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Urban Oasis Project Launches CSA Program
Since 2009, Art Friedrich, co-founder of Urban Oasis Project, has had one goal in mind: to make healthy, local food more accessible to all
JOSIE GULLIKSEN | OCTOBER 2, 2020
Fresh produce boxes like this will be part of the Urban Oasis Project's CSA program. Photo courtesy of Urban Oasis Project
Fresh produce boxes like this will be part of the Urban Oasis Project's CSA program.
Since 2009, Art Friedrich, co-founder of Urban Oasis Project, has had one goal in mind: to make healthy, local food more accessible to all.
Friedrich and his group of volunteers do this by teaching people in underserved communities to start and maintain food gardens. They also connect consumers to local produce through farmers' markets and fruit and vegetable subscription programs in conjunction with various health clinics.
Five years ago, Urban Oasis operated the CSA (community-supported agriculture) program for the Farm at Verde Gardens. That experience, and urging from its loyal customers to start a program of its own, prompted Friedrich to kick one-off.
The weekly CSA box will cost a flat fee of $40. Inside, customers will find a surprise assortment of locally grown produce.
The CSA program is a win-win for farmers and consumers alike, Friedrich says. “We get to buy more from local farms and the customers get a premium, first-dibs selection of what’s available. Because of the standardization and commitment, we will be able to offer more produce for less price."
For the program, Urban Oasis will be drawn from multiple farms they’ve been working with for years, plus any new local ones they can find, Friedrich adds. It will be a multifarm CSA," he says. "It will be a shorter commitment than the usual CSA because we have a lot more flexibility since we also run farm stands at so many farmers' markets.
Since the coronavirus pandemic closed Urban Oasis' in-person farmers' markets around town, Friedrich and his volunteers have found a new, larger home at Radiate Fermentation Lab in Allapattah to store, pack, and sort produce.
“This current site is much more developed and helps us keep everything fresh. We converted an old walk-in fridge into our packing area, so it keeps everything nice and cool,” Friedrich says.
Since the pandemic descended, Urban Oasis has been packing community food boxes to give to families in need. Before that, it had staged a variety of special events for different groups, including a Thanksgiving giveaway for the Miami Dade College Hialeah campus. "We’ve done this for the past few years and it’s very similar to what we’ve done with the fruit and vegetable subscription program," Friedrich says.
Friedrich says all of Urban Oasis' projects serve one main goal. “We want to connect people to fresh, seasonal produce. The online store and our pick-up and delivery gives people another option. And because we are used to doing deliveries now, CSA feels like a very natural extension of what we do,” he says.
Creating the CSA program is also a homage to horticulturist Booker T. Whatley, an agriculture professor at Tuskegee University in Alabama who is credited with introducing the CSA model to the United States in the 1960s. Sam Vazquez, who with Ashley Varela runs Urban Oasis’ Project Maracuya, a CSA-style SNAP box program for families experiencing food injustice for a variety of reasons, did extensive research on Whatley.
“CSA has been an important part in the growth of the local food movement therefore, it’s imperative for the public to know that the roots of this very important development of farms came from an African-American farmer,” Friedrich says.
Friedrich anticipates reopening Urban Oasis' farmers' markets at Legion Park and the Arsht Center the weekend of October 24, and in South Miami and Vizcaya on November 7.
“We’re excited to get the physical markets back open but even when they do, we plan to keep the online market as long as people keep ordering and, of course, keep up the CSA Program,” says the Urban Oasis cofounder.
Order an Urban Oasis CSA box at urbanoasisproject.org.
Josie Gulliksen is a Miami native who's been covering Miami's arts and culture scene for more than two decades. She loves biking, spending time in nature, eating out, and attending all types of events. She dreams of one day writing a play and being on the stage.
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Josie Gulliksen FOLLOW: Twitter: @josiegullikse
Local Company Providing Fresh Produce, Tools to Grow It All Year Long
Since opening its doors last July, Cold Acre Food Systems has been perfecting its indoor hydroponic growing systems for greens and herbs that can be harvested continually throughout the year.
August 6, 2020
The Yukon isn’t the place in the world most suited to year-round farming, given its long winters and short, unpredictable summers, but one local company is trying to change that.
