I had my first day of work today...

and I just can't even describe how great it was.  Greening of Detroit, the place that I'll be working for this year, is just pretty amazing and I could go on and on about it, but I will just try and describe a little bit about why Detroit in particular really needs the sort of work that they do with Urban Agriculture.

First let's just talk about how bad the food system of Detroit is.  56% of Detroiters get their groceries from liquor stores.  Places with only processed food available in general, where there is no customer service, where there is plate glass between you and the person selling you the food and where your money is most likely going to leave the community.  This percentage is even higher for people on food stamps, mostly because the neighborhoods with the worst grocery store availability are the poorest.  The sort of food you can buy in these stores not only is unhealthy and thus adds to both adult and childhood obesity problems, but also a sense of just generally depression and low self esteem.

Detroit in general is not a place where people usually feel good about the place they live.  Detroit has a bad rap and has been going down hill in many ways for a long time.  The area of the city is larger than Manhattan, San Francisco and Boston COMBINED.  There used to be 2 million people living in the city and now 730,000 folks live here, and that is still dropping.

When things get bad like they are in Detroit people tend to turn on themselves and act in self abusive ways and just try to take what they can get from life.  Luckily Detroit has a history of using farming and gardening to pick itself up.  In what may be the first example of urban gardening Mayor Pingree during the depression of 1890 gave empty plots to hungry people.  He even sold one of his own horses to buy them seeds.  This became a model for many other cities and was repeated with Thrift Gardens during the Great Depression and Victory Gardens during World War 2.

There was also a great program here during the 1970s called Farm-A-Lot which I'll try and learn more about and write about here later.  The point is that Detroit has a history of using agriculture as a way of picking itself up during hard times, which with 11.6% unemployment this certainly is.

And there's plenty of space for it.  There are about 50,000 PUBLICLY owned lots in Detroit with zero structures on them.  Note that this doesn't even begin to address all the privately owned lots or lots with structures that should probably be taken down.  There are about 10-14 lots per acre so we're talking about 5,000 acres of potential farm land.  A study found that with just that publicly held land Detroit could grow about 76% of its current consumption of vegetables and 42% of its fruit.  That is amazing potential to change the way Detroiters eat and live.  Truly an inspiring work to be involved with.