City Farm – Chicago, IL by Patty

Wednesday, August 29. After the Edible Market, we zipped over to City Farm, a place that combines two of my favorite things in life – recycling and tomatoes.

City Farm is a project of the Resource Center, the city’s oldest nonprofit recycling program. The idea behind City Farm is that an urban farming program is not just about raising food, but also about doing it with minimal environmental impact. City Farm is located on a formerly abandoned lot that is leased from the city. They farm on 2 feet of compost that is placed on top of layers of wood chips and compost that are placed on top of a clay sealer. Basically it is a giant 1.25-acre raised bed.

The folks at City Farm are realistic about the nature of land in the city – as neighborhoods change so does land use, which means that vacant lots don’t always stay vacant. Which is why they refer to themselves as a “mobile” farm. They can move if they need to and build another farm on a different site.

The commitment to recycling is a huge part of their operation. City Farm picks up restaurant waste and landscaping waste from the city government and turns it into the compost that is the heart of their operation. Then they close the loop by selling tomatoes and other produce back to some of the restaurants that contribute to the compost. All within sight of downtown Chicago.

So that’s probably enough about the compost. Now on to the tomatoes. Our tour guide for the afternoon was Tim Wilson, the project manager for City Farm. He showed us their beautiful organic crops, including 20 varieties of heirloom tomatoes, greens, beets, eggplant, radishes, carrots, and herbs. Tim explained that City Farm is a self-sustaining project. The proceeds from selling their produce to restaurants and members of the community (on a sliding scale) allows them to pay living wage salaries with benefits for their employees and hire interns from the neighborhood around the farm (home to the infamous Cabrini Green housing project.)

It was a great visit, not just because I am a recycling geek and they gave us lots of tomatoes, but also because City Farm is an incredibly cool idea and they are totally making it work.

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