Since opening its doors last July, Cold Acre Food Systems has been perfecting its indoor hydroponic growing systems for greens and herbs that can be harvested continually throughout the year.“
Hydroponics is a very old growing system and can be done in different methods,” said Carl Burgess, Cold Acre Food Systems CEO. “It’s essentially nutrient water delivered to roots to grow plants.”
The benefit of it in food production for a community sense is that there is less soil management because there is no soil management and in that way it can stabilize production year-round,” Burgess added.
The company does the majority of its farming in two shipping container-style growing facilities located on Titanium Way in the Marwell industrial area.“
Right now we are operating 6,000 planting spaces,” Burgess said. “One of those (containers) is basically equivalent to an acre of a market garden,” and “one container can give, at minimum, a weekly supply of greens to about 100 to 200 people.”
Denise Gordon, Cold Acre Food Systems lead grower, holds trays of microgreens in front of their growing unit in Whitehorse on July 26, 2020. (Crystal Schick/Yukon News)
Environmentally, the system uses 10 to 20 percent less water than the traditional method of growing, Burgess said. The carbon footprint is also greatly reduced since produce only has to travel a couple of blocks to its destination compared to being shipped on trucks, food waste is almost nonexistent because of the high reliability of growing indoors, the company uses compostable packaging, and there are no storage facilities.“
We harvest and go,” Burgess said. “It’s usually within two hours of harvesting that the produce is in the grocery stores or dropped off at someone’s home.”
What began as some test lettuce crops have turned into a diverse selection of leafy greens, like bok choy, arugula, kale, mizuna, and rainbow chard, as well as several different types of microgreens, which are similar to sprouts in appearance, and basil. The company is also experimenting with growing edible flowers and mushrooms.
Cold Acre Food Systems currently sells the vegetables it grows to several grocery stores in Whitehorse, restaurants, and cafes, and through a subscription box.“
The last year of business has been lots of fun,” Burgess said. “We went from being a very small food producer to a medium-sized food producer (in the Yukon).”
But selling the vegetables it grows isn’t the end game for this company. Building, selling, and installing growing systems is also part of Cold Acre’s business model. The company can build custom growing facilities for just about any client, from smaller at-home units to the larger commercial shipping container-style units.
Right now there are two large units that will soon be providing fresh produce to Yukon communities. The first, in partnership with the University of Calgary, is at the Kluane Lake Research Station near Silver City. Once it is up and running it will provide food to the Haines Junction and Burwash Landing areas. The second, currently still in Whitehorse, is owned by Na-Cho Nyäk Dun Development Corporation (NNDDC) and will be ready to feed people in the Mayo area this spring.
Leafy greens grow under neon lights in a shipping container style facility in Whitehorse on July 26, 2020. (Crystal Schick/Yukon News)“
We are currently fabricating a small-scale unit for demonstration/growing inside the Mayo Foods Store as part of the NNDDC project,” said Burgess.
The objective of Cold Acre Food Systems is to reduce food scarcity in the North and to enable everyone access to fresh produce year-round. “Success will be twofold,” said Burgess. “Our goal is to activate indoor growing. So success will look like a handful of growing facilities around that we either deployed or helped deploy. And success for us looks like a large growing facility that’s displacing a number of food products that right now are coming up the road and doing that cost effectively for consumers.”
Contact Crystal Schick at crystal.schick@yukon-news.com
As Food Supply Chain Breaks Down, Farm-To-Door CSAs Take Off
Redmond, a founding partner of the 450-acre, organic Full Belly Farm, is busier than ever trying to ramp up production to meet soaring demand. "The interest in getting local, fresh, organic produce just has skyrocketed during this crisis," Redmond said.
By Eric Westervelt | NPR | May 10, 2020
Images of some American farmers dumping milk, plowing under crops and tossing perishables amid sagging demand and falling prices during the deadly coronavirus pandemic has made for dramatic TV.
But it's not the whole story.
"We had a reporter call here and say, 'We want to see some produce rotting in the field and milk going down the drains,' " said Judith Redmond, a longtime farmer in California's Capay Valley, northwest of Sacramento. "And I said, 'Well, actually, that's not what's happening in the Capay Valley.' "
Redmond, a founding partner of the 450-acre, organic Full Belly Farm, is busier than ever trying to ramp up production to meet soaring demand.
