INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. — Ashley Atkinson, co-director of Keep Growing Detroit, is working to make the Motor City "food sovereign" – growing most if not all the fruits and vegetables its citizens consume.
"I’m representing both our food policy council back home as well as the urban gardening community in Detroit," said Atkinson, who was the keynote speaker at an Indy Food Council event on March 20.
Gardening is a personal passion for Atkinson. "Even as a little kid, at ninth grade I would have told you I was going to be standing right here today," she said. "I started in urban agriculture and farming when I was 19, when we started our first organization. Sometimes they call me the Grandma of Urban Agriculture in Detroit."
She believes in the mission of food sovereignty, with the city’s produce "by Detroiters, for Detroiters."
"It is possible in the city of Detroit," Atkinson said. "We have 20 square miles of vacant land. There has been a lot of research that shows that on between two and seven thousand acres, which is a slice of our vacant land, we could be growing over 70 percent of our vegetables and over 40 percent of the fruits that Detroiters consume, keeping the very same things we do every single day and we have for the last 10 years."
The starting point, she said, is "helping people change their relationship to food," primarily by encouraging them to grow it themselves – "whether it’s in a container on their back porch, in their backyard, in their side lot, at their community garden, at a school garden or at a market garden."
The key to Keep Growing Detroit’s success has been deceptively simple.
"We set out to do one thing very well, and that was to listen to people very actively," Atkinson said. "And when we listen to people and we say, ‘What are the barriers for you to be growing wherever you’re at?’ They say things like, ‘we need transplants,’ ‘we need seeds,’ ‘we need compost,’ ‘we just need the basic stuff.’"
Facing a lack of large stores in the city, and limited transportation and funds, her organization set out to make resources available to the community "in a very conscious and committed way."
"We don’t want to rely on the suburbs or the rural areas on the Michigan side of the border with Toledo to provide our transplants and seed and all that stuff," Atkinson said. "We actually want to grow it in the city. So for 10 years now, we’ve been growing every single transplant that we distribute to our entire network in the city; last year we grew between 250 and 300 organic transplants – all at Detroit-based greenhouses. We’re growing some of the seeds that we distribute, the rest of the seeds we buy in bulk and we repackage as a community.
"We were producing some of the compost. We’re on a trajectory to be able to be producing, through business and other endeavors in the city of Detroit, every single thing that we need to be a food-sovereign city."
To support the growing number of urban farmers, Keep Growing Detroit offers community education.
"We’re doing between 30 and 100, usually between 50 and 80, classes every single year," she said. "And those classes are basic gardening, intermediate gardening, advanced gardening, cooking, canning, preserving, harvesting, post-harvest handling – you name it, we’re teaching it."
The result is that Keep Growing Detroit now supports nearly 4,000 gardens in the city (including the communities of Hamtramck and Highland Park), with more than 500 being at least five years old, said the organization’s 2014 annual report.
"Our return rate is high," Atkinson added. "Gardeners don’t just show up one year, and they don’t really get it, and the next year they’re gone. What we see is that they come back year after year; their gardens are stronger; there’s more people involved.
"And they’re actually growing a ton of food," she said. "So we had this problem where we started to be so good at growing food all of a sudden, in addition to feeding the community and in our neighborhoods, that we had enough gardeners – again, we were listening actively and intentionally to people – who said, ‘Hey, let’s sell it!’"
The result was the brand Grown in Detroit, with around 1,400 gardens participating in a free cooperative.
"We aggregate our products," Atkinson explained. "Some family gardens bring a little bit; some of our big gardens bring a whole lot. We all together decide what we’re selling, where we’re selling, what’s the prices that we’re selling, how do you harvest, the harvest handling and then how we’re going to nurture our community. So Grown in Detroit has grossed between, I think, $150,000 and $200,000 since we started; 100 percent of those proceeds go back to members."
Understanding not everyone in Detroit wants to become a farmer, Keep Growing Detroit has been working to encourage more market farms, Atkinson said. It has also worked in partnership with local organizations, such as Detroit Community Markets, a trade group of operators of neighborhood farmers’ markets.
One partner, FoodLab Detroit – a network of nearly 100 emerging food-based businesses – worked with the organization to develop the Detroit "Grown & Made" logo, to encourage and develop locally made food products which use locally grown ingredients.
