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New program hopes to raise crop of urban farmers in Boston
By adamg on Wed, 05/11/2016 - 4:48pm
Mayor Walsh's office today announced it will invest $100,000 in a program to hire and train up to 25 returning inmates as farmers on a city-owned parcel in Roxbury or Dorchester.
During the program's first year, 25 participants will be trained in urban agriculture practices and will grow and distribute 5,000 pounds of healthy produce to 1,000 residents through five farmers' markets in Dorchester, Roxbury and Mattapan. Pending a successful first year, the program aims to create a long-term partnership between re-entry workforce development, sustainable urban agriculture and increased food access to jointly address the missions of all partnering organizations.
Youth Options Unlimited Boston (YOU) will house a program coordinator to oversee the initiative and work with City Soil, the Urban Farming Institute and other community partners to develop programming. YOU works with Boston's youth and young adults ages 14 to 24 and specializes in serving young people from neighborhoods with the highest level of poverty and violence, and those reentering the community from incarceration.
Partners for Places, a project of the Funders' Network for Smart Growth and Livable Communities, awarded half of the funds, which were matched through a contribution by The Boston Foundation. The program will cost approximately $320,000, with the opportunity to re-apply for a second round of funding after the first year. Additional costs will be covered in full by the Neighborhood Jobs Trust and the Boston Redevelopment Authority.
Starting in the Menino administration, the city has looked for vacant lots that can be used for growing vegetables. In 2014, officials broke ground for one such farm on Harold Street in Roxbury.
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Comments
Nothing Says Great Urban Job Training Like Farming!
Where are these inmates going to bring these new found farming skills? To all of the bustling inner city farms in Boston? Wouldn't it be better to spend money training them in more relevant trades to their neighborhood like carpentry or plumbing? Apparently those eye sore community gardens throughout the city pay more than I thought they did...
Something it seems like these programs are decided by throwing darts at a board full of feel good political buzzwords. (inmates!...job training!...urban farming? Whatever, just go with it.)
Farming is the task. The people coming out need to learn or
re-learn simple things like responsibility, commitment, showing up on time etc. If you think you can just say hey go be a carpenter or plumber, they'll take you. You're as lost as these ex-cons.
Why Can't They Do Both?
Learn a useful skill and responsibility at the same time. We've progressed from the days of hard labor that just involve breaking rocks or digging holes for the sake of work.
Even in prison, the job training programs involve teaching skills, not just busy work.
And you're right, carpenters and plumbers will certainly not take you if you've just spent the last year growing turnips in a vacant lot in Roxbury.
What are you doing
about it?
I don't get it.
It sounds nice but most farm work is migrant labor these days - what are these guys going to do from November through March? I'd rather have the city spend $100k to set up a parks maintenance team to augment the MDC or something if we're going to pay to have people find purpose outside.
You don't get it [...]
There's a couple fairly profound misapprehensions in your comment.
First, most farm work here in New England is not migrant labor. (a good chunk of it is labor of permanent immigrants, but that's a different thing).
And secondly and just as importantly, farming/landscaping/gardening is not just a warm-weather job - in fact, a lot of the really heavy work occurs in the non-growing season.
Working with the soil and providing food for one's community builds mutual regard and support - imo catalyzing that is exactly the right thing for us to do with people who are adrift - either in danger of incarceration, or trying to return from it. Like working in construction, it's never going to be outsourced and it looks like the demand for it is only going to increase around here for some time to come.
It's the sort of labor that one can start at unskilled, but if motivated and talented, one can work up to a fairly sophisticated skill set.
City Soil already employs several former inmates, and as far as I know, they're full-time. I'm making a point of getting the bulk of my compost et al from CS whenever possible in part because I want to support anyone working hard to get back on their feet. (Also because they can vouch for the quality of their base materials better than their competitors, and they put most of their money right back into the community).
No, I just disagree with you.
So I haven't lived in Roslindale long enough to understand it like you do (cut off was 1995 I think?) but the 20 years I spent growing up in a farm community in rural MA isn't relevant? Gosh, I only wish I could have lived in Roslindale long enough to not be a city slicker.
IMO, if we're spending $100k to promote people finding value in work outside in the community, farming is a weird choice given the huge need for green space for parks/rec space and for housing in the city. Having local produce come from say Hadley, MA or wherever, places where there isn't a housing crunch and there's good arable land and farms that need support seems like a better approach. We're never going to have wide scale farming in Boston nor should we so this promotes a specialized, non-scalable kind of work for a small group of city residents.
The Arboretum or Millennium or Pond or wherever really, the city's green spaces are under maintained. If we had a team of landscape maintainers or the like to help make the common, free green spaces of our city more attractive and pleasurable for all of us to use seems like a bigger win to me. Granted, better management by the MDC, etc... would be great but really this program is about doing something for the people involved as much as what the most efficient use of money is, right?
BTW, from my reading of this - http://www.mass.gov/massworkforce/docs/programs/migrant-farm-workers/far... ... temp workers who work less than 150 days at a farm are 60% of the people employed by the agricultural sector in MA. Not exactly great employment. Also in that document, 39 people worked in agriculture in Suffolk County in 2012. This is where we need to grow jobs? In Boston?
picker of nits
Note: the MDC is not around anymore. It's the DCR for state properties or Parks and Recreation for City-owned properties.