From California to Maine, the movement known as community supported agriculture (CSA) is booming. Members buy a share of a farm's often organic harvest that gets delivered weekly in a box. CSA programs almost everywhere report a surge in memberships and growing waiting lists.
"The interest in getting local, fresh, organic produce just has skyrocketed during this crisis," Redmond said.
As with many farms, the restaurant and farmers market sides of her business have cratered. But the CSA side, which includes business across the San Francisco Bay Area, has jumped to 2,000 boxes a week. "We've doubled our CSA box numbers and quadrupled our add-ons like wheat flour, oils like olive oil, nuts, fruit juices, even yarn," Redmond said.
CSAs have long been something of a niche market that have never really penetrated the mainstream. Yet, the coronavirus just might prove to be sparking community supported agriculture's breakout moment.
"In all the time that we've worked with CSAs, which is several decades, we've never seen a surge as quickly as we have of the last few weeks," said Evan Wiig with the Community Alliance with Family Farmers, which supports and lobbies on behalf of CSAs across California.
"It's sort of a heyday for CSAs," he said. "Farmers that were starting in March struggling to get enough members for the season – which we see every year — by mid-March were dealing with waiting lists with hundreds of people trying to get in."
The coronavirus has exposed the vulnerabilities and fragility of the U.S. global agribusiness supply chain. The CSA model's focus on local and fresh is ideally suited for a crisis that has people deeply worried about germs on lettuce, beets or broccoli as the crops make their way from the field to the kitchen counter.
People "don't want that many hands on their food right now," said Sarah Voiland. "And we can offer that."
She and her husband, Ryan, run the organic CSA Red Fire Farm, in the Connecticut River Valley outside of Amherst, Mass.
The low-touch factor is an especially big draw at a time when a trip to a supermarket can involve masks, social-distancing lines, hand sanitizer and angst. "The supply chain with CSA is very short. It's like, we harvest the produce and you come pick it up" at a local site, she said.
"We think people's habits will shift because of this" pandemic, said John Tecklin, who runs the CSA Mountain Bounty Farm, serving the northern California communities around Truckee, Nevada City and Lake Tahoe, as well as Reno, Nev. "For a lot of them, it's kind of a wake-up call: 'what's really important to you?' "
In a move spurred partly by the pandemic, and a sign of the changing times for CSAs, Tecklin's farm is now entering into a partnership called Forever Farms with a non-profit land trust, a local food advocacy group and a food cooperative to help secure ownership of part of the farm's land in perpetuity.
"It's local food security for our community," Tecklin said. "In these times it's more important than ever now."
He believes that's the same motivation driving the recent doubling of interest in his CSA. "Everyone is just all of a sudden, 'Wow this is the kind of thing we need, we need local farmers who we're dealing with directly.' "
Some farms, large and small, that relied on restaurant, hotel, school and university food-service contracts have been hit hard. Many are now scrambling to adapt to a CSA-type model, at least in the short term, to survive. Some are now partnering with CSAs in a mutually beneficial pact that helps CSAs meet growing demand while offering an outlet for suffering farms.
Federal and state governments are also now taking a page from CSAs. As part of its coronavirus relief, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has put out a call for $3 billion in contracts for farmers to produce and deliver fresh produce and dairy boxes to food banks, many of which are struggling to support the growing ranks of Americans who are hurting and out of work.
Some states are trying to redirect to charities farm produce that in normal times would have headed to restaurants and hotels. California has expanded funding to help cover the costs of harvesting, packaging and transporting fresh fruits and vegetables from farms to local food banks. The state's Farm to Family Program, a partnership with the California Association of Food Banks (CAFB) and the USDA, provides fresh produce to needy households across the state.
CSAs still represent a very small slice of America's $100 billion farm economy. But their renaissance marks a rare bit of good economic news for an agriculture industry battered by trade wars, threatened by climate change and now facing a global pandemic.
