From Farming Veggies to Farming Ideas: Social Innovation Through Urban Agriculture

Publication Date: January 3, 2012

Mary Seton Corboy, well-known in the urban-agriculture world for running a pioneering farm on a city block in Philadelphia, will argue that she is neither a pioneer nor a farmer.

“I backed into this when I thought all I was doing was starting a little business to sell lettuce,” she says in her customarily blunt talk.

Over time, though, that little lettuce operation, begun in 1997 by Corboy and her then-business partner, Tom Sereduk, transformed her into a nationally recognized leader and admired innovator in urban farming. Sereduk bowed out early in the start-up, but Corboy persevered, turning a vacant lot once the site of a galvanized steel plant into a vibrant enterprise bringing fresh food, flowers, and locally-produced goods to hundreds of city dwellers.

Today, Greensgrow runs a nursery, farm stand, and a 600-member Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program that together bring in annual revenues of nearly $1 million. The money sustains the farm’s business operations – managed by as many as two-dozen employees during the busiest seasons -- and helps pay for Greensgrow’s community projects aimed at making healthy food available to low-income residents. Greensgrow’s site, hemmed in by rowhomes and metal-gated businesses, also showcases sustainable farming methods like composting, bee-raising, and converting used cooking oil into biodiesel fuel.

Inside its eight-foot-high chain-link fence, Greensgrow is a homey hodge-podge of hand-built, colorfully painted structures – greenhouses, a solar-powered composting toilet, a chicken coop, an outdoor demonstration kitchen and more. A few blocks away in a local church is Greensgrow‘s Kensington Community Kitchen, turning out the farm’s own value-added products, like sauces and jams, and incubating other local food entrepreneurs.

Greensgrow grows plants, flowers and a couple thousand pounds of fruits and vegetables each year at its main one-acre site and two other smaller plots around the city, and it gathers even more produce from other area farms to sell at its twice-a-week market. The organization also runs classes on gardening and cooking, workshops on land re-use and urban farming techniques, and all sorts of special projects, like a food truck it regularly deploys to the poorest neighborhoods in nearby Camden, N.J.

At the center of it all is Corboy, 54, who at once appears totally amazed and completely blasé about the micro-world of food and community she has created. At the start, she says, the original plan was simply about supply and demand. Sereduk, a chef, and Corboy, a former chef working as the caretaker of an estate, knew plenty of area restaurants increasingly keen on cooking with fresh and local ingredients. The pair found the $150-a-month derelict lot in the neighborhood of Kensington and started growing lettuce hydroponically (a growing process that requires nutrient-rich water, but no soil) and delivering it freshly picked to kitchens around the city. Corboy points out that it was circumstance – the fact that the site was so environmentally compromised that traditional planting was not an option – not “revolutionary thinking” that led to hydroponics. Over time, they added tomatoes, then flowers, and other produce planted on raised beds.

When neighbors began to show interest in Greensgrow, the group opened up its gates to the community in a variety of ways, inviting people in for tours and sponsoring neighborhood gatherings. When would-be urban farmers, urban-agriculture advocates, and community-development folks from around the country began to notice Greensgrow, it opened its gates even wider, positioning itself as a demonstration site for developing a profitable, sustainable, urban, green business.

Here, Corboy talks about what it has meant to turn a toxic slab of concrete into an exemplary urban farm; why nonprofits need a business plan; and how not everybody wants to eat kale.

Let’s start with the big picture: Urban agriculture is often evoked these days as the answer to so much of what ails our nation’s cities, like poor health among residents. Do you agree that urban farms are the answer?
Urban ag has parts of some answers, but it’s not the answer. It can be used as a conduit to teach people about food. It can create access in communities. It can create healthy, green spaces. Community spaces. It can create jobs. It can create a body of knowledge. It can help rural farmers by being a liaison with the urban consumer who lets the rural grower know that the taste of the consumer is changing and they are looking for different things. It is one of many things that could lead to a change in the food scenario in our country. Having educated consumers and farmers, whether they be urban or rural, can lead to changes in food consumption and therefore also food-growing practices.

Are you talking just about the high-end consumers looking for that latest “it” vegetable and the farmers who are growing those, or about the food habits and needs of other urban dwellers, like immigrants and low-income people?
It’s been un-PC to say, but urban farms and farm markets and other urban food efforts sometimes look like they are pushing, almost shoveling, the idea of local food or fresh food on low-income populations without recognizing that low-income people are often resistant to buying or even wanting that kind of food. It’s not necessarily what they know or prefer.

So isn’t your food-truck program in Camden an example of just the kind of programs pushing fresh food?
You have to teach them what to do with it. That it really is affordable. In Camden, we are working with a lot of other organizations. One of the programs we are involved in is with a doctor whose practice will be handing out food-truck coupons to patients. They’ll say, “Hey, you have type 2 diabetes, you’ve got to start changing what you eat. There’s a farmers’ market on Tuesdays and Thursdays, here are coupons to help buy the food. Here are instructions about how to cook the food without lard and whatever else. And you have to start getting on this train.” You have to help people make choices.

You’ve been here for all these years and you’re saying your own closest neighbors are not customers. Is that disheartening?
It’s a long process. You have younger people who are learning about food, who are breaking with what their parents ate and so will become customers. They are getting used to seeing apples at school and then they wonder why they don’t have any at home. They’ve learned a lot just by walking past our farm. Do I think I am going to get a 50-year-old, who I can’t get to stop drinking Miller Lite or smoking cigarettes, to change her eating habits? No. But it’s generational.

