This Detroit Agrihood is Transforming its Community - Michigan Urban Farming Initiative Tour

we are in Detroit Michigan Detroit Michigan the song of Ontario finally has exited Ontario yeah I mean borders are kind of stupid so we decided to cross one legally and we're gonna visit a urban farm project so we're here we're meeting with the manager and we're gonna see some cool stuff today and welcome to the Michigan urban farming initiative a little bit of background information on me is that I was born and raised in the city of Detroit five miles from here I went to Michigan State University I studied in the College of Agriculture and I got my degree in food science I double minored in environmental and sustainability studies and then brewing and distilling and then post college I joined the Peace Corps and I was in this rural village in Nepal focusing on nutrition sensitive agriculture so I was just teaching them new or improved technique agricultural techniques and then post that I came back to Michigan I got a job as an organic chemist and cannabis for a cannabis company and I didn't really like the lab life so I got this job and this is where we are now I'm so a little bit about this place is that it was founded in 2011 so eight years ago by a guy named Tyson Kirsch he noticed that there were two challenges that Detroit were facing I mean there's tons of challenges but these were things that he could do something about one was the vacant land issue so there's a lot of vacant land around Detroit abandoned houses other things like that and then the second one is the food insecurity issue so you might have heard of Detroit being called a food desert so people don't have access or availability or the means to get nutritious foods all year round so we try to tackle those challenges how we do that is we have this urban farm here so we have three acres of land in total the farmland that you can see right now is one acre and on this farm we have 300 different varieties of produce growing and since 2011 we've given out over a hundred thousand pounds of produce to over 2,000 households in a 2.5 mile square radius so we've given up a lot in every Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. that's when we give of the produce and it's all free so anyone from the Detroit city or area can come into our farm and pick up the produce right here the other things that we have on the overall three acres are a bunch of different projects and various stages of development so the first project that I'll tell you about is this Resource Center right here the building with a great mural on it it's currently undergoing some construction renovations but when it's finished the top floor will be for our administrative things we're also hoping to lease out that space to other organizations that do work along the lines of what we do here on the second floor will be on multi-purpose floor and so we're hoping that the community can go in there and have their neighborhood meetings that we can do trainings workshops we want to have like an educational component to that floor where we teach people about nutrition sustainability composting agricultural things and then the bottom floor will be our kitchen so we'll have we'll be doing like packaging and processing of some of our produce we want to turn it into a DAT value products maybe the basil into pesto and it's Mayo's tomato sauce the hot peppers into a hot sauce so that's our goal I guess with that community center the next thing is this shipping container right here it was given to us by General Motors and we're turning that into a shipping container house so it'll have two bedrooms a bathroom and a kitchen inside of it the second thing that I'll talk to you about is the sister and I'm gonna just take you over there collects rainwater or like melted snow and it takes it down to the bottom that collects it and then we use that water to water all the plants out on the field so it's not like our irrigation I'm works without irrigation and this was an old house that a dilapidated house that was torn down we cleared out the basement we lined it with a pool liner we put like plastic crates in there to create spacing we covered it with like clay and sand and other rocky stuff that you can see here so well it's not enough to supply the entire year for water it definitely helps offset the amount of water that we use on a regular so we save some money and we use less water that way but it is very convenient when we do run out of water because then I can just stick the hose into the cistern and I get old still water everything out there because it would take forever for me to take the hose from bed to bed and water everything so it's still pretty convenient even when there is water there we get interns and volunteers from all over the world it's an unpaid internship and what we would like to do is house them since we don't really have any funds to pay them we would like to house them and possibly feed them someone to produce up the farm this is also currently under construction renovations but we're really hoping that we can get this going soon so we can I don't know have a place for them to stay speaking of the volunteers we had 10,000 volunteers since 2011 gave us over a hundred thousand hours of service French volunteers a couple of weeks ago we had 120 Swedish volunteers and it's become quite the international tour site so that's pretty awesome and the greatest part about it is that people just reach out to us they just want to come and in the soil and like help out Detroit which is pretty awesome and makes my job a lot easier when they do that so before I came along this organization was a 100% volunteer run organization and then I became the first paid employee that they had that's pretty cool yeah the next project that I want to show you is this right here this is a compost toilet so we're hoping to turn human waste into compost most of our funding comes from sponsors we have we do fundraising donations and grants mom and so a lot of the different projects that I pointed out to you had a bunch of different sponsors you know motor I mean general motors for Sadie's bins target garden a TerraCycle all of these places sponsored a lot of different things that have occurred on this but the donations in the grants are also a really big help this area right here is our children's sensory garden and this is probably my