And the new success brings new challenges. Many CSAs are now scrambling to find additional labor to plant, harvest and deliver produce to meet the moment. "We're totally able to produce so much more than we are, but we don't have the workers," said Redmond, of Full Belly Farm. "We're so stressed out by that that, you know, just knowing that there's going to be a difficult time getting workers, it just doesn't make any sense to ramp up production."
A big question for CSAs is whether the renewed interest represents a fleeting reaction to fear or a more sustainable, long-term trend.
"When the lockdown or shelter-in-place started in March, people were just a little panicked," Redmond said. "And what we're trying to do is turn it into a longer-term relationship with our farm and those members so that they see that there's a tremendous advantage of getting food locally from people that they know."
The Sickness In Our Food Supply
The very system that made possible the bounty of the American supermarket—its vaunted efficiency and ability to “pile it high and sell it cheap”—suddenly seems questionable, if not misguided
By Michael Pollan | The New York Review of Books | June 11, 2020 Issue
“Only when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett observed, “do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” For our society, the Covid-19 pandemic represents an ebb tide of historic proportions, one that is laying bare vulnerabilities and inequities that in normal times have gone undiscovered. Nowhere is this more evident than in the American food system. A series of shocks has exposed weak links in our food chain that threaten to leave grocery shelves as patchy and unpredictable as those in the former Soviet bloc. The very system that made possible the bounty of the American supermarket—its vaunted efficiency and ability to “pile it high and sell it cheap”—suddenly seems questionable, if not misguided. But the problems the novel coronavirus has revealed are not limited to the way we produce and distribute food. They also show up on our plates, since the diet on offer at the end of the industrial food chain is linked to precisely the types of chronic disease that render us more vulnerable to Covid-19.
The juxtaposition of images in the news of farmers destroying crops and dumping milk with empty supermarket shelves or hungry Americans lining up for hours at food banks tells a story of economic efficiency gone mad. Today the US actually has two separate food chains, each supplying roughly half of the market. The retail food chain links one set of farmers to grocery stores, and a second chain links a different set of farmers to institutional purchasers of food, such as restaurants, schools, and corporate offices. With the shutting down of much of the economy, as Americans stay home, this second food chain has essentially collapsed. But because of the way the industry has developed over the past several decades, it’s virtually impossible to reroute food normally sold in bulk to institutions to the retail outlets now clamoring for it. There’s still plenty of food coming from American farms, but no easy way to get it where it’s needed.
How did we end up here? The story begins early in the Reagan administration, when the Justice Department rewrote the rules of antitrust enforcement: if a proposed merger promised to lead to greater marketplace “efficiency”—the watchword—and wouldn’t harm the consumer, i.e., didn’t raise prices, it would be approved. (It’s worth noting that the word “consumer” appears nowhere in the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, passed in 1890. The law sought to protect producers—including farmers—and our politics from undue concentrations of corporate power.)1 The new policy, which subsequent administrations have left in place, propelled a wave of mergers and acquisitions in the food industry. As the industry has grown steadily more concentrated since the 1980s, it has also grown much more specialized, with a tiny number of large corporations dominating each link in the supply chain. One chicken farmer interviewed recently in Washington Monthly, who sells millions of eggs into the liquified egg market, destined for omelets in school cafeterias, lacks the grading equipment and packaging (not to mention the contacts or contracts) to sell his eggs in the retail marketplace.2 That chicken farmer had no choice but to euthanize thousands of hens at a time when eggs are in short supply in many supermarkets.
On April 26, John Tyson, the chairman of Tyson Foods, the second-largest meatpacker in America, took out ads in The New York Times and other newspapers to declare that the food chain was “breaking,” raising the specter of imminent meat shortages as outbreaks of Covid-19 hit the industry.3 Slaughterhouses have become hot zones for contagion, with thousands of workers now out sick and dozens of them dying.4 This should come as no surprise: social distancing is virtually impossible in a modern meat plant, making it an ideal environment for a virus to spread. In recent years, meatpackers have successfully lobbied regulators to increase line speeds, with the result that workers must stand shoulder to shoulder cutting and deboning animals so quickly that they can’t pause long enough to cover a cough, much less go to the bathroom, without carcasses passing them by. Some chicken plant workers, given no regular bathroom breaks, now wear diapers.5 A worker can ask for a break, but the plants are so loud he or she can’t be heard without speaking directly into the ear of a supervisor. Until recently slaughterhouse workers had little or no access to personal protective equipment; many of them were also encouraged to keep working even after exposure to the virus. Add to this the fact that many meat-plant workers are immigrants who live in crowded conditions with little or no access to health care, and you have a population at dangerously high risk of infection.
