Yale Sustainable Food Program

urban agriculture

People Focused Farming: A Short Documentary on What Defines Urban Farming | GFF '25

People Focused Farming: A Short Documentary on What Defines Urban Farming

This Voices was written by Sawan Garde as a part of his O’Shaughnessy Global Food Fellowship.

Sunflowers and corn from The Three Sisters plot at The Edible Schoolyard Project. Photo by Sawan Garde ’27.

I had two goals in mind when thinking about how I wanted to spend this past summer. The first was to connect with my home through community-based work. The second was to work, in some way, with food systems. Urban farming became an obvious way to realize these goals.

I was fortunate to work with The Edible Schoolyard Project in Berkeley, CA and Urban Tilth in Richmond, CA this past summer. I grew up in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area and quickly came to realize just how impactful these two organization’s decades of work have been on improving food equity in the East Bay.

On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, I would work at The Edible Schoolyard Project, which was founded in 1995 by the chef Alice Waters. The Edible Schoolyard Project is located in Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, Berkeley’s largest public middle school. It is an outdoor classroom, sanctuary for King students, and community gathering space. In fact, the gates to the garden are only locked during school hours. The Project is a key piece of King’s curriculum, and every student will take many arts, humanities, and science glasses in the garden and kitchen throughout their middle school education. My responsibilities included farm maintenance, cover-cropping and developing curriculum. I even got to test out my food justice and soil health curriculums on summer school students at King.

Preparation for a cooking class in which we explored food supply chains with summer school students and cooked fresh pasta with tomatoes from The Edible Schoolyard Project garden. Photo by Sawan Garde ’27.

On Thursdays and Fridays, I would work at Urban Tilth’s North Richmond Farm, only thirty minutes north of Berkeley. Urban Tilth feels like a completely different world. North Berkeley’s tree-lined streets with flowers overflowing from every front yard gives way to broken glass on shadeless streets lined on each side by industrial warehouses. Urban Tilth was founded twenty years ago by Doria Robinson, a lifelong resident of North Richmond. Located directly next to the Chevron Refinery, California’s third-largest oil refinery, North Richmond struggles with some of the worst asthma rates in the country. Urban Tilth’s programs range from youth education to job training, public health education, subscription-based weekly produce bags, and watershed restoration. The organization makes sure to serve its community holistically, operating sites all throughout Richmond and providing employment opportunities for community members. While there, I worked on farm maintenance, staffing their free farm stands, and public health education.

Leading a nutrition workshop in Lucas Park, a public park in Richmond, at the end of the summer. We discussed the impacts of sugary drinks on our health, gave away free produce, and made fruit and vegetable smoothies together. Photo by Sawan Garde ’27.

Throughout the summer, as I explored the work of my host organizations, I became curious about how two organizations that operate in such different, yet complementary ways, could both be considered urban farms. What defines urban farming? What makes an urban farm an urban farm? What struck me in the first weeks of my summer was just how many people I was meeting daily. I began to pose my curiosity to them, capturing their answers on video. What has resulted is a short documentary exploring the many ways of defining urban farming.

Implicit in my decision to create a documentary lies my answer to this question. Urban farming is people focused farming. It prioritizes connecting community members to their neighbors and to the land over monetary profit. It envisions an urban food system where people are empowered to grow their own food. It also challenges the physical status quo of urban spaces, giving soil once covered by concrete the chance to heal and breathe again.

Just as urban farming helps defines and redefines so many relationships, it has redefined my connection with home. Working with the dirt, alongside passionate community members, gave me a new, tactile connection with the place I come from, a connection I could not have anticipated.

Setting up for the Friday free farm stand at Parchester Village in Richmond. Urban Tilth operates free farm stands every day of the week in different locations throughout Richmond. Photo by Sawan Garde ’27.






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Workday and knead 2 know | Friday, September 23

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 On September 23, 2022, around two dozen folks came up to the Farm to participate in our weekly workday. The fall harvest was fully upon us, and the afternoon was all about pulling, picking, and prepping.

One group pulled weeds from the lower culinary berm, a tangled texture of green. YSFP’s Manager of Field Academics Jeremy Oldfield taught attendees how to distinguish the weeds from the crops: lemon balm—a cousin of mint—was the target crop, and an eggplant cousin—with spikes!—needed to be pulled, along with unwanted veins of ivy growing in the underbrush. One group of participants dedicated itself to the berm, other students picked sweet peppers (and snuck a couple delicious bites), Still another strung up chrysanthemums.

After the berm was cleared of weeds, workday attendees took turns digging holes and planting black eyed susans. These seedlings had been growing in the Yale Science Building greenhouse for about a month, and they'll spend the next month pushing their roots into the berm. In the winter they’ll die back; come spring, they’ll bloom gold.

As the workday faded towards pizza-time, the sun started to dip towards the horizon and some workday participants wandered the flower field adjacent to Prospect Street. YSFP Communications Manager and photographer extraordinaire Reese Neal ’25 aptly noted that what makes our Farm so special is its dedication, not just to growing food and creating community, but also to celebrating the beauty that comes from working the earth.

