Urban Ag

Do you like to garden? Well, for some people fresh is what it's all about when it comes to putting food on the table. Right now, we're going to introduce you to some folks who take a hand on approach to making that connection from farm to fork.

It’s an unlikely spot for an agrarian effort, a street corner garden in a gritty section of Kansas City, Kansas that’s become a symbol for change.

Angela Green is teaching some inner city youngsters how to grow their own food and appreciate it. In ways most have never considered. She says, "This is something our culture has to realize, we can still eat our traditional soul foods, but we can make them healthier and still have them be tasty to us, ok."

Green created the city’s "salt of the earth" program, community supported agriculture that champions work skills, neighborhood cooperation and entrepreneurship.

For 11 year old Jessie Williams, the program means he can turn to the community garden for food. He explains, "Most of the stuff is very good because I'm a vegetarian, I like most of the things we grow: cucumbers, zucchini's and squash."

Some salsa is one product made from their garden ingredients.

It doesn’t look like much, but consider this: those who know urban agriculture say a community garden on a quarter acre lot like that will feed 30-families week in, week out for an entire 6-month growing season.

Urban agriculture is part of a growing trend all over America. And in the Kansas City area, those agrarian efforts are alive and well. Katherine Kelly of the Kansas City Center for Urban Agriculture says, "Our agriculture systems used to be diversified. We had large farms, we had mid-size farms, and we had smaller farms. Every region had a local food system. Kansas City, as little as 50-years ago, used to support itself."

5-years ago the city’s center for urban agriculture created a produce exchange. There, farmers pool their homegrown goods and members can buy, sell or trade. Health care funders have gotten interested in supporting local food production because they started realizing that a lot of the obesity epidemic & the diabetes-heart disease epidemic are connected to people’s diets.

In the upscale West Bannister neighborhood, Brook Salvaggio has turned her grandfather’s backyard into a suburban homestead. It took the neighbors a while to embrace the idea. But Salvaggio and her husband feed a number of families and they earn a living, the concept is opening eyes. Brook says, "And people just could not believe that this was happening in suburbia. They started thinking about their own lawns and thought to themselves, ‘Oh, my gosh, I could do this!’ Maybe not on this level, but I could do this."

A beautiful garden is nice, but "points for style" don’t count in the inner city where feeding hungry families is more important. 63-year old Sammie Davis teaches farming to inner city residents. But he admits it’s a tough sell for some people. Used to getting their goods at the grocery store. Sammie says, "Three out of ten, is going to he happy, like doing it. That other seven is going to like eating out of it, but they ain't gonna’ like getting up and bending over."

The city’s growing immigrant population has added diversity to the crops at the small community based gardens like this one. And urban farmers are trying their hands at Asian melons, lemongrass and yams.

Back at the corner of 13th and Georgia, Angela Green is trying to make an impression on the next generation. She says, "We are the salt of the earth. The garden is a metaphor for life. We have to tend the garden, we have to pull the weeds, and we have to take care of it. And it's just like that in our life. If we don't reap the harvest, we don't get out of it what we're trying to sow."