Urban WWOOFer: D-Town Farms

D-Town Farm, a 7.5 acre farm on Detroit's west side, was started by the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network.  The DBCFSN has been developing for seven years, contributing to the public dialogue on food security, food justice, and racism in Detroit.  In addition to farming D-Town, they give tours and maintain a farm stand on site; they participate in farmer's markets six days a week and have a co-op buying club; and they run a lecture series and a youth development program.


There was a great Democracy Now video about D-Town in 2010.

D-Town is now at its third and hopefully final location, thanks to a ten-year lease from the city.   On a temporary lease, they cannot build any permanent structures and only now are in the process of getting electricity, thanks to solar panels that were donated from DTE Energy.  For so many challenges and such little time, they have made huge strides.  Today, their 7.5 acres includes:

- Organic vegetable gardens

- Compost.  They believe their compost is the most important product they create:  they must rebuild a soil that is entirely degraded and frequently toxic after years of industrial growth and little environmental regulation in Detroit.  They compost their own farm materials along with wood chips that are brought from the city and rotting fresh food brought from Forgotten Harvest.  They hope to use this extensive compost project to serve their own needs, to use for education, and to eventually sell to other Detroit farmers to help bring back soil health around the city.

- Mushroom beds.  A renown professional came in and did preparation and execution of a giant project.  Unfortunately, it was completely unsuccessful.  Soon they will reassess and attempt again.

- 8 Beehives
        
- 4 Hoop houses for year-round growth

- Farmer's Markets 6 days a week

- Soon-to-be pond or marsh area to solve flooding




D-Town Farms is an exciting project, but it undoubtedly still has a steep road ahead.  Currently, its economic stability is due to the work of interns and volunteers, the leased land and donations.  Their goal is a for-profit model.  They are selling large amounts of local produce in the community and have had successful results on much of their land.  But as is the case with almost every farm seeking sustainability in the country today, in their development process their costs would still outweigh their income if they were not receiving donations and volunteers.




Challenges (to D-Town and to the 100 other small farms in Detroit):

- Organic Agriculture.  Chemical-free agriculture is simply more labor intensive and less fruitful in the short-term and in our economy.

- Rural farm challenges in an urban environment.  While they have many of the challenges that go along with having an urban farm, they also are dealing with deer, groundhogs, and many of the farming challenges of a rural environment.

- Farming Knowledge.  Many of the farmers are from Detroit and do not have a lifetime of experience built up in agriculture.  Many are starting from scratch as adults (sort of like me!)

- Cultural Stereotypes attached to agriculture.  Agriculture has negative connotations enough in our society at large. But in the African American community, it is often still associated with slavery and sharecropping.  Who would want to regress to a past that their families had spent so long to get away from?  One of the DBCFSN's largest challenges is addressing this misconception and encouraging the African American community to realize the value of participation in food production and gaining control of their food supply.  

- Accepting help that empowers; not that dis-empowers.  The DBCFSN is very wary of white hand-outs.  In fact, most organizers and activists in Detroit are.  Inner-city Detroit is 85% colored and the surrounding suburbs are 85% white.  The racial tensions in Detroit today still run high.  African Americans were excluded and compartmentalized throughout Detroit's rise, and they continue to be long after its fall.  Surrounding areas do business with each other but avoid Detroit, except when it comes to Detroit's resources that they need (from a direct quote).  White nonprofits and white humanitarians come in to help "fix problems", reinforcing the inherent inferiority complex that our society has already taught colored society.  White "help" reinforces that our certifications and degrees make us more valuable, they cannot solve problems without outsiders, and it creates a system of dependency. 

D-Town Farms made it very clear that race is a big issue still today in Detroit and on the farm.  If a group of white superheroes, for example, comes in to volunteer, they will have a few things to address before they accept our offer.

One they realized that we were offering nothing more than hands to help them execute their vision...they were more than happy to welcome us in.  :-)

Musings on Superhero culture

Friday August 17, 2012

Hall of Justice:  The Superhero Bicyle Ride

The Superhero Bicycle Ride is a phenomena that still eludes the internet's choking web, and, like most, I found out about it by word of mouth.  About one quarter of the riders on this August's Superhero Bike Ride were returners; the rest were new.

