Urban Agriculture involves bringing fresh, nutritious foods closer to people who live where access to those foods is limited. Spaces like community gardens and urban farms help fill the gaps in Milwaukee’s struggle toward food access. Those spaces connect people, too.
An example is Kinship Community Food Center. It runs a farm, a food pantry and a café. And Kinship is an advocate for creating community through food.
Kinship’s mission is to help Milwaukeeans secure healthy and nutritious food in five of the city’s zip codes.
Kinship Urban Farm is comprised of 11 hoop houses on 27,000 square feet in Glendale. Volunteers gather on a bright and sunny morning to harvest green beans.
The team descendes on the plants after a quick lesson from the farm manager, Cole Compton.
Marty Horning was spotted among the beans. He was bent over filling his fists with green beans and rhythmically tossing them into the bin.
Horning explains why he chooses to volunteer on the farm.
“The corporate control over the food supply has created a food stream that is neither nutritious or safe, and we see that every single year with, you know, whether it's E. Coli breakouts or other kinds of contamination or whatever. And so I think that that's something that people need to take back is food production, and it's really important in the cities to show that we can do this,” says Horning.
Horning says at the farm, it’s not just food that’s being grown.
Seeds of community and unity are being planted. It impacts the city and the people from neighboring states who come here to learn from Kinship’s practices.
“It's a tremendously incredible community. I've met so many new people and continue to meet new people every year who are all together on this same project, which is again producing high quality, clean, nutritious food and getting it into people's mouths,” says Horning.
Once the harvest bins are full, volunteers and Kinship staff pack their truck. They drive the vegetables to two places: the Kinship Café in Bronzeville, and the Kinship Food Center in Riverwest.
It’s a food pantry where visitors have a full-service grocery shopping experience, free of charge. Once a month, shoppers can get meat, dairy, bread and of course farm fresh organic produce.
Sincere Whaley-Smith works on the farm and food center. “That is the produce section, so that's the one I work in mostly, and most of that stuff is from the farm," says Whaley-Smith.
Whaley-Smith gave a rundown of recent deliveries from the farm. The produce doesn’t sit on shelves long.
“So this morning we picked those banana peppers, those green beans. This kale is from ... probably Thursday last week, this rhubarb we picked this morning, these zucchinis we picked this morning, this basil we picked this morning," says Whaley-Smith.
The food pantry adds to its supply of produce from local stores — food that’s still good but considered “ugly” by supermarket standards. Think of fruits and vegetables with blemishes or odd shapes.
”We make sure everything is up to quality because even though people aren't paying for it, these people still deserve fresh, quality food," says Whaley-Smith. "So every day, especially in the produce section, there's a process of weeding out anything that's moldy, anything that's old, anything that we wouldn't want to eat ourselves, and making sure that everything looks fresh and good."
Nothing goes to waste. What can’t be consumed is composted so it can be used as fertilizer and mixed into the soil on Kinship’s Urban Farm.
While urban farms are small — compared to sprawling operations in the countryside — their contributions can be big. In the last growing season alone, Kinship Urban Farm produced almost 20,000 pounds of produce to go to Milwaukee homes.
