While much of the city hunkered down on a cold February day, the stewards of Hope Garden in Dorchester were out pruning apple trees at an edible park, trying to keep the trees from overshadowing the vegetable beds below.
The garden on Geneva Avenue is one of about a dozen "food forests" in the city, run by the Boston Food Forest Coalition, a nonprofit that turns vacant lots into edible parks and gardens.
"There's hundreds, maybe thousands of vacant parcels across the city, and this is the critical moment in the history of the city of Boston to transform the fabric of the city," said Alex Alvanos, who leads Boston Food Forest Coalition's strategy, operations and site management.
There are various approaches to land stewardship for agricultural purposes. Nonprofit land trusts are popular; many community gardens across the state are run that way. There are also farmer cooperatives; local businesses owned and operated by growers themselves, who share their land and resources.
And there are plenty of parcels in the city to work with. In 2022, Mayor Michelle Wu conducted a land audit of all city-owned property to identify which lots are suitable — in the city's eyes — for housing development, and which are better suited for green space conservation, parks and gardens.
But practitioners of both land trusts and farmer co-ops are sounding alarms about rising costs and growing regional food insecurity. As the city works through its budget for the next year, urban gardeners say they're expecting massive cuts that could undermine their mission to localize the food system.
Land in trust
Groups like the Boston Food Forest Coalition are trying to create a patchwork quilt of edible, public parks through land trusts — nonprofits dedicated to community-led land stewardship — in partnership with the city.
It's a modern take on the community garden that hearkens back to the Victory Gardens of WWII, an era when neighbors came together to grow food during tough times.
Boston struggles with equitable food access and a food system that many feel should be much more sustainable. The vast majority of fresh produce is shipped in from out of New England, meaning higher emissions and overall costs. Across the region, hunger is rising, with more than 40% of Massachusetts households facing food insecurity.
Many modern sustainability goals could be achieved by returning to agragrian concepts accessible to everyone, said environmental historian Kate Brown, author of "Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present and Future of the Self-Provisioning City."
"In a common working-class neighborhood in an American city, people would have chickens. People would have gardens. And they would grow a good part of their food," she said. "They'd use the small animals — chickens, rabbits or pigs — to biodigest their household waste, to make soils to grow more food. And they would just keep that cycle going."
Demand outstrips supply
At their height, the Victory Gardens produced more than 40% of the nation's fresh vegetables from backyards, rooftops, and public spaces. Right here in Boston, the last Victory Garden is still in operation in its original location in the Emerald Necklace. With more than seven acres, it has grown food for more than 80 years.
The demand for garden plots in the city has outgrown the supply. The Trustees of Reservations manages more than 50 community gardens in Boston alone, also through land trusts like the BFFC. Yet many allotments have waitlists.
It takes a lot of organizing to start a new land trust. As tax-exempt nonprofits, they are run by an elected board, sustain staff and executive salaries, and rely on a network of volunteers.
The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative knows these challenges well. In the 1980s, community organizers pushed the city to grant eminent domain rights to the Roxbury neighborhood, which had been ravaged by redlining, white flight and arson-for-profit insurance fraud schemes.
A once-contaminated auto garage was transformed into the Dudley Greenhouse, which this time of year shows promise of spring: rows upon rows of tomato seedlings.
"The idealized concept [of a land trust] is that it centers community, and that it gives community control of resources," said John Smith, executive director of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative. "The whole idea of controlling, even in terms of your own food, some aspect of that becomes central, that's an appealing thing."
Farmer cooperatives
One urban farmer in Dorchester favors a different model for preserving land for community agriculture: farmer cooperatives.
Kafi Dixon cultivates a half-acre and is founder of The Common Good co-op, a for-profit collaborative with local growers and artisans.
Dixon argues that co-ops encourage a hyper-local food system by empowering growers who have already been tending the land. During the pandemic, her cooperative grew hundreds of pounds of produce, distributing the food to senior centers in the neighborhood.
"It's really the truest form of landowning and landsharing of any model," she said.
But Dixon's dozens of raised beds are vulnerable to real estate development, because the vacant lot she farms is still owned by the city. In order to change hands, it has to go through a public request for proposals process.
"We will be doing a community engagement process related to [the land Dixon cultivates]," said Shani Fletcher, director of Grow Boston, the city's urban agriculture department. "We are not able to just sell parcels to someone because they live next door at that scale."
Dixon's co-op will have to compete for the land she has been using to feed her neighbors for years. That highlights a tension in the city between an urgent need for more housing, and what farmers say is an approaching crisis in the national food system.
"It's not the people who are trying to grow food that's the problem. It's the city," said Dixon. "Because the city is stuck in this tug-of-war between wanting to be a Zohran [Mamdani, mayor of New York City] and being really capitalistic around housing development."
Kate Brown supports Dixon's efforts through a course at MIT about cooperative agriculture in collaboration with the farmer. Her students produced an accessible how-to guide on starting an urban farm, as well as a design proposal for Dixon's land.
Brown feels Dixon's fears of displacement have been borne out throughout history.
"People improve territory with their sweat equity, their own labor, and other people want to swoop in and capitalize," said Brown. "And then gentrification occurs, and the people who started the gardens can no longer afford to live there."
It's a green space paradox Bostonians have been fighting for generations. But regardless of the model, urban growers agree in feeling that Boston needs to prioritize protecting green space and localizing the food system — for the health of the people who live here now, and the future generations to come.
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