This is now the twenty second Superhero Bicycle Ride (Michigan 2012 among rides in Iowa, England, Thailand, British Colombia, Texas and Australia).  The first was a ride from Seattle to Boston beginning with Ethan Hughes (The Zing) in 1994.  Today, the Zing can be found creating an intentional, sustainable community at the Possibility Alliance in NE Missouri.  The space is petroleum and electricity free and hosts guests and educational courses.  Ethan, busy on the farm and with young children, did not attend this ride, which was called and organized by Laughing Moon and Stardust.


Beautiful Musings from My Time the Superheroes

The superheroes have a fantastic group culture that creates consistency year to year while honoring the uniqueness of each ride and its group culture.  Daily ritual is created morning, noon and night through words, games, and activities.  From our morning "Readings of the Great" to our daily "Dice of Destiny" and our evening "Goodnight Hugs", these rituals use a daily culture to create spontaneity and to invite fun and play.

Taking time off of work for service and often doing work like weeding that does not highight your abilty and talent, can become less than exciting.  As is usual in this sort of work, sooner or later it usually causes burn out.    Part of the necessity of the joy and silliness of dressing as a superhero is to bring levity to heavy topics.  The Superheroes try to inject play into our own space and in our public  service.

Creating the character is a giant part of the process, both in name and in Fantastical Superhero Costumes.  We went through a Superhero Naming:  The Spectrum of Perspectives training to help us find the superhero within us.   What part do we want to highlight?  Where are our personality strengths?  Are we leaders?  Teachers?  How can we choose a persona that will be the best version of ourselves?  Once we have a personality, we create a persona, with costume and all.  In costume, people are willing to act in ways they may not in other circumstances, and people receive us differently, as well.  I may not walk into a town fair and dance around to a kazoo while engaging anyone and everyone in conversation normally, but in costume, sure!  Here, we always have on our superhero capes, allowing or encouraging us to always be the best version of ourselves.

Example top--notch names of other superheroes:  Soular Eclipse, SerendipiTease, Lady Joystous, Laughing Moon, Stardust,  Bright Sky, Compashman.

We live without expectations.  We arrive to a town not knowing a) anyone b) if there is any service for us to do C) if there will be a place for us to stay.  These are all important things, yes?  Yet to plan them in advance prevents us from the meaningful interaction we have when trying to make those connections face to face on the street.  Perhaps we will get a community center to stay in; perhaps a backyard.  We may have access to a bathroom and heating; we may have a shovel, trees and an outside water spicket. 

We do not plan the number of showers one "needs" to ensure comfort.

We are comfortable making your bathroom--from toilet to shower to sink--in the woods

We enjoy camping...and get used to setting up and taking down camp frequently.

We enjoy bugs, slugs and dirt.

We are happy to have foraged greens, dumpstered food, donated food, and LOTS of bulk grains!  For breakfast, we are content to have cold oatmeal and no coffee.  We consider ourselves blessed to eat delicious food prepared with tender loving care!

We share!  In free-time, we do lots of skillsharing:  yoga, massage, co-councilling, cooking, Harmonica-ing, sewing.

We wear capes everyday!

Most importantly, after volunteering for any person or group, we make it clear to them that we are part-time superheroes who wear funny costumes, while they are the full-time superheroes, there day in and day out.  We surround them with a Super Send Off of a Supernova of Exploding love and Unending Kindness to honor the superhero within them.

After a month, I ask myself what more uplifting and healing way to spend a month every year than with the bicycling superheroes?

Superhero Training

I headed north from Detroit with Bright Sky, another superhero, to challenge the impossible at Superhero Training, roughly 75 mi away.  Setbacks included (but were not limited to):  three flat tires, falling out screws, falling off panniers, and twice broken pedal.  Setbacks resulted in:  new tubes, tires and tape; extraordinary pannier arrangement savvy; and new pedals. 

