Kansas City, MO – In the shadows of Kansas City, shop carts rattle past an urban farm as ragged figures scurry away from the burnt shell of an apartment building.
“You get a strut on this block,” said Jake, an intern on the farm who spent almost a year living homeless under a bridge. We watched the motley crowd with their carts full of metal. “You see? Head down and shoulders up.”
The farm sprouted in a neighborhood forgotten by the twinkling skyline to the west, where old buildings are often burnt to expose the copper wiring within the walls. The wiring is then stripped by “scrappers” and sold to the local scrapyard for five cents per pound. With all of the nearby high schools discredited as educational institutions, scrapping metal is often the most viable means of income.
A month earlier I had shivered against a February wind in the scrapyard, a post-apocalyptic landscape of jagged industrialism. I had watched Jake clamber out of a dumpster. The foreman glared disapprovingly as Jake’s frost coated fingers scooped snow and rubble from inside of his metal load, which he had been caught packing to increase the weight. After hours of work, Jake’s numb hands grasped $2 of payment.
Now, his cigarette hissed softly as he looked over the hundreds of garden beds, the chicken coop, and the rows of solar panels that filled the urban farm which is transforming the block.
“Urban Farming Guys saved my life,” says Jake. “There is a reason people don’t scrap this property.”
The reasoning is subtle. It is intertwined with the time when Lunchbox, a notorious arson, showed up on the doorstep bleeding profusely from a hammer wound on his head, and Jason stitched and cleaned him. The reasoning lies within the community strawberry patch growing beside the bus stop, and the smell of hamburgers wafting down the street during open neighborhood barbeques.
“People know this is a place that will accept them.”
The owners of Urban Farming Guys moved with their family into the neighborhood almost a half decade ago when they realized that their weekend volunteering expeditions into the inner city weren’t having their desired impact. Selling their business and house, they abandoned the suburbs to start an urban farm.
In the last several years they have created hundreds of garden beds, a solar powered energy grid, a rain-harvesting water system, and a state-of-the-art aquaponics system, all within one of the most blighted neighborhoods in Kansas City.
“What we want to do is, when a family is deciding between food and medicine, or food and rent, to take away that pressure,” says Mike, an intern from Texas. “Even if we can save them $50 per month, it makes a big difference.”
With a new greenhouse under construction, asparagus sprouting from the sidewalk, and a community garden open to the neighborhood, this goal is becoming a reality. But the development doesn’t stop with food.
“What we really want to do is empower them to do things,” says Claudia, an intern from Connecticut.
Jason, the man who started Urban Farming Guys operation, hopes that eventually his project can work as a kick-starter for small businesses. He aids with simple things, like letting kids borrow lawn mowers to mow vacant lots. But he also looks at the larger picture, recently buying an abandoned art warehouse to transform into a Makerspace. Complete with a 3D printer, wood craft workshop, welding center, and computer lab, this building can act both as a center of education and a business incubator for locals.
In addition to empowering locals, Jason creates an environment conducive to facilitating the spread of similar projects in other cities. Every weekend, volunteers pour in by the dozens to aid and to learn.
It is a movement that is attracting a growing crowd of development enthusiasts from all corners of the country. Internship applications are flooding in.
“We take all types,” says Mike. “Gap years, grads, homeless, recoverers.”
Everyone works together. Jake, whose blue tattoos and scarred teeth whisper of cold nights hunched under a bridge, plants side-by-side with high-school and college students visiting on class trips.
The neighborhood is acquiring a village feel, which may account for the astounding 22% crime drop in the two years since this project began.
“We’re interested in projects that can be produced and maintained on a village level for a local impact,” says Jason. “But we try not to rely on the government for support because we also want these sorts of systems to work in places where there is no government.”
Jason’s nonprofit has already installed an aquaponics system in Indian and Mexican villages, and will potentially be making his aquaponics design open-source so that it can be implemented anywhere in the world.
In this sense, he is planting a seed to save the world.
By 2050, the global population will be pushing 10 billion. 75% of this population will reside in squalid urban slums, relying on imported food from environmentally unsustainable agricultural practices. What if the stomachs of these populations could be filled locally, without damaging the environment? What if the very act of filling these stomachs can lower crime, raising living standards by forming cohesive “villages” within the concrete jungles?
Jackson County legislator Scott Barnett thinks this is a possibility. “Community gardens and projects like this are definitely an asset to positive urban development and lowering crime rates,” he says. Barnett believes that if these trends continue it would not be surprising to eventually see city funds channeled towards community development and away from law enforcement.
Projects such as this do more than simply halt negative action; they mold the existing system into a sustainable trajectory. Popular opposition becomes a form of popular action and development.
It requires a different strength to farm in the inner city. These pioneers are not protesting in oil fields, where there are clear victims and tangible enemies. In the inner city, when your friend writhes on the floor bleeding and crying from a drug relapse, or children who never had a chance for education are being arrested with their guns confiscated on your doorstep, who do you blame? Where is the enemy to fight? The system perpetuating this structural violence is in the flame of the burning apartment and the pavement cracked under foot.
The concrete closes in, judgement flashes in police lights, and the ambiguous social powers of the inner city nip and growl from every angle. Many succumb, but with the lush smell of vegetables on the wind comes the hope of systemic change.
All you can do is plant another seed.
Jordan Thomas is an anthropology student at Kansas State. All photos and the video in the body of this article are by Crystal Zevon of Searching for Occupy.