Growing Home Farm - Chicago, IL (Urban Ag Project)

I'm Ezra Lee, I'm the Farm and Program Manager for Growing Home. This is one of our three farm sites here in Englewood, Chicago. So we are about an acre and three quarters at the moment, full size. The fields behind me make up the bulk of our outdoor farming space. Inside we've got seven high tunnels. A lot of them we use for winter production. We also use them for really good fruit and crop production during the summers. So this year we put two of them onto drip and under plastic. We put them under plastic for peppers and for tomatoes. That way we get really, really heavy harvests. We keep that soil temp a little bit higher. And we also can really directly distribute water to them through the drip. The rest of them we use as rotation for anything else that we're using for market gardening. So that could be beets, carrots, salad mix. We've started to put okra in there. Just trying to find the best really, really hot weather crops that grow well in high tunnels for the summer. We have expanded a lot. Our first site over on Wood Street, South Wood Street, started out as kind of just a parking lot. And now it was developed about 15 years ago into our first urban farm site. It's got just one little section of field space and then three high tunnels out there. It's also got a couple different buildings on it that we use for our training programs. It includes our main building, which has a processing room, as well as our seed starting area. And then upstairs we've got a really nice classroom, beautiful wood floors. And it's really just our meeting space. So the farm team will meet there in the mornings, go over our plan. But then in the afternoon, it's used as a training program. Part of that training program involves environmental literacy, practicing reading and writing skills, as well as emotional self-sufficiency courses, which is known as TIP, through Loyola University. And so that helps train people to kind of feel themselves out, get comfortable asking themselves some big questions and planning their futures. And then, yeah, that's the main part of our training. We also partner with other folks to come in and do additional trainings for nutrition, for specific job training that people are interested in, whether that could be moving into manufacturing, forklift, it could be customer service, anything like that. Growing food is one great way to kind of reintroduce people into a different part of their lives, maybe something that they've never done before, but also something everyone's interested in. We know everybody eats. Most everybody is interested in the food that they eat and have some emotional connection to it. And so providing kind of a bridging activity, something new to people that also touches the roots of what they're used to, what they're comfortable with, can give them a new sense of purpose, a new sense of hope within their community. Who farms here? Lots of people farm here. I do, as well as a team of four farm educators is what we call them. They're working on site every day. In the morning, they're working with 25 production assistants. Those are folks going through one of our cohorts of our job training program. They're helping produce over 30,000 pounds of food every year off of these two acres. So it's a big high scale production farm that those farm educators are really holding down and putting a lot of food out from. But we get a lot of help and hands from production assistants, from other staff members and from volunteers as well. So Growing Home, that first site over on Wood Street, that's owned by Growing Home fully outright. It was presented as part of the beginning of the Englewood Quality of Life program, where we were tasked with or proposed and then tasked with starting an urban farm in this community to try to improve the quality of life from food available to jobs available to just the general community space as well. Then, as we've expanded, we've reached out to other partners. We're currently standing on a site that is leased to us through a long-term lease through NeighborSpace at a very, very low rate in order to provide space to grow food locally. I think the vision of the farm is, of course, aligned with the nonprofit that runs it. One of our mission statements is that everybody deserves good food and a good job. We want to be able to provide access to a place to learn, a place to eat well, a place to grow, a place to experience something new. And so the mission kind of links all of that together. We see this as a space that we're introducing people to growing food. We're maybe reaching out to local community members and other organizations to help partner and find ways that we can get people to eat the healthy food being produced right here, get people to value local food in a new way, in a different way, and try to connect all of those things that people are already doing. There's lots of people with backyard gardens who we're just trying to reach out to at real scale here. That being said, the program is a huge part of what we do here. Working with production assistants, like I said, for 12 weeks at a time, most of those folks are coming in with barriers to employment. And that could be whether coming from a justice-involved situation. It could be a long time going without employment. It could be a lack of education or access to many different services, whether that be health care or child care, and trying to provide wraparound services while working on our farm. So it's paid hourly for all the hours that production assistants are on the farm helping us out or working in class on themselves, growing and practicing those job training skills, job readiness skills. And at the same time, hopefully providing healthy food. It's great to see that excitement in people and have kind of a unique space in the city to