For the last 10 years, residents in the south Baltimore neighborhood of Cherry Hill who struggled to access affordable food had a reliable place to go.
Visitors to the Cherry Hill Urban Community Garden, a 1.5-acre urban farm, would find cheap, fresh vegetables and a strong sense of community.
But in the spring of 2021, the farm received an eviction notice. For Eric Jackson, servant director of the Black Yield Institute which managed the land, it was a huge blow. The farm’s influence went far beyond the kale, peppers and other fresh produce it sold at 50% below market rate, he says.
“It gives people hope. I know hope is cliche, but it gives people a glimpse of what we can be by teaching tangible skills and providing opportunities for relationship building,” Jackson says. “It’s been called a church without walls.”
Set up in 2010 on a vacant lot, the urban farm had an expired lease with the Housing Authority of Baltimore City, operating on what Jackson calls a “gentlemen’s agreement” that would be renewed year after year. In June 2021, the authority suddenly decided the time had come to take it back to build housing on the plot.
By December 2021, BYI had been evicted and Cherry Hill Urban Community Garden lay empty.
What happened in Baltimore is not an isolated event. Urban farms around the US are increasingly important, especially in “food desert” neighborhoods, yet they face big challenges with land security. It’s a struggle that particularly affects Black farmers: people of color own only 3% of all agricultural land in the US and Black farmers make up only 1.3% of farmers.
Verbal and temporary leases are common, says Neith Grace Little, urban agriculture educator at the University of Maryland Extension in Baltimore. This can put urban farmers at a disadvantage, especially when developers show interest. Farmers can easily be forced to move, forfeiting years of investment.
Little advises urban farmers to buy land if they can, but ownership remains out of reach for many as gentrification pushes prices up and complex city bureaucracy locks farmers out. A third of participants in a University of Maryland survey of more than 400 urban farmers across the north-east said that land access is a huge barrier, with only one-third saying they owned the land they steward.
Finding ways to give urban farms land security is one of the most efficient ways to improve the food ecosystem, says Baltimore councilman Kristerfer Burnett, especially as Covid disrupts supply chains and food prices rise. “You go to the grocery store and you see the empty shelves. With shipping delays and worker shortages, food insecurity will be more apparent,” he says.
Burnett is pushing for measures to support urban farms, including creating incentives for land ownership through models such as community land trusts, where non-profits buy and keep land in trust for the benefit of the community.
It’s a form of ownership that’s working well for an urban farm nearly 800 miles from Baltimore. The Victory Garden Initiative in Milwaukee is home to several community gardens and a 1.5-acre urban farm owned through a community land trust. Land ownership gives the organization more freedom to serve the community, says its executive director, Michelle Dobbs.
Launched in 2009 in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Harambee, the organization was inspired by the victory garden effort of the first and second world wars, where people grew fruit and vegetables in any outside space they had.
The context may be very different now but the sense of urgency is the same, says Dobbs. During the waves of the pandemic many people struggled to access food staples. “Urban gardens have proved to be a saving grace,” she says.
“We have so much food on our land we just started giving it away.” The farm was converted into an emergency food distribution center. They made canned spaghetti sauce from tomatoes and included it in food boxes along with berries, greens, potatoes and other items from the garden.
For Dobbs, security over the land has helped the farm better serve the community. “I feel safe, with our land being held in trust, that developers cannot develop the neighborhood for other purposes, right beneath our feet,” says Dobbs. “People need and want this food we’re growing.”
It’s this same powerful community need that’s also driving an effort in Detroit to make ownership a priority for Black urban farmers.
For decades Detroit has had a thriving urban farm movement. In the majority Black city known for blight, urban farmers saw abandoned lots as an opportunity to feed the community. But until relatively recently, most remained illegal, usually because the farmer didn’t own the land or due to zoning laws. It wasn’t until 2013 that an urban agriculture ordinance gave some protection.
But Black farmers in Detroit still lose out, says Jerry Ann Hebron, executive director of Oakland Avenue Urban Farm, which grows more than 33 varieties of fruits and vegetables in the city’s North End neighborhood. They can’t compete with top-dollar offers by speculative land developers. “We were farming on land we didn’t own and at any day we could be displaced” Hebron says.
For the last few years, Hebron has seen several urban farms evicted by city agencies and private landowners without explanation or compensation. It cost one farm $40,000 to relocate when it was evicted. People with more resources were able to navigate the system to buy land resulting in widespread gentrification, she says.
In an effort to change this, Hebron’s farm, along with the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network and Keep Growing Detroit, founded the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund, a coalition aiming to increase land ownership for Black farmers in the city. In its first year, the fund managed to raise $55,000 through a crowdfunding campaign, 10 times more than its original goal.
“The donations came pouring in and that’s when we were able to help our Black farmers,” says Hebron. The Black Farmer Land Fund distributed $2,000 to 30 urban farmers and bought some vacant lots in blighted neighborhoods for as little as $500.
The Black Farmer Land Fund has started working with the Detroit Land Bank Authority, a public agency that manages the city’s abandoned properties, to create an easier path to ownership for Black urban farmers.
Black farmers have been socially disfranchised, Hebron says: “We are focused on trying to bring equity, land ownership and economic security to their families.”
Detroit now has more than 200 acres of urban farmland and these farms are an essential part of the food chain, she says. While they contribute to the wellbeing of the community, Hebron also believes they can be a source of generational wealth for Black farmers.
Back in Baltimore, the Black Yield Institute is now farming a new plot of land in the Mount Clare neighborhood. Moving equipment, uprooting plants and other relocation expenses have cost the organization close to $30,000, not including expenses to set up the new farm. “Not only did they evict us, but they left us with a bill,” Jackson says. “Now, we have to raise money to buy land. Who’s going to pay for that?”
The organization has a right to use the land for two years and has launched a fundraising campaign to buy it.
Growing healthy food accessible to those living in food deserts is not only a service but for Jackson and other urban farmers like him it’s a movement. But the movement remains vulnerable.
“There is no policy that protects land or earmarks land that’s available for agriculture and supports urban agriculture,” Jackson says. “If we can secure land reparations we would be in a better position to have the money, resources and power to be able to grow and advance urban agriculture for Black people, Black farmers and Black families.”
For now, Jackson says: “We will continue to be a faith institution without walls. Wherever we are, we will steward the land to our best capacity and we will continue to do the work.”
