Growing a Greener World

MALE ANNOUNCER: Growing a Greener World is made possible in part by-- FEMALE ANNOUNCER: The Subaru Crosstrek, designed with adventure in mind, built in a zero landfill plant, so you can roam the earth with a lighter footprint.

Subaru-- proud sponsor of Growing a Greener World.

MALE ANNOUNCER: And the following-- the US Composting Council, Milorganite, and Rain Bird.

[gentle instrumental music] JOE LAMP'L [voice-over]: I'm Joe Lamp'l.

For 10 years, Growing a Greener World has told the stories of the people and the places who are making a difference in the health of our environment and the sustainability of our global community.

But as we embarked on our 11th season, life changed overnight.

So many things we took for granted would never be the same again.

Now it's up to each of us to take a more active role in not just saving our planet, but making it better, feeding our families with organically grown food, conserving vital resources, protecting natural habitats, starting in our own backyards.

Growing a Greener World-- it's still our mission, and it's more important than ever.

It's easy to get wrapped up in a big raised bed of tomato plants or imagine that lone farmer on a tractor working that huge plot of acreage and think, that's what gardening and farming look like, but it can happen anywhere.

And we love sharing the stories of people in places carrying this movement into big cities and with the help of their local community around them.

And that's something very important to me.

In fact, our very first episode before there was even a show was shot on the streets of Philadelphia on an abandoned lot surrounded by concrete in an impoverished neighborhood.

That's how important urban and community gardens are to the mission of Growing a Greener World.

Over 10 seasons, we've visited some amazing community gardens and met some pretty incredible urban farmers.

And while their techniques and methods may be all over the map, their goal is always the same-- grow food, grow unity, grow togetherness, grow hope for a better tomorrow.

[music playing] Once America's most productive manufacturing city, Detroit was home to a thriving automotive and music industry, almost 2 million residents, and a robust economy.

But in the mid-1960s, the city changed drastically when factories began closing, forcing residents to leave in droves to find work elsewhere.

Detroit is over 140 square miles, enough room to fit all of New York City, San Francisco, and Boston, and still have space left over.

So in vast areas of the city were abandoned, much of Detroit's urban landscape deteriorated into overgrown lots and condemned buildings.

Within city limits, many residents struggle to find employment and access to healthy food, in some cases living over 30 miles from a grocery store and fresh produce, resulting in a kind of food desert.

[music playing] In the face of decay, Detroit's residents are planting the seeds of change.

Just in the last decade, over 1,300 community gardens and urban farms have sprouted.

And the residents are rebuilding neighborhoods, and inspiring community, and creating careers in urban agriculture.

[birds chirping] At the Georgia Street Community Collective, founder Mark Covington simply planted a raised bed vegetable garden with his mother in a vacant lot on the street where he grew up.

A couple of years later, this lone raised bed had blossomed into a community garden spanning four vacant lots with 42 raised beds, and even a fruit orchard.

During the growing season, all neighbors are invited to harvest and keep whatever they pick from this garden whenever they want.

MARK COVINGTON: I was born and raised on Georgia Street.

I got a job and I moved away for a little while.

I lost the job, and I had to move back home with my mother and my grandmother.

That winter, the snow started melting.

I came outside and that's all monetary garbage that people had threw out in the vacant lots.

And that was something that I'd never seen before in our neighborhood, and so I wanted to clean them up.

During the process of planning the cleanup, I decided to put a community garden here.

I thought putting a community garden out here would help keep people from dumping their garbage on the vacant lots.

Being out here when we started cleaning up, a lady down the street had some foster kids and a son of our own, and she wanted me to give the kids some structure.

And so she sent them down and one morning, and they started working in the garden, and helping, and they liked it.

The next day, they came.

They brought some more friends.

And the next day, some more came and some more, and we got up to about 20 to 25 kids working in the garden that first year.

I'm proud to be a community activist and a mentor to kids in the neighborhood.

I enjoy the opportunity to be able to teach them life skills and other ways that they can go through life and be better people.

Through gardening, they see results of their hard work.

They plant a seed.

They see it grow and produce fruit.

And they can use that throughout life as far as school.

If they put in hard work in the school lessons, they'll get good grades.

They'll grow up and get better jobs.

I feel like the kids in our neighborhood and kids period need something like that.

[birds chirping] I helped teach a class at our local elementary and middle school, AL Holmes.

We go there on Wednesdays and we teach the basics of gardening.

Even we teach about composting in books.

We also teach planting, how to plant a garden, and how to start and implement a garden and a community garden.

[music playing] JOE LAMP'L [voice-over]:: Bobby Wilson is president of the American Community Gardening Association.

Along with his ever-present passion for his work lies an army of like-minded volunteers and leaders and some impressive resources to help spread the gospel of community gardening.

