Sowing the Seeds of Food Sovereignty and Knowledge in Chicago

CHICAGO — Urban learning spaces like Community Food Navigator’s Seed, Soil and Springtime Gathering keep the community going, according to Mel Carter, who ran a farm business, a plant store and worked with the Let Us Breath Collective on 51st Street.

Carter said that just making sure that people eat was crucial, as she described how food got more expensive, how people were losing EBT benefits, and how healthy grocery stores were scarce.

“One thing I believe strongly in, is that food is a right, not a privilege, and everybody should have access to food,” Mel Carter said. “Especially during the growing season.”

Community Food Navigator, a Chicago-based not-for-profit that organizes for food sovereignty in Black and Indigenous communities, hosted a Seed, Soil and Springtime Gathering, at Plant Chicago in the Back of the Yards community southwest of downtown. At the event, people gathered to celebrate a just food system, grow new relationships and get seeds started for urban growing spaces.

“The navigator team wants to help by celebrating and reflecting on the start of the season with fellowship with all of you in this space,” Lisa Tallman, project executive director with Community Food Navigator, said during introductions. “We gather to bring visibility to each other and catalyze relationship building, knowledge sharing and to lean into the collective joy and mutual care in our urban agriculture community.”

The Seeds, Soil and Springtime Gathering was about community empowerment and contributing to making urban food production spaces accessible for people to grow their own food according to Sydney Coyle, project coordinator with Community Food Navigator. Coyle also emphasized that there is a lot of injustice in current food systems and that local communities should feel like they have control over their food systems.

“Particularly led by Black, Brown and Indigenous growers, food mobilizers and culturally rooted food educators, Chicago has a really dynamic food scene of food justice mobilizers,” Coyle said. “We are here to support, and empowering people to grow their own food, and to have that kind of ownership over the work that they do.”

Tallman also encouraged local food growers, mobilizers and educators to stay involved by using the Community Food Navigator App. A smartphone application designed to grow connections in Black, Brown and Indigenous food-centered networks in Chicago, according to the Community Food Navigator website.

A Community Space for Cultivating a Circular Economy

Plant Chicago, located in a historical Chicago firehouse that was active from 1908-1978, provided an active learning space for Community Food Navigator to organize with local growers. They also host sustainability education workshops, support local regenerative food producers and raise awareness about food production and the regenerative value of hydroponics, aquaponics, composting, mushroom growing and even worm bins that break down waste.

“Our mission is to cultivate local circular economies,” Jonathan Pereira, Plant Chicago executive director said. “So, we are very much focused on making sure we are supporting small local food producers that are utilizing organic or regenerative practices.”

Waste reduction was one of the circular economy strategies that Plant Chicago contributed to. Contemporary economies used an extractive resource strategy when making consumer products from materials of the earth, and Pereria said that strategy contributed to the production of disposable products that were often single-use and ended up in landfills.

“So, when you think about a circular economy, it’s about taking less out of the earth and utilizing what you’ve got, and making things that are more durable, so they last a long time, and when they reach end of life, they are either returned to the environment safely or repurposed in another form,” Pereira said. “In the context of a food system, composting is a paradigm of a circular economic activity.”

Pereira said that Plant Chicago’s building reflected this commitment. The facility used renewable energy from a 16-kilowatt solar array, improved efficiency with insulation, and the heating was set to be upgraded to a modern heat pump system, to extract heat from the outdoors rather than burn natural gas. The Plant Chicago property also contributed a public resource for electric cars.

“We added the first publicly available electric vehicle (EV) charging station on the southwest side,” Pereira said “One of the obstacles to EV is making sure there’s equitable access that has public access to it. People live in apartments, right? So, the only way you could do that (EV ownership and apartment living) is if you have access to a public electric vehicle charging station.”

Growing Collective Land Stewardship with Legislation and Learning

The Illinois Stewardship Alliance, which was a statewide organization that brought farmers and eaters together to solve problems in the food system, participated to spread the word about their policy efforts with the State of Illinois. Malissa Frueh, Illinois Stewardship Alliance development director said they collaborated with Illinois farmers to build two caucuses, a local food farmer caucus and a soil health farmer caucus.

“Farmers come together and talk about challenges they are facing in being responsible stewards of the land,” Frueh said. “If there are issues that come to the table that can be solved by proposing new legislation or amending existing legislation, then we work together in campaign teams to address those issues with local representatives.”

The Illinois Stewardship Alliance worked with multiple organizations to boost their efforts in Illinois communities, and Frueh said that she was encouraging people to get involved with their legislative efforts. The Illinois Stewardship Alliance raised awareness about current state legislation such as the Partners for Conservation Reauthorization Act, which was a statewide effort to implement soil health practices and support regenerative agriculture with Illinois farms. Frueh said that these collaborations with the Illinois Stewardship Alliance were “farmer-led, and eater powered.”

“We work with farmers to learn more about the issues that they are facing, and they drive our legislative priorities, but our members also play a hand in voting on legislative priorities,” Frueh said. “They (farmers and eaters) direct in a sense like, yes, we think this issue is important, we should prioritize this and build collective power to get this solution moved forward and signed into law.”

Carmen Holmes, owner of the small Harvey Illinois farm called “It’s All Natural,” said the Community Food Navigator was an organization she felt strongly about supporting. Holmes said the Community Food Navigator regularly gathered urban growers for learning.

“So, what I am hoping here is that they (community members and urban growers) not only get friendship, but that they walk away knowing something about how their food is being grown,” Holmes said. “What seeds look like, how many seeds that they can plant, how to water it and what kind of growing mediums do they need in order to make it thrive, but, the key thing here is knowledge.”

It’s All Natural farm supported individuals who wanted to grow their own food, and Holmes said she helped people with training to gain the right information for producing food over long-term periods of time while taking care of the soil.

“With the Produce Safety Alliance, I do training for farmers and organizations for FSMA, which is the Food (Safety) Modernization Act under the (U.S. Department of Agriculture) USDA, to make sure that we are growing our food in a sustainable way, but also a safe way, and making sure you are dealing with the soil properly,” Holmes said. “These are small farmers, small growers, they don’t have a lot of technical assistance.”

Chicago Communities are Cultivating Knowledge and Green Space

The North Lawndale Greening Committee, which started in 1995 with goals of increasing public green space and food production spaces in Chicago, helped residents and businesses gain access to land and repair soil on land used for urban agriculture. Dr. Shemuel Israel, president of North Lawndale Committee contributed to the Seeds, Soil and Springtime Gathering with education and he gave away a refractometer, a device for measuring the refractive index of a liquid sample of produce to quantify sugar content and salinity.

“That’s what I was doing here today, showing people how to use the refractometer as part of the consumer education,” Israel said. “You can go to the store or farmers market, wherever you get your food, and you actually test to see how much dissolved solids are in it.”

Israel explained that urban growers can use this strategy to determine how the minerals and nutrients in local soil lots impacted the taste and quality of produce. Using this knowledge, Israel can make suggestions as to how to improve soil health where the produce was grown.

“So, I do this to try and restore the balance to the soil,” Israel said. “Typically, I do four things, make sure it has the soil energy, make sure it has the foundational minerals, make sure it has the humic (acid) and humus (decay/leaf litter), and the fourth thing I do is make sure it has trace minerals.”