Reclaimed, Revised: The Importance of Food Access
It was a cool fall day in 2018 when the big d-6 dozer and ripper attachment slowly inched across the land at the corner of Bicknell and Hazelwood Avenues in southwest Louisville, former site of the Iroquois Homes Housing Project Complex. The bulldozer felt to me like a last ditch effort, all of my and various other tractors and small farm implements having just bumped and bounced over the surface successfully dispatching implement parts and various hand held items but soil, barely at all. In my mind, I had imagined the purposeful compaction of soil after the housing had gone down with something like the large metal toothed barrels attached to what I remember as a steam roller when I was a kid. It was their job, whoever it was that was charged with the work, to fill in the holes that were once basements and flatten the earth so that it could be mowed for the four or so years that passed before we arrived with different ideas.
The dozer and ripper worked, at least to an extent, having not exactly dealt with the high levels of alkalinity and the background and likely naturally occurring arsenic levels in a few of the test plot results. After my spring return and some repeated runs with discs, the soil responded, drained out in a places I’d not expected and, also in places, began to breathe again as you could tell when you walked across the soil when dry and it gave beneath your feet. It also began to yield crops, not in a way that good land does, but in a way that was better than it was before. You could see looking down a row that, at least some of the plants seemed on the verge of thriving, and, indeed, some did.
And the model was right there, right beside the 4-5 odd acres we had been working, or, at least, in my effort to find inspiration, this is what I told my farm apprentices when we went on this particular roughly curated field trip. When I first started at Iroquois Urban Farm, as it came to be known, I remember thinking that of all the work I’d done, multiple farms and farmer’s markets, a local food distribution center, a restaurant, and so many years mentoring young people in agricultural efforts, this would or could be the most transformative. As things have turned out, the thought was more grandiose than the opportunity warranted even while the soil had come along much more substantially and much more quickly than I had expected. And yet reclamation moved forward. The model was there immediately adjacent to our efforts in the appropriately named Gate of Hope Ministries community and individual garden plots. It was from these plots, tended with extraordinary care, and significantly, almost entirely by hand, that I could observe multiple crops whose soil requirements varied fairly widely from the okras and sweet potatoes whose capacity to thrive even in the most marginal soils is fairly renowned to the dozens of individual plots of three sisters, corn and beans and squash, whose elegant combination both covers the soil, feeds its own and provides vining opportunities and even to the most hungry of plants, the various kales, cabbages, collards, and mustards.
It was a true joy and wonder for me to see this apotheosis of cultivation. This soil came alive in the hands of folks who knew how to midwife/husband soils even when both people and soils struggled with healing. It was with this kind of hope that I came on at Iroquois Urban Farm, in 2016, just shortly after my friend and colleague, Valerie Magnuson, the founder of Louisville Grows, who, upon arriving herself, then offered space to Gate of Hope Ministries. She had already initiated a relationship with the Louisville Metro Housing Authority under Tim Barry, who showed courage in his willingness to allow for alternate uses of Federal (HUD) Lands. It has always been a contradiction in my mind that while western federal lands are extraordinarily and preferably rented, urban federal lands are not. This is a significant contradiction with bluntly obvious racial implications that needs to be corrected.
My hope was that, in partnership with KentuckyOne Health, which has since wound down and disbursed assets in Louisville, with another friend and colleague, Alice Bridges, then VP of Healthy Communities at KentuckyOne, I would, at their request, help deliver healthy local food from Iroquois Urban Farm as a part of KentuckyOne’s effort to manage and model
upstream health interventions, in their effort to help appropriately model prevention. The wind down of KentuckyOne’s involvement was disheartening and a real measure of the how sometimes even with both money and extraordinary ideas, extraordinary plans, as was farm to hospital table, can still go undone.
