Page 10
Street Roots • September 22-28, 2017
Book Review
Dig deep! This
farmer and
activist has some
radical ideas
Sole Food Farms co-founder is
working to grow farm ers in the city
BY SUSAN STORER CLARK
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
ou might flip through this attractive
volume in a bookstore. It has lots of
colorful, glossy photos of beaming
people of varying ethnicities tending lettuce
and holding huge bunches of brilliant beets.
You’d probably notice tomatoes and peppers
glowing in their market boxes.
But other pictures show weedy lots
strewn with trash bags and litter, people
passed out on the sidewalk, discarded
needles. By now, you’d be aware of several
sides of the multi-faceted reality presented
by farmer and longtime activist Michael
Ableman. There’s much more to it than is in
the pictures.
Ableman is the cofounder of Sole Food
Street Farms, a network of four farms using
mentally ill people they hired to do the
five acres of reclaimed land in downtown
work. Some have bloomed and grown, some
Vancouver, British Columbia. He’s been
have faltered. Some have grown, and then
working for more than 40 years as a farmer
faltered, as human beings often do. Ableman
and almost that long as an activist aiming to
weaves their stories through his narrative.
bring farming to cities. His book tells the
He also weaves in pieces of wisdom and
story of Sole Food Street Farms, begun in
practical advice. A few paragraphs on Water
2009, but it is also an analysis of the ills of
Wisdom note: “Water is a finite resource
our current food system, a wide-ranging
and should be treated as such.” A thought-
manifesto on why we need urban farming
provoking half page on The Parking Space
and a revelation of how much you need to
notes that a typical parking space is 9 feet
Y
Street Farm:
Growing Food,
Jobs, and Hope
on the Urban
Frontier by
Michael Ableman
farmer.
We are not talkii
urban gardens here
We are not ta lkin g urban
Many people in citi
gardens here. Many people
have containers or
in cities have containers or
small plots where t
sm all plots where they grow
grow a few tomatoe
a few tomatoes. Mblemaa writes Ableman writes ab(
about production farm ing,
production farming
growing food for sa
growing food for sale.
He writes that they
produce more than
tons of fresh produi
per year, supplying
more than 30 area restaurants, selling at
farmers markets and operating a
community-supported agriculture prograr
About two years ago, Vancouver Magazine
voted Sole Food the top food producer in
the area.
The idea was not simply to grow food but
also to offer disenfranchised people a
chance to learn new skills, participate in
meaningful work and heal themselves, as
well as helping to feed the city. That part is
the ongoing story of this book: the story of
the poor, homeless, drug-addicted or
by 18 feet, 162 square feet. He says that
space could produce 450-500 pounds of
food in a six-month growing season, with an
average retail value of about $1,500. (He
does point out that’s assuming ideal
conditions and a high skill level.)
Is this a “how to do this in your home
town” kind of book? No. It quickly becomes
apparent how complex such an operation is,
and how much knowledge and skill it takes
to do it.
First, think about what it takes to be a
successful farmer. “Doing agriculture well
requires a very sophisticated and complex
set of skills,” Ableman writes. “These skills
take years to develop, and they require a
deep understanding of soils, insects, biology,
botany, mechanics, physics, marketing, labor
management, and on and on.”
Even with that knowledge, it took
Ableman a couple of growing seasons to
realize they were going to have to use
plastic containers, rather than planting
directly into the soil or raised beds. There
are a couple of reasons for that: The soil
beneath the city is often contaminated, even
biologically dead, plus the land is often
leased, or its use just granted temporarily,
so the whole farm needs to be portable.
He only hints at the complexity of the
political and permitting processes, but it’s
clear these take up a lot of his time, as does
coordinating with the owners of the land.
Still, the most difficult relationships can be
with the people who work the farms. The
main hope is to offer work that is life-giving,
and he says it is “a relief to witness such
fecundity and productivity and blatant
health in the midst of the struggles” of the
neighborhoods. Still, he acknowledges that,
if you do this work, you have to recognize '
that you cannot save people, and that is
sometimes bitterly hard to accept.
Ableman has a larger agenda. He wants
to upend the food system we have, the
disassociation most modern people have
from the sources of their food and the
abuse to which we subject our land. Yes,
small-scale food production is more
, <
.
o iu ic o , bUli 1OSS
and degradation, groundwater depletion and
pollution, and farmworkers who are not
always well cared for.”
Toward the end of the book he presents
his Urban Food Manifesto, beginning with
this proposal: “Every municipality should
establish publicly supported agricultural
training centers in central and accessible
locations. He’s talking about working urban
farms Some of his ideas, he says, are
radical, but some are obvious.
He’s worth paying attention to. He seems
S
Vwemn
16384 ° ne radicaI idea work