Community

The Philadelphia farm that plants other farms

Sankofa Community Farm works three and a half acres in Philadelphia and sends eighty thousand seedlings a year out to gardens across the city.

By Harry Hayman 6 min read
The Philadelphia farm that plants other farms

Philadelphia has about forty thousand vacant lots. When the city finally counted what it grows food on, the answer was roughly 450 spaces covering nearly 130 acres. That figure comes from Growing from the Root, the city’s first urban agriculture plan, published in April 2023, and it includes everything: community gardens, school gardens, market farms, somebody’s side yard.

I keep those two numbers next to each other because together they say something that most conversations about urban farming get backwards. We talk as though the constraint is land. It is not. The city holds more ground than it has uses assigned to, which is exactly why the Philadelphia Land Bank exists, and reporting by the Philadelphia Inquirer on the Land Bank’s record of transferring vacant property put the count of publicly held parcels still available at around six thousand.

So if the land is not the bottleneck, what does a working piece of city food infrastructure actually look like? Go to Southwest Philadelphia.

Three and a half acres on the Schuylkill

Sankofa Community Farm sits inside Bartram’s Garden, on the river in Southwest Philadelphia. It was founded in 2011 by Chris Bolden-Newsome and Ty Holmberg, and it works three and a half acres.

Three and a half. That is smaller than a lot of the vacant parcels the Land Bank is holding.

On that ground the farm grows over sixty crops and wild foods, most of them rooted in the African Diaspora, and produces more than fifteen thousand pounds of food a year. That food moves through farm stands, grocery partnerships and a weekly neighbourhood market rather than out of the neighbourhood entirely, which is the part that distinguishes a community farm from a farm that simply happens to be inside a city.

The farm describes its own work in terms of food sovereignty and of confronting food apartheid, and it is worth using their language rather than mine here, because the framing is the point. This is not a charitable donation of vegetables into a neighbourhood. It is a neighbourhood growing its own.

The number that changes what the place is

Here is the figure I cannot stop thinking about.

Sankofa distributes over eighty thousand vegetable transplants a year to roughly one hundred and thirty farms and gardens across Philadelphia.

Read that as an infrastructure statistic rather than a gardening one. A single three and a half acre site is supplying the starting material for about a hundred and thirty other growing operations. It is not only a farm that feeds a neighbourhood. It is a farm that plants other farms.

That is a distribution network, built and running, inside a city that keeps commissioning plans about how it might one day build a distribution network. Nobody had to invent it. Somebody just did it, quietly, while the rest of us were in meetings.

The rest of the farm’s numbers describe the same thing from other angles. More than fifty local families take part in its community garden programme. Around twenty high school students hold paid internships each year, which matters because paid is doing real work in that sentence. Over fifteen hundred volunteers come through annually. More than fifty home and school gardens have been built and supported in the surrounding neighbourhood.

Why I read this as infrastructure and not as charity

There is a habit in civic conversation of filing anything involving vegetables and volunteers under goodwill. Nice, worthy, small, and fundamentally decorative.

That filing is wrong, and it is expensive.

The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, which supports more than two hundred community gardens, urban farms and grow spaces across the region, states plainly that Philadelphia is the poorest big city in the United States and that more than sixteen percent of residents are food insecure, as a result of decades of discriminatory policy rather than of anything individual. Through its City Harvest programme, participating gardens have spent more than fifteen years growing deliberately for donation and sharing those harvests with food pantries, mutual aid groups and their own neighbours.

Put the Sankofa seedling number beside that and a system comes into view. Propagation at one site. Distribution to a hundred and thirty others. Growing at the neighbourhood level. Sharing into pantries and mutual aid. Nobody drew that as an org chart, and it works anyway.

What it is actually short of

Not land. Water lines, secure tenure, and permission.

Ask anyone running a growing space in this city what stops them doing more and you will hear about hydrant access, or about a lot they have worked for eleven years on an arrangement that can end, or about paperwork designed for a developer rather than for a dozen neighbours with a shared hose. The Neighborhood Gardens Trust exists precisely to solve the tenure half of that, by taking gardens into permanent protection.

The distinction matters more than it sounds. A gardener with a secure lease plants an orchard. A gardener without one plants annuals, because nobody puts a fruit tree into ground they might lose. You can read a garden’s tenure straight off what is growing in it.

Water works the same way. A lot that has to be watered out of jugs carried from somebody’s kitchen will stay a small lot however many hands are willing to work it, and the ceiling on that garden was set years earlier by a plumbing decision nobody thought of as a food decision.

What I would do with this

Stop measuring urban agriculture in acres. A hundred and thirty acres sounds like failure right up until you notice it is spread across 450 places where people who did not previously know each other now do, and that at least one of those places is seeding a hundred and thirty more.

Then fund the boring half. Water access and tenure, budgeted rather than improvised. Publicly held ground made legible enough that a group of neighbours can find out a lot’s status without hiring anyone.

And in the meantime, the useful thing is small and immediate. Find the growing space nearest you, ask the people in it what they need this month, and bring it. That is a shorter route to a fed neighbour than anything I could write.

Sources and references

Every figure above comes from one of these, and each is linked where it is used.

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