The State of Urban Agriculture
As the dust settles from the Thomas Jackson saga, is Toledo ready to let growers grow?
The controversy
On June 22nd, the downtown library hosted a forum on urban agriculture featuring speakers from the Toledo City Council, the Lucas County Commissioners Office, the Lucas County Green Party, and the Lucas County Auditor’s office. County Commissioner Pete Gerken opened his remarks with the image of a pioneer getting shot in the back. He was referring to Thomas Jackson, the urban farmer whose well-documented persecution by the city government shined a bright light on the city’s unpreparedness for an urban agricultural movement.
At the center of the Jackson story sat large piles of woodchips. The piles, according to neighbors, stank, harbored a growing population of rats, and were a misuse of residential land. Jackson claimed they were meant to remediate the soil on three of his central city properties.
Even before the woodchips started to accumulate, Jackson, a certified master nursery technician and master urban farmer, had a vision for the combined 2.2 acres at 1446 Macomber St., 1505 Milburn Ct., and 2325 Swiler Dr. “I prayed,” he says, “five, six years consistently every night to beautify my neighborhood, redevelop my neighborhood, and grow the food that’s going to change the eating habits of my neighbors, and to acquire the wealth from it.”
In order to achieve this goal, he had to ensure he was planting in uncontaminated soil. Soil remediation is Urban Farming 101, especially important in the postindustrial lands of Toledo and the greater Rust Belt region. In the twenty months since nuisance charges were filed against Jackson for maintaining the piles, the wood chips have become the soil that now holds six thousand fruit and vegetable plants.
Jackson can’t help but laugh when he replays the situation. “If I try to grow organics, create my soil and make sure there are no contaminants in it, no heavy metals, no toxins, no pesticides, no herbicides so that we get a pure, unadulterated organic product, that was the issue,” he says. “And that’s crazy. That’s crazy.”
Jackson is a professional, and in the food-deserted neighborhoods of Central City Toledo, his actions are laudable and necessary. That the city government chose to run him through a ringer of vindictive local politics and lengthy court proceedings instead of bolstering his efforts demonstrates a large gap between rhetoric and action. This was on full display at a March 31 hearing in which Judge McConnell praised Jackson’s intent only to berate him for not accepting a conciliatory offer made by Toledo’s Department of Development. “The city made their move, you haven’t,” the judge said.
The city’s “move” was an offer to lease a concrete-covered parcel of land at Auburn and Bancroft at a nominal price. Beneath the concrete were contaminants that the city would not remove. It was an offer he could only refuse.
Luckily, Thomas Jackson is a good fighter. He dug deeper into the dirt, and local growers, activists, and leaders organized around his efforts. As a result, Toledo citizens and politicians are taking a long view on the issue, trying to catch up with neighbors like Cleveland and Detroit who have linked urban agriculture to renewal efforts.
The bigger picture
In Rust Belt cities like Toledo, where the population is dwindling and vacant lots abound, urban farms are community-driven solutions that lend an air of progressive thought to the renewal process. Many local politicians sense this and are swarming to the cause.
But the issue at the heart of urban farming is much plainer than the discussion surrounding it: people are hungry. Urban farmers like Jackson know this and state it plainly. “We’re not getting the nutrients we need,” Jackson says.
According to 2015 data from Feeding America and Mind the Meal Gap, 17.8 percent of Lucas County Residents experience food insecurity, just above the Ohio average where one in six people experience food insecurity. These numbers square with USDA data from a 2013-2015 study which ranked Ohio as the seventh most food insecure state in the nation (in another 2015 report from the Food Resource & Action Center, How Hungry is America?, Ohio ranks as the 13th most food insecure state). Ironically, Ohio is the thirteenth most agriculturally productive state per cash receipts by commodity, also according to the USDA. This means that in a hungry state, farmers export their food and residents eat imported food.
