Urban Farming in Oakland: City Slickers Fundraiser features Novella Carpenter

Urban farming is fast catching on as an alternative to shopping in overpriced food stores and worrying about how to feed a family on a challenged budget in a bad economy. Oakland, California has become the San Francisco East Bay Area's center of the urban farming movement. All of this was evident at the City Slickers June fundraiser held at St. Paul's Church near Lake Merritt.

Why wait this long to blog about the event? Because everything about the Oakland urban farming effort, from City Slickers and the people involved in it, to the work of Oaklander Novella Carpenter, City Slickers Founder Willow Rosenthal and her friend Laura Pivas and, it's board members including Kelli Saturno, Barbara Lafeete - Olawale and Interim Executive Director Barbara Finnin .

And others not in the West Oakland food organization, but an influence on the movement, like UC Berkeley Professor and Activist Michael Pollan (who Rosenthal and Carpenter describe as a "hero" and a "great guy"), and others, all in Oakland and the East Bay, form, in the urban farming movement, a World unto itself. It deserves more than the short, keyword-friendly blog post.

Moreover, the people I met at the City Slickers fundraiser are some of the most interesting, energetic, and fascinating I've ever met in my life, and that's saying a lot.

City Slickers' Mission

City Slickers describes its mission as "to empower West Oakland community members to meet the basic need for healthy organic food for themselves and their families." In this, it combines seven farms to provide "affordable fresh produce" to the people of West Oakland. That's something long overdue in West Oakland, a part of Oakland historically blighted with supermarkets featuring overpriced, canned goods, and little in the way of fresh produce, all because supermarket execs said they "couldn't afford" to do better without a subsidy by the City of Oakland.

How do I know this? Because solving that problem was one of my tasks when I worked as the Economic Advisor to Elihu Harris when he was Oakland's Mayor and from 1995 to 1998. It was sad to see so many supermarket chains out to extort the City of Oakland just to be convinced to provide the proper kind of food product for West Oaklanders.

What Is Urban Farming

Urban Farming is nothing more or less than establishing a plot to grow vegetables and raise animals for food in your backyard, but it's in an urban area. According to Willow Rosenthal and Novella Carpenter, the habit goes back 100 years, but the reason its become "hot" now, in the 21st Century, is a combination of awareness of the unhealthy results of fast food consumption, and the economy itself. It's cheaper to grow, make, and cook food, than to spend a $100 per grocery store visit.

Urban farming is, from this perspective, the apparent manifestation of Michael Pollan's idea that industrial eating disconnects us from nature; the best way to reconnect with nature and eat with the environment instead of against it, is to establish, or at least eat from, an urban farm. That's what Novella Carpenter's done.

The Crazy Genius of Novella Carpenter

Novella Carpenter is, and I write this lovingly, a brilliant, nutty, funny-as-hell genius. You've heard of women who run with the wolves? Well, Novella's more likely to get them knocked up. The guest at the City Slickers event and Der Kaiser of Ghost Town Farms is someone you know is there, even if you don't know who she is. That was certainly the case at the fundraiser.

Carpenter's given to speaking frankly and hilariously, as certain to refer to drunken encounters as she is the proper way to establish an urban farm, or for that matter, mate animals.

Of all kinds.

Carpenter's established her West Oakland farm into what reads as something out of Charlotte's Web, with flies that go unswatted, and two turkeys named Harold and Maude. Carpenter's book Farm City: The Education of An Urban Farmer, describes how she came to be Oakland's most famous urban farmer.

But as much of a hoot as Novella is to talk with, get her paired with Willow Rosenthal and it's all over. The two really draw energy from each other as the video shows; it's no wonder they're at the center of the urban farming movement in Oakland.

Novella's a "genius" because she's found a way to channel her amazingly powerful creative sprit into something that touches everyone directly or indirectly, changing the culture around the production of the food we eat. She's not a TV star – but should be – yet, she's having a massive impact on how people think about how their food is gotten just by telling her story in Farm City.  One reviewer wrote "At the end of the memoir, I felt as though I had been tending the farm right alongside Carpenter—and emerged satiated and renewed." Moreover, Novella's giving an image of a West Oakland that can be - separated from drugs, crime, and The Riders case - and at the heart of the Bay Area's urban farming movement.

Why Oakland?

Novella's West Oakland farm is successful mostly because in Oakland, people"let you do your thing;" a massive contrast to Berkeley, where that city's famously neurotic residents remind you of the permits you need for urban farming.  Oakland's combination of weather, acceptance, and diversity was the perfect stew for Novella's work.



Get involved with City Slicker Farms

If we're to make Oakland that "better place" Oaklanders talk about, helping City Slicker Farms by volunteering or donating is a great start. City Slicker Farms is looking for a Program Assistant and a Development Manager as of this writing and someone who's serious about what they do, which is developing a needed alternative to access to food that should become the norm. Visit the website at http://www.cityslickerfarms.org .

And stay tuned.