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Adam Taggart: Hello, and welcome to the Resilient Life podcast. Resilient Life is part of peakprosperity.com. It’s where we focus on practical and actionable knowledge for building a better future. I’m your host, Adam Taggart. Those of you living in cities or densely-packed suburbs should find this podcast of particular interest. My guest today is Michael Ableman, founder of the nonprofit Center for Urban Agriculture and we’ll be talking with him about how innovative farming methods with concrete social goals, help create healthier and more resilient communities.

Today, we’ll be talking with Michael about his recent book, Street Farm: Growing Food, Jobs, and Hope on the Urban Frontier, which focuses on his efforts to transform acres of vacant and contaminated land in the inner city and grow artisan quality fruits and vegetables. Deaths due to overdoses of heroin and opioid pain relievers are on the increase, just one sign of the urgency to rejuvenate marginalized communities and provide networks that empower individuals to heal themselves. Urban agriculture presents a unique opportunity to address both these goals.

In Michael’s new book, Street Farm, he shares the inspirational account of residents in one of the worst urban slums in North America, who join together to create an urban farm as a means of addressing the chronic problems in their neighborhood. In the downtown eastside of Vancouver, British Columbia, a broad menu of drugs are for sale along every street. It’s also home to one of the continents’ highest concentrations of open prostitution. In this squalid setting, Ableman and co-founder Seann Dory, along with a ragtag crew of local residents, launched Sole Food Street Farms in an abandoned parking lot.

Sole Food has since grown to transform acres of vacant and contaminated urban land in Vancouver into street farms that grown artisan quality fruits and vegetables. The Sole Food Project, now one of North America’s largest urban farm initiatives, has empowered dozens of individuals who are managing addiction and chronic mental health problems by providing jobs, agricultural training, and the chance to be part of a vibrant community of farmers and food lovers. What a great mission.

Michael, thank you so much for joining us today.

Michael Ableman: Oh, it’s so nice to be with you, Adam. Thanks for having me.

Adam Taggart: Oh, it’s our pleasure. Well, look, let’s just start with the general background. Can you start by giving us kind of your path as to how you came to get involved in the urban agriculture movement?

Michael Ableman: Yeah, certainly. Well, first of all, I started at the age of 18 as a more traditional farmer, organic farmer. I farmed for Sunburst Farms back in the mid-70s in California. Sunburst had 4,000 acres of organic farmland. We were producing everything from dairy products to grains, to fruits and vegetables. And we had our own distribution company and restaurants and natural food stores. And so that’s kind of where I learned how to farm, and continued on that path, and again, this what a time when I probably knew everyone in North America who was farming organically. Now, of course, that movement has grown dramatically, and now we have kind of many permutations of that, urban agriculture being one of them.

When I was farming in California, I was on a piece of land there for 20 years in Southern California that became completely surrounded by suburban and urban development. That 12.5 acres was essentially an island floating in a sea of tract homes and shopping centers. And on that agricultural island, we grew 100 different fruits and vegetables, we employed 30 people, we generated close to one million dollars in gross income. It was one of the kind of the early progenitors of the farm-based education and organic farming movements, but it was also one of the early examples of what was possible on a small piece of land within more of an urban or peri-urban context. And so, I got to play out a lot of the challenges that are happening between — the collision between urban and rural and the transition of valuable and rich, fertile land into development, which was happening all around us.

And we started a nonprofit there, in the early 1980’s, called the Center for Urban Agriculture. It was initially founded to save the land we were on from development. We had to raise a bunch of money to do that. But we also were invited to participate in projects in places like Watts and communities like that, where we started some very interesting urban agriculture projects. And those are the days when you used the words urban and agriculture in the same sentence, people looked at you rather strangely. Now, as you know, there is an international movement tied to that. I’m not sure all of it is what’s being called urban agriculture is truly agricultural, but that’s another conversation.