Ken Meter analyzes these phenomena in Finding Food in Northwest Ohio, a 2012 report commissioned by the Department of Urban Affairs at the University of Toledo. Meter estimates that 3.6 billion dollars of potential wealth are lost through the food economy each year. Of the 3.3 billion dollars spent by Northwest Ohio consumers on food each year, only .5 percent of that, or 6.8 million dollars, are direct sales from farmer to consumer.
Those direct sales represent meaningful interactions between growers and eaters, populations that rarely come into contact with each other. Not only does direct purchasing from local growers demystify and make personal the where-does-my-food-come-from question, it also achieves many levels of good in the overlapping spheres of sustainability, public health, local economics, land use, and a general sense of fellowship within communities.
When scaling these issues back down to the city of Toledo, specifically the urban core, the needs and potential for urban agricultural interventions are all the more clear. Toledo’s post-recession concentrated poverty rates (a measure by which 40 percent of a given census tract lives below the federal poverty level) rank third in the nation. Of the approximate 113,000 Toledo residents living in poverty, 35 percent live in extremely poor neighborhoods (data per 2016 Brookings Institution report, US Concentrated Poverty in the Wake of the Great Recession).
Being poor in a poor neighborhood adds insult to injury. Along with all major indexes of public health, education, and economic opportunity, poor residents of poor neighborhoods fare worse than poor residents living in non-impoverished areas. Distributed across race, the impact of concentrated poverty on people of color is even greater. Though whites account for 44 percent of America’s poor, only 18 percent live in extremely impoverished neighborhoods.
Zoom in again. When Thomas Jackson talks about changing the eating habits of people around him, it sounds like a modest goal. Filtered through this lens, Toledo’s mishandling of his efforts can be chalked up to much-ado-about-nothing. Zoom out and the reality is historical and monstrous. Limited social mobility for poor black and brown people occurs daily and materially through diminished access to nutritious food, quality education, land, and capital. This is the modern-day iteration of redlining, sharecropping, and slavery.
The problem solvers
Herein lies another conundrum. While urban food insecurity disproportionately impacts families and individuals of color, the face of urban agriculture is often white and bestowed with an air of do-gooder benevolence.
So what happens when a black person in a black neighborhood seeks to empower others by controlling the means of production? Malcolm Cunningham has worked on community-based development projects for over a decade both internationally— in Malawi and Rwanda— and in his hometown, Toledo. He grapples with this issue on many fronts. “It’s not always comfortable to have solutions in communities of color come from people of color,” he says.
In his work with youth groups at the ZONE Farm, Cunningham aims for skill development and self-efficacy. He eschews the coded language of “at-risk youth” often used to describe the young people he works with. Instead, he acknowledges a range of challenging circumstances they face: “a lot of the youth get in trouble at school, a lot of them have undiagnosed depression that manifests itself as irritability, frustration, or challenges to authority.” Throw into the mix a diet based on processed foods, he says, and “the changes in blood sugar that come from eating [those] foods can again lead to irritability and all these other issues that someone can look at and say, ‘oh, they’re ODD, oh, they’re ADD, or they’re this issue,’ when really it’s the diet and the way that their body is processing those foods.”
To demonstrate ZONE’s impact on a variety of levels, Cunningham shares an anecdote about a program participant who came into the program not knowing what asparagus was. By the end of the season, not only did this individual know how to grow, harvest, and cook asparagus, they were proudly passing on this knowledge to family and peers. Cunningham considers pride and knowledge to be crucial pieces of self-efficacy, what he calls “a protective factor” that “can help reduce the impact of trauma or mental health issues. If you’ve developed not just self-esteem but self-efficacy, your confidence in one area can translate to other areas of your life.”
Indeed, the transitive property is at the core of urban farming. Healthier food leads to healthier people, which leads to healthier communities.
Liz Harris, the owner of Glass City Goat Gals, has also spurred change in her neighborhood, the Cherry Street Legacy, through urban farming and environmental impact work. In a cul-de-sac once known by neighbors as Murder Alley, Harris has torn down fifteen vacant homes with the Land Bank, created a goat pasture, and started a summer youth employment program known as the Green Team.