When the number of Covid-19 cases in America’s slaughterhouses exploded in late April—12,608 confirmed, with forty-nine deaths as of May 11—public health officials and governors began ordering plants to close. It was this threat to the industry’s profitability that led to Tyson’s declaration, which President Trump would have been right to see as a shakedown: the president’s political difficulties could only be compounded by a shortage of meat. In order to reopen their production lines, Tyson and his fellow packers wanted the federal government to step in and preempt local public health authorities; they also needed liability protection, in case workers or their unions sued them for failing to observe health and safety regulations.
Within days of Tyson’s ad, President Trump obliged the meatpackers by invoking the Defense Production Act. After having declined to use it to boost the production of badly needed coronavirus test kits, he now declared meat a “scarce and critical material essential to the national defense.” The executive order took the decision to reopen or close meat plants out of local hands, forced employees back to work without any mandatory safety precautions, and offered their employers some protection from liability for their negligence. On May 8, Tyson reopened a meatpacking plant in Waterloo, Iowa, where more than a thousand workers had tested positive.
The president and America’s meat eaters, not to mention its meat-plant workers, would never have found themselves in this predicament if not for the concentration of the meat industry, which has given us a supply chain so brittle that the closure of a single plant can cause havoc at every step, from farm to supermarket. Four companies now process more than 80 percent of beef cattle in America; another four companies process 57 percent of the hogs. A single Smithfield processing plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, processes 5 percent of the pork Americans eat. When an outbreak of Covid-19 forced the state’s governor to shut that plant down in April, the farmers who raise pigs committed to it were stranded.
Once pigs reach slaughter weight, there’s not much else you can do with them. You can’t afford to keep feeding them; even if you could, the production lines are designed to accommodate pigs up to a certain size and weight, and no larger. Meanwhile, you’ve got baby pigs entering the process, steadily getting fatter. Much the same is true for the hybrid industrial chickens, which, if allowed to live beyond their allotted six or seven weeks, are susceptible to broken bones and heart problems and quickly become too large to hang on the disassembly line. This is why the meat-plant closures forced American farmers to euthanize millions of animals, at a time when food banks were overwhelmed by demand.6
Under normal circumstances, the modern hog or chicken is a marvel of brutal efficiency, bred to produce protein at warp speed when given the right food and pharmaceuticals. So are the factories in which they are killed and cut into parts. These innovations have made meat, which for most of human history has been a luxury, a cheap commodity available to just about all Americans; we now eat, on average, more than nine ounces of meat per person per day, many of us at every meal.7 Covid-19 has brutally exposed the risks that accompany such a system. There will always be a tradeoff between efficiency and resilience (not to mention ethics); the food industry opted for the former, and we are now paying the price.
Imagine how different the story would be if there were still tens of thousands of chicken and pig farmers bringing their animals to hundreds of regional slaughterhouses. An outbreak at any one of them would barely disturb the system; it certainly wouldn’t be front-page news. Meat would probably be more expensive, but the redundancy would render the system more resilient, making breakdowns in the national supply chain unlikely. Successive administrations allowed the industry to consolidate because the efficiencies promised to make meat cheaper for the consumer, which it did. It also gave us an industry so powerful it can enlist the president of the United States in its efforts to bring local health authorities to heel and force reluctant and frightened workers back onto the line.
Another vulnerability that the novel coronavirus has exposed is the paradoxical notion of “essential” workers who are grossly underpaid and whose lives are treated as disposable. It is the men and women who debone chicken carcasses flying down a line at 175 birds a minute, or pick salad greens under the desert sun, or drive refrigerated produce trucks across the country who are keeping us fed and keeping the wheels of our society from flying off. Our utter dependence on them has never been more clear. This should give food and agricultural workers a rare degree of political leverage at the very moment they are being disproportionately infected. Scattered job actions and wildcat strikes are beginning to pop up around the country—at Amazon, Instacart, Whole Foods, Walmart, and some meat plants—as these workers begin to flex their muscle.8 This is probably just the beginning. Perhaps their new leverage will allow them to win the kinds of wages, protections, and benefits that would more accurately reflect their importance to society.
