Urban farming: It’s not sharecropping anymore

Collie Graddick. Consultant at MN Dept of Agriculture, Board Member at Minnesota Environmental Partnership, Board Member at Preventing Harm Minnesota.

Food advocate urges Blacks to form Twin Cities farm cooperative

By Charles Hallman
Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder
5/26/2010

Excerpt:

Collie Graddick says the time is now for neighborhoods all over the Twin Cities to set up urban farms. “A community food system, in my opinion, is a way to hopefully bring economic opportunities to inner-city communities,” explains Graddick, a Minnesota Department of Agriculture consultant, of his “neighborhood-level sustainable food system.”

This is a good fit with the growing “sustainability” movement, which Graddick, an educator and food justice advocate, believes more Blacks should understand and appreciate. He defines sustainability as simply ensuring provision of the basics needed to live.

“It’s looking at the resources that you have and living within those resources. It’s working with your community and sharing what you have so that everybody can prosper together. It’s [concerned] with food, clothing, shelter, transportation and vacation” (adding that if we adequately take care of the first four needs, then we can afford to take a vacation).

Graddick, a Georgia native who grew up on a farm, says, “This country was founded on agriculture and on farming,” adding that Black people in particular have moved away from farming since the Civil War.

“When sharecropping came along, it shined a different kind of light on food production for our community than it did for anyone else. We looked at it as a job we didn’t want to do.”

It’s time to return to those roots, Graddick opines. “It’s part of our history, too. If we are going to grow all this food, then why not help our community make money off it rather than saying if you have extra food, give it to the food shelf? I want to create a system where we actually buy that food and process it.”

He isn’t just talking about gardening; rather, Graddick wants to plant locally an idea that is taking hold in other urban areas. “All over the country there is this push for urban food systems, urban gardening and community gardening,” Graddick points out.

See the rest of the article here.