Published by City Farmer, Canada's Office of Urban Agriculture

Farm Experiment Thrives In The City

By Natalie Pompilio
Posted on Tue, Sep. 30, 2003
Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Writer

Farmers Lori Albright (left), 32, and Nicole Shelly, 28, have worked since March on the farm, which is expected to gross $25,000 this year. The pair usually work 45-hour weeks for $7 an hour.

It's a real farm, all right, except there are no endless acres of green, no silo, no hardworking family rising with the rooster.

Instead, this pastoral patch is a half-acre plot in the midst of the city, with nearby strip malls, busy streets, and farmers who travel to work on a SEPTA train.

Somerton Tanks Farm, on Philadelphia Water Department land in the 200 block of Tomlinson Road in the Far Northeast, is an experiment in urban farming. Less than six months old, the farm, in the shadow of two red-and-white-checked water tanks (the farm's namesake), is flourishing, with two full-time workers churning out everything from tomatoes to cilantro - and a salad mix that has already become legendary among its devotees.

"We wanted to prove that a city person who didn't have a lot of resources could, in fact, practice urban agriculture and be successful at it," said Roxanne Christensen, a volunteer accountant for the operation.

"It's just not economical for farmers to farm on a huge scale anymore. The taxes on their land is going up, and they're selling out to developers who can get more out of the land by building houses and selling them. We're going to have to farm closer to cities and on a smaller scale."

Scattered efforts in urban farming are already under way in Philadelphia, but Somerton Tanks is a model that can be replicated by anyone with farming dreams, some land, and as little as $20,000 seed money. The farm is expected to gross $25,000 this year and, if statistics prove true, could double that next year.

"This project has a lot of potential for the city as a whole - for tax revenues, for job creation, for more environmentally sound uses of land," said Nancy Weissman, economic-development director for the Water Department, one of the farm's main sponsors.

If Somerton Tanks proves a success, Weissman said, she could see the Water Department supporting other urban farms on its property.

"The department has become so enthusiastic about this," she said.

Unlike a community garden, where a recreational gardener can spend a few hours a day pulling weeds and plucking flowers, this is "stoop labor," with long hours, low pay, and lots of frustration.

"Farming is a job. It's a business. It's working in the dirt, getting rained on, getting bit by mosquitoes," said Joseph Griffin, an organic farmer and president of the nonprofit Oley Institute, another Somerton Tanks sponsor. "But the people who do this work love it... . This is what they want to do."

It's exactly what "farming fellows" Nicole Shelly, 28, and Lori Albright, 32, say they want. Shelly, of Bella Vista, was an architect until she ditched the job because she "just couldn't be in an office anymore. I had to be outside, working with my hands, growing things."

Albright, who lives in Northern Liberties, worked for a nonprofit that promoted greenery in urban areas before she decided she wanted to try her hand at farming.

The pair generally work 45-hour weeks for $7 an hour, a stipend provided by the Philadelphia Workforce Development Corp.

"It's hard physical labor and your back hurts a lot, but it's fun," Shelly said.

"My back's fine," Albright said. "It's my shoulder that's messed up."

The farmers practice intensive relay farming. The half-acre is divided into 200 2-by-25-foot beds, and most are planted with high-value crops - like lettuce and spinach - that grow quickly and sell for a good price.

"What this garden is all about is organization," Griffin said. "It's not only about having a green thumb, although that plays a part."

After the crops are harvested, they are replanted with a different vegetable to be gentler on the soil. In a good year, the cycle of planting, harvesting and replanting can be repeated four times. Somerton Tanks markets its products as organic, meaning no chemically formulated fertilizers or artificial pesticides or herbicides are used.

That can be a problem.

"We're both vegetarians and we don't like to kill anything," Shelly said after plucking a fat, fuzzy brown caterpillar from the wall of the packing shed.

She passed the insect to Albright, who wasn't sure what type of caterpillar it was but authoritatively announced that "it eats green things."

That meant it had to be destroyed. Both farmers looked uncomfortable as Albright walked outside to do the deed.

"We're learning we have to kill some things," Shelly said with a sigh.

The long winter and the rainy spring made this a challenging year for many area farms, Somerton Tanks included. The farm has also been plagued by lamb's-quarter, considered a weed by many, an herb by others. At Somerton Tanks, it's a weed.

"We have to pull it out and pull it out and pull it out," Albright said as she grabbed madly at the tall stalks intermingling with her spinach.

But their efforts pay off when the farmers get to show off their wares to buyers. Besides doing a brisk business with local restaurants, such as Blue Bell's Normandy Farms, the farmers also appear at local farmers' markets, including those in Rittenhouse Square and near South Street.

Somerton Tanks Farm produce has already developed a loyal fan base, Shelly and Albright said.

There are the so-called Osaka Purple Ladies, who follow them from market to market in search of the spicy mustard greens; a virtual cult of turnip addicts, many of whom first tried small, white Japanese turnips when the farmers gave them away for free; and salad aficionados, who show up 45 minutes before the market opens and start begging for the godly greens.