BOBBY WILSON: Lots of people are concerned about where their food comes from, so more and more people want to grow their own food.

So more and more people want their children to be exposed to the environment so they can get a good positive feeling.

And we want our children to know where the food comes from.

So many of our children think food comes from the grocery store.

They have no idea that it comes from the soil.

The American Community Gardening Association is a binational organization that provides technical assistance to individuals and groups that has a desire and a means to want to grow their own fresh vegetables.

Community gardening is about building communities, making the community that you are part of strong so that you can deal with the challenges within that community.

And that's what the American Community Gardening Association is all about is providing that network of people and resources so that you can make your community a much better place to live and grow in.

JOE LAMP'L [voice-over]:: Along with all the resources that the National Community Gardening Association deploys across the country, they've also put a big investment right here into Columbus, Ohio.

BOBBY WILSON: Exactly.

The American Community Gardening Association is excited about our new home right here in Franklin Park Conservatory.

It's an excellent opportunity.

It's a good central location.

It gives us means that we can disperse across the country to really do some exciting things with all sorts of communities across North America.

And we're just so excited to be here at this new facility that they have put together.

And they've really gave the American Community Gardening Association a new home, a new home so that we can provide the technical assistance to communities across the country that is really needed in order for community gardens to be successful.

It's an exciting time to be involved in gardening greening movement.

[music playing] JOE LAMP'L [voice-over]:: Over the last few years as the interest in growing backyard food was taking off, there was a recurring theme that kept playing itself out.

People wanted to grow their own food, and they even had the space, but they lacked the knowledge to get started or the time to keep it going.

Like right here in New York City, there are over 800,000 private backyards.

Now, that's a lot of growing space and a lot of opportunity for Stacey Murphy.

She's the founder of BK Farm Yards, a Brooklyn-based farming network that grows fresh and healthy affordable food for area residents.

Now, Stacey and her apprentices farm in these small backyard while making that trip from farm to table, a whole lot shorter.

STACEY MURPHY: I have a background in mechanical engineering and architecture.

I was working in the city working on high-end residential buildings and going through the farmer's market every day on the way to work, and I got really enthralled with food again.

I grew up growing food with my mom when I was a kid, and I was excited about how fresh everything tasted again, and how beautiful everything was, and the connection to the farmer.

And it was something that I had lost touch with.

And so little by little, I decided that I wanted to become an urban farmer.

So I thought about an idea that would be a decentralized urban farming network so.

That what that means in layman's term is that we would have a lot of farms spread across the city.

Lots of different farmers provide lots of opportunities and increased amount of fresh food that people could have access to in the city.

It would be a whole new distribution network in the city.

So the tagline for BK Farm Yards is you have the land, we grow the produce.

And so essentially, that's how we started the business is going around and asking people, hey, do you have a yard?

Do you have some land?

Can we farm it?

[bird cawing] So the business model is that the homeowner pays for the installation the first year, and they get free produce for the life of the project.

So at this point, they're getting free produce.

And as many CSA members, Community Supported Agriculture, as many shares as is possible for the site, we get families who pay upfront.

They get a share of the produce for the whole season.

So every week, they come, they pick up produce in the farm.

So what that means is that the setup cost of the site is covered by the homeowner, and they get a gorgeous lush backyard around and free produce.

And then the other people are paying the labor for the farmer.

It doesn't take a lot of space to grow a lot of food.

This farmer sitting on his foxtrot farm yard-- it's the first backyard farm in our business-- there's about 450 square feet of planting beds.

So even before the height of the season when our tomatoes came in, or eggplant, or cucumbers, all the really heavy produce, we were getting 33 pounds of produce every week.

So in the height of the season, you can only imagine that that would be probably double.

It feed six families over the course of 20 weeks.

[birds chirping] My hope for BK Farm Yards is to create a system where everybody has a role to play as a participant, an active participant in our local food system.

It means that you're engaged in the process and you're supporting things that you believe in.

[music playing] JOE LAMP'L [voice-over]:: It's an expanding problem.

How do you feed a growing urban population all year round without increasing your load on the environment?

Because in most big cities, you have to either leave the city to go get the food or it's shipped in from a long way away.

Now, neither option is good for the environment, to say nothing for nutrition and fresh picked flavor.

But the good news is there are systems today where you can grow food and raise fish indoors in city buildings without soil or even sunlight.

And not only are the systems really efficient, but they lighten the load on the environment.

And they're being used to not only educate people about sustainability, but fresh food and nutrition, too.

Meet Emmanuel Pratt, a visionary urban farmer and educator who wants to change the way city dwellers get their food.

He's the co-founder and executive director of the Sweetwater Foundation.

EMMANUEL PRATT: It all started in Milwaukee where we had a 10,000 square foot vacant warehouse site.

