Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (24 page)

Toronto-based urban-agriculture advocate Lorraine Johnson published a book on urban agriculture titled
City Farmer: Adventures in Urban Food Growing
in 2010, in which she writes extensively about her three urban (outlaw) chickens.
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I figured, correctly as it turned out, that she would be more than happy to show me her small brood of three laying hens. After I promised not to disclose her actual street address, Johnson happily invited me over to meet Nog, Hermione, and Roo.
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I arrived just in time for feeding. Johnson led me through her house and into a long, narrow backyard that was being overrun with pumpkins the size of beach balls. Passing the garden shed and stepping warily over the thick pumpkin tendrils snaking across the grass, we arrived at the wire fencing and gate that enclosed an inner wire cage for extra predator proofing. This double-layered security, Johnson assured me, was “what you want in the city.” Raccoons are the main predator concern for urban chicken farmers.

The hens scurried and chortled as we approached but quickly resumed their pacing and pecking. Nog, the dark, small Babcock chicken almost black with iridescent auburn streaks, and Roo, the ginger-feathered Buff Orpington, looked like they might attempt a run at backyard freedom, but Hermione, a snowy-white Araucana with red trim, just strutted back and forth in front of her modern sky-blue “Eglu” prefab hen house, manufactured by UK backyard urban-agriculture product company Omelet.

Johnson tossed a few handfuls of feed pellets next to some vegetable peelings, and the day's chores were pretty much done. Every second day, Johnson cleans out the Eglu's waste tray under the coop and changes the bedding and straw. For relatively little effort, Johnson said that on average, she could count on eighteen eggs a week between the three hens.

I remarked that I'd been in several commercial egg-laying operations with thousands of birds in cages whose shrill calls would compete with the loud buzzing fluorescent lamps and giant fans that move the ammonia-sharp air around.
That
had been my impression of keeping chickens up to that point, but Johnson's three-hen setup was nothing like that. There was no smell, other than that of the straw bedding and the mulching leaves from the overhead trees that provide shade and shelter. So much for controversy. Even Johnson laughed at the nonevent of it all.

The most common reason people keep chickens in the city is for the
ultra-fresh, tastier-than-store-bought eggs. Also, chickens are keen consumers of just about any type of kitchen peelings and act as roving composters and fertilizers for urban farmers. But concerns about animal welfare, predators like coyotes and foxes being attracted farther into cities, noise pollution, and smell are common arguments against allowing urban chickens to become backyard fixtures. For a while, avian flu concerns were an issue as well, but they seem to have faded in the wake of the more recent swine flu panics.

Toronto is currently grappling with the pros and cons of changing its bylaws to allow small broods of chickens in residential backyards, just as many cities are faced with a de facto urban chicken movement on their hands. Johnson's three hens figure prominently in her book and in her magazine and newspaper articles. Toronto, for instance, already has a well-publicized Toronto Chicken Coop Tour, much like the regular coop tours that take place in Portland, Oregon, or Madison, Wisconsin. The people who go on the Toronto Chicken Coop Tour are asked to keep the locations of the outlaw coops to themselves. And the list of urban chicken blogs continues to grow by the day in Toronto, as it does in most cities, with or without the blessing of city hall.

N
OT
F
AR FROM THE
T
REE

Laura Reinsborough, founder of Not Far from the Tree, admitted that she hadn't picked a piece of fruit from a tree until she was twenty-five and volunteering at the Spadina Museum in downtown Toronto.
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But oh, what an epiphany it was. At the time, she was a graduate student in environmental studies at Toronto's York University and had “experience in urban agriculture,” so she was asked if she could pick the ripe fruit from the museum's fifty-some apple trees on its grounds. The Spadina Museum had the capacity to maintain the heritage orchard but couldn't deal with the actual fruit production that resulted. Reinsborough agreed
to pick the apples—the first of many revelations of the caches of fruit hiding in plain sight in an urban setting.

“The whole city just changed for me,” Reinsborough said, her voice still rising enthusiastically at the thought of it. “I became so much more aware of what was growing in my neighborhood and the potential of urban soil to produce amazing, delicious…” Her voice trailed off and then rebounded. “It's not just that there's fruit, but there's an abundance!”

In 2008, Reinsborough put her master's degree into action when she mobilized a dozen of her friends to collect the sour cherries, apricots, mulberries, apples, and other fruits from her neighborhood that were otherwise just falling to the ground and rotting. Reinsborough had approached the trees’ owners and offered to bring a crew to pick the ripe fruit for free. The deal was that they'd give one-third to the trees’ owners, keep one-third to divide among the volunteers, and donate one-third to local shelters or community centers for distribution to residents who didn't have access to fresh fruit. The bonus was that these backyard trees were mostly unsprayed—the crew avoided fruit grown on any contaminated ground—and therefore mostly organic by default.

Reinsborough describes her way of looking at her city now as “putting on her fruit goggles.” She started to see how the potential for urban fruit production lay right under her nose once she actually started to pay attention. She noticed fruit trees in ravines, in city parks, and on private property. Stringing them together was not so much like an urban forest but a giant urban orchard. “The whole city changed for me,” she remembered.

