The Soul of Urban Agriculture

George Washington Carver designed a mobile classroom to take education out to farmers. He called it a “Jesup wagon” after the New York financier and philanthropist Morris Ketchum Jesup, who provided funding to support the program. See more information here.

Today is the day to return as the dressers and keepers of the garden

By Uriah Yisrael
Truly Living Well Urban Harvest
Oct 4, 2011

Excerpt:

In 2008, I was directly affected by the Recession. For months I survived off of severance pay, and unemployment benefits, the months became years and all hope and money seemed to fade. I then remembered a sharecroppers words “everyone needs something to eat”. This sharecropper escaped the Jim Crow south and moved to the city of Boston, Massachusetts, where he continued to grow his beloved crops in a vacant lot next to his home. With no fanfare, grant money, or nonprofit status and while working 3 jobs with a family of 6 to feed he nurtured a trash filled plot into the envy of the neighborhood.

Presently he feeds family, neighbors, and strangers from this plot and daily gives advice from his garden in the hood. This sharecropper was the first urban farmer I ever met, this sharecropper is my father.

Like many African Americans, who fled the south in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, my parents worked the soil. We were the cheap labor force brought to this country and hemisphere to till the land, plant the crops and harvest these crops for 350 years without reward or pay day. Nonetheless just like my father, the love of agriculture runs in the DNA and so where ever the black migrant landed urban farm and gardens sprang up.

Read the complete article here.