So far, the produce sections of our supermarkets remain comparatively well stocked, but what happens this summer and next fall, if the outbreaks that have crippled the meat industry hit the farm fields? Farmworkers, too, live and work in close proximity, many of them undocumented immigrants crammed into temporary quarters on farms. Lacking benefits like sick pay, not to mention health insurance, they often have no choice but to work even when infected. Many growers depend on guest workers from Mexico to pick their crops; what happens if the pandemic—or the Trump administration, which is using the pandemic to justify even more restrictions on immigration—prevents them from coming north this year?
The food chain is buckling. But it’s worth pointing out that there are parts of it that are adapting and doing relatively well. Local food systems have proved surprisingly resilient. Small, diversified farmers who supply restaurants have had an easier time finding new markets; the popularity of community-supported agriculture (CSA) is taking off, as people who are cooking at home sign up for weekly boxes of produce from regional growers. (The renaissance of home cooking, and baking, is one of the happier consequences of the lockdown, good news both for our health and for farmers who grow actual food, as opposed to commodities like corn and soy.) In many places, farmer’s markets have quickly adjusted to pandemic conditions, instituting social-distancing rules and touchless payment systems. The advantages of local food systems have never been more obvious, and their rapid growth during the past two decades has at least partly insulated many communities from the shocks to the broader food economy.
The pandemic is, willy-nilly, making the case for deindustrializing and decentralizing the American food system, breaking up the meat oligopoly, ensuring that food workers have sick pay and access to health care, and pursuing policies that would sacrifice some degree of efficiency in favor of much greater resilience. Somewhat less obviously, the pandemic is making the case not only for a different food system but for a radically different diet as well.
It’s long been understood that an industrial food system built upon a foundation of commodity crops like corn and soybeans leads to a diet dominated by meat and highly processed food. Most of what we grow in this country is not food exactly, but rather feed for animals and the building blocks from which fast food, snacks, soda, and all the other wonders of food processing, such as high-fructose corn syrup, are manufactured. While some sectors of agriculture are struggling during the pandemic, we can expect the corn and soybean crop to escape more or less unscathed. That’s because it takes remarkably little labor—typically a single farmer on a tractor, working alone—to plant and harvest thousands of acres of these crops. So processed foods should be the last kind to disappear from supermarket shelves.
Unfortunately, a diet dominated by such foods (as well as lots of meat and little in the way of vegetables or fruit—the so-called Western diet) predisposes us to obesity and chronic diseases such as hypertension and type-2 diabetes. These “underlying conditions” happen to be among the strongest predictors that an individual infected with Covid-19 will end up in the hospital with a severe case of the disease; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have reported that 49 percent of the people hospitalized for Covid-19 had preexisting hypertension, 48 percent were obese, and 28 percent had diabetes.9
Why these particular conditions should worsen Covid-19 infections might be explained by the fact that all three are symptoms of chronic inflammation, which is a disorder of the body’s immune system. (The Western diet is by itself inflammatory.) One way that Covid-19 kills is by sending the victim’s immune system into hyperdrive, igniting a “cytokine storm” that eventually destroys the lungs and other organs. A new Chinese study conducted in hospitals in Wuhan found that elevated levels of C-reactive protein, a standard marker of inflammation that has been linked to poor diet, “correlated with disease severity and tended to be a good predictor of adverse outcomes.”10
A momentous question awaits us on the far side of the current crisis: Are we willing to address the many vulnerabilities that the novel coronavirus has so dramatically exposed? It’s not hard to imagine a coherent and powerful new politics organized around precisely that principle. It would address the mistreatment of essential workers and gaping holes in the social safety net, including access to health care and sick leave—which we now understand, if we didn’t before, would be a benefit to all of us. It would treat public health as a matter of national security, giving it the kind of resources that threats to national security warrant.