Adam Taggart: Great. Well, so your book focuses on what’s going on in Vancouver. What was the inspiration behind starting the Sole Foods Street Farm Project there?

Michael Ableman: Well, I was — I received a phone call, it’s been eight or nine years ago, asking me to attend a meeting in Vancouver on the downtown eastside. The downtown eastside is the neighborhood where the term “skid row” was coined and you mentioned in your introduction a little bit of a description of that neighborhood. The invitation was to meet with several social service agencies in the neighborhood to discuss some interesting strategies for helping people in that community, which is… the entire neighborhood is almost entirely inhabited by folks who are dealing with some form of long-term addiction, mental illness, and certainly, high levels of material poverty. And so, I agreed to attend that one meeting, and one meeting led to a next, to the next.

The group of people meeting had access to a half acre parking lot next to one of the dive hotels, and we decided there was a desire to do something agricultural. And we decided that the most important thing that we could achieve was to try to create a model that developed meaningful work employment; a reason for people to get out of bed each day. And so, we developed that first half acre as a model to kind of prove our systems, created a technical system that allowed us to safely grow on either pavement or contaminated land using these boxes, these innovative boxes that we designed that isolate the growing medium.

And we eventually expanded to over almost five acres of land, four different sites, including a production orchard, 16,000 square feet of high tunnel unheated greenhouses, large, open parking lots where we’re growing, to the point where we’re now producing 25 tons of food annually, employing close to 30 people. And we now have people employed with us who never held a job for five or six months, they’re with us now for almost eight years in supervisor positions, having in many ways, cleaned up their act, and learned new skills, and found some sense of purpose. So that’s really — the social piece is really big for us. That’s at the top of the list.

Adam Taggart: All right. And I want to talk about that social piece in a moment. But we’ve got a bunch of people who read peakprosperity.com and listen to our podcasts who hear us talk about building resilience, and Chris and I talk a lot about our own personal experiences with growing some of our own food calories on our properties or sourcing from local farms because we both live in pretty rural areas. But we know a lot of people who are listening live in the city, or live in really densely-packed suburbs, like Silicon Valley, where I lived before I moved up to where I live now. And a common question we get from them is, well, what are the options that we have, where we live in a much more urban setting? One of the reasons that I was very excited to get you on the podcast here.

So I’d love to talk the nuts and bolts of the how you farm in an urban environment, and then I definitely want to delve into the social issues. But getting into those nuts and bolts, how do you go about growing food in a place that’s paved over and contaminated, as you mention earlier? I know people are dying to kind of hear the nuts and bolts and I’m sure there’s all sorts of other issues, like zoning, and permitting, and all that stuff. So, if you wouldn’t mind giving us kind of your best cheat sheet, how do you guys go about doing this?

Michael Ableman: Well, sure, yeah. I mean, I think that’s a very good question and it’s always important to try to bring it home to what people need personally. I will say that the project that we’re doing is very much on an agricultural scale. It’s, in fact, one of the few projects that uses the word urban agriculture, that is truly, from a scale and production level, agricultural. But I think that all of what we’ve learned in achieving that goal is applicable to very small scale. And I’ve always been a big proponent, through all my books and lectures, etcetera, of trying to encourage families and individuals to grow more for themselves.

I think that the fundamental problem with the food system is not what we think it is. It’s not all these big things like pesticides, or genetic engineering, or soil loss. It’s the crisis of participation is not as much a food crisis, as a crisis of participation. It’s the fact that food production, something as fundamental to our existence, and our survival, and our well-being, has been relegated to a mere one and a half to two percent of the population. And the results of that have been incredibly negative.

And in my view, the solution to the food crisis is to somehow encourage, inspire, and train every individual to have a much greater role in how their food comes to them. And I think, to some degree, we all can do that personally, even if it’s just a window box. Perennial herbs, for example, can be grown in a very small space. Salad greens, these things all can be done on a scale that it’s remarkable how much can be produced on a very small area.