"If you come between 10 and 11 a.m., bring your boxing gloves," Shelly advised.

Some shoppers complain the produce prices are prohibitive: $2 for a pound of new potatoes, $8 for a pound of salad mix. The farmers disagree.

"We don't think it's expensive because we know the work that goes into it," Albright said.

Added Shelly: "Once they taste it, they're willing to pay for it."

One of the best parts of farming, the pair said, is meeting the people who enjoy the vegetables of their labor.

"People don't know where the food comes from," Albright said. "They'll say, 'That comes from out of the ground? In Northeast Philadelphia?' "

---

Lettuce Rethink City Farming

By Julian Walker
Times Staff Writer

Everyone knows the story.

Old McDonald, the proverbial nursery-rhyme farmer, had room on his land for countless animals . . . chickens, ducks, sheep, cattle, donkeys, you name it.

However, unlike the Old McDonald homestead, Somerton Tanks Farm in the Far Northeast doesn't have the space to accommodate such livestock. What the half-acre plot on Tomlinson Road can do, say organizers of the agricultural pilot program, is produce at least $25,000 in annual revenue from crops grown and sold to local restaurants and markets.

Vegetables - including several varieties of lettuce, potatoes, tomatoes, radishes, scallions, broccoli, beets and beans - are grown on the plot. Officials with the Philadelphia Water Department and the Oley Institute, the prime sponsors of Somerton Tanks Farm, announced last week that the first crops soon will be harvested.

"We want to prove that farming on a small piece of land makes good economic sense," said Nancy Weissman, director of economic development for the water department.

The farm site is adjacent to PWD's monstrous red-and-white-checked water tanks.

Since February, organic agriculturist Kathy O'Hara has trained three Philadelphia farm fellows, teaching them how to work the land, plant and nurture crops, and to network with area restaurant owners to market their produce.

And there is a market: Philadelphians consume an estimated $2 billion in fresh fruits and vegetables each year.

The unseasonably cool spring has delayed the harvest by a few weeks, but project sponsors remain confident that the crop will bring a profit. "Our notion is to grow, sell and document the fact that we can at least generate twenty-five-thousand dollars' worth of produce, and hopefully more," said Joseph Griffin, president of the non-profit Oley Institute, based in Berks County, near Reading.

"People can actually earn a modest but acceptable living doing seasonal, full-time farming on a small piece of land," he added, noting that urban farmers in 19th-century Paris supplied all of the fresh fruits and vegetables for the city's then nearly 2 million residents. "In Colonial America, everyone was a farmer."

Today, that tradition continues in places like Hong Kong and Singapore, where thousands of urban farmers produce enough crops on small plots of land to support themselves and their families, said Griffin, citing United Nations statistics that there are 800 million urban farmers active in the world today.

By comparison, fewer than 2 percent of all Pennsylvanians are considered active farmers, urban or otherwise, said state Secretary of Agriculture Dennis C. Wolff.

The folks behind Somerton Farms know the few new farmers they produce won't have much effect on those numbers.

But they believe they can gradually train and introduce independent organic farmers into the local market who will create a niche industry for themselves, thereby adding jobs and taxes to the economy. "At the end of this year we'll have three farmers with enough experience to operate their own urban farm and be profitable," said Griffin, noting that expenses for such an endeavor are nominal. "We want to demonstrate the power of urban farming and that it is worthwhile to be trained in these techniques.

"Urban farming is not a panacea for employment, but gradually we will have dozens and dozens of small-scale urban farmers scattered all throughout Philadelphia who can start their own businesses. The byproduct is that communities in Philadelphia will be made beautiful, people will have better access to fresh food, and jobs will be created." That's welcome news to government partners of the effort, including the city Commerce Department and the Philadelphia Workforce Development Corp.

"This demonstrates the diversity of our economy and adds a new dimension to the Philadelphia economy," said Commerce Director Jim Cuorato, a Northeast resident.

And it hasn't cost too much to get this pilot program off the ground. Funding for the entire project is less than $150,000. In addition to job creation, proponents of the pilot program believe that urban farming can function as a component of Mayor John Street's Neighborhood Transformation Initiative.

The anti-blight program has cleaned and cleared more than 30,000 vacant lots in the city during the last two years.

Many of those spaces could serve as urban farm sites and provide a needed splash of color against the sometimes cold, concrete backdrop of the city, noted Griffin, himself a college academic turned farmer. "The beauty of farming is that it represents the American drive for independence, to do your own thing. You are your own boss, nobody tells you what to do. It's as American as apple pie," Griffin said as he scanned the half-acre farm. "This is a field of dreams."

Somerton Tanks Farm will be back with a new crop of white turnips, broccoli raab, tomatoes, salad mix, braising greens, arugula, carrots, mustard and other bunches of greens, and cilantro.

Discussion Forum
City Farmer's Urban Agriculture Discussion Forum

Search Our Site

Return to Contents' Page