Professor Mike Hamm: Great potential for urban agriculture in Detroit

By Russ White
February 02, 2010
Written by Lauren Talley
Michigan Live

Hamm is the CS Mott Chair for Sustainable Agriculture and leads the CS Mott Group for Sustainable Food Systems at Michigan State University. He’s been working on a way to use that land to develop an urban agriculture system in Detroit.

Excerpts:

Hamm works with Kathryn Colasanti, a graduate student who analyzed Detroit’s publically-owned space. Colasanti’s study focused on open land where buildings had already been torn down. She didn’t include parks or right of ways.

Colasanti discovered about nine square miles of empty available land within the city limits. If her study included land with abandoned buildings, that space would be doubled or tripled, Hamm said. Hamm and Colasanti determined with just 2,000 acres Detroit could produce up to 75 percent of the vegetables needs and about 50 percent of the fruit needs for 900,000 people.

With the use of high-tunnel technology which is already in place at the MSU Student Organic Farm, four-season extension technology and controlled atmospheric storage, Detroit could become a food production center for Michiganders in the region, Hamm said.

“If you think of 2,000 acres and you think of three acres, it would take 700 new farmers … and my personal opinion is in the next 10 years it’d be difficult, if not impossible to generate that many farmers inside Detroit,” Hamm said.

Hamm suggests different scales of agriculture will be needed to reach the 2,000-acre goal. Two companies are looking at creating 30- 40-acre farms. These larger scale farms would complement medium and small scale farms to realistically reach 2,000 acres, Hamm said.

See the rest of the article here.