There are some real challenges. Most urban land, most urban soils are too contaminated to grow in, so that has to be considered. In our case, all of the soils we’ve had to deal with are either contaminated or paved over. And so, we developed a box system that we design these boxes, they have forklift tabs so they’re moveable, they’re stackable, they’re nestable, they have little hoop plugins, drainage is interconnected so you can recycle the drainage as you’re watering. They are virtually indestructible and the most important thing is that they sit above and on top of either an impervious paved area, or land or soil that’s too contaminated to grow in.

Any soil that an urban dweller would want to grow in has got to be tested first. It’s not safe to grow vegetables in soils that are contaminated. So, that’s the first step. There are certainly creative ways of attempting to bio or remediate contaminated soils, but that’s a long process, and one needs to be very careful. So I would suggest, if you’re either dealing with an impervious layer, or you’re dealing with contaminated soils, to find something to grow in that will isolate the growing medium from the soils beneath it.

And to start with products that are both easy to grow, and will give a high level of success early on, and can be produced in quantity in small spaces. And so, I always focus on things like salad greens, which are really easy. They have a disproportionately positive effect on the table, and they’re harvested and served. Add culinary herbs. Add some roots to that, as you get more comfortable. And then, if you have enough space, of course you can build into other things.

Adam Taggart: Great. To the boxes that you were talking about, are those proprietary only to the projects that you’re working on, or if someone’s — I’m jumping ahead a little bit, but if somebody is looking to kick start something like this in their own neighborhood, can they procure those from you or from other companies out there?

Michael Ableman: Yeah, it’s really awesome. It’s a great question. I think that we probably could sell far more boxes than the vegetables that we currently grow in them. And we actually have discussed creating a sub-enterprise to do that. One of the challenges that we have in this climate is that we’re not able to keep our staff employed during the dark, rainy winter months, which are the worst months for our staff to be laid off. And we thought, maybe if we were producing these boxes and distributing them, that would be a source of winter employment. So we are, in fact, looking into trying to begin manufacturing these boxes and making them available to the public.

But there are, in every community, there are existing containers of various sorts that could be used for the same purpose. Whether they’re stock feeders, or stock watering containers, or even plastic, or metal, Dutch bulb boxes, fruit bins, there’s a range of things that could be used that would achieve the same result. We’ve kind of taken our design a little bit further, as I described, and I hope that maybe, if we talk in another six months or a year, that I can say, yeah, go to this website, and they’re available. But we’re not there yet.

Adam Taggart: Okay. I love the concept, especially if it’s what keeps your employee base employed over the winter months there. So I am correct in –?

Michael Ableman: Yeah, I mean, I’m always looking for — it’s Wendel Barry who many of us who have read over the years and who I’ve been fortunate enough to have gotten to know, has a wonderful term called solving for pattern. And too often, when we try to solve one pattern, we create numerous other problems. But the concept of solving for pattern is finding one elegant solution that solves numbers of problems at the same time. And certainly, the boxes that we have created already do that. They allow us to move on short notice on expensive land, isolate the growing medium. They could, as well, become an additional economic enterprise. So, I think this is a good example. So, yeah, sorry for interrupting you.

Adam Taggart: No, no, no. I’m glad you did. Where I was going was just, is the progression sort of, look, you can start with something as simple as a window box, plant some herbs like you mentioned. If you’ve got a patio, maybe a couple of pots. If you’ve got a little patch of grass somewhere, maybe you can put in a raised bed or two. But if you can find yourself with access to a lot, which it sounds like, that’s what you’re working on in Vancouver there, you’re finding these vacant lots, that’s when you really want to have something akin to the type of boxes that you’re talking about.

