Boston’s often overlooked long history of urban farming

Vegetables growing in this Thornton Street plot, operated by Haley House and the Hawthorne Youth and Community Center, end up on pizzas served at Dudley Dough.

A locally-based tech-savvy hydroponic city farming startup has brought media attention to Boston’s urban agriculture scene. But while a recent article in the London-based Guardian newspaper celebrated the white entrepreneurs behind the startup, it left in the shadows the story of the black activists who jumpstarted the movement more than four decades ago.

The latest media attention went to Freight Farms, a company that sells pre-assembled hydroponic farms housed in recycled freight containers, which can be stored in alleyways, parking lots or other spots of open space available in city environments. The design allows for maintaining a controlled interior climate regardless of outside temperature, and the containers are equipped with a monitoring system tied to a smartphone app.

This and similar initiatives are just another stage of the urban growing movement, say Mel King, who advanced urban farming legislation in the 1970s, and Glynn Lloyd, who lobbied for the legalization enabling the urban agriculture industry in the early 2010s and in 2009 co-founded a farming cooperative with plots in Dorchester, Roxbury and Mattapan.

“Folks from the community, we catalyzed a lot of this stuff, going back to changing laws and generating a lot of the urban farming energy in Boston,” said Lloyd, co-founder of City Growers. “I don’t see it as a separate thing; it’s just part of the whole.”

Early push

During his time on Beacon Hill, former state Rep. Mel King filed and promoted legislation to facilitate urban farming. Among the legislation was a bill that permitted use of state land for community agriculture and allowed the state to offer to purchase for-sale farm land, with the purpose of then leasing or selling the property to food growers, he said.

“We were in a period where the state was backing of off having farms at mental health institutions and the corrections department and we just wanted to make sure that the land was kept in the hands of the people who were into farming and agriculture,” King told the Banner.

In 1979, Massachusetts implemented the first-in-the-nation Agricultural Preservation Restriction Program. Under the program, farmers who were in possession of “state important” or “prime” growing land had the opportunity to receive a payment from the state in exchange for a permanent deed restriction designating preventing property use that would negatively impact the land’s agricultural viability.

In part, King said, he was inspired by the World War II-era victory gardens that were popular in Boston during his childhood and from watching how urban farms brought communities together to collaborate across racial and cultural groups. Promoting healthy eating also was a driver.

Boston Urban Gardeners

Another push for urban agriculture came from Puerto Rican and Caribbean immigrants living around Roxbury Community College who wanted to be able to access land on which to grow food, according to King. In response to this need, he said he pushed for the state to clean up the vacant plots that had been cleared for the failed Southwest Corridor highway and open the property for residential farming use.

Lead paint from the razed buildings had leached into the land, making the soil untenable for crops. Instead, earth was trucked in from Marlborough with activist Dick Gregory leading the trucks into the city to draw further attention to advocacy for healthy eating, King recalled.

This southwest corridor effort led to the creation of Boston Urban Gardeners in 1976, which took up farming on the land and provided gardening education to community members in the South End, Roxbury, Jamaica Plain and Dorchester. One of the founders, Charlotte Kahn, said in a 1989 interview with the Washington Post that that project was intended to beautify and improve depressed areas as well as provide fresh produce to people in low-income neighborhoods with limited food access and to provide them with landscaping job training. In 1990, BUG merged with the Southwest Corridor Community Farm, an organization with similar aims.

Other efforts

Other farming efforts in Boston have included rooftop gardens, which picked up steam about 20 years ago, King said, as well as farms run by land trusts.

City Growers Cooperative, co-founded by Lloyd in 2009, works to turn vacant lots into urban farmland, thus providing the community with control of their food source and supplying residents jobs and local retailers, restaurants and consumers with fresh food. Among the benefits are giving youth productive activities and helping to improve health — something that continues to be a high concern, Lloyd said.

“[Our community] suffers a lot of chronic illnesses at a higher percentage — cardiovascular, diabetes,” Lloyd said. “People who see where food comes from eat differently.”

Another boost to the movement came with the founding of the Urban Farming Institute in 2012. The organization, of which Lloyd and King are directors, aims to promote urban farming training, acquire and prepare land for farming, and advocate on supportive policies. This has included co-developing Article 89, which paved the way for much of the current face of Boston’s city farming.

Legalizing urban agriculture

Boston’s urban farming received a leap ahead with the city’s passage of Article 89 in 2013, which legalizes and regulates urban agriculture as a by-right land use, allowing growth and sale for profit of produce within the city. Farming advocates met with the then-Boston Redevelopment Authority to develop the legislation, and two Dorchester farms were selected to pilot the program, including one licensed by Lloyd’s City Growers.

Lloyd recalled the outpouring of farmers and farming advocates to regular meeting with city officials to craft Article 89.

“We had Thursday morning meetings, and it was packed with everyone — farmers, chicken people, greenhouse people, rooftop people, bee people,” he said.

Continuing to grow

Despite the strong history and continually growing movement in Boston, the urban agriculture field is still often unnoticed by the mainstream and by officials in charge of development and space allocation in the city, Lloyd said. Many people stand to benefit from the budget savings of growing their own food as well as the health benefits, and the next challenge is getting more people aware of the offerings, he said.

Dave Madan, a founding board member of Urban Farming Institute, said minority-led urban farming organizations often have gone overlooked — something that can limit the organizations’ ability to continue and expand their work, given that media attention and recognition in the public eye often is important to bring resources.

“There’s a pretty stark difference in the access to publicity and resources that happens between white organizations and organizations le-d by people of color,” Madan told the Banner.

He said that the Guardian’s article sparked for some the idea that this could be “an opportunity to build the conversation about what the history of the movement is and where credit should be due, and to share the story so that the folks supporting this movement — funders and consumers — have a proper sense that there are these other organizations that may not get the same level of publicity and that there are other individuals doing this work.”

“The history should be remembered and told,” Madan concluded.