Written by Emerin Boomer. Photography by Ella Barnes and Cassidy Brage.

“When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

–Wendell Berry

The Women of Cincy capstone project allows residents to take on a project that’s wholly their own – from ideas to research to interviews and production. When I began thinking about my project this summer, I couldn’t get away from the subject of farming.

Yes, farming. It’s not something we usually think about despite its prevalence in our day-to-day lives, but having had the opportunity to take a class on the subject last spring, I wanted to dive deeper. How does farming affect our lives here in Cincinnati, and how can that relationship change?

“Food” and “security” are two words that naturally go together, but in Cincinnati, food insecurity has historically been an issue, with 3 out of 10 people affected, according to organization Hunger in Cincinnati. Could urban agriculture be something of an equalizer, something that helps support social equity? Furthermore, as environmental awareness grows nationwide, our access to resources and the sustainability of our practices are increasingly important. So why is it that we rarely consider where our food comes from?

Over the past few months, I’ve been able to interview a few of the people involved in Cincinnati’s urban agriculture. Through doing so, I realized the importance of farming to a community and the value of knowing where our food comes from, whether it be from a rural farm or urban farm, whether or not it’s organic, and how far our food travels to reach us.

No one is disconnected from the future of farming.

The type of farming most relevant to Cincinnati is urban agriculture. This is the practice of cultivating and distributing food in urban areas, usually with sustainable or social justice goals (many urban farms participate in the SNAP program). I asked Braden Trauth, a professor of land, farming, and community at Xavier University to tell me a little bit about what urban agriculture means to Cincinnati:

Urban agriculture is a great strategy to address a lot of our big challenges. It's an opportunity to address a lot of social injustice, economic inequality. It can really take on some of those challenges, but also it can bring food closer to home, reducing food miles traveled and – especially if it's grown sustainably – eliminating a huge environmental impact.

The Beyond the Kale project in New York City makes the case that unjust social structures can be challenged in part by urban farming – it gives access to healthy, fulfilling food, creates jobs, and implements green spaces in areas that otherwise may not have access to these things. To better understand the impact agriculture has on Cincinnati, as well as what the future of urban farming may be, I visited Urban Earth Farms and Turner Farm. They are different iterations of urban farms working towards the same goal of connecting us with the land and providing fresh, organic food to this community.

Urban Earth Farms is an ecovillage nestled into Price Hill. The way the farm functions echoes the social justice aspect of urban farming that Braden described, utilizing SNAP and connecting people in a community-oriented, progressive way.

Gretchen Vaughn, one of the primary pulses of the farm, grew up on a 150-acre, diversified family farm in Northeast Ohio. “It was 9/11 that got me thinking that we need to return to some of the older values of taking care of each other,” she said to me as she separated garlic bulbs with Urban Earth’s intern Katie McDowell. “Farming or growing food is a life skill – I want to share that with others and get them thinking about the environment and the next generation.”

One way urban agriculture can help combat social issues, as stated by Beyond the Kale, is through Community Supported Agriculture, or C.S.A., which is essentially a symbiotic relationship between the farmer and the consumer. As part of an ecovillage, which aims to integrate the neighborhood into the farming by land and food sharing, Gretchen and the Urban Earth team share why they think C.S.A. matters:

In the spring, farmers need cash to buy their seeds and supplies and things like that, so we make a promise, like a contract with consumers that we will provide you every week with produce when it’s grown in the season. And the wise farmer tries to really involve the community as much as possible, so they really understand what is going on. It's so different from what you would find at any store because you don't question, like, “Okay, who grew that cucumber? What conditions do they have?” This is to get a more intimate knowledge of what growing food really involves.

Turner Farm, in operation since the 1800s, has a different experience with urban agriculture because it’s on the fringe of the urbanscape; rooted in Indian Hill, its location and acreage allows it to operate more like a rural farm with the benefits of proximity to a city. Its mission is to preserve Turner and Meshewa Farms and their heritage, as well as promote community connections and connection to the land and food. Abby Lundrigan, Turner Farm’s crop production manager, says that more and more “fringe farms” like Turner are appearing due to land availability and prices as well as the proximity to the market. Having large, organic farms close to a city helps decrease food miles, giving us fresher food without the need for preservatives as well as reducing transportation carbon emissions.

The future of farming involves women more than it historically has.

Urban agriculture is much more than a hip new movement, and it can take several forms and still be successful. It has real effects on social justice and the environment; industrial agriculture is one of the top greenhouse gas emitters, according to the E.P.A. Crop and livestock production contributes to these emissions with the carbon released in tilling, mass deforestation due to irresponsible farming leading to dead land, and so on. But we are at a turning point with agriculture – certified organic is more common, and people are taking it a step further with Permaculture, which unites organic agriculture with a more holistic, natural view of farming.

