City Slicker Farms Programs (Essay Sample)

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City Slicker Farms
Introduction
The City Slicker Farms in Oakland, CA was founded back in 2001 with an aim to empower the West Oakland community people to meet their immediate and basic need to access fresh and healthy foods through backyard gardens and urban farms (cityslickerfarms.org). Healthy foods in the Oakland neighborhoods never existed until City Slicker Farms supported the community efforts to grow fresh and healthy food. City Slicker Farms was initiated by a local farmer and West Oakland resident Willow Rosenthal who felt that the food she grew was not affordable by the low-income residents. She formed this non-profit project to grow organic food for her community. Since then, City Slicker Farms (CSF) has developed to be a real community-based organization. Its main site, Central Street Farm is where CFS runs a farm stand every Saturday, building community support as well as distributing over 50,000 pound of organic produce since its founding. The Central Street Farm is also used as a demonstration site to showcase different growing methods and animal-husbandry techniques such as for keeping bees, ducks and chickens as well as composite and seedlings distribution. The City Slicker Farms has several sites which are Ralph Bunche School Nursery, five urban farms (former vacant lots), Mandela Farmers’ Market and over 65 backyard food gardens (Finnin).
City Slicker Farms Programs
1 Back yard garden building
Just like most urban food production projects, City Slicker Farms bases its work mainly on leased lands. Since CFS depended on lands it does not own, the Back Yard Garden Building Program was developed to assist low-income residents to grow food at their homes and use it to feed their families or barter or sell at CSF sites.
Figure 1: Sample Slicker farm backyard individual plots
The Backyard Garden program also has a two-year mentorship program on proper garden build and application. It also has add on services and so far 100 household equivalent 600 people have benefited from the program. It has produced 24,000 lbs of sustenance and helped in community building. However, the program has some constraints such as safe soil, unfavorable rental housing policies and policies that do not allow animal husbandry plus sales (Finnin).
2 Urban farming education
The Urban Farming Education Program is another program under CFS and deals with bridging the generational gap for food security, raising awareness, improving urban agriculture skills and developing community leaders. The Urban Farming Education Program has benefits such as apprenticeships, internships for West Oakland youth, workshops, partnership opportunities, service learning and farm tours (Finnin).
3 Community market farms
The last program is the Community Market Farms Program that has transformed the unused land into fruitful market farms. This is through creation of farm stands and greenhouses. With the program, over 725 residents have benefited from large farm produce, 26,000 seedlings and 11 tons of compost manure. The residents are made to understand that urban farming is part of their right and a personal obligation.
Figure 2: City slicker farms campaign poster
However, this program has challenges such as soil contamination and limited access to land and water. The people who work at the City Slicker Farms are four staff (full-time), two to three staff (part-time) and hundreds of volunteers. The role of the staff and volunteers is helping to plan and build organic backyard gardens plus provide materials and ongoing support. Additionally, CFS works together with the backyard farmers to assure quality and provide market for produce (Finnin).
Advantage, disadvantage and improvements
Advantages
Some of the positive aspects of City slicker farms is that i runs a compost program through which kitchen scraps from neighborhood restaurants are picked through bikes. The hundred volunteers cultivate culinary and medicinal herbs, fruiting plants, vegetables and other country-or country-specific plant varieties through the seed-saving and nursery program (cityslickerfarms.org). City Slicker Farms also holds education and workshops programs to offer the residents with extra tools for self-dependence through gardening. The staff and volunteers at CFS are involved in community outreach activities by promoting empowerment programs through workshops, farm stands, paid jobs for members and face to face invitations. Another core activity by CSF is to educate both the youth and the adult about food justice, nutrition and environmental issues. CSF takes into consideration improvement of the public health by using this food system to fight nutrition related diseases such as malnutrition, heart problems or diabetes. Presently, City Slicker Farms has revitalized farms, nourished communities and give them a chance to feed on healthy food (Finnin).
Disadvantages
Despite its big role in the West Oakland growth, CSF has the challenge of raising funds. Statements made by Rosenthal, reveal that City Slicker Farms needs institutional support as this is a citywide scale project. However, City Slicker survives on individual donations or grants. This is because City Slicker Farms has to balance between two issues i.e. at the community level, build a movement for food independence at the same time on the policy level, change how the food system works. On the other hand, CFS has become successful in providing fresh produce and installing 60 backyard gardens and continued support with materials.
How it can improve
There are several things that are possible with City Slicker Farms. If half of the city’s 1,200 acres public land was to be utilized this would increase the produce by 5 to 10% (Finnin). In addition, if the farm starts mobilizing resources in form of grants, contribution and related agencies the program would greatly evolve.
The Community in City Slicker Farm
The community at West Oakland, CA had been writhed by struggles that upsurge risk to food insecurity. The community was affected by poverty, pollution, chronic health problems, history of structural injustices like Redlining and limited access to healthy food and transportation. Therefore, there was the need to empower the communities through a program such as this.
What is city slicker farm's goal, focus?
The goal of City Slicker Farms is to increase food self-reliance in West Oakland by investing in high yield, sustainable, organic urban granges and backyard gardens (Finnin). City Slicker Farms focuses on growing staples mainly produce that performs well and requires small spaces such as dino kale, cooking greens and other farm produce that are very productive and nutritious. The backyard gardens continues to help families survive as well as ensure that CFS’s vision will thrive by making members less dependent from outside sources (Finnin)
How it effects the environment
City Slicker Farms provides the bes...