But to be comprehensive, this post-pandemic politics would also need to confront the glaring deficiencies of a food system that has grown so concentrated that it is exquisitely vulnerable to the risks and disruptions now facing us. In addition to protecting the men and women we depend on to feed us, it would also seek to reorganize our agricultural policies to promote health rather than mere production, by paying attention to the quality as well as the quantity of the calories it produces. For even when our food system is functioning “normally,” reliably supplying the supermarket shelves and drive-thrus with cheap and abundant calories, it is killing us—slowly in normal times, swiftly in times like these. The food system we have is not the result of the free market. (There hasn’t been a free market in food since at least the Great Depression.) No, our food system is the product of agricultural and antitrust policies—political choices—that, as has suddenly become plain, stand in urgent need of reform.
—May 12, 2020
An earlier version of this article included an incomplete credit for “‘The Workers Are Being Sacrificed’: As Cases Mounted, Meatpacker JBS Kept People on Crowded Factory Floors,” which was a collaboration between FERN and Mother Jones. The footnote has been amended.
This history is recounted in Barry C. Lynn, Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction (Wiley, 2011), pp. 135–138. ↩
See Claire Kelloway, “Why Are Farmers Destroying Food While Grocery Stores Are Empty?,” Washington Monthly, April 28, 2020. ↩
See “In America, the Virus Threatens a Meat Industry That Is Too Concentrated,” The Economist, April 30, 2020. ↩
See Leah Douglas, “Mapping Covid-19 in Meat and Food Processing Plants,” Food and Environmental Reporting Network (FERN), April 22, 2020. FERN has covered this story extensively and compiled statistics. Also see Esther Honig and Ted Genoways, “‘The Workers Are Being Sacrificed’: As Cases Mounted, Meatpacker JBS Kept People on Crowded Factory Floors,” FERN and Mother Jones, May 1, 2020. Civil Eats, FERN, and Mother Jones have done an excellent job of covering the outbreaks in the meat industry. ↩
See Magaly Licolli, “As Tyson Claims the Food Supply Is Breaking, Its Workers Continue to Suffer,” Civil Eats, April 30, 2020. ↩
See Tyler Whitley, “Don’t Blame Farmers Who Have to Euthanize Their Animals. Blame the Companies They Work For,” Civil Eats, April 30, 2020. ↩
It’s worth remembering that the federal government actively promotes meat consumption in myriad ways, from USDA advertising campaigns—“Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner”—to exempting feedlots from provisions of the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts, to the dietary guidelines it issues and the heavy subsidies it gives for animal feed. ↩
See, for example, Daniel A. Medina, “As Amazon, Walmart, and Others Profit Amid Coronavirus Crisis, Their Essential Workers Plan Unprecedented Strike,” The Intercept, April 28, 2020. ↩
See Shikha Garg et al., “Hospitalization Rates and Characteristics of Patients Hospitalized with Laboratory-Confirmed Coronavirus Disease 2019, COVID-NET, 14 States, March 1–30, 2020,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Vol. 69, No. 15 (April 17, 2020). ↩
See Xiaomin Luo et al., “Prognostic Value of C-Reactive Protein in Patients with COVID-19,” medRxiv, March 23, 2020. The study has not yet been peer-reviewed.
You Must Be Able To Sell Vertically-Farmed Goods At Competitive Prices
Urban Harvest’s owners do see a future in vertical farming but do not believe it will replace ‘normal’ greenhouse cultivation. “It is better to consider vertical farming as a supplement to a greenhouse and full soil farming.
Two years ago, business partners, Alexandre Van Deun and Olivier Paulus, opened one of the very first vertical farms for herbs in Brussels, Belgium. Now, the complete classic herb assortment is grown. Not only for local retailers like Delhaize and Aveve, but also for catering companies and restaurants. The farm's current 1,400m2 has become too small. This duo's next step is, therefore, a new 2,5-hectare farm with 15 cultivation layers.
