Mill Creek, NJ Urban Farm Expands Greenhouses, Community Spirit
Mill Creek, NJ Urban Farm Expands Greenhouses, Community Spirit
May 24, 2018
Gateway Community Action Partnership Director of Agriculture and Food Initiatives Marcus Weaver, at left, with Bridgeton Mayor Albert B. Kelly, in front of two new greenhouses at Mill Creek Urban Farm Wednesday, May 23, 2018. The greenhouses were built with a $250,000 grant from the TD Charitable Foundation.
BRIDGETON — Two new greenhouses at the nonprofit Mill Creek Urban Farm will soon be filled with towering tomato and cucumber plants, grown hydroponically to provide year-round produce to food pantries, senior centers, restaurants and schools.
Built with a $250,000 grant from the TD Charitable Foundation, they were open for a tour and ribbon-cutting Wednesday. The farm is on the five-acre site of a former public housing project on Ronald Bowman Way, which used to be called Mill Street.
“I grew up here. My father and grandfather grew up on this street,” said Bridgeton Mayor Albert B. Kelly, president and CEO of the Gateway Community Action Partnership that runs the farm, now in its ninth season. “It’s a personal triumph to me to be able to utilize the street I once played on and lived on for something positive and productive for our community.”
Gateway CAP runs daycare, housing, family support and other programs for much of South Jersey and Philadelphia.
The farm started as a way to address food insecurity in the area, Kelly said. About 30 percent of the 24,505 people who live in Bridgeton live in poverty, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That means they live on less than about $25,000 per year for a family of four.
Bridgeton's median household income was $35,417 in 2016.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture lists Bridgeton as a food desert, in spite of being located in a rural county with many farms. Being a food desert means at least 33 percent of the population has low access to a supermarket or large grocery store.
Some of what the farm grows is donated to CAP's emergency food pantry, senior centers, and soup kitchens, and some are sold to support the farm, said Marcus Weaver, Gateway CAP director of agriculture and food initiatives. The farm sells to the Bridgeton School District, local farm markets, and others.
“Our biggest customer is a broker supplying the North Jersey restaurant market,” Weaver said. “The farm is not set up as a farm stand or for retail. But a few people show up at the farm and ask, ‘What do you have today?’ We are happy to sell them whatever we have.”
The new greenhouses add 5,376 square feet of new growing space, Weaver said.
The farm previously had just three greenhouses, where it has grown lettuces and other salad greens, shiitake mushrooms, tomatoes, eggplants, broccoli, squash, green beans and melons. It also grows in about 1,300 EarthBoxes, an outdoor container gardening system that increases yield over conventional methods.
Weaver said produce grown hydroponically develop roots in a medium that includes ground-up coconut hulls. But the plants take all their nutrients from a solution in water.
Compared to traditional growing methods, hydroponic growing produces 8 to 15 times more product and takes one-tenth of the water, Weaver said. And it produces all year, rather than in a compact growing season.
The housing project was torn down about 30 years ago because the houses were sinking, Kelly said.
“(The land) laid vacant for 20 years, until we developed a relationship with the housing authority, started a container garden that’s now grown to greenhouses,” Kelly said.
Three-quarters of the new space will be used to produce tomatoes, and the rest will produce seedless cucumbers, Weaver said.
Warren DeShields, director of food services for Bridgeton Public Schools, said the district prepares 4,000 meals a day and buys produce from the farm.
Weaver said the farm is about more than just growing food.
“This work provides an opportunity for education, to be able to demonstrate how food grows,” he said, for visiting students and the general public.
The new production capacity will allow the farm to hire three new full-time workers, Kelly said.
“No previous farming experience necessary,” Kelly said. Applications are available on the website at www.gatewaycap.org.
Contact: 609-272-7219
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In my first job after college got paid to read the New York Times and summarize articles for an early online database. First reporting job was with The Daily Record in Parsippany. I have also worked in nonprofits, and have been with The Press since 1990.