really practice job training. Our produce goes to a lot of different places, right? As a high-production farm in the city, there's kind of a lot of demand around, and we've adapted. While a lot of farms might look to one or two distribution methods, we know that the connection to the place in the city can also be really important. So we go to many different farmers markets, including hosting our own on Thursdays. We also have gone to Green City Market up in Lincoln Park for a long, long time, and we've started going to Experimental Stations Market in Hyde Park every Saturday as well. We continue to have wholesale partnerships with Greater Chicago Food Depository, which is the Chicago branch of Feeding America. Through with them, we developed a program called Farm to Pantry, where they're purchasing our produce and we are delivering it directly to one of their partner pantries. That way, we know that the food is getting there the day of. We know it's not going into a big distribution chain, so we're still meeting some of our hyper-local needs and goals, while they can also begin to work on that mission as well. So we do that through them. We work with Beyond Hunger, which is another non-profit pantry up in the Austin neighborhood, providing food to another food-insecure neighborhood there. We work with pop-up markets. We work with some smaller local markets, including Plant Chicago and Amman, and yeah, that's most of it. We also provide CSA boxes. We do run two different kind of matching CSAs. One is run on the north side of Chicago to help support us as a Southside institution organization here, and then we also run about a 50-person Southside CSA, which is all donation-based, where we're delivering boxes directly to people's house, mostly seniors or people with mobility issues, and we're delivering those every other week throughout the whole summer. Yeah, so the project has morphed a lot over time. We've become kind of an Englewood-based non-profit, but originally, we started with a farm down in Marcelles, Illinois. There's a farm site down there, and our founder, Les Brown, was focused on helping create jobs for people experiencing homelessness. Since then, we've developed into a really big, pretty high-production farm, like I've mentioned, and the mission has sort of evolved into providing food as well as providing training. Now, over the course of about a decade previously, most of our food had been going into Northside neighborhoods. That was where we found markets were available, people were kind of interested in valuing hyperlocal food, and we've shifted that focus. Over the past couple of years, we've committed that at least 50% of our food will stay in Englewood or in food-insecure neighborhoods in the Southside, and at this point, we're kind of passing that mark. We're at about 70% of distribution within food-insecure neighborhoods in the Southside. The greatest challenge, just in general, regarding lots of different pest species is that we're on such a small footprint. I mean, two acres is sizable for an urban farm, but still pretty small, and looking at kind of what people want to see at market is varied, but there's certainly certain trends that people want more of. So finding the balance of crop rotation in order to manage kind of these cultural control options can be difficult. So we keep only one tomato hoop house every year. We try to cycle through to prevent too much whitefly buildup or anything like that. I think one of the most major things that we suffer from year to year is aphid pressure. We found gray aphids on every planting of brassicas we've ever planted. And while we try to rotate through, certain sites have access to things like water through the winter, or we're hoping to get some active heating soon. So trying to find places for these crops to go during their peak seasons, or the seasons where that's the only thing we can really grow, has been difficult to manage as demand is high, and also we're trying to maintain the site for the long term. So we've seen gray aphids, we see that issue with cucumber beetles, with potato beetles, with cabbage white moth. Those are really the major ones that we find do a lot of damage, but we've also started to see some swede midge on our kale every year. And while we've tried to prevent that by moving site to site, like I said, it can be challenging to just find those locations and meet demand. We know collards are a big seller. Some of the recommendation at the moment is to just try to split up your collard planting into not having any summer planting, or even only just having a fall planting. And that we find is a difficult recommendation to adhere to, knowing that that's one of the things people really seek out at a local market here. Really, really exciting future plans. We're hoping to expand to some more space. We have one more really empty lot right across the street from us, over behind me. The goal is to develop that into another farm site, as well as a new building space. Our current building is about 15 years old. It was developed for the only site over there, which is less than a third of our growing space at the moment. And so that processing room, processing center, and even the classroom space is smaller than what can accommodate our current production rates. So we're very excited to look forward to developing that into a full-blown facility for us to use and to hopefully pass our capacity and start lending out space to other producers in the area. There's lots of local farms who have, you know, great sites that they've set up, but difficulties in specific areas like seed starting or post-harvest processing. And being able to offer those services to beyond just our grounds would be a really, really important step. To contact us, you can reach out to me or any of our Growing Home team. You can find us at growinghomeinc.org.