You might not have a lot of local customers still, but you have certainly become a neighborhood institution. What changed?
At some point early on, we decided to buy a greenhouse. Someone was tearing down their greenhouse so we could have it. We built it and decided to grow flowers. We had already done a study, and we knew we couldn’t just grow lettuce in the winter in the greenhouse. It wasn’t financially viable, so we started growing flowers, and that really started to change the nature of our relationship with the neighbors. Some of them had window boxes and they had marigolds, so we planted marigolds.

Greensgrow started as a small business and then became a nonprofit in 1999. Did you expect to run your operation with donations and grants
No, we thought that if we could get it right then we’d be able to run a profitable organization and the grants could help us try things out and see if they could fit into the model. That’s the way we still use grants today. Two years ago, I don’t think we applied for any grants at all because we weren’t in expansion mode; we were just doing what we were doing. Last year, we started two new initiatives so we applied for grants. We did a low-income CSA and the Camden truck. What we do is put something in the pipeline with the help of grant money and we give it three years to see if we can do something with it. If it emerges from that as something that is viable, that is sustainable, then it gets thrown into the farm pile and doesn’t get any more support.

What would be an example of a project that started with a grant and became self-sustaining?
Years ago, we got a grant from USDA to launch a CSA. That was pretty much a lifesaver. We were at the end of our rope and that got us through the next two years and then the CSA really took off, and so did the nursery and the farm stand. We abandoned the wholesale lettuce entirely, and found a whole different income model. We were able to do that because we weren’t beholden to any particular thing. It’s not like we’d gone out and bought a $50,000 potato truck. We took down hydroponics and made it into something else. We’ll be back using hydroponics maybe next year, but this year we used the space mostly for chickens and nursery stock. 

Why will you go back to hydroponics next year if you’re doing so well with these other initiatives?
Because I think it’s an important part of who we are – growing and alternative growing methods, and people love it. They love to see it. It’s an important demonstration of how you can grow in different ways and in different places.

What are more recent examples of projects that went from grant-supported to self-sufficient?
We used foundation money to make biodiesel and to develop composting toilets. One of our composting toilets is solar.

Should other urban farms strive to move programs away from dependency on grants?
Programs that are about social entrepreneurship, like urban farms, should basically run like a business, where you have to draw a line that says, this is what we can do with the resources we have or can generate. And if you can’t do that, just like in any other business, you have to determine why you are not meeting those goals. Is this something you’re not supposed to be doing in the first place? Is there not a demand for your product? Are you not good enough to create demand for your product?

Are you saying it appears that some urban-farm efforts lack business savvy?
Yes, or they just don’t have a plan that makes sense. You have to look at what is in demand. Just because you like kale or you think that it would be nutritious for people to eat kale, doesn’t mean you should start a farm to grow it. You have to develop a market for people to buy it. I’ve seen all these small urban farms pop up and there’s no market for them.

What does an urban farm need to get the right start?
This is something that should be started small and, no pun intended, grown. You don’t need a million-dollar greenhouse to start a farm. You need seed and a shovel. And you need time. It is 40 acres and a mule. We’ve dealt with people who wanted to start an urban farm, and we threw their business plan back at them and said, you don’t make $100,000 a year as an urban farmer. The urban farming movement will have a lot of fall out, but it will stick on many levels once people realize that it is not about production, it will never be about production. The plots are too small or compromised for it to be all about production.

If urban farming is not about growing produce, what is it about?

Greensgrow runs a farm stand, but you have said elsewhere that you think farmers’ markets may not be all they are cracked up to be. What’s your take on them?

We have started a low-income CSA. It has 15 to 20 members. We have another year to work that out, and we may find it’s best to roll it into our traditional CSA. But we try to do special programs, like pair the pick-ups with cooking lessons. We have a sincere desire as a nonprofit to serve the low-income community around us. Just being here though and letting people know we have fresh food – probably helps. It’s generational, I think, like I said. We have a wonderful relationship with St. Michael’s Church, where we’ve built our community kitchen. And we do a lot of work with local businesses. We purposely put our chickens in the corner where people can play with them. And they do. All generations come down and feed the chickens through the fence.  

Are you still feeding the chickens, watering the crops?
I’m not doing as much farming these days. Now I call myself an Idea Farmer. That’s my new title. I came up with it last week. I used to be C.F.H., Chief Financial Hoe-er. With an ‘er’ in polite company. I used to do a lot of hands-on farming, but I don’t do that as much anymore, so I call myself an Idea Farmer.

What was an idea that you have had that people questioned, but turned out to work?
In the early years, when we built our own refrigeration with green roofs, people thought that was never going to work, but that has sustained us for years and years. We couldn’t afford to get a much bigger compressor-driven refrigerator. A lot of it is our tweaking little things. Instead of a regular outhouse, we had the idea for a composting toilet, and one that people would actually want to use. It has a comfortable seat and magazines.

Let’s wrap it up where we started, with the big picture: Where does Greensgrow fit into the national picture of urban agriculture?
We get tons of calls from people around the country interested in urban farming, and so we are like a demonstration project. But no matter what you tell people, they have their own ideas and will do what they want. Greensgrow has kept its eyes on what it is doing, and does not make a big political thing about it. We had a goal. We wanted to have a successful farm, and we proved it could be done. We wanted it to be something that other people can replicate, but we try to tell other people that they have to start small and see what is right for their community. Do they want chickens? Do they want education classes? Do they want you to have a pig? Don’t force things. We were a business. It was a very casual change. It just evolved. And it has continued to evolve.