In a press release from city hall this past Friday, Mayor Emmanuel announced a new plan to reimagine the city’s food desert known best as the South Side to be rebuilt (or perhaps regrown would be a more fitting term) into a healthy local food spot. As many manufacturing plants have closed up shop on the south side of Chicago over the last half century and poverty has foreclosed on many homes and small neighborhood pockets, the one thing there is an abundance of in this once booming part of the city is open, available, and unused land. So, much like they say with lemons,”When life gives you vacant properties in struggling neighborhoods, create a haven of small scale urban farms and farmers.”
The Botanical Gardens and a few other non-profit organizations have been working with some degree of success to help promote and create the changeover to a modernized and ultra-local food system, but never before to this degree of scale. Changing over a lot to farmland often takes a great deal of work and a surprising amount of capital to get started both through purchasing equipment, seeds, plants as well as renting and/or hiring tractors, plows, and tree trimmers to ready the land for full scale production, it also costs a great deal to hook into a water supply and create an irrigation system if needed. Grist reports that it can cost up to $250,000 to fully overhaul just one of the city’s 15,000 vacant lots.
These financial factors along with the slow start for a new farm are a great deal of what the city will be alleviating the new farmers of in the form of grants, loans, speedier permits as well as creating and encouraging a slew of new farmer’s markets all around town to make this healthy and local produce directly available to the city’s residents and also keeping the price low for the consumers by cutting out the middle man. In addition to the 20 or so farmer’s markets, the rest of the food will be sold to and through local groceries, restaurants, convenience stores and the like, according to the Associated Press. Just a quarter to half an acre can be very full time work for a single farmer, so there will be lots of new jobs opening up for those interested in the city. The administration does, however, require experience or training in farming in order to qualify for the program, send in your application if you have a business plan you would like to be considered.
The new initiative will be largely based on and in conjunction with the nearby Growing Power of Milwaukee, run by MacArthur genius grant winning Will Allen, and the revolutionary work they have done in many cities throughout the country.
The driving will behind the new program, however is Dave Snyder of Chicago Farmworks who said about the plan,”To be certain, Chicago is going to be a very large urban ag hub. I can’t think of another place where city government is turning over land for farming. The commitment is real and it’s a thriving and diverse scene. Chicago has this reputation of being segregated. Yet, last week I went to a community garden summit and when I walked in there was the most diverse group of people you could ever imagine.”
Urban farming is nothing new to Chicago, as is the case with most historic cities, it’s simply a great thing we once forgot and are just now beginning to remember.
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