In a city like Washington, where experts and advocates are working to improve air quality and build sustainable food systems, green spaces like urban agriculture sites are necessary. Since farms and gardens in the region help safeguard the environment, tackle food apartheid, and help residents reconnect to the land, local farmers are pushing to protect these spaces.
Urban agriculture, defined by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) as encompassing the cultivation, processing and distribution of agricultural produce in urban and suburban areas, often utilizes sustainable growing practices that benefit both the planet and its people. Some of these techniques include cover cropping, heirloom seed farming and biointensive growing methods.
“We are in a farming illiterate society,” Mchezaji “Che” Axum told The Informer, “because many of us [are] so many generations removed from the farm. Sometimes it takes one generation to be away from farming, [and] that particular family or people just forget about even knowing how to do it.”
Axum is the director of the University of the District of Columbia’s (UDC) College of Agriculture, Urban Sustainability and Environmental Sciences (CAUSES) and its Center for Urban Agriculture and Gardening Education (CUAGE). Since CAUSES was established in 2010 and CUAGE in 2013, they have been part of efforts to increase education about farming and to prioritize these agricultural spaces in the city.
CAUSE’s Firebird Research Farm, Van Ness Urban Food Hub, East Capitol Urban Farm, Lamond-Riggs Urban Food Hub and P.R. Urban Food Hub are just some of the 236 urban agriculture sites in the District.
Through local growers’ passion for creating access to food while conserving the region’s environmental health, the city inches closer to meeting its Sustainable D.C. 2.0 goal of adding 20 additional acres of land into cultivation for growing food by 2032. Since vegetation slows the heat-dependent reactions that form smog, achieving this goal could help the city mitigate its ozone pollution, which has been a hurdle when tackling air pollution.
Fulfilling this sustainability goal could also help tackle the food insecurity experienced by approximately 22% of the region’s households.
“It’s urgent work,” chef, filmmaker and farmer, Jamaica Kalika, told The Informer. “It’s super necessary, especially in this day and age. You will always need food. [It] is an essential for everybody on this earth.”
Protecting Tomorrow with Yesterday’s Techniques
Ever since working in commercial kitchens, Kalika became interested in learning about the life cycle of food — where and how it grew and ended up in the kitchen and on people’s plates. One of the most critical components of food production is the soil, as its nutrients feed the plant and help it grow. This is why maintaining soil health is crucial.
As the D.C., Maryland and Virginia region (DMV) was part of the tobacco colonies in the 1600s, it suffered the consequences of monocropping — the practice of growing large quantities of a singular crop on the same land every year. Through this practice, soil erosion becomes more probable, which can release carbon back into the atmosphere and also cause particle pollution that can harm humans’ and animals’ lungs.
To protect soil health, some growers have been looking into the past.
“I think a lot of Black farmers… are turning toward indigenous technologies and really ancestral ways and traditions of growing food that is better for the earth, for the environment and better in terms of the health of the food they’re growing and feeding people,” Kalika told The Informer.
One of these methods is planting cover crops, which are any crop grown with the intention of covering the soil in between growing seasons. These plants, such as rye, buckwheat, okra, clover and others, are meant to renew the soil after cash crops strip it of its nutrients. Some cover crops are considered “nitrogen fixers,” meaning they can extract nitrogen from the air and administer it to the soil, increasing fertility and replacing nitrogen fertilizers.
This method could directly reduce ozone, because synthetic nitrogen from fertilizers can pollute the air if plants don’t completely utilize it in their growing process. When an excess of nitrogen is present in the air, ground-level ozone is more likely to form.
Many of the plants with nitrogen-fixing properties are perennials — plants that continue to grow each year without needing to be replanted. One of the many goals of the Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance (UCFA), a nonprofit organization aimed at training people in heirloom seed growing, is to educate about the benefits of perennials.
“Nuts and berries [are] super good examples of perennial crops that keep Mama Earth covered, and she rewards us with some deliciousness,” Bonnetta Adeeb, one of UCFA’s founding members, told The Informer.
While speaking with The Informer, Adeeb began praising some blooming elderberries in her garden that had caught her eye. She said the plant was easy to propagate, which is the process of producing a new plant from an existing one. This reminded her of another plant she deems excellent to propagate.
“I have a fig tree that my uncle gave my mother 20 years ago,” Adeeb told The Informer. “You can take cuttings [throughout] the year, and those fig trees will reproduce from a cutting, and as we teach those skills, it allows each one of us to do our part in sequestering carbon and reducing our footprint.”
UCFA chose to focus on heirloom seed-growing due to the practice’s sustainability. When an heirloom crop is planted, it grows and deposits a seed that a person can harvest and plant, eliminating the need to repurchase that plant as long as the cycle is continued. As the cycle progresses, the crops become more resilient against climate, preserve genetic biodiversity and become something to be treasured from the past, directly connecting people, especially Black and indigenous farmers, to their ancestral growing roots.
Adeeb sees that the continuation of these farming traditions is a way to honor the earth, increase food sovereignty and reclaim the agriculture industry.
“It’s Black power,” Adeeb told The Informer. “We’re living in a country that really isn’t our best friend. We have to be taking control of ourselves, our lives, our food, our education and our future.”
Another way of farming that connects people to historical growing traditions is biointensive agriculture, which maximizes the amount of crops grown on a small plot of land only using soil, water, air, sun and hand tools. This type of agricultural practice produces more food that is nutrient-dense and biodiverse, benefitting both environmental and public health.
One of the biointensive practices taught on UDC’s agriculture sites that derives from the Guinean highland region of Fouta Djallon is sheet mulching, a no-digging gardening process in which gardeners make compost in the spot where they want new garden beds. This technique mitigates weed growth and encourages soil and plant health.
Axum hopes that through education with CAUSES and CUAGE, future Black farmers can be reminded that the community was farming long before enslavement, and that it’s something to cherish. He hopes that more land in the District will be used for cultivating healthy, accessible, sustainably-grown food.
“The first true sustainable urban agriculture was created in the Nile Valley, so we should be celebrated just for that,” Axum told The Informer. “We have a long history of farming, but it doesn’t start with [enslavement]; it starts way before that. So the more we know that, I think the more we will embrace it.”
