Columbia South Carolina’s New Farmers

Robbie McClam and his wife Sue show off seedlings in the City Roots greenhouse.

Urban Entrants Changing Face of Agriculture

By Eve Moore
Columbia’s Free Times
02/01/2010

Excerpt:

Robbie McClam of City Roots is also a man of many trades. An architect and builder, McClam once headed the Columbia Development Corporation. Now he’s turned his attention to farming.

All the municipal government and planning experience has come in handy. When he wanted to start City Roots, he discovered the city’s industrial zoning classification didn’t allow farms, so he worked with the city’s planning department and City Council to change the zoning ordinance. Future urban farmers of Columbia: Thank Robbie McClam.

City Roots sits on 2.7 acres right across from the downtown Hamilton-Owens Airport and the nearby soccer fields. Its long furrows, sheets pulled over them to protect them from frost, extend right up to Rosewood backyards.

The farm is very much in the community, which is just what McClam intended. McClam was inspired by Will Allen, an urban Milwaukee farmer who won a 2008 MacArthur Fellowship — also known as a Genius Award — for his pioneering work in community farming. McClam took classes at Growing Power, Allen’s Milwaukee collective. And now he’s trying to apply Allen’s principles here, trying to make the farm part of the city.

So, McClam is not quite a gentleman farmer in the classic British sense of the term; he’s not farming merely for pleasure. Rather, he’s farming for the public good. “We didn’t start this to make money,” McClam says. At the same time, he says, “The goal is to create a business model that can sustain itself and pay the people working on it a living wage.”

But the goal is bigger than that: “To provide healthy, nutritious food grown locally to the community, to involve the community. We’re finding that we’re being received with open arms. Everyone’s excited about us.” If the folks behind Freshly Grown Farms are specialists, McClam and his family at City Roots are generalists.

In their first year, they’ve experimented with everything from squash to citrus to sunflower sprouts. A 3,500-gallon pool inside their greenhouse will soon house thousands of tilapia (a freshwater fish). Enormous compost heaps break down discarded produce from Rosewood Market and farm waste.

This being winter, they’ve got a lot of lettuces in the ground and in the greenhouse. The variety is impressive: heirlooms with names like rouge d’hiver, deer tongue, sweet Valentine and the wonderfully named flashy troutback, which is mottled red and green. City Roots’ lettuce has started popping up on a few restaurant menus around town. Eric McClam, one of Robbie and his wife Sue’s four children, has been the one taking the farm’s produce to local restaurants and markets lately.

“One of the most rewarding things is taking it to some of the chefs here and seeing the look on their face like ‘Oh my god, this is amazing, I really love this,’” Eric McClam says. Eric just finished a master’s degree in architecture last year. He graduated into an ugly job market, which meant his father’s dream for a farm came along at the right time. “There’s pretty much no architecture jobs out there right now,” Eric McClam says. So, for now, he’s a farmer. So far, the McClams love the farm, but Robbie McClam is honest about the challenges.

“Some people say it takes five to seven years to be a decent farmer,” he says. “I think that’s probably true. Every decision is loaded with big information.” He gives an example. “We want to put some lettuces out: Well, what varieties do well here? When do you put them out? What’s the spacing they can handle? How do you water them? How frequently? When do you harvest? It’s an amazing sort of wealth of knowledge out there that is a little intimidating for me.”

The solution, for McClam and other new farmers, is to depend on the knowledge and wisdom of other farmers. Among the small group of people helping out at City Roots that day is a familiar face: Ben DuBard, who’s been farming a few acres north of Columbia with his family for the past several years.  “Ben has been a consultant and a friend all along,” Robbie McClam says. “We take advantage of the wealth of knowledge that he has.”

The rest of the article here.

City Roots website here.

Freshly Grown Farms website here.