favorite place in the entire farm because it invites children to come and check out nature there's no better way for kids to learn about nature and through things that they can sense so we've got tons of flowers and you can feel touch smell and see we've got berries like huckleberry blackberry blueberry raspberry strawberries right there we've got grapes in the back we've got two beehives that were given to us by an organization called B's and the D so that organization gives us the bees the bees do their thing and then they come back and harvest the honey and sell it at the Eastern Market and then we have our fruit tree orchard and this fruit tree orchard was actually given to us by mercedes-benz so there were 200 fruit trees in there five fruits apple pear plum peach and cherry and it's it's a high density fruit tree which is why the spacing is so close so you give up the food on Saturdays do you have any system in place if you have extra food or people don't come and pick it up so normally we try to donate to local churches and have them take the excess produce and almost every Saturday we've had someone come and get the produce so we haven't had any issues just yet but I'm trying to work on like a more consistent way of like getting rid of the excess produce just so we don't ever run into that problem where we're like oh we have so much produce what are we gonna do with it yeah I don't want that to be an issue so I'm working on something I'm like talking to local churches like food pantries and trying to see if we can donate to them you have people coming from like all around the world to visit this farm to see this farm have you heard stories or like witnessed things where they will actually take this model and try applying it in a different country or in a different City I know that when the Swedish group came they were talking about how they wanted to start doing her bit bombs and they were super interested in our motto which is one of the reasons why they came so they could like then take it and put it to use over at Sweden but I haven't seen anyone actually apply it yet and we've had a bunch of French visitors who also plan on doing the same thing like in Paris and other urban spots in France but I haven't heard of anyone actually like doing it just that they were interested in our model and they were hoping to do something like it yeah it's really cool like abandoned space like repurposing that for some right then also solves a big community issue yeah and speaking of community like that's a big thing for us you know we want to empower the community want we want to build a stronger sense of community here and so we don't just do things on the farm we'll also do like neighborhood cleanups we'll try to tackle some of these overgrown alleyways will have people picking up trash and just going around talking to people in the community I've been to a couple of their block meetings so I'm also like a definite visible face like representative of the farm and I talk to them about the things that they might need or how in ways we can help the community the cleanups are the most popular because we get like a hundreds of 200 volunteers every week and we can definitely just throw them on different tasks around the community and they love that and just walking over here you get that those vibes and yeah community and it's very vibrant and it feels thriving yeah and like you're walking around other like streets and it's just like a little bit like so you can see some buildings that might look a little dilapidated yeah and then you get here and it seems like a thriving space yeah there's like all these fresh it's really cool really it really a cool thing to it and suddenly I would have seen more stuff like this in the cities well fun fact about this like these urban farms I recently read an article that said that there are over 1,400 urban farms and gardens in Detroit I was like one right down the street like a mile away and there's a there's a couple over in that area as well and so they seemed to be like really popular spaces in Detroit like we're trying to become the city of Vons yards you know which is pretty awesome in my head because it gives like city people a chance to get out into nature and just like learn more about like these things because when I was growing up in the city I knew nothing about plants I never even touched the dirt you know because it was I won't get dirty but look at me now and so yeah it's I think it's great for people to learn how to like grow their own produce learn about nutrition and waste like sustain themselves in the city growing up here I definitely experienced the food desert I know firsthand about not having access or availability to any of these things and I didn't really think anything of it as a kid but as I got older I realized that it's probably not that common in a lot of places or maybe it shouldn't necessarily be like this and that's what interested me and my field of study and in the path that I've taken who like with all of my career choices you know I think that this place holds a special spot in my heart because ask someone from this city who's gone through like the food desert experience and all of the stuff around like not having access to any of that information not having access to the produce we don't learn about nutrition and Detroit Public Schools or we didn't back when I was coming up and so for a place like this to exist to provide those resources and the produce for people to get I don't know it just like really touches my heart and it's amazing that I can be a part of it because my education like I said was focused around this stuff you know and I didn't know how I was gonna get into it when I got out of college no one really knows how they're gonna do anything after they get out of college and so it was it's just like such a rare unique awesome opportunity that I've been given to come here and manage this place and meet the people that I've met and like touch the people I don't know and like this cool way it's my city it's now my organization you know like well not mine I didn't find it but um like you know I'm a part of it and so I feel like it's something to be proud of it's something that I've worked long time to get to finally here and so now I'm excited to see what I can do for this place what I can do for my city how I can get back to a place that's given me so much yeah