MetroAg Course

Food Field is a new urban farm on four acres in Detroit's Durfee neighborhood, between Boston-Edison and Highland Park.

Seemed easiest to steal some of this from my farm's website, foodfielddetroit.com

Hope this works.

Since May 2011 we have harvested several thousand pounds of organic produce, built relationships with local chefs and neighbors, raised a large hoop house for year-round growing, and hired an intern and neighborhood teens. Our goal is to build a sustainable business feeding Detroit and create real alternatives to our corporate food system, while bringing jobs, resources and benefits back to our community.

Noah Link lives in Detroit’s Boston-Edison neighborhood and manages Food Field full-time during the growing season. Noah also works as a substitute teacher in Hamtramck and Dearborn and plays music with Ann Arbor-based percussion group Juice. Noah graduated from Michigan in 2007 with degrees in Middle Eastern & North African Studies and Social Science (focusing on globalization, trade & agriculture). Noah has worked as a barista in Brooklyn, an activist in Palestine and at Michigan, and studied abroad in England, Tanzania, India, New Zealand and Mexico. 2011 was Noah’s first full growing season, despite growing up with a vegetable garden and working multiple years at Tantre Farm in Chelsea.

Alex Bryan started an independent business, Apollo Farms, on an old family orchard in Laingsburg in 2010. He works as the Volunteer and Outreach Coordinator for the Greater Lansing Food Bank. Since graduating in 2007 in English and Earth Sciences, Alex has also farmed in Colorado, worked as a chef in New Hampshire, and traveled to Turkey, New Zealand, and Thailand. He recently climbed Mount Rainier, won an adventure race in Pinckney, and took up the bass guitar.

Yes, stakeholders, ever important.

Primary investors have been myself and my business partners. We've rallied some community support among our immediate neighbors and found money to pay a few neighborhood teens to get involved here and there. We've connected to various restaurants, individuals markets and urban ag networks in Detroit. Through the winter we "sold" trees for our orchard. Offering people the option to buy a tree and basic irrigation. We'll take care of the tree and you can come split the harvest with it when it starts producing. A sort of modified CSA. We'll be running a CSA of about 20-25 this first year. Hopefully primarily Detroit residents, ideally from the neighborhood.

We've connected into some research at MSU, some money for data on the farm. I've most recently connected to the National Young Farmers Coalition as a board member. This network of other young farmers sharing goals, innovation, and resources is invaluable.

At a policy level, we've reached out to both the city for urban ag zoning issues and our state senator for the area, who had proposed some legislation change to the MI right to farm law. We're hoping to take SNAP for the CSA shares too.

I'm sure I could go on in stakeholders, (girlfriend, friends, family, etc.) but I'll stop here for now.