It feels especially important to me at this point before closing to say that the Gate of Hope Ministries farmers (and yes, they are farmers, regardless of the diminutive size of their plots), are former refugees from countries including Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo and are again being displaced and looking for a new and secure home. It also seems especially important to say that young folks from the Food Literacy Project, whose executive director, Carol Gunderson, my long-time friend and colleague, supported this and my effort to reclaim productive land once KentuckyOne was no longer available, especially including the young folks from the FLP’s Youth Community Agricultural Program, that their extraordinary efforts continue to go without long term land security.
It would have been a much better and more sustainable opportunity for the Youth Community Agricultural Program to both entirely provide for and expand their production for their field to fork program. It was a point I made with Carol when we talked about how my support of their capacity for productivity ran against sales for me. It was a greater good opportunity that I, nevertheless, understood and supported. I had looked forward to a story of reclamation, the documentation of what we had done to bring large tracts of urban public land to agricultural productivity. If we had had time and we had achieved something like regular farm production, we might have modeled brown field reclamation across the south and beyond. If there had been the opportunity for Iroquois High School Students to participate further with people from their community both local and international, then, indeed, the idea of shelter would have been expanded.
I still have two or three marbles I picked up at Iroquois Farm while working the land. As I bumped along with the small Kubota tractor off and on hoping down to toss the broad flat sided pieces of concrete that were likely once pieces of sidewalk along with the more irregular shapes that might have been parts of foundation, I would also find bits of toys, parts of either white Barbie or GI Joe, along with occasional silverware, enough to have imagined the community and family life that was, how dinner might have been. I have never been exactly clear about how the various housing complex diasporas may land, but it seems straightforward to me that even when folks ultimately find better accommodation, the path itself to improvement when that occurs is disruptive.
It especially strikes me as I have thought about how the soil at Iroquois Farm returned to something like health, that the community’s participation in our returning Iroquois Urban Farm to productivity would also have seemingly helped correct for the part of the definition of brownfield that is psychological, which is to say intellectually constructed and having nothing to do with the soil’s capacity to produce. Even the wikipedia entry for Iroquois Farm calls the previous dwellings “the notorious Iroquois Tenement Housing Complex,” both starkly illustrating and contributing to the challenges faced by community. The decision to impose a top down housing response runs counter to the idea that people are necessary, that people’s minds and involvement are necessary to the rejuvenation of land and communities.
While it’s a cliche to say we live in difficult times, it’s also true and maybe more helpful to think of saying that, we live in difficult times of our own devising. We’ve already lost or are on the way to losing the Hope Farm refugee community’s extraordinarily cared for okra, eggplant, and three sisters among so many other crops. Along with that, the young people from the Youth Community Agricultural Program have lost the chance both to learn and serve their communities with purposefully cultivated sweet potatoes, garlic, tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, and a variety of greens so various that they have surprised both the young folks and their beneficiaries. Any belated solicitation of input such as has been requested by LMHA after key decisions foreclosing on alternatives have been made exactly contributes to community disempowerment and, unfortunately, provides fuel for people who would seek a more broad effort to discredit government and, indeed, democracy. I feel a visceral disappointment for both refugees and young people who found some calling at Iroquois Urban Farm, feeling for everyone who called Iroquois Urban Farm home a sense of having been both evicted and excluded. My friend Richard McCarthy, the former head of Slow Food USA, in a defense of Slow Food’s seemingly exclusive focus on food (for those who think access to healthy food isn’t just for the few), once said that the better goal can be found at the intersection of joy and justice.
Still, even as we have had to abandon a broad-based farm experience at the corner of Bicknell and Hazelwood, there are important lessons here. Yes, everyone with compassion agrees that new HUD housing at Iroquois Urban Farm is a significant step in the right direction for the unhoused, but it seems also fair to interrogate whether or not newly housed and formerly displaced people might, at least, have the option to grow their own food or that a holistic sustainable living environment might be encouraged beyond housing, so that so called amenities like healthy food and open green space might also be available to the newly housed. It is still true that ordinary folks, especially people who have been historically excluded, experience significant barriers to accessing basic needs. And sometimes, even with the help of extraordinary monied interests, those needs still go unfulfilled.