Michael Ableman: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think that — I’ve always said, and maybe to the consternation of my commercial farming colleagues, that I look forward to the day when individuals and families put us out of business by growing more for themselves. I think, really, this is the fundamental problem, as I’m repeating myself. And so, I will do anything to encourage individuals to begin to embrace creative ways of growing more food for themselves and for their families, for their neighborhoods, and doing it in ways that address the particularities of where they’re doing it. Whether that be climate, and the need for season extension, or whether it be soil contamination issues, or whether it be the limitations of space. All those things can be creatively addressed. And there are ways to grow food in every situation, and I have certainly seen that all over the world.

When there is a real need, and I can tell you, the creativity is stronger in those parts of the world where the need is greater, where food security is a bigger issue, you see the most remarkable creative endeavors that people are putting into place and ingenuity that’s unbelievable, in order to solve what is really as fundamental as a thing as we can get to. And that is, how we feed ourselves; how we secure our food. So, I think that certainly in North America, which I assume is most of your listeners, we have a much greater opportunity. And I think I want to see this happening in every household. It should be required, really.

Adam Taggart: Well, I totally agree, for so many reasons. And one of the things that I embraced when I lived in the suburbs, and now that I’ve moved out to the more rural area, I find that it was very accurate, was when I built my first raised beds and was growing just a little bit of produce in my little square foot garden beds there. I knew that it wasn’t going to do much more than just kind of compliment my dinner plate, I was never going to feed my family off of those boxes, but I was doing was, I was sort of looking at as tuition. In other words, I was beginning to develop the skills for how to grow things. And as anybody who has become a gardener knows, is your first couple of years you’re basically more learning how not kill things than you are how to grow things.

Michael Ableman: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that it’s one of those things, you could read a book, or go take a workshop, or watch a YouTube or something, but the truth of the matter is, this is something that you just need to do. And really, what you need to develop more than any and most important or agricultural or horticultural skill is observation. It’s not all these other techniques. Is, you just really develop a keen sense of observing what’s happening in and around the places where you’re growing things, and the plants and their responses to things you’ve done. And this becomes your great teacher. And really, in the end, without sounding too woo woo, it’s absolutely true that the plants will actually tell you what they need. I’m not talking about hearing voices, I’m talking about, your observation will then translate into real action. And so, I just encourage people to jump in and do it. Not a large scale to start with, but on some scale. And consider that part of your responsibility as a human being today, is to, you described it as tuition, I describe it as a basic, fundamental responsibility that every human has. To participate in some real way, with their own hands, in how their food comes to them. And again, that does not have to be anything but a few herbs in a box.

Adam Taggart: Right. Well, so, for those who are looking to, or inspired to take action here, so you talked about, ways in which you can secure the right kind of soil to actually do the growing in. But in terms of actually securing the space itself, what’s involved there? Do you need to have some pull from the community first, looking for a neighborhood to revitalize, or can you just go knock on the door of a city council? I mean, how does — what are some of the ways people can actually this kick started in their own areas?

Michael Ableman: Well, it’s a good question. And there’s an entire chapter in the book called “The Urgency of Spring”, which really was about the fact that we were — the first year we were trying to get going, we were waiting for the wheels of the city to move fast enough to give us the amazing array of permits that were required to do what we’re doing. I have to tell you that the scale we’re operating on in Vancouver, there are no municipal codes that actually address agriculture on that scale. So we essentially had to invent the process. And we were fortunate, we have a mayor, former organic farmer, friend of mine, city manager, and a city council who were extremely on board. But in the end, in spite of the high-level permission and support, by the time all this made its way through the complexity of the municipal bureaucracy, we still were paying thirty, forty thousand dollars a site just for all the permit process, and the environmental assessments, etcetera. And the process was so cumbersome.

That is all now beginning to shift, not just in Vancouver, but in cities all over North America. I think if people are wanting to do something on the kind of scale we’re doing it on, it’s a big haul to pull it off. Money has to be raised, and bureaucratic support has to be generated, and you really have to have a lot of patience. If you’re talking about something about doing something on a family scale, or neighborhood scale, which I really encourage, I think the options are much greater and the cost and municipal challenges are much fewer, much less. And so, I think that backyards and front yards are such an incredible resource that is terribly wasted, for the most part, on things like lawns, which have no place in especially Western landscapes. That’s the worst possible idea.

