Open Letter on "First" Urban Agrihood

Update: Interesting Metrotimes article on many of these points

Michigan Urban Farming Initiative has created the “first urban agrihood” in much the same way that Christopher Columbus was the “first” person to discover America. With this  long history of false “firsts” perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised by all the headlines last week. But even if it was not a surprise, it was disappointing.

I’m a white woman who moved to Detroit in 2011 to participate in the city’s already thriving urban agriculture movement. People have been growing food in this soil since before white settlers got here. The French colonists built “ribbon farms”along the river and many of our streets are named after those farmers. The current wave of urban agriculture continues from the City’s Farm-A-Lot program (1970s-1990s), which distributed seeds and provided other resources for residents to grow food on vacant lots. When the City stopped funding the program, the Garden Resource Program was born in 2003, initially as a partnership of MSU Extension, the Greening of Detroit, Earthworks Urban Farm, and the Detroit Agriculture Network. The program is now coordinated by Keep Growing Detroit, with over 1,430 gardens participating in 2016.

The history of agriculture in Detroit has been mainly a history of people of color, especially African Americans whose families worked on farms in the American south. Without an understanding of both local and national history, we erase the experiences and contributions of the people who came before us. Just like if we say that Elvis invented Rock and Roll we erase the Blues performers that influenced him. By claiming that we are the first we deny the existence and experience of all those other people.

I lay all of this out because history is important. Urban agriculture is not just a short term trend nor is it an entirely new movement. It has been and continues to be a way that thousands of residents provide healthy, nutritious food, and sometimes income, to their families, neighbors, and congregations.

Michigan Urban Farming Initiative didn’t start urban agriculture in the city nor did they invent the “Urban Agrihood” (though no one else may have called it that). The Brightmoor Farmway and its impact on the neighborhood has been written about in many local and national publications. Georgia Street Community Collective, on the near east side, has used agriculture as a transformational force, with a community garden, orchard, community kitchen, and youth programming, to great effect. Georgia Street’s director, Mark Covington, has been much written about in the local press as an advocate for allowing livestock in the city. D-Town Farm covers 7 acres in Detroit’s Rouge Park and grows over 30 varieties of fruits and vegetables while also acting as an important space to teach people about gardening and nutrition. Not a half mile up the road from MUFI is the Oakland Avenue Urban Farm and Farmway with their community house and gardens, farmers market, AfroJam business, and more. I know there are many more examples that I’m failing to mention. All of these projects have been grassroots in their beginnings, slow growing, underfunded, and, for many of them, led by people of color.

The project at the Michigan Urban Farming Initiative is exciting, an interesting corporate partnership in this work, and audacious in its scale. All of these are great reasons to write a news or blog article about it, but none of these things make it first.

http://www.modeldmedia.com/features/new-beginning-north-end-091216.aspx
www.oaklandurbanfarm.org/
http://www.uixdetroit.com/projects/dtown-farm.aspx
http://www.metrotimes.com/detroit/how-paul-weertz-helped-stabilize-the-tiny-detroit-neighborhood-you-almost-never-heard-about/Content?oid=2343926
http://www.neighborsbuildingbrightmoor.org/
http://www.georgiastreetcc.com/