And while urban farming could be expanded (in ways that are far more distributed and not conducive to viable commercial operations), I agree that I can't see how this provides meaningful employment for more than a handful of people.
The cynical answer is since
The cynical answer is since this is through the mayor's office, it was a lot easier and faster to do a program the city could control in its entirety. Getting a program into state/DCR jurisdiction up and running takes actual effort on Marty's part.
Not just disagreeing, you're either mistaken or misleading
You may have spent time "growing up in a farm community", but I guess you didn't pay much attention. I apologize for assuming that your blithe mistatements were the result of lack of exposure, and not just knee-jerk cynicism - I've edited my initial response to reflect that.
I actually grew up on a working farm before coming to Boston 30+ years ago. When I spoke about the need for year round work, it was from direct experience.
Tellingly, that document you linked to only refers to straight-up farm jobs, not landscaping, gardening, arbory, or retail associated with such - which is really much closer to what the programs in the article are promoting.
(It also shows that between '07 and '12, half-to-full-year farm jobs in MA have increased by over 32% - three times the rate of shorter-term jobs. At that pace, the number of long-term farm jobs will account for the majority of such work in just the next couple years).
Talking past each other, as usual
Cynical? Blithe misunderstanding? I don't get the hostility which seems to be a very consistent thing with you. Saying I'd rather have city green spaces improved vs. having some dudes grow some kale is cynical?
My post literally says that it seems like $100k would be better spent on landscaping type projects vs. farming as that's a better fit for what the city needs in general. I'm not saying we shouldn't spend this month or anything. If this is as much a landscaping project as farming project, fine. But why call it farming then?
I think farming lends itself to our various farming communities, not the limited green space in Boston limits. Is the theory that these people are going to work in city farms in the city, then move to the Valley to work the fields? We could train these guys to work an oyster bed out by Logan too but that doesn't mean that job would suddenly be a good option for a city resident, presumably the target of this kind of city funding.
Do you think we need more city farms vs. more public parks, protected urban wilds and more housing? Because those are some of the other things we can do with that land.
I have no real comment about
I have no real comment about the applicability of THIS program to THIS population, but farm training is actually not a bad idea. There's a looming crisis back out west where a lot of long running family farms and smaller outfits are starting to see the end of their lifespan as farmers age out and die, and young people from those areas are fleeing to the coasts and cities. Being creative about training a new generation is a good idea.
Year Round Farming
is quite possible via hot house or hydroponic techniques. There are already some commercial freight farms in Boston, and the BLS freight farm operates a single container demonstration lab. I've had some produce from the latter, which is excellent and incredibly fresh. I don't know the details of this particular program, but I wouldn't write it off just because my garden lies fallow in the Winter months.
And even outdoorsy farms have
And even outdoorsy farms have work to do in the cold months. I have visited a couple urban farms in the winter, and people were busy taking care of over-winter crops, conditioning the soil, fixing stuff, and setting up new equipment or plots. I admit it probably doesn't require as many hands, but there is stuff to do on a farm when it gets cold.
In terms of utility for job training, I am mixed. Yeah, urban farming is not going to get a lot of people rich, but I agree with the point about it helping people get into a rhythm of responsibility. Urban farming also ties in with food (some urban farms get connections with local restaurants), so there is that. I would also think there might be an easy transition to jobs in landscaping or grounds maintenance. If they get to work side by side with people in the community, then there might also be a good community organizing aspect of it. At a minimum, we can grow vast fields of hemp for making rope and blankets.
Math exercise
$320,000 ÷ 5,000 lbs of veggies = $64 per pound
Job program ≠ for-profit biz. Also...amortization is a thing!
The way you're figuring it, almost every business in history has irrationally huge per-unit costs for their products when first starting up. I would imagine that the cost to continue or expand the program in subsequent years would be proportionately lower.
I would also suggest that the food created by this program is an ancillary benefit, while the real 'product' is sociallized and productive young humans. That would mean something more like $320,000 ÷ 25 = $12,800 per useful member of society. (And we should also count the removal of costs to all of us, if those 25 people were not being gainfully employed).
If it works, it sounds like a very good deal.
Reality Exercise
Most of the jobs in Boston are not for-profit; those that are are often with firms which will not start having profitable quarters for five to ten years, if ever.
Think of it as a startup, darling.
non-profit employment
Funny you should state this today as yesterday the Boston Business journal had an article precisely about this. Unfortunately it was data for the state as a whole, not Boston and Google won't easily relinquish that info at the moment.
But for the state it's 17% of the workforce that's in the non-profit industrial complex. So that's a big jump from 17% to "most of the jobs in Boston" being in that sector, but it's possible. God knows most of the property seems to be held by tax-exempt entities.
City Hall
This is totally off-topic, and I apologize, but I have always thought it would be a good idea to implement a version of roof farming at city hall.
They kind of do
Not edible, but if you go up to the eighth floor, you'll see the balcony around the atrium has become a "green roof."