Urban Harvest is currently located in an old meat market in the heart of Brussels. “The building was standing empty, and we wanted to grow our products locally, close to the consumer,” says Urban Harvest’s Alexandre. “At the moment, we cultivate on five or six layers in a 1,400m2 farm. We have all the traditional pot herbs in our range and also grow special herbs per client orders. Our clients are always interested in novelties. So we are always busy testing new products and growing techniques to respond to their demands.”
Herbz“The two largest retailers that buy our herbs are Delhaize and Aveve. Delhaize sells the herbs under their private label, and at Aveve, from May, they will be sold under their house brand, Herbz. The packaging is completely plastic-free, and on it, you can see that the herbs are grown, sustainably, in a vertical farm."
"In stores, there is no surcharge for vertically-farmed herbs. Sustainability is important to consumers, but they will not pay more for a different cultivation method. We deliberately built our system in such a way that we can supply our products at competitive prices,” continues Van Deun.
Flavor and shelf lifeUrban Harvest cultivates its herbs on a substrate and, according to Van Deun, this contributes to the herbs’ good flavor and the plant’s resilience. “There are crucial aspects. The flavor must win over consumers, but the herb must also store well. Our herbs can easily last a week in someone’s kitchen,” explains Alexandre. “One of the most difficult herbs to grow is mint. We grow our plants from seeds, but it is almost impossible to find mint seeds. In the business, we mainly work with cuttings, making it hard to find good mint seeds. That is a puzzle we have not yet cracked.”
“Automation equals costs”Alexandre and Olivier developed the entire vertical farm themselves. “We were busy building the farm for 16 hours a day, seven days a week. We are very proud of that. Once we got four investors, we were ready for the next step,” continues Van Deun. “Our current and new farms are not completely automated. There are plenty of textbook examples of vertical farms that are not fully automated. There are costs involved with automation that people are not prepared to pay."
"That is why we decided to only focus on processes that make sense to automate. We, therefore, retain a measure of human interaction. Harvesting is still done by hand, and being able to control the quality is a considerable advantage of this. A harvesting robot would not be able to do so. In contrast, planting is automated. There are machines that do this perfectly, so why do it manually?”
Fifteen cultivation layers“We have since burst out of our seams and so, had to go in search of a new location. We will remain in Brussels, with a site that lies adjacent to the channel. We soon want to use the channel to transport raw materials, rather than using road transportation. We are already busy building the new vertical farm at this new location. It will be 2.5 hectares in size, and ten meters tall, so we can grow on 15 layers,” says Alexandre. If all goes to plan, the new farm will be operational in 2021.
Urban Harvest’s owners do see a future in vertical farming but do not believe it will replace ‘normal’ greenhouse cultivation. “It is better to consider vertical farming as a supplement to greenhouse and full soil farming. That is why, nine times out of ten, an idea like a roof greenhouse fails. Why build a conservatory in the middle of a city, on an expensive site? This can easily be done at the edge of town or in the countryside. If something’s production price is too high, there is no sense in investing in it,” concludes Alexandre.
More info
Alexandre Van Deun
alexandre@urbanharvest.eu
Urban Harvest www.urbanharvest.eu
By Sharon De Ridder | FreshPlaza.com | May 7, 2020
Farmer-to-Farmer Harvie Webinars - Managing Customer Friendly Farm Shares And Direct-To-Consumer Marketing Channels
The webinars will occur each Tuesday in November at noon EST / 11 am CST / 10 am MST / 9 am PST
You are invited to a free webinar series - Farmer-to-Farmer Harvie Webinars - managing customer-friendly farm shares and direct-to-consumer marketing channels, brought to you by 3 farmers who use Harvie on their farm.
They will spend about 30 minutes talking about how they use Harvie and how it has benefited their farm business. There will be time for Q-and-A following each webinar.
The webinars will occur each Tuesday in November
at noon EST / 11 am CST / 10 am MST / 9 am PST.
Here is the schedule:
November 12th: Noah from Rora Valley Farm - "How Harvie helps my farm increase financial stability and profitability through selling more product to a highly satisfied membership"
November 19th: Robyn at Park Ridge Organics, "How we pack 350 customized farm shares per week"
November 26th: Curtis from Millsap Farms, "How Harvie Vanquished 'The Dread Of The Empty Box' On Millsap Farm Or "how I learned to stop worrying and love the algorithm..."