Superhero Training

22 Superheroes converged on Colombiaville, MI for four days at Three Roods Organic farm for training, service on the land, and service in the community. 

By the end, when old superheroes' powers were dusted off and new superhero powers had been found, we set off for the next stage of our adventurous mission, to spread spontaneous joy and realize the impossible across Michigan. 

Building an Intentional Community

Mission Statement:  Fireweed Universe-City is a grassroots movement to realize a sustainable  eco-friendly community of universal consciousnss.

Lovely mission, in theory.  However, in practice there are some challenges. 

1. Differing Intentions.  The people living here have very different short-term and long-term goals.  Some have the goal of creating a sustainable life around things that were unnecessarily left for waste.  This may mean squatting as a way to reinhabit a perfectly good home (repurposing the immense amount of waste that goes into home building) but putting up solar panals for power and building a compost toilet to put nutrients back into the earth.  Others have the goal of squatting and getting free stuff.  As long as expecting and feeling deservent of anything are part of the mentality, I think the challenges to success here will be huge.

2. Distraction.  Alcohol, sex, drugs, Rock and Roll. Moderation and prioritization are key.  In Maslow's hierarchy of need, I'm pretty confident that those things don't come before windows, heating source, food aquisition and production, sewage system, and water...all needs that definitely do not yet have stable solutions here.

Instead of spending money to purchase books to learn skills like canning or agriculture and spending time to use those skills and the rewards to meet needs and to sell, time is spent standing in line to get food at a food pantry, applying for food stamps, smoking or listening to/playing music on the porch, and money is spent on cigarettes, pot and beer.  Even if they had the follow through to develop that music as a skill that they could benefit from, but that dedication is not the norm, either. 

There are certainly a few people here who to an extent understand a necessary balance.  In fact, some people in the community have done absolutely wonderful things.  But for the most part either a) they have a lot of culture to change before they get others to realize and dedicate themselves; b) they don't have the tools to lead, teach and empower; and/or c) they are disheartened that their work is constantly being taken advantage of, leading them to distraction themselves.

I know they have a lot of potential for the future, but a lot of people will need to step up to realize it! 

Abandoned Detroit

Thursday Aug 9

"Detroit is failure driven.  Detroit is made of broken glass and shattered dreams."

-Couch Surfing host Mars (in response to my comment that NYC is very success driven.)

Abandoned houses. 

It took several days to get too far from this nook in Highland Park on West Goldengate.  I worked most of the daytime, and I couldn't find anyone to go ride around with me.  For the sake of having a tourguide, knowing which way to go and what to look for, not getting lost, robbed or raped, it only made sense.  Finally, I asked our next door neighbor, Work, and he was happy to join.  First we rode through Palmer Park, what was once a lovely and giant park.  In some ways it still is; there is a golf course somewhat sectioned off by giant mansion-like homes with designer cars and closed gates.  While I had read about it and sought it out, Work had never known this part of the park existed after living a lifetime in Detroit.  I think that was intentional design.  The public pond was only intermittenly cleaned and full of trash, but they did maintain some fish and crawfish inside to please the general public. 

After the park, we went toward the downtown and then weaved in and out of residential streets to return.  We passed a historical Ford plant--now with a broken window quantity that would have at one time rivaled its vehicle output--and Dollar Tree's that were hopping next to chiquer stores that had been closed down. 

In the neighborhoods, there were empty lots from homes that had been razed and every level of abandoned house from those with rock-sized holes in the windows to those that had been completely gutted, burned, or covered in foliage.  Most interestingly, among these houses were still inhabited homes.  As we crept in one abandoned house, a man in one of the few inhabited houses of the block across the street was mowing his lawn.  It was an interesting dichotomy and a testiment to the human sense of dignity, to watch this man take pride in his "plot" of land, even surrounded by these others in disarray.  Next to the burned house was a home inhabited; then another abandoned.  As we tried to step through the sidewalk leading to the house now covered in weeds waist-high, the next door neighbor told us that there was nothing to see in there and that he had "stuff" in there (I.e. we shouldn't enter). 

