Field Notes: Spring 2010

Urban Harvest Makes a Splash to Help the Hungry

by Wylie Harris

Rows of aquaponic greens in one of the Urban Harvest greenhouses.

From the front, the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma  in Oklahoma City has the warehouse look of most other large food banks around the country, perhaps with better-tended landscaping. With a closer look at the greenery, though, that similarity begins to fade. The food bank’s front grounds are covered with edible landscaping and demonstration gardens.

Pass through the entry doors, and the scene begins to conform once more to expectations: warehouse, loading dock, offices and meeting rooms. (All a bit nicer than average, thanks to a recently completed expansion.) But step on out the back, and it’s right back down the rabbit hole: compost bins, greenhouses, even a fruit orchard.

Step inside the greenhouse, and things get even fishier – literally. While Oklahoma farmers are beginning to dip a toe into alternative aquaculture on the back forty (see p. 12), the food bank's Urban Harvest program aims to bring it into urban backyards.

Urban Harvest Director Bruce Edwards displays the submerged roots of the plants protruding through holes in the floating sheets of the aquaponics system.

Leaves and Fishes

Urban Harvest’s greenhouse has lush green plants growing in long floor-level rows, just like many others. What sets it apart is that these plants are supported by floating sheets of styrofoam, with their roots dangling through holes into the water below.
Tracing the water through a maze of piping leads back to its source: a 1,500-gallon cylindrical tank. A window allows a view into the tank’s interior, below a sign warning, “Beware of attack fish.”

Such a system, in which fish wastes nourish plants, and plant roots filter water to keep it healthy for the fish, is an example of aquaponics: aqua from “aquaculture,” and ponics from “hydroponics” (growing plants in a soilless medium).
Aquaponics embodies the principle of sustainability that tries to make a useful input of every “waste” product and turn linear flows of matter and energy into self-sustaining cycles.

Urban Harvest’s oversized aquarium holds 500 tilapia, a tropical fish whose popularity in the U.S. has grown rapidly in recent years.

The fish grow to a harvest weight of one and a half pounds in nine months. The floating foam sheets have room for 900 individual plants; in one trial, lettuce grew to harvest stage in just five weeks.

Most recently, the program has been selling aquaponic basil at $8/lb., and microgreens at $15-20 per tray, to local chefs. The tilapia have earned high praise from instructors at a local cooking school. Program director Bruce Edwards is trying to develop markets that will not involve Urban Harvest in processing the fish.

Wastes to Worms

Fish aren’t the only unconventional enterprise cooking up at Urban Harvest. Edwards seems bent on nurturing a herd of every off-the-wall livestock species he can lay hands on, including one that squirms right through the fingers.

Urban Harvest uses vermiculture, or raising worms, as a means of processing leftover vegetable matter from its own gardens, along with any unusable produce that comes in as donations to the food bank.

The worms turn these materials into worm castings, a rich source of fertilizer. Urban Harvest has sixteen worm boxes, each capable of generating 400 pounds of worm castings every four months.

Urban Harvest sells the worm castings at farmers’ markets for $3 a pound. The program also offers worm box “starter kits,” including the worms themselves (and one year of free email consulting to make sure they get off to a good start), for people interested in composting their own kitchen trimmings at home.

Reaching Out

The proceeds from everything that Urban Harvest sells go right back into its own projects, in an ongoing effort toward making the program financially self-sustaining. However, neither the income nor the food produced is enough to have much direct impact on the food bank’s budget or food supply.

Instead Edwards guides Urban Harvest to complement the food bank’s efforts in less direct ways, by cutting overhead and enabling clients to answer some of their own food needs.

For example, a new initiative, the Red Dirt Soil Builders, puts Urban Harvest volunteers to work sorting more of the food bank’s reject produce stream into the program’s compost piles. The extra labor means that packaged produce, which formerly went into the trash for lack of time to unwrap each piece, now becomes valuable compost.
Volunteers learn composting skills, and, after 50 hours’ time, are eligible for a share of the compost they’re helping to make. Meanwhile, by reducing the Food Bank’s trash removal bill, the Red Dirt Soil Builders free up space in the budget for tens of thousands of additional meals for Food Bank clients.

Food in Community

Urban Harvest’s educational efforts don’t end with compost. The demonstration gardens on the grounds serve as classroom sites for sessions on topics like ‘Gardening 101,’ ‘Basic Composting,’ and ‘Edible Landscaping,’ open to the public for a small fee (see calendar, p. 20).

In addition, Urban Harvest runs the community garden program in the 53 central and western Oklahoma counties that compose the Food Bank’s service area. The tally of gardens is up to 29 (from seventeen in 2004), with an additional ten slated to open this year (see list).

Some gardeners can reduce their own grocery bills by consuming their own crops; others contribute produce to those in need through programs like Plant a Row (see box) and other charitable pathways.

“There’s much larger interest,” Edwards says, “I think because of the economic times and also