She realized that her immediate neighborhood was a bonanza of free, fresh, organic urban food and promptly launched Not Far from the Tree as an urban fruit-gleaning nonprofit with an entirely volunteer workforce, of which she is a part. By the end of 2008, Reinsborough had a corps of 150 volunteers who picked 3,003 pounds of fruit off just 40 residential trees. In 2009, Not Far from the Tree had 450 volunteers, with four paid staff, thanks to grant money and private donations; and
had collected 8,135 pounds from 125 trees, donating a full 2,711 pounds to local charity groups.
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Urban fruit gleaning is not unique to Toronto. The number of fruit-rescue outfits has exploded in cities everywhere, enabled in part by social media and the Internet, where it's easier to connect people with unwanted or overproducing private fruit trees in cities, with the teams of volunteers ready and willing to pick and redistribute the bounty. Most major cities now have fruit-gleaning groups at work. FoodForward in Los Angeles has picked 434,269 pounds (197,000 kilograms) of fruit in urban Los Angeles since its inception in 2009 and has given 100 percent of it away.
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There's also the Portland Fruit Tree Project, which began in 2006 and in 2010 collected 29,397 pounds (13,334 kilograms) of fruit that would have otherwise gone to waste.
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Food banks across North America have even begun to organize their own gleaning crews.

In 2010, more than 700 volunteers with Not Far from the Tree picked 19,695 pounds of fruit from trees in just a handful of residential neighborhoods in Toronto. That said, they got around to only one-quarter of the fruit trees that Toronto residents offered up via the group's online tree registration on its website. In 2011, Not Far from the Tree launched a public fruit tree-mapping initiative to get a better idea of just how much fruit grows in Toronto. The fruit picked in 2010 is just a fraction of the 1.5 million pounds of tree fruit that Reinsborough estimates ripens in the city every year.

Not Far from the Tree recently started a tree-tapping pilot project, called Syrup in the City, to tap trees like Norwegian maples and other urban sugar-producing trees. Other partnerships with community-based food groups have been made to offer cooking and fruit-preservation classes to fuel the enthusiasm that seems to be building for urban fruit production and gleaning.

Reinsborough is also consulting with other communities and cities about starting fruit-gleaning programs, and the requests are coming in from all over North America. She has even received queries from Scotland
and Puerto Rico. But her ambitions are really focused on the task close to home. She hoped to expand into fourteen or fifteen different neighborhoods in 2011, but she quickly noted that there are a total of forty-four neighborhoods of that scale in Toronto. Reinsborough originally cobbled together funding from provincial and municipal government sources but now is shifting that toward private funding and other revenue streams. Undaunted, she is convinced that soon Not Far from the Tree will cover the city. “We see ourselves getting there within a few years.”

Growing Public Orchards

It's infuriating when deer maraud through the pea or corn patch and nibble it down to stubs. But nature can be forgiven; the human element, not so much. Produce-napping and unauthorized gleaning in any community garden or urban farm is no more welcome than vandalism.

Talking to community gardeners and garden managers, stories of thieves who made off with the ripe tomatoes, pulled beets, pinched herbs, and stripped raspberry canes were easy enough to come by. Most urban gardeners at community gardens just accept this as part of urban living, and they plant a bit extra to compensate for it. (Anecdotally, urban gardeners have told me over and over again, the culprits are usually “little old women”; the second-most common tomato-nappers or herb pinchers are fellow gardeners.) Often, if the problem persists, gardeners collect fees from the collective for fences and padlocks.

But what if foraging and grazing wasn't just expected but encouraged? What if parks were places to go for a walk on a sunny afternoon where you could pick an apple off a tree and crunch away in plain view of others? This is exactly the idea behind municipal public orchards and other edible landscapes that some cities are experimenting with—for example, a nine-fruit-tree public orchard in Ben Nobleman Park in Toronto, and others farther west in Calgary, Alberta.

On a mid-July day, I sought out a public orchard in Calgary, a city
better known for its oil- and gas-industry corporate offices than for forward-thinking municipal food-security initiatives. But in this case, Calgary was ahead of the curve in Canada, having established three municipally planted orchards in 2009 as part of a five-year test pilot. The idea was to test management models—city-run orchards to self-organizing community-run orchards—to gauge which type would be more effective. The city also needed to gather information on which fruit and nut trees would grow; how much they would produce; what pest and disease pressures they could withstand; how well they worked in the larger community parkland; and, at the most basic level, whether orchards could even get a foothold in a city where there are often fewer than a hundred frost-free days per year.

I decided to visit the Hillhurst-Sunnyside Community Garden orchard, the first completed community orchard in the city.
The community is one of the city's oldest residential areas, but it is also one that has resisted densification despite being separated from the huddle of skyscrapers at the city's business core only by the narrow Bow River. The orchard was at the end of an inner-city residential street of neatly kept single-family homes. The first thing that struck me was that it was not an orchard as I had pictured in my mind (well-organized straight rows of mature fruit trees). Instead, it was a haphazard collection of saplings planted rather close together on a triangular point where a small park with spruce and birch trees rimmed an irregular patch of lawn.