Notes to self: 

Instead of paying for an apartment in NYC without so much as closet space, perhaps I should consider coming to Detroit where I will not only have my own closet space but also an entire abandoned house next door for any extra storage. 

Instead of four people paying a total of $2,200 a month to sublet from a fifth person (Side note: The best way to make money/take advantage of people in New York City  is to rent an apartment and then sublet it to others for way above that cost.) the four of us could have come to Detroit and bought TWO houses for one month's rent.  Christ-do you know how many Detroit homes I could own with what I paid in one year's NYC rent? 

With over a thousand community gardens now in the city I would have been able to find a way to participate there, and I definitely would have found plenty of needy inner-city kids to teach dance to.  :-)

Fireweed Universe--Day 1

The Space

After a 75 mile ride to my grandparents' house to see visiting family, we (ironically) loaded my bicycle and panniers into my parents' car to be dropped off at a farm in Detroit.

We arrived, past derelict houses with weeds chest high.  It was pretty easy to find, what with the chickens in the street, the many congregation of interesting bodies outside, and the bicycle collective painted brightly.  My host is Mars (interestingly the same day that we landed on Mars; must be a sign!    Now my goal will be to find a host named Venus, one named Jupiter...).

I can't wait to do a bit of bicycling around Detroit.  It is clearly in a really rough state; if this many people are openly squatting on one block for two years and counting, and two-story houses are being sold for $1,000, then I can only imagine. 

WWOOFing

This is not exactly the structured WWOOF experience, which I knew going into it. One needs to be a self-starter, or at least in the period in which I arrived: the man running the show is pulled in every direction, the next is completely burned out, and the vast majority are used to taking without giving. This all can change, of course, but leading in a way that empowers others to take on responsibility is one of the most difficult tasks in the world.  This morning, I decided an easy task to begin without knowing anyone or the system would be to clear the garden of weeds. And I did! There is one other enthusiastic guy who has only been here a month (not yet jaded) and just finished a permaculture class (thus new fuel for enthusiasm). Then there are four lovely WWOOFers  (a band from NYC, no less, traveling to Seattle) and they helped us weed all day! It was a full summer's worth of Hulk-sized weeds overtaking a giant garden, but company makes any work enjoyable. It is rewarding to be able to use my past farming and permaculture knowledge to lead projects today on day one; tomorrow it looks like I will lead us in building raised beds in a green house that was recently constructed.

We have a giant compost pile, great for the 300 lbs of weeds we gathered today, in the lot behind our house. Conveniently for all of the people who have taken over abandoned houses on this block, the block behind us is COMPLETELY empty! Thus, their backyard space becomes ours. I helped myself to a little walking tour of the abandoned house behind ours today. It is a strange feeling to see the house that someone entirely left behind. The nuance of the basement, from the floor tile to the wallpaper, told me that I would have gotten along weill with the previous inhabitants. It was just like any other house that anyone else grew up in with stories in its walls...now with trees growing in the place of its long gone window frames, holes in the sides of the house to the outside, and empty cigarette packets of looters and squatters. It really makes the motto "location, location, location!" seem real in an entirely more profound way. The same home on Long Island one year ago would have been sold for $400,000 and here, it was entirely abandoned and is now rotting away.

Riding in Ohio

Corn Corn Soy Corn Soy Corn Corn Corn Cow!

Corn Soy Corn Soy Soy Soy Soy Soy Corn Corn Two Lane Highway!

Corn Soy Corn Soy Corn Corn Soy Corn Corn Corn Soy Soy Corn Truck!

Corn Corn Soy Corn Soy Soy Corn Corn Soy Soy Corn Corn Horses!

Corn Soy Corn Corn Corn Soy Corn Corn Corn Soy Soy Non-Passenger Train!

Corn Corn Soy Corn Soy Corn Soy Corn Corn Corn Soy Corn Annual Tractor Show! 

Corn Corn Soy Corn Corn Corn Corn Corn Corn Corn Soy American Flag!

In a nutshell, that is riding through Central Ohio.