Michael Levensten, an early advocate of urban agriculture, in Kitsilano’s City Farmer demonstration garden.

Credit: Doug Shanks

NEWS: Urban agriculture moves into the mainstream

While urban agriculture may appear to be a relatively new trend in Vancouver, everybody knows that people have been growing their own food for centuries. One crucial development, however, is that the City of Vancouver is now providing more municipal-level infrastructure for people to grow their own food, dispose of food waste, and learn about food-security issues. The City marks this year’s Earth Day (Apr. 22) by making it the launch date for a new curbside compost pick-up program, which is initially restricted to homeowners but will expand in the future to include apartments and businesses.

On a somewhat related note, council approved a new policy earlier this month that allows Vancouver residents to keep backyard hens. While that issue spurred naysaying from some members of the media and the general public, it’s old hat for Michael Levenston, who penned the first article on the backyard-hen debate for City Farmer magazine in 1978. “It was [about] a woman in trouble for raising chickens in her backyard. A protest went to City Hall, and, of course, the woman lost her bid to keep them,” Levenston told WE in a phone interview from his Kitsilano office.

City council’s recent decision to approve backyard hens, Levenston says, marks an ideological shift that proves urban agriculture has moved from the fringes to the centre of mainstream thinking. “We [City Farmer] went from being the fringiest of the fringe to a group that speaks the same language as our educators, our leaders in universities, our leaders in politics,” he says. “In the end, it’s the same thing that our ancestors did: It’s growing food close to where we live, in backyards, to help feed ourselves.”

City Farmer magazine is now defunct, but in the mid-’90s Levenston launched the first blog on city farming, CityFarmer.org. He continues to write about urban agriculture at the website CityFarmer.info, as well as maintain the City Farmer demonstration garden at Maple and 6th. Designed to help educate the public on how to grow their own food, Levenston believes the garden has played a significant role in showing the benefits of urban agriculture. “It gives some strength and positive feeling to communities to know that there’s something we can do [for the environment],” he says. “You don’t have to feel defeated... There’s something you can do to improve things.”

There’s still room for improvement, though. According to Vancouver city councillor Andrea Reimer, the Greenest City Action Team (an initiative developed by Mayor Gregor Robertson in early 2009) has a goal of decreasing Vancouver’s food-related carbon footprint by 33 per cent over the next decade. By extension, the City is increasing its support for composting initiatives, community gardens, and farmers’ markets, matching already strong support from the public. “We have way more people who want to access community gardens than we have community gardens right now,” Reimer admits. “If anything, we’re lagging behind the public now, not ahead of them.”

A case in point is the recent growth of East Vancouver’s Fresh Roots (FreshRoots.ca), an urban-agriculture project that aims to convert six East Vancouver backyards into food-producing gardens by the end of the year. Those who have paid to participate in the project will get a share of the harvest. The initiative started a few years ago, when project co-founder Gray Oron started growing food for his housemates. “I’m an avid cook, so I like to have fresh, good food. And I don’t like the implications of our food system when it comes to the carbon footprint, the way it’s being produced, and the resources it uses and abuses,” he says.

After successfully growing enough produce to feed his 10 housemates, Oron embarked on a pilot project last year that included seven garden shares, and Fresh Roots grew from there.

“We’ve become a B.C. business: I’m beginning collaborations with different youth organizations, preparing various forms of youth curriculum and skills-training through urban agriculture,” says Fresh Roots co-founder Ilana Labow. She and Gray also have a team of volunteers and UBC interns working with them on the backyard gardens, and news of the project continues to spread. In fact, most of this year’s Fresh Roots participants learned of it through word of mouth. A major draw, Labow says, is affordability. “[A lot of] money goes into maintaining a green lawn, as opposed to putting that energy towards growing food and knocking down the food bill at the end of the week,” she says. “This is so much more affordable for folks — to have food growing in their backyard — than going and buying it.”

Responding to what he thinks is a dearth of locally produced food in Vancouver grocery stores, Labow’s friend, 22-year-old Martin Gunst, has embarked on a food-security enterprise of his own. Gunst will graduate from UBC next month and start working full-time as Grocer Gunst (GrocerGunst.com), a bicycle-delivery grocer specializing in produce grown at local farms. “Eating food that I know is grown sustainably and locally is important to me, and I find that when I go food shopping it’s pretty difficult to find food that meets those qualifications, with the exception of the farmers’ markets,” Gunst says. “So, I wanted to start a business that would make eating farmers’-market-type produce more accessible.

“I think the farmers’-market movement of the past 15 years has played an important role in increasing people’s interest in having a personal connection with their food. Farmers’ markets have increased people’s interest in putting a face on their food, and knowing that their food comes from a place that they can trust.”