By Mwagale Babumba
Urban Farms are becoming a staple in cities. Two organizations in Boston are taking the lead in food sustainability in different ways.
The Revision House Urban Farm is located in Mattapan is a farm and a women's shelter. The Revision House provides an opportunity to the women who live there to learn entrepreneurial skills by growing food on the farm and selling the food they harvest at a farmers market.
Jolie Oliveti a grower for the farms sees urban farming a s movement "Urban Farming is part of a small farm movement people just coming together and not standing for treating humans, treating animals or treating land the way that industrial agriculture treats all of these things."
The Revision Urban farm is not the only organization that is feeding the community with local food, the food project is a few miles away is impacting their community through food accessibility. The food project produces around 18, 000 pounds of food a year and have four farms in the Boston area including a rooftop farm at the Boston Medical Center.
The food project teaches youth all aspects of farming. The youth also train in workshops around social justice and food accessibility.
John Wong the youth program intern supervisor at the food project really feels like he is making a difference in the lives of the youth he works with,
"I feel through the work that we're doing we're empowering youth to change a lot of their communities, that's what I think my strength and what my contribution is to give people opportunities and train them."
Organizations like these thrive because community volunteers assist with a large portion of the farming and harvesting.
For more information about these organizations visit
www.vpi.org/Re-VisionFarm/ and http://thefoodproject.org/
Whenever the word "farming" is mentioned lots of people switch off in the belief that this cannot be for them. Wrong! Lets make a new word "micro-farming" this is just old-fashioned gardening with a new slant. The reality is that just growing something gives a huge amount of satisfaction and pride and nutrients too.
My children have learned a great deal from growing potatoes in a bag and the lemon trees that we got last year are a never-ending source of pleasure when we want lemonade or lemon in a drink.
Just bridging that gap between what we eat and how it grows will eventually be extended to more types of plants and thinking about what "organic" really means ie: you only put good stuff into the pots so good stuff comes out for us to eat.