Alex Hetterich, a Xavier student who volunteers at Urban Earth as well as a C.B.D. farm in New York, fears for the future of farming due to climate change: Crops are fragile and require a certain standard of soil and weather in order to prosper, something jeopardized by rising temperatures. “Over the summer, we had extreme humidity,” Alex told me, “so our plants got mold on them, which shut the majority of the production down, which was really hard because you put so much work in. Working at Urban Earth Farms or working at my farm back in New York, there are no pesticides; everything is extremely natural.”

Farming is indeed a gamble, especially with looming fears and realities of the climate crisis. Abby explained to me why the present is such a critical time for agriculture, with looming uncertainty about which direction farming might take. She told me she has hope for the future of farming in knocking down barriers to becoming and surviving as a farmer:

It seems that our culture has begun to view industrialized agriculture more critically to some extent in recent years, but I also believe that industrial agriculture and large producers and corporations still have a tight hold on the market and on many consumers' mindsets. In 20 to 50 years, I would hope to see agriculture on all scales in our country evolve to take a more holistic approach to management, with greater prioritization of soil health and stewardship and ecological and environmental impact.

Most importantly, to me, I'd hope to see a greater portion of the population return to agriculture of all kinds as a livelihood. In 1840, agricultural workers made up 70% of the labor force in the United States. Today, farmers and ranchers represent 1.3% of the American workforce. Since entering this field, it has bothered me that such a small portion of our population makes a living producing food when all of us eat every day. In 20 to 50 years, my greatest hope for agriculture would be to see more people – especially young people – engaged in farming and agriculture, creating a resurgence of the number of small- to medium-sized independent family farms providing food for our country.

To that end, I hope to see some of the barriers to entry addressed in the coming decades – including access to affordable land, and the burden of student loan debt, which were identified as two of the top challenges to beginning farmers in the National Young Farmers Coalition's most recent Annual Report (2017).

I also believe that, in large part, the future of farming involves women more than it historically has. In my own experience, the majority of people I've seen managing farms and working on farms have been women, which is incredibly exciting to me.

These are only a handful of farms in Cincinnati with women at their forefront – Women of Cincy has interviewed other women, such as Vicki Mansoor, Mary Laymon, and Annie Woods, who are active in the urban agriculture community. Why? Alex Hetterich theorizes a homey, loving touch that women add to the earth; Of the 5,300 farmers and ranchers in the United States under 40, 60% were women, according to a recent study by the National Young Farmers Coalition.

“I've wondered if this shifting demographic has to do in part with young and beginning farmers in the U.S. shifting more towards small to mid-scale, localized farms and production scales; on a global scale, women are responsible for much of the food production in small scale and subsistence farm systems,” Abby said. “I believe women are drawn to agriculture because they are drawn to the land and the earth itself. Nature and the earth are often depicted or associated with the feminine for a reason; in my opinion, women identify and empathize with the earth as a fellow biological progenitor of life.”

No one is disconnected from the future of farming. We all need to eat– what goes into our food and how that food production affects society should be important to us. The interviews and research I have conducted over the last few months have been fun, enlightening, and incredibly interesting. Studies have shown that responsible farming practices create soil that can withstand droughts, as well as cutting down on environmental effects of irresponsible tilling and irrigation systems. However, research alone couldn’t give me the insight that I got from actually visiting these farms and talking to these amazing people. I’ve become increasingly aware of the link between the climate crisis and sustainable farming, as well as more aware of how I can get involved. Throughout this project, I learned the answers to a lot of questions I hadn’t even thought to ask.

One question I did ask was what actual farmers might predict for the world of farming. Gretchen believes there are four possibilities: a return to family farming, an increase in mono-crop industrial agriculture, more climate-controlled warehouse farms as a response to the worsening climate conditions, or smaller urban farms and ecovillages such as Urban Earth. To that end, I leave you with one more quote from Wendell Berry:

The small family farm is one of the last places – they are getting rarer every day – where men and women (and girls and boys, too) can answer that call to be an artist, to learn to give love to the work of their hands. It is one of the last places where the maker – and some farmers still do talk about “making the crops” – is responsible, from start to finish, for the thing made.

Community Mix is our monthly hodge-podge of content from the voices of a hodge-podge of beautiful Cincinnatians, including our awesome residents. Check out more capstone projects from our students or learn more about our residency program.

A Girl on a Farm: Exploring Cincinnati’s Urban Agriculture

No one is disconnected from the future of farming.

The future of farming involves women more than it historically has.