Big City Farms: Sustainable Farming Right in the City

“There’s a lot of land in urban areas that is just not uti­lized or is under­uti­lized,” Alex Persful, one of Big City Farms’ four part­ners, told Organic Connections. “Here in Baltimore our demo farm is actu­ally on an asphalt park­ing lot, which used to be a city garage, that we’ve leased from the city for five years. We put in a 22-by-50-foot hoop house, then put down a plas­tic bar­rier. We bring in com­post on top of the plas­tic bar­rier and actu­ally plant directly upon that.”

The demo model has worked like gang­busters. “The local response is excel­lent,” Persful said. “I’ve never been in a busi­ness where I don’t even have to sell it; it’s already gone. We cut it and deliver it the same day, and it’s really hard to beat that freshness.”

Crops grown are pri­mar­ily salad greens and herbs. Clients include food ser­vice giant Bon Appétit (which ser­vices two col­leges within the area), and local restau­rants. They also sell through farm­ers’ markets.

A Personal Mission

Persful him­self, hav­ing been engaged in sus­tain­able grow­ing for some years, was very happy to find the com­pany and to come aboard as a part­ner and man­ager. “I’ve lived in Panama since 1995, up until the last year when I moved to Baltimore,” he said. “In Panama I did many things. In the last six years I had a corn plan­ta­tion, and ran about 1,500 acres of orange trees; we processed up to 15,000 gal­lons of orange juice per season.”

Sustainable grow­ing became impor­tant to Persful at an early age. “I’m orig­i­nally from Arkansas; I grew up on a cat­tle ranch,” he related. “When I was younger I saw the exten­sion agents come over and help us out spray­ing the field with some Agent Orange. That was pretty much my first taste of the chem­i­cal side. I didn’t want any part of that.”

After a stint in the navy and a short time in col­lege, Persful appren­ticed at work­ing with cat­tle. During that time, he became enam­ored with sus­tain­able grow­ing. “Through the man who was appren­tic­ing me, I got to meet many peo­ple includ­ing Chuck Walters, founder of Acres USA mag­a­zine and a big book writer,” Persful recalled. “Chuck changed me a lot, and I started get­ting more involved in soil.”

Not long ago Persful decided to make the move back to the US. “I was curi­ous about mov­ing back to the States, and I wanted to see what was here,” he said. “I read an adver­tise­ment for a man­ager at this com­pany, and I said, ‘Well, that’s pretty inter­est­ing: urban farm­ing. What an oxy­moron that is.’ I talked to the guys and I came up here. I liked the mis­sion. It’s more of a social mis­sion than nor­mal farm­ing, because we’re actu­ally doing it right in urban areas. I was also sur­prised at what we could do with the model we were using.”

The Successful Model

Big City Farms has already part­nered with a Baltimore non­profit cor­po­ra­tion to help them estab­lish another farm in the Big City Farms model. “They have two acres of land on a five-year lease from the city,” Persful explained. “We’re help­ing them out with the fundrais­ing so they can put all of their hoop houses up.”

Additional farms estab­lished in Baltimore and then expand­ing to other cities will fol­low the same suc­cess­ful model. “Somebody comes to us when they have a piece of prop­erty in a city, or they want to rent out or lease a lot. We’ll help them do that process and assist them in get­ting it up and run­ning. Then we’ll guar­an­tee the buy­back of all their prod­uct. We can go ahead and pre­sell those orders, and every­body will grow on the same stan­dards that we do.”

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Best Practices Researched Out

Those stan­dards have been well researched to sus­tain­ably max­i­mize pro­duc­tion. “One of our part­ners is Dr. Thomas Handwerker of University of Maryland Eastern Shore,” Persful con­tin­ued. “He’s in charge of the UMES Small Farm Institute. He went all around the world look­ing at dif­fer­ent pro­duc­tion mod­els of the hoop houses, and he pretty much came up with the idea.”

The idea is to grow strictly in com­post, and uti­lize purely nat­ural means with no her­bi­cides or pes­ti­cides. “I like to con­sider myself a bio­log­i­cal farmer,” said Persful. “Taking care of the soil means tak­ing care of the plant, and so we put in a lot of bio­log­i­cals, such as preda­tory nema­todes, ben­e­fi­cial fun­gus and ben­e­fi­cial bacteria.”

Insects are also taken care of through such methods—although the rapid­ity at which har­vest occurs is itself a nat­ural deter­rent. “We have a very fast turnover rate,” Persful pointed out. “We’re able to pro­duce 52,000 pounds of head let­tuce and about 20,000 pounds of salad mix, and noth­ing stays in the ground more than 6 weeks. In the sum­mer­time it’s only 3½ to 4 weeks before they’re har­vested. So it doesn’t give the bugs a chance to breed.”

The hoop houses them­selves are built to be strong against weather. “It’s a hur­ri­cane house, built a lot dif­fer­ent than most hoop houses,” Persful said. “It’s strength­ened with poly­wire and will stand up to the wind; we’ve had up to 65-mile-an-hour winds. The strength also keeps the plas­tic from sag­ging if there’s snow on it.”

Going for­ward, the suc­cess­ful model will be repli­cated for max­i­mum suc­cess for all grow­ers uti­liz­ing the method. “We always want to do the same thing, because grow­ing on com­post is work­ing out very well,” Persful con­cluded. “We just want a uni­form stan­dard of the prod­uct that we’re using, and every­body using the same thing. That way we can tackle any prob­lems as they arrive as a group instead of individually.”

For more infor­ma­tion, please visit www.bigcityfarms.com.