The Grounded Community: East New York Farms!

From farming fish in high-tech warehouses to growing mushrooms under city streets, interest in urban agriculture is well and truly coming into season. But producing food in urban areas is nothing new, and there’s much to be learned from those who’ve been doing it for a long time. We visit East New York, the site of the largest concentration of community gardens in the city, to find out why growing in the ground still matters.

‘The city that never sleeps’ might not be the first place you think of when it comes to community gardening. But, at least in one corner of the Big Apple, the urban jungle looks a little greener than grey. That’s thanks in no small part to East New York Farms! (ENYF!), an urban agriculture project that’s been providing fresh produce to its local community for more than 20 years.

In addition to operating two farms and as many of its own gardens in East New York, ENYF! runs three local farmer’s markets so that green thumbs across its network – some 40 community gardens and 20 backyard gardens – can feed the neighbourhood and make an income at the same time.

It’s the community ties ENYF! cultivates, not the greens, that mark it out as something special. Founded in 1998, the project began as a local initiative to provide residents with fresh food, create more safe public spaces, generate income for residents, and engage local youth by leveraging the area’s abundant community gardens.  

By the 1990s, the East New York area was still recovering from decades of underinvestment as a result of racially discriminatory housing policies. Scores of abandoned buildings were knocked down in the preceding decades, leaving many vacant lots across the area. But, instead of waiting for the municipality to intervene, East New York’s enterprising residents turned many of these into gardens – and the network behind East New York Farms! was born.

Today, ENYF! operates as a programme under East New York community-based organisation United Community Centers (UCC), but its core mission remains the same. In a community that has been historically underserved by the city, fresh, healthy food means much more than its nutritional value.

Iyeshima Harris-Ouedraogo, Co-Project Director at ENYF!, puts it this way:

“It’s about using food as a vehicle to bridge and build and strengthen communities and allowing for those within their community to give back to each other and rely on each other.”

This philosophy is reflected in the project’s youth intern program, a key feature of ENYF! from the beginning that has continued to expand over the years.

“A lot of the work that we do is hyper focused on our intergenerational bonding,” Iyeshima says. “And that’s intentional. When East New York Farms! was first founded we had eight youth interns. We went from eight to 36 youth interns, who all do a nine-month internship programme that they get paid for.”

Too Many Growers in the Greenhouse?

But running an urban agriculture project like ENYF! is not without its challenges. For one, it can be difficult to open gardens to new members.

“It’s really hard for the gardeners to transfer the space over to others, and that has been a struggle that we’ve been facing since forever,” Iyeshima says. “It’s really hard to get new people involved or to provide them with space, because people have such strong emotional ties to the land.”

Iyeshima says disagreements can also arise over what exactly a community garden should be.

“People have their own different ideas and visions for how they would like to shape their garden. Some folks want to have an artistic garden or a therapeutic garden. Some folks just want to grow food. Some folks just want to grow native plants.”

Differences between land ownership models in East New York mean that the avenues for addressing grievances can vary. UCC mediates disputes for the gardens it owns. However, in the case of ENYF! community gardens, which are operated on city-owned and licenced land, the mechanisms for conflict resolution aren’t as clear.

“[ENYF!] has to develop by-laws and be in certain agreements or standards with the city in order for it to function. So they have to have a certain amount of community members as a part of the garden, et cetera. However, that’s not always followed, and there’s no real system of accountability for garden space.”

Staying Grounded

The disagreements over what community gardens can and should do go beyond the plots themselves. Often, the interest in more modern forms of agriculture overlooks community gardens and farms, which are sometimes perceived as being old-fashioned or having limited potential.

“Before Eric Adams became the mayor, he released [The New Agrarian Economy Report]. In that report, the majority of the funds went to hydroponic or aquaponic farms, and a really small portion went to community gardens,” Iyeshima says.

“That’s an issue, because what society is now teaching folks is that urban agriculture looks like growing food inside of a building, rather than growing food on land.”

“The art of growing food directly in the ground is becoming lost because people are now being told, ‘Be creative; grow on top of a roof.’ And, when you can’t be creative and grow on top of a roof and you’re working with what you have, you tend to lose out on the funds that you need to sustain your operations.”

This is highlighted by the flurry of investment in vertical farming projects like Plenty, which have attracted backing from the likes of Jeff Bezos and Walmart.

According to Iyeshima, the ‘community’ in ‘community farms’ isn’t necessarily a synonym for unprofitable – and nor do profit and community need to be mutually exclusive terms.

“There are going to be folks that say, ‘Community gardens can’t feed the world.’ It’s true; we can’t feed the world. We can’t feed the amount of people that live here. At the same time, I think it can be a profitable space, but society thinks about the profits as the end goal rather than how can we make our environment and our communities more sustainable and self-sufficient. It’s more about asking: how can we intentionally build solidarity without necessarily putting greed first?”

For all the challenges, Iyeshima sees real potential for urban agriculture projects in New York – of all stripes – as politicians begin to wake up to the possibilities.

“I think that’s something that the new mayor for New York City is trying to accomplish. Urban agriculture and food justice is one of his top priorities. But it’s gonna take a lot of work, because it’s the first time we have a mayor that’s really thinking about this intentionally and actually pouring a lot of funds into making the system work.”

Interested in learning more about how urban agriculture can transform our cities? You can find more articles on food and sustainable cities here.