The going is not easy. Harris runs the Green Team with donated lawnmowers and lawn care equipment (she is always accepting donations), and the first year she paid the youth out of her pocket. “My community is 30 percent under the age of 18,” she says, “and these kids have nothing to do. So we found out with having a worksite in the community that’s accessible to them, they really take ownership of their community…They get to know people in their community that might not live on their street.”
Harris remembers the resistance neighbors put up when she decided to bring goats to Mentor St., “when I first started people said, ‘Goats here over my dead body,’ and now they bring their grandchildren out, they call me if they think anything looks out of place…You have people looking out for you. That’s community.”
Harris chose to start Glass City Goat Gals, a grazing business, as a change in career. Goat grazing is an eco-friendly alternative to land maintenance techniques that traditionally use harmful herbicides and heavy, gas-run machinery. Goats, she says, “manage the vegetation, they stomp things out that shouldn’t belong and they bring back the natural look of the land.” Toledo can be beautiful and healthy, Harris insists, but it will require citizens and local government to re-think how we manage local land and resources.
The scope of this work is massive. Jackson, Cunningham, and Harris are not just stewards of the land, they also challenge the passive consumption of food, narratives, and politics that shape our capacity to change or even think about change on a micro or macro level.
There are countless other Toledoans who have taken this work into their own hands. Yvonne Dubielak manages Toledo Grows, a hub for urban agriculture that hosts workshops, seed-swaps, and supports 130 community gardens across the city. Bryan Ellis trains the future generation of local growers at Toledo Public School’s Urban Agriculture and Hydroponics program. The OSU Extension, Owens Community College, and the Toledo Lucas County Sustainability Commission also offer structural, educational, and technical support to urban farming initiatives.
In this landscape, however, Thomas Jackson’s case stands out all the more as a cautionary tale in which an obstinate city government and wooden legal system suck the air out of a big idea.
So the question remains: can Toledoans trust their local government to not be an impediment to future urban farmers working in the neighborhoods that need healthy food the most?
The answer might lie in smart legislation.
The “Right to Grow”
Cruelly designed or unequally applied, legislation has always played a central role in the use of land and resources. More often than not, large corporations and privileged individuals who exploit natural resources for their own obscene gains enjoy governmental favor while community growers get short shrift.
The “Right to Grow Ordinance” seeks to change this paradigm. Prompted by the city’s treatment of Jackson, Sean Nestor, co-chair of the Lucas County Green Party, brought together a team of experienced urban agriculturists, a zoning expert, and an attorney at Advocates for Basic Legal Equality to draft legislation that can “take the city from a position of not really knowing how to approach urban agriculture to one where we could say that we have a very forward-thinking urban agriculture community.”
The group drafted the ordinance with two central themes in mind: one, don’t reinvent the wheel, and two, bring urban farmers to the table and keep them at the table.
On the first front, the group tweaked bits of Cleveland’s Urban Agricultural Law (a comprehensive bundle of ordinances that were passed starting in the mid-2000’s) to apply locally. The central piece of this legislation is an itemized list of agricultural activities that can occur on residentially zoned properties without the need for further permitting. These practices include the sale of produce (with limitations) and the construction and use of farm accessories (within a certain size), such as hoop houses, farm stands, and sheds.
On the second front, the ordinance seeks to establish an Urban Agriculture Community Board comprised mainly of urban farmers that will advise the Mayor’s administration on tough to legislate issues. Nestor says that “by establishing the urban ag board, which you can do legislatively, you get this wing inside the administrative branch where there’s an opportunity to move certain issues forward.”
According to Nestor, the draft is complete and will soon be in the hands of “industry groups” for further consultation before going public.
With friendlier zoning codes, a strong group of advocates in the city administration’s ear, and an already established urban agricultural community, Toledo may be on its way to becoming a regional example of urban farming done right.
