Growing Cities: A Film About Urban Farming in America

If you’re flooded with disbelief that healthy food resources in America are dwindling faster than ever, why not cut a deal with yourself. Consider how much you know about the three big C’s: community gardening, composting, and cooking healthy. And if that still leaves a bare light bulb hanging up above your head, filmmakers Dan Susman and Andrew Monbouquette have developed a little something to help you cultivate your self-proposal a little further.

“Growing Cities” is the two Omaha natives’ original documentary about how the urban farming trend in America is really nothing new at all. When this pair got out of their respective coastal universities and returned back to their home state they found “the farm state” to be in rather dismal condition in regards to crops. Sure there are corn and soybeans being grown for miles around, but as Andrew puts it, none of it is being grown for food to eat. Instead, these starchy staples now go on to become livestock feed, fuel or junk food. If this message wasn’t startling enough, Susman and Monbouquette starting noticing the billboards popping up around town pointing a finger at what poor health their city was in (“Our town was one of the fatest cities in the country!”)

So the two hit the road in search of some answers about food, what it meant to find secure and sustainable sources of it, and a need to connect with others to discover how people in other cities were learning to feed themselves better.

In San Francisco they discovered both diversity and leniency. Urban farmers are allowed to walk their goats down the street in the morning the same way you and I takes our dogs out to pee in the park. With an area of just 40 ft x 200 ft. Green Fairie Farm in Berkeley can raise chickens for eggs, rabbits double as both fertilizers and lawnmowers, and everywhere else there is some type of vine, branch or lettuce leaf reaching towards the sunlight to get higher. But what if you don’t have a spare 8000 square feet to just start planting your favorite cruciferous vegetables?

Little City Gardens and The Free Farm, also in the San Francisco area, showed the filmmakers the first solution to this question. Less ground can still mean a more localized food economy when the work is donated and the products are given back with no money exchange. People work together on land they will https://www.wnymedical.com/buy-accutane-acne/ never claim to be their own, yet the yield is open to all who contribute.

In Seattle they found the P-Patch Community Gardens, a community agricultural resource started in 1973 to help low-income immigrants find a place they could work their knowledge together. Five different languages are spoken at the same time some of the time, yet the gardening still gets done, and successfully, making this type of growing a type of cornerstone for the community. But still the filmmakers wondered, could it be enough to produce half of the food required for an entire city?

As they continued their road trip around the country, from Milwaukee, to Chicago, Boston, then on to Atlanta and New Orleans, Susman and Monbouquette found both young and old growers trying on new methods to recycle their spaces in order to produce usable food. It’s amazing to see aquaponics being used in an old meat packaging plant in the windy city to grow rows and rows of plants and fish for live harvest. Growing Home is the name of a farm program that raises both agriculture and the hopes of those who till it. This farm has the idea that you will waste nothing if you invest in folks who need recovery from joblessness, whether its from previous problems with homelessness, addiction or crime. They give people the chance to learn small farming skills so they can grow their resumes and move on to bigger and better jobs.

Just as important is the dark side of necessity portrayed in the film by the “food desert” some 550,000 people live in the Detroit area. Hundreds of vacant lots there have tremendous potential for urban farming for folks who have to rely on either fast food outlets or convenience stores as their main source of sustenance. Food activism and food justice are also explored. A surprising antidote, but firmly defined as “not a novelty,” is the one-acre roof top urban farm shown being raised on an abandoned rooftop in New York City.

Over the 13,000 miles they travel, Susman and Monbouquette discover that every community can use to learn something about plowing, growing, seeding and sowing. But could it be that your own backyard is the space that could really use your budding farming interest the most? To find out more about urban farms and get involved with others with the same interests in your community, check out growingcitiesmovie.com.

Guest Blogger: Sandi Salina, Dietetic Intern