 All the while, our undergraduate culinary events team was working hard to whip up some delicious pizza and press some fresh apple cider. Workday attendees—happy to sit down after two hours of farmwork—were spoiled with platters of pizza. As they ate, former Yale Farm Summer Intern and beloved YSFP community member Donasia Gray ’23 gave a moving knead 2 know about her summer working with the Sweet Water Foundation. She helped build and grow a neighborhood space in Chicago that uplifted the local community, recycled discarded materials, and redefined public space. Afterwards, participants asked questions, ate more pizza, mingled, and laughed. As always, many thanks to those who came; and, please join us next time.  

To view all photos from the event, please follow this link.

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Mapping the "Grandparents' Garden"

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What’s in a history of a garden?

I first learned about the Grandparents’ Garden** through fellow Yale Sustainable Food Program student and friend, Addee Kim. We were at our friend Lauren Kim’s Knead 2 Know talk on urban food forests in Taiwan, when Addee mentioned the Garden during the Q & A session. At the time, I had just formally accepted my summer internship with the Yale Farm, the beginning of a (hopefully!) lifelong engagement with food systems, food justice, and sustainable agriculture. I knew I wanted to do my independent project on the Garden, even though I had never been there, let alone walked past it.

When Covid-19 outbreaks worsened across the United States, I struggled with finding ways to connect with the gardeners. People were already on edge, so a stranger walking over and striking up a conversation would likely cause alarm or at the very least, discomfort. Given that many of the gardeners were elderly, I hesitated to conduct ethnographic research face-to-face in the first few weeks of my internship. What follows is a mental and visual roadmap of the many, many conversations with people— from my housemates Emily Sigman and Steve Winter to our next door neighbor Caroline Posner (one of the few younger, non-immigrant gardeners)— that eventually led me to meeting several gardeners, who have their own sections below. This project would not be possible without them, their patience, generosity, and openness to a complete stranger. Aside from those who have a direct connection to the Garden, I am incredibly grateful to Jacquie Munno, Sarah Mele, Erwin Li, Abby Lee, and Mark Bomford for giving me insightful guidance throughout this project period.

This project is ultimately the culmination of my journey among a web of interrelated people and communities. My time in New Haven this summer has also given me time to experiment with gardening and growing. I like to think that by doing gardening every day across the street from the Grandparents’ Garden, I was engaging in an indirect form of “participant observation.” By learning and experiencing the challenges of growing vegetables from seed with limited knowledge and resources, I could also manage to understand some of the challenges and delights that my neighbor gardeners were experiencing.

A link to the full zine can be found here.

**The “Grandparents’ Garden” is an informal name, one that I choose to use throughout this zine for ease of reference. I borrow this name from Addee, and from local news articles that highlight the elderly demographic of the Gardeners.

It is important to note that not all of the gardeners are necessarily grandparents, and even more so, that the Garden is living and transforming even as I conduct my research. Even my usage of the term “Grandparents’ Garden” (rather than “the garden” or “my plot”) denotes my status as an outside observer looking in, since each gardener has their own ways of naming and thinking about the Garden.

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Detroit's Hyperlocal with Kiki Louya

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What does building a hyper-local food movement around equity look like?

Kiki Louya is a born Detroiter and Congolese-American chef, who founded Folk and The Farmer’s Hand. Together, the restaurant and grocery store have advanced the fair treatment of food and farm workers alike, supporting thriving urban agriculture and food justice efforts in Detriot. Also a co-owner at the all-women hospitality group, Nest Egg Detroit, Kiki visited Yale on February 24 to speak more about triple bottom-line practices (environment protection, social responsibility, economic success) in food business.

Kiki’s visit was the third in our “Cooking Across the Black Diaspora” series. A themed line-up for Chewing the Fat, this series was conducted in collaboration with the Afro-American Cultural Center at Yale, and the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration. In doing so, it commemorated Black History Month, and the 50th anniversary for both the Afro-American Cultural Center (fondly referred to as “the House”) and the Yale Department of African American Studies. Timothy Dwight College also supported Kiki’s time on campus.

Following a podcast session with YSFP student Thomas Hagen ’20, Kiki shared lunch with Yale students & staff, as well as New Haven community members at the House. Emphasizing her connection to food through her father’s cooking, Kiki spoke of the unapologetic ways she often brought her Congolese heritage into her menus and work, even when her career in hospitality may have been at odds with her own family’s wishes for her; later that afternoon, a number of students were able to enjoy cooking with Kiki, learning of a Congolese peanut stew Kiki’s father often made for her as a child. A perfect dish for winter!

YSFP student Kenia Hale ’21 moderated Kiki’s public conversation, exploring how Folk and the Farmer’s Hand have worked to address inequity, from tipping policies to empower urban agriculture in Black neighborhoods. The next day, Kiki was able to delve further into Detroit’s urban “revival” and working with many stakeholders like activists and farmers as part of a class visit to YSFP Director Mark Bomford’s college seminar, "CSYC 312: Sustainable Approaches to Food & Agriculture.”