JOE LAMP'L [voice-over]:: Sweetwater Organic started as a for-profit organization focusing on the commercialization of urban agriculture.

Inspired by Will Allen of Growing Power, they wanted to explore how aquaponics could take a lead role as an indoor growing operation.

EMMANUEL PRATT: So aquaponics is a recirculating water ecosystem where the plants and fish live together symbiotically.

So you need some form of a tank.

So you have the water for the fish.

You feed the fish, they eat, they create waste.

Most people understand it, though.

If you don't change the water, it'll get cloudy.

It'll get dirty, right?

What most people don't understand is that it's a chemical reaction that happens in the water with all this bacteria buildup, which is awesome life at work.

And see you feed the fish.

They eat.

They create waste.

The water gets pumped to a grow bed, and then grow bed has the plants that filter the water because the nitrate from the water, the naturally life water, is actually a food source for the plants.

They grow up towards the light for the photosynthesis.

Filtering the water to come back to the fish-- so the plants need the fish and the fish need the plants.

But the best part about it that they both need us.

They need humans to play their role in order to take care of that system, to harvest it, to feed the fish.

JOE LAMP'L [voice-over]:: Sweetwater saw the opportunity to utilize those human resources in a way that offered many benefits, but there wasn't a blueprint for their commercial application.

EMMANUEL PRATT: It was just learning by doing.

And it required the roofers, the plumbers, the carpenters, the veterans, and everybody else to come together to try and see.

So in a short amount of time, six to eight months, we have four commercial-scale systems producing thousands of fish, producing, of course, thousands of plants.

And then the question came about, how many jobs can you supply and what's the future of how this can translate?

JOE LAMP'L [voice-over]:: That led to Emmanuel co-founded the nonprofit arm known as Sweetwater Foundation to explore how all this translates to community education as well as science, technology, engineering, art, and math.

EMMANUEL PRATT: How does this become really real for the future of education?

How do we even get people to understand what basil is if you don't know?

Our kids come to us, they don't know how food gets to the grocery store.

You live in a food desert, they don't know the term "food desert."

Like, really.

It's all about the exposure.

And it led us to doing tours that led us back into the schools, into the faith base, the churches, the households, the vacant lots.

And all of a sudden, these new spaces all throughout the city started popping up.

People say, can you help us bring some new life into these quote unquote "blighted areas" where there was no life or there was no economic value?

So it was interesting because it started off as a commercial venture, but then people started realizing, this is much bigger than what people ever anticipated.

[music playing] JOE LAMP'L [voice-over]:: Over the years that we've been creating episodes for Growing a Greener World, growing food has been a theme that's become more popular with every season.

And it's no surprise because people want that connection between the freshest, healthiest food they can get.

And as far as food production growth, the biggest area there is urban farming and gardening.

The reason for that is that urban dwellers are seeing paths through all those conventional barriers that would have stopped most people in their path just a few years ago.

Take Britta Riley, for example.

A small one-window New York City apartment didn't stop her from finding and creating an innovative system to grow fresh salad greens to satisfy her year-round cravings.

BRITTA RILEY: I live in Brooklyn, New York.

Lots of cement, lots of people, lots of snow, not a lot of farms.

This is what I like to eat-- fresh food, mostly vegetables.

And this is where I get a lot of my food.

I have no idea where most of it comes from, but I do know where some of my food comes from.

In fact, it comes from my window.

This is my window farm.

It's a vertical hydroponic garden made out of water bottles, tubing, an air pump, and some hydroponic supplies.

Most of this stuff I got out of the recycling bin at my apartment and at the local hardware store.

Not only do I know where this food came from.

I know exactly what nutrients feed the plants that I'm eating, and I grew the plants up from seed myself.

The window farm works because an air pump generates a little bubble at the bottom of a tube submerged in the nutrient-rich water.

The bubble carries a column of water on top of it, and it rises up through the tube and spurts out the top.

Then the water trickles back down through all of these bottles.

JOE LAMP'L [voice-over]:: The technique of growing hydroponically, or without soil like Britta did, is providing new opportunities to grow food in the most unlikely places, which is particularly important in an urban environment, where the common trait is an overabundance of asphalt and concrete and a similar lack of green space and open land.

[thunder] [music playing] So Matt, you're the brainchild behind this hydroponic growing system inside of a shipping container.

I got to know how this all came about, because you're not even a farmer or grower by trade, are you?

MATT LIOTTA: No.

I have a high-tech background in software.

And after I had sold my last company in the telecom industry, I spent a lot of time cooking for my daughter.

And as I went around to grocery stores and sort of looked at where the produce was coming from, I noticed a lot of it was coming from other countries.

JOE LAMP'L [voice-over]: Yeah.

