Wall Street Journal features Newark’s Burgeoning Urban Agriculture Initiatives

Reprint of August 8, 2012 article in the Wall Street Journal:

Down Home in Newark

New Jersey’s Largest City, Long a Symbol of Decay, Gives Urban Farming a Try

NEWARK—Newark may be known for many things, but its homegrown hydroponic lettuce, chicken coops and bushels of local kale aren’t among them.

But city officials in New Jersey’s largest city are increasingly turning to urban farming as a tool to reclaim vacant land and provide jobs, just as similarly gritty cities like Detroit and Baltimore have already done.

“We want Newark to be a green city,” said Adam Zipkin, Newark’s deputy mayor and the director of the Department of Economic and Housing Development. “It’s an attempt to create a local food system and to grow produce here that we distribute locally.”

Newark, historically a symbol of urban decay, has allocated at least $700,000 in federal grants to urban agriculture projects since 2010, Mr. Zipkin said. In February, Mayor Cory Booker’s administration hired one of the country’s few full-time food-policy coordinators. And the city is home to several weekly farmers’ markets and an ambitious program to train low-level offenders to grow pesticide-free produce on vacant lots.

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Kevin Hagen for The Wall Street JournalMark Kearney, center, leads a group of students on a tour of the Court Street Urban Farm in the Central Ward section of Newark. Mr. Kearney came to the farm after getting out of prison two years ago as part of the Greater Newark Conservancy’s vocational programming for offenders.

The city’s efforts took a leap forward last Wednesday, when the Municipal Council unanimously agreed to allow the city to take over a two-acre lot to build what would be Newark’s largest farm.

The gated South Ward site was acquired by the state Schools Development Authority in 2004 to build a new high school. The district didn’t include the school on its priority list, and it is unlikely a school will be built there in the near future, authority spokeswoman Edye Maier said.

The state hasn’t finalized the agreement, Ms. Maier said, but it is expected to allow the city to use a portion of the property for an urban garden on a six-month basis with an option for renewal. The Greater Newark Conservancy, a nonprofit backing much of the city’s urban farming effort, hopes to begin growing trees and vegetables in the lot by the fall.

“I think there’s a huge interest in buying fresh food here. We still don’t have enough supermarkets in Newark,” said Robin Dougherty, executive director of the conservancy.

The city of 277,140 people was once revered for its food markets. Downtown Mulberry Street was lined with blocks of butchers and produce stalls in an outdoor market that was a destination for the entire city. Around the 1980s, the market shrunk and eventually closed for good. Supermarkets also closed.

But what Newark did have was vacant lots, estimated at more than 1,000 throughout the city. Beginning in 1978, a Rutgers program funded by the U.S. Farm Bill started building community gardens in empty spaces, eventually numbering in the hundreds, said Jan Zientek, department head for the Rutgers Cooperative Extension in Essex County, a backer of the community gardens.

Former Mayor Sharpe James seized many of the gardens for development beginning in the 1990s. “One day they were there and then they were gone,” Ms. Dougherty said.

When he was elected in 2006, Mr. Booker pledged to address the lack of fresh food in Newark and adopt “green” policies. The popular Democrat, who is a co-chair of first lady Michelle Obama‘s initiative to reduce childhood obesity, has since provided assistance to bodegas to buy refrigeration equipment to carry vegetables. A program for city residents to adopt a vacant lot for a dollar a year was promoted and made less bureaucratic, Ms. Dougherty said.

Newark residents have adopted 46 lots, with eight growing a significant amount of produce for the city, according to city officials. Many residents also grow vegetables at homes, including one man who collects old toilets, tubs and appliances to turn them into planters, officials said.

Kevin Hagen for The Wall Street JournalSummer intern Kiara Quinones, 15, at the Court Street Urban Farm.

Newark community groups, universities, hospitals and primary schools have independently started growing produce in the city. Newark Beth Israel Medical Center, for example, is cultivating organic vegetables and herbs in an on-site greenhouse, and high-school students are growing produce on the roof of the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Newark is now home to farmer’s markets of varying sizes five days a week, some of which carry produce grown within the city. “Our tomatoes are really popular and people buy lots of herbs,” said Kim Frankel, a history teacher at the North Star Academy Charter School who coordinated the NJIT rooftop garden.

The city’s most ambitious farm is on an acre of land next to the dilapidated Krueger-Scott Mansion, an 1888 landmark once owned by a city beer barren. In 2009, the conservancy took over part of the property, brought in several tons of soil and started planting vegetables. The “Clean and Green Team,” a city-funded program that employs low-level offenders, provides the labor.

Last year, the farm produced more than 5,000 pounds of produce, Ms. Dougherty said. This year, it is building a chicken coop and an apiary for honey bees. The food is sold at rotating sites throughout the city, including two housing projects.

“It’s very local. These are people without cars. No one drives in from Maplewood,” she said.

Still, Newark’s markets don’t typically attract the throngs that visit those in New York City. A weekly farm-share membership program has started slowly, and sales have been swifter for corn than arugula.

“They weren’t used to the beets,” said Baye Adofo-Wilson, founder of the Lincoln Park Coast Cultural District, a Newark group that ran a small hydroponic farm on a vacant lot for two years. It shut down the farm this year to build a new one, which will include cooking classes.

Farming in a city isn’t easy. Newark’s soil tends to be contaminated, city officials said, and the conservancy spends two days a week bringing soil and water to city community gardens. Farming is a good temporary use of open land in a city like Newark, but eventually the priority should be placed on housing, said Chris Sturm, senior director of state policy at New Jersey Future, a policy group.

“It’s not like Detroit and Baltimore where the land is begging for productive uses,” she said.

Mr. Dougherty said crime in the gardens has been minimal. Beer bottles occasionally get tossed into them, and a prized watermelon was recently stolen. But local residents tend to protect the gardens as their own, she said.

“These were once barren eyesores,” she said about the vacant lots. Now, “it’s a good use of public resources,” she said.

Write to Heather Haddon at heather.haddon@wsj.com