And California, where I farmed for over 30 years, I will say to my fellow Californians, the drought may have been relieved this year, but California is still essentially an arid climate. And I encourage people to grow within the ecological limitations of where they’re growing. So, California, you can grow everything, but please consider that a lawn is not an appropriate use of resources. Food would be a wonderful thing to be doing in front and backyards. And when you look at the vast amount of land that is dedicated to lawn spaces, the conversion of those alone would have a dynamic and profound impact on food security in those communities, on the level that’s just —

Adam Taggart: Not to mention water security, too.

Michael Ableman: Not to mention water security, exactly. Which, I think, you can’t talk about one without discussing the other. So I think that — I don’t see obstacles as much as I see opportunities. And I certainly see incredible opportunity for communities to take more responsibility for this and use those smaller spaces.

Adam Taggart: Great. Great. All right. So just a couple of last, quick tactical questions, and then we’ll get to the social side of things. So, Michael, in terms of the food that’s being produced by the employees there at the Street Farm, is that food mostly just going to them and their families, or is it actually being sold at farmer’s markets, or in stores, or whatnot?

Michael Ableman: Yeah, it’s a good question. I mean, when we started meeting with organizations on the downtown eastside, all of whom are devoted to the social improvement of the members of that community, which as I described, these are folks who’ve had a pretty tough go. People from those organizations, they wanted to do everything. They wanted to feed the community, they wanted to provide jobs, there was a whole range. And I said, look, we can’t do everything. Let’s find out, let’s really get down to what is really important here. And in the end, for the population we were wanting to serve, it was the jobs.

What we’ve set up, had a profound impact on people’s lives, but it was such a simple solution. It was meaningful work. And so, as a result of that, we have stayed very focused and while we give away, probably, I don’t know, around 10,000 pounds of food every year to local soup kitchens and organizations, the more food we give away, I always look at that as dollars we’ve taken out of the pockets of the people we’re employing, or the potential additional people we could employ. So I don’t see that — although it sounds strange to say, but for our folks, we want to sell every single leaf, every fruit, every root in order to provide income — because these are paid positions — to our staff and to be able to hire more people. So while I’m happy that the seconds, the culls as we call them in the farming business, are going to local soup kitchens, I’m not happy that they’re not sold because for us, our primary goal is employment. And we’ve stayed focused on that.

Now, our staff have access to that food for their own personal use, but again, we’re producing 25 tons of food annually. So, way more than staff could use, and so, we’re selling to high-end restaurants, we’re selling to farmer’s markets, we have a community supported agriculture program. So, we’re involved with marketing most of that food.

Adam Taggart: That’s great. So you actually run a CSA off of that, those profits?

Michael Ableman: We do. Until this year, it was a more traditional one where we were either delivering boxes of food, we had a couple corporate chairs, corporations that were — had solicited all their staff and we were delivering truckloads of boxes. Now, we’re doing strictly a full choice, market-based debit system CSA, where people actually come to the market with a card and they pick up, they can choose whatever they want. Because we found that, choice was really a big deal for folks. They did not want the farm to be choosing for them, some people didn’t want kale every week, they wanted something else.

Adam Taggart: I was involved in a CSA last year and we used to call that season, fifty shades of kale.

Michael Ableman: That’s great. That’s a good line. Can I borrow that? I like it.

Adam Taggart: Yeah, feel free. Steal away. Yeah. Well, that’s great. And are you finding that the community is really receptive to truly locally grown food? I mean, I’m sure when you’re knocking on doors initially, it’s got to be sort of a foreign concept to some of these people, wait a minute, you grew that here?