MATT LIOTTA: And it just seemed like with all of the emphasis on quality and on where we're getting our food from, I was curious as to why more of it wasn't coming from right here.

So I sort of researched into what it would take to become an organic farmer and provide local produce.

So I sort of asked myself the question from a tech point of view, which is, forget everything that there's known about farming, and kind of start over, and say, OK, if we want to have local produce, what problems do we have to solve to actually get there?

And this is the result of the answers to those questions.

Yeah.

So when we looked at it, we said, OK, if we can grow in an urban area, what do we need to do?

And the problem is there's no farmland in an urban area, so we needed to create our own environment for growing.

And what would be the optimal conditions to grow?

What do we need to control?

Things like temperature, humidity, CO2, et cetera, et cetera.

So we came up with a methodology to control all those things, and we needed some way to enclose them.

So I stumbled across a shipping container as a basic building block.

It provided an enclosure that was very easy for us to maintain, and it's a very dense footprint that can be scaled by simply stacking one on top of another.

JOE LAMP'L [voice-over]: Yeah.

Now, anywhere there's room to store a container is all the space needed to grow the equivalent of a one-acre lettuce farm every month from just 330 square feet.

Shipping containers in a parking lot, a forgotten warehouse, Big Apple backyards, the inner city of Detroit-- today's community gardens and urban farms can take on many forms and they're all part of the revolution.

BOBBY WILSON: But more and more people are doing community gardens-- young people, old people, Black people, white people.

Everybody wants to be involved in this gardening green movement.

Let's take it to the next level.

Let's make it successful.

Let's make sure that people are not only growing vegetables to feed themselves, but they are also growing their communities to make them exciting, to make them a better place.

And we are going to make it happen.

MARK COVINGTON: I think Georgia Street is helping to build a stronger Detroit by giving our neighbors in our community a gathering place, somewhere where everybody can go, and get together, like how it used to be back in the day when you sit on the porch and you can talk to your neighbors.

I'm proud of what we're doing here on Georgia Street, but there's a lot of different gardens is doing the same thing.

And I know we're trying to come together, but I know individually they're doing their part in their neighborhoods.

And collectively, we're helping to rebuild Detroit.

BRITTA RILEY: So I don't think what I'm doing is all that unique.

I think there's people growing food everywhere.

I've seen people growing out of shoes in school gardens that don't have enough space.

I've seen people growing on rooftops, people growing in basements, growing everywhere.

If all these people were to work individually, it would just be a series of projects.

But at some point, it's got to become a local food system that's supportive, and is rewarding for all of the people involved, and it somehow sustains them financially as well.

EMMANUEL PRATT: The city's here, and the Rust Belt is filled with people who are unemployed, but have skills.

It's filled with people who are carpenters, plumbers, electricians, handy people that know how to do this, people that have tanks that are sitting in their garages, people that have tanks in their basements that are just sitting.

And so we said, let's just try an experiment, introduce some life into that system and see what happens.

Then that becomes a hands-on experiential education tool.

It's real.

It's not abstract.

You can do it, repeat it, live it, eat it, share it, do it again, right?

Do it again.

Do it again.

Do it again.

So our tagline with Sweetwater Foundation is there grows the neighborhood, and we mean it.

s aren't just for backyards in the country, and farms aren't confined to rolling hills or pastures.

Look around and you might be surprised to find where some of your local community gardens and urban farms are thriving.

What's not surprising, behind each one, there's a dedicated and passionate group of heroes who are truly growing a greener world.

And I hope that today we inspired you to seek out a local community garden or support an urban farmer next time you need some local fresh produce.

And maybe you'll even start a community garden or an urban farmer of your own, because we could all use of our heroes.

And if you'd like to learn more about what you saw today, we'll have that information on our website under the show notes for this episode.

And the website address, that's the same as our show name.

It's growingagreenerworld.com.

Thanks for watching, everybody.

I'm Joe Lamp'l, and we'll see you back here next time for more Growing a Greener World.

MALE ANNOUNCER: Growing a Greener World is made possible in part by-- FEMALE ANNOUNCER: The Subaru Crosstrek, designed with adventure in mind, built in a zero landfill plant, so you can roam the earth with a lighter footprint.

Subaru-- proud sponsor of Growing a Greener World.

MALE ANNOUNCER: And the following-- the US Composting Council, Milorganite, and Rain Bird.

[gentle instrumental music] MALE ANNOUNCER: Continue the garden learning from the program you just watched, Growing a Greener World.

Program host, Joe Lamp'l's Online Gardening Academy offers classes designed to teach gardeners of all levels, from the fundamentals to master skills.

Classes are on demand any time.

Plus, opportunities to ask Joe questions about your specific garden in real time.

Courses are available online.

For more information or to enroll, go to growingagreenerworld.com/learn.

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