Working For Jobs

by Breaking Through Concrete team.

It’s sunny and 94 degrees, and the pavement’s steaming after a
thunderstorm rolled sideways through north Philly. Mary Seton Corboy
wears a full-body, white bee suit. She stands atop a small trailer’s
grassy roof on a vacant city lot. Smoke puffs from the antique-looking
box in her hand, and the bees calm down.

“We put these up here originally just for security,” she says. “Figured no one would bother the equipment with a bunch of bees around.”

Mary has created a small world, called Greensgrow, here on one block. The trailer under
the beehives holds farm tools. Beside the trailer, tanks for the
biodiesel conversion operation transform used cooking oil into fuel
for Big Yellow, the delivery truck that collects fresh produce and meat
and dairy products from farms within 75 miles of this square of green
in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood. That food goes into the
homes of 400 CSA members, some of them low-income, and for sale at the farm’s
market. That is to say, the Greensgrow farm and nursery is a little bit
of everything, and all of it connected, somehow, like any good old
city.

Farming in Kensington, now a low-income neighborhood largely populated by
Russian and Polish immigrants, is no more new than it is throughout
Philadelphia. Community gardens, backyard gardens, and “guerrilla”
gardens on vacant lots have been producing thousands of pounds of fresh
food annually for over a century. The Vacant Lot Cultivation
Association, begun in 1897, helps people access land and start
market gardens. War rationing during WWI and II spurred Victory Gardens, as
they did in many cities. And the early-to-mid-century exodus of
African-American farmers from the sharecropper South brought a new
agrarian population to the city.

There
weren’t meetings or board members or conference calls. Just a need for
food, empty land, and people who knew how to dig in with a shovel and
hoe.

Then the community vacant-lot gardens took off in the ‘70s, just as
the industrial boom imploded. More than 100,000 people lost their jobs,
industries ran screaming, and many people bolted for the hills, or
somewhere not-Philly.

At the same time, another wave of southern African-Americans moved
north, this time in conjunction with a Puerto Rican migration and
Southeast Asians escaping the poisonous aftermath of the Vietnam War. Having grown their own food in their homelands, the newcomers brought
that knowledge and ethic with them.[1]

The city, meanwhile, took little interest in its agencies’ land
holdings, so they barely blinked at signing multi-year leases to
neighborhood farmers on empty city lots. The 1970s made inner-city
blightification as American as apple pie. In Philly, pirate farmers
built soils, and fed families and communities.
The common-sense food production continued into the ‘90s. There
weren’t meetings or board members or conference calls. Just a need for
food, empty land, and people who knew how to dig in with a shovel and
hoe.

Mary calls a shovel “the idiot stick,” and she holds it in high
regard. She came onto the scene at the tail end of that mini-urban-ag
revolution. Plenty of vacant-lot and community farms still exist in Philly, but
not on the scale they did 30 years ago. The decline is partly due
to older farmers passing away, and partly due to increased real-estate
values, the subsequent interest of developers, and city agencies’
reluctance to continue signing those multi-year leases on the empty
lots. The rogue farmers have had to abandon soils they’d developed over
a decade or more.

Mary doesn’t like meetings, and she looks far more comfortable in the bee
suit and mask than I imagine she would in a pantsuit or dress. She’s a
gritty farmer with a helluva business sense. When she takes off the bee
suit, she reveals a dusty, wrinkled Subaru farm shirt. Two Subaru
wagons sit along the curb between the bee and tool lot, and the larger
farm and nursery—the socially progressive Subaru company financially sponsors
Greensgrow.

Tom Sereduk, cofounder of Greensgrow, and Mary starting digging
into Kensington in 1998. The two had restaurant experience and they saw
a market for salad greens. Since they knew hydroponic growing methods
(growing in water, rather than soil, with mineral supplements), they
could bypass the immediate concerns over the lot’s EPA brownfield status. They opened during the growing season and sold to white-table
cloth restaurants for a profit.

But Mary and Tom were like
energetic hippies rolling in for half the year to grow fancy lettuce
for fancy restaurants, and kids threw rocks at them over the fence. Though Tom opted out of the depressing
situation, Mary stuck with it and she kept her vision open.

“Over time, we never really invested in any one thing, so when the
winds of change moved in—more and more interest in local foods—we
shifted. We started growing more heirloom tomatoes and micro-greens.
Then we built the greenhouse, grew flowers, stayed year-round, and the
neighbors got interested,” she says. “We saw what people grew in their pots here in
the neighborhood and we offered them in the nursery. As we’ve grown,
we’ve tried to keep one foot in this community and one in the greater
city.”

At the corner of the farm, the chickens peck at the soil on one side
of the chain-link fence, while neighbors cruise on bikes or stroll the
sidewalk a foot away. It’s an easy symbol of the urban farm, but it
actually does what you’d think it would. A few women sit on the steps
of their row-houses a block away; their young kids bump Razor scooters
over the sidewalk cracks, and they love the chickens.

Janice Teague has lived here for 25 years. She likes the
farm. She goes every week to the Thursday market for fruit and
vegetables, and she buys tomato plants to grow in her backyard garden, a 6-foot-by-2-foot sliver of soil in the tiny
concrete-floor-and-cinder-block-walled back patio. She doesn’t have a
car, so she can’t get to Home Depot to buy potted plants. Greensgrow
lets her use the wagon to roll her purchases home, and the nursery
prices are no more than Home Depot’s or Lowe’s.

“I’m not into the butter and milk and cheese stuff,” Janice says. “I
get that from the regular grocery store. My daughter gets her soap from
the farm. I get fruit and bread, and I get flowers that I plant in my
backyard. I get peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes. They’re fresher and
they’re a little more money, but I like Jersey tomatoes from the farm
market better than the supermarket ones.”

Janice doesn’t see many neighbors at the Greensgrow market. The
people she sees there are from elsewhere. They’re nice, but she can
tell that they’re “uppy.”

I see that, I guess,  as I look at the Thursday market shoppers: young
folks with mustaches on their faces and baskets on their bikes, a
double date popping out of a Prius, a mom with a stroller the size of a
Peugeot. But there’s also a policeman and the owner of the auto-detail
shop across the street.

“When you become an asset to your community or neighborhood then you’ve done something. I don’t do this just to be
tan.”

Mary has always intended for Greensgrow to be profitable. She wants
it to be a model for sustainable profitability, in fact. All 19 staff
members are paid by the for-profit side of the business, from nursery
and farm sales, which grossed $1 million last year. The Community Supported Agriculture program has 400 members. That’s enormous for a
city-block-size farm, but Greensgrow has created a 75-mile web of farms and
producers with the Greensgrow CSA as the mothership distribution point.
It’s so big that they’ve achieved the holy grail of the CSA model—a
low-income option.

It’s been a dozen years since Mary ducked rocks while hanging
plastic over the greenhouse. The bees help, but mainly she and her
staff and her chickens and the nursery’s petunias have put a face on
the farm and the neighborhood.

“In the short term I see a positive change. I got a Google alert
last night. I don’t usually check those, but I did this time. It was
from a real estate listing. It said, ‘Great house, great location right
next to Greensgrow Farm!!!’ When you become an asset to your community
or neighborhood then you’ve done something. I don’t do this just to be
tan.”

[1] Source: the Community Gardening in Philadelphia, 2008 Harvest Report compiled by Domenic Vitiello and Michael Nairn of the Penn Planning and Urban Studies, University of Pennsylvania. October 2009

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