Michael Ableman: Yeah, well, you know about local food systems, this is uber-local. In our case, we can say the food was grown down the street, let alone 10 or 20 miles away. And so, yes, there are a lot of folks who really love what we’re doing. I’m very careful about this. We have this very strong social mission, which is, as I said, our main goal. But I don’t really want people buying our food out of some sense of charity, or because they support our mission, or even if it’s because it’s organic or otherwise. I want them to buy it because it’s the best food. And if not, if we’re not living up to that standard, they should go to somebody else. And because, I think we first and foremost have a responsibility no matter what the issues are of the people we employ, to grow food at a very high level. We really hold all of our staff to that level. We’re supplying many of Vancouver’s top restaurants, with chefs that are extremely discerning. And so, we’re trying to do something at a very high quality level.

We have a policy at the farmer’s markets, whereby, our downtown eastside staff, we have one or two people from the downtown eastside front and center at every market, that’s part of our policy. We don’t hide them away. And that gives the public a chance to deal with their own issues when they see somebody offering them a sample of food, that doesn’t look like a farmer, or looks like somebody who’s definitely been on the streets. They can deal with those issues, and for our staff, it allows them to work on and improve their own social skills, which they’re sometimes uncomfortable with. And so, this has proven to be a very successful strategy. We’re trying to hold the high-quality products and the social piece front and center for all to see.

And there’s been some negative repercussions to that approach as well. I can tell you that some people steer away from us because they might be worried about the food grown by somebody that doesn’t look like a farmer. But it’s our responsibility to our staff.

Adam Taggart: Right. Well, and it sounds like that’s not constraining your growth. It sounds like there’s a lot more people who are openminded than there are close minded.

Michael Ableman: Absolutely. And again, if the quality of our products was not good and we were just trying to sell stuff based on our story, it would not work. The products are really good quality and hopefully people see that and they buy on that basis. And we have a good following as a result of that. And we’re up against, we’re in the marketplace competing with some Big Earl farms and we have to hold our own.

Adam Taggart: Well, and that’s great because the long-term sustainability of any endeavor like yours is definitely rooted in its financial sustainability. And so, if you’re able to make this thing profitable, a. great kudos to you and I’m hoping it inspires all those listening that this is not just a good thing to do, like we talked about earlier in the podcast, but it can actually make good business sense.

Michael Ableman: Yeah, and just a comment on that, for clarity’s sake, I mean, we generate about three hundred and fifty thousand dollars in gross income in earned revenue annually on products grown and sold. But our budget is closer to seven hundred thousand dollars a year, and the other half of that budget goes to support the social component of what we’re doing. If you were going to run just a farm business in the city, you would hire people who were capable, who were not dealing with personal issues, drug issues, etcetera. But we are not able to operate on the same playing field, and so, we do a lot of trainings, we have a breakfast program, we have to buy rain gear for people, we have to take people to the hospital when they need it, we have to go — I mean, hook them up with various social services. There’s a whole range of work that we do that is certainly out of the normal farm operations purview for their staff.

And all this costs money. We can’t always operate on the same — with the same production levels or efficiency levels as a regular farm would, although, we’re pushing for that. So just to be clear, as the charitable end of our operation, we do have to raise some money as well, to support the half of our budget which we can’t support with products grown and sold. And that was something I’ve had a hard time with because as a farmer, I never felt that I wanted to have this operation — we won’t have our hands out forever, but it really is very much tied to the social agenda that’s key in our work.

Adam Taggart: Right. Well, I appreciate you clarifying that and let’s go in there now. Because you really are — you do a mission, right? You’re trying to create high-quality grade produce in an urban environment, and you’re trying to rebuild communities by providing jobs to people who have really fallen pretty far down life’s ladder. I’ve got a copy of your book here in my hand. And for those listening, it’s full of really beautiful pictures of what they’ve been able to do, and also, a lot of pictures of the farmers themselves, and Michael’s right, a lot of these people don’t look like your traditional farmers. I think the tattoos on many of these folks are more colorful than the produce itself. But in addition to the pictures, there’s lots of great individual stories in here about people who talk about how this not only turne