Farm City

Farm City
Baltimore Magazine
Amy Mulvihill
August 15, 2016

One wheelbarrow-full at a time, Walker Marsh is transporting an SUV-size pile of horse manure from one end of his farm to the other.

“Man this stuff gets stinky as you get into it,” says Marsh good-naturedly, as he lifts another shovelful into the cart.

The effort, an early spring project to create compost for newly demarcated plant beds at his nascent flower farm, is an almost archetypal act of farming—low-tech, simple, wholesome—probably practiced ever since agriculture first began in the Fertile Crescent some 11,000 years ago. But everything else about the scene—at least to our modern eyes—seems jarring.

Instead of long, uniform rows of crops stretching toward the horizon, the site is a half-acre triangle of compacted dirt in East Baltimore, strewn with trash and fenced by a knee-high strip of woven black plastic. Instead of a bucolic vista, the view is of Inner Harbor skyscrapers and construction cranes over the nearby Johns Hopkins medical campus. Instead of a quiet country road, there is only the persistent rumble of traffic on city streets. And instead of barns and silos, there are sad-looking liquor stores and vacant row homes ringing the farm. Marsh himself might confound some expectations, too. Do a Google Images search for “farmer” and what results, overwhelmingly, are pictures of farmers who are male, middle-aged, and white. Marsh is almost none of those things. A tall, thin 28-year-old African American with a nose ring and an easy, sibilant laugh, Marsh is a new breed of farmer on a new breed of farm—the urban farm.

“Right now, it’s just dirt but . . . we’re going to get it done. I’m a big dreamer, I’m a vision-type person,” Marsh says.

Though growing crops in urban environments is not novel—victory gardens were common during World War II, for instance—an almost revolutionary zeal for the practice is sweeping the country, and thanks to Marsh and his fellow “urban ag” compatriots, Baltimore has joined the crusade. Baltimore is such fertile ground for it that U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack came to Baltimore in April to announce the launch of the Department of Agriculture’s new online resource guide for budding urban farmers. Before the press conference at Frederick Douglass High School—which had just installed garden beds and a small orchard on its campus—Vilsack attended a roundtable with some of the major players on Baltimore’s farming scene.

“There’s an awful lot going on in this space,” he said afterward. “One day, you’re just going to wake up and go, ‘This is everywhere!’”

That day may have already arrived. In recent years, the city has adopted a suite of regulations to better accommodate farming, everything from rewriting the rules about livestock (bees, miniature goats, rabbits, and chickens are allowed now in limited numbers) to clarifying the building code to permit lightweight, temporary greenhouses called hoop houses. Perhaps most ambitiously, last year the City Council passed an Urban Agriculture Property Tax Credit that provides a 90 percent tax break to farmers who produce $5,000 worth of crops annually. There is also a pending rewrite of the city’s zoning code, which would codify urban agriculture in almost all of Baltimore’s residential zones.

As a result, if you know where to look, you can now find agriculture in every corner of the city, in forms ranging from flower farming to aquaponics—a combination of aquaculture (fish farming) and hydroponics (growing plants in water). Among the city’s 17 urban farms and more than 75 food-producing community gardens, the variations seem endless.

“It’s a lot of really innovative people just trying things out,” says Maya Kosok, who runs Hillen Homestead, a flower farm on two small vacant lots near Clifton Park. “There’s a lot more potential.”

Nowhere in the city is this potential more apparent than at Real Food Farm. Totaling eight acres across two sites—one in Clifton Park and one in a nearby blighted neighborhood—the operation is supported by the larger nonprofit Civic Works. It has become what food and farm director Chrissy Goldberg calls “a model urban ag farm,” its goal less about making money than about creating new farmers. Groups from local high schools and universities constantly stream in and out of the Clifton Park site, learning about food systems, food justice issues, and urban farming. On Fridays, the farm’s woodchip-lined walkways buzz with activity as city farmers congregate to prepare for the next day’s Waverly farmers’ market, where they sell under the collective banner of the Farm Alliance of Baltimore. And, as a partner with national and local job programs, the farm is a constant source of hands-on experience for aspiring agriculturalists. Marsh himself started here, transitioning from a different project under the Civic Works umbrella.

Read the full article: http://www.baltimoremagazine.net/2016/8/15/farm-city-urban-farming-takes-root-in-baltimore#