is to become fully self-sustainable, employing members of the community while simultaneously giving back and enriching that very same community.
Lynch hopes that the trees will start producing fruit in a year’s time, with full production estimated to be anywhere from two to five years. Once the trees have grown, Lynch would like to see community members take over the responsibilities in caring for them, after he provides mentorship and training.
“We can let people take over the business and let the community thrive off this produce and off this energy,” Lynch says.
He envisions a community in which the youth of Roselawn can easily pick a piece of fruit off of a tree to eat and it’s completely free, locally grown and, most of all, a healthy option.
Activating Hydroponics
Peebles is the founder of the Brick Gardens project. Brick Gardens activates vacant, unused buildings in neighborhoods that are recognized as food deserts by growing produce in them using a custom model of vertical, hydroponic towers.
The long-term goal is to create rich, indoor urban farms all year round.
“My idea was if the space is there, if it doesn’t need a ton of rehab, why not ‘activate’ it for growing food?” Peebles says. “You can then take that same spot and you can offer educational courses to youth around the importance of growing your own produce.”
As opposed to outdoor farming, indoor hydroponic farming is advantageous in the sense that the difficult aspects of the growing process — invasive species, crop rot, soil contamination, temperature, humidity, the weather — dissipate under a controlled environment. The less of those things you have to deal with, the greater the yield you can count on.
Peebles is hoping the completion of his hydroponic towers will attract the interest of landlords of vacant buildings in food desert communities and persuade community councils that they can do this sort of growing with relative ease and without using the entire property.
With his current tower model, electricity can cost up to $2 a day per tower, which adds up at the end of 30 days. But that cost is from using direct current electricity. Peebles is in the process of looking at how much electricity he can save by running the towers off of alternating current electricity drawn from solar panels.
He has been fine-tuning his growing model at four sites over the past 10 months: Xavier University, Cincinnati State, New Prospect Baptist Church and at a storefront on Main Street. The schools pay for the models at Xavier and Cincinnati State, and Brick Gardens will be responsible for all the electricity bills generated upon receiving permission to “activate” vacant buildings in the future.
Peebles plans to expand his operations by donating vegetables to Gabriel’s Place and New Prospect during the warmer months to provide fresh food for their farmers markets and community dinners.
Peebles’ 10-month cycle with People’s Liberty is drawing to a close, and he and the philanthropic lab are currently in the process of discussing next steps for the continuation of Brick Gardens so it can exist as a full-fledged sustainable business. Since there seems to be a new upgrade or piece of equipment for hydroponic technology every year, Peebles is confident he can bring the cost down with forthcoming technological advancements.
“This should be something that hopefully every neighborhood can use, but we’re being very intentional on being in food deserts because they’re the ones that need it the most,” he says. “If we can use those areas as a blueprint, then we are assuming that other neighborhoods are going to buy into it as well.
“It’s a new way to think about how to utilize space. Who is going to say no to feeding people?”
For more on the progress of URBAN ORCHARDS and BRICK GARDENS, visit peoplesliberty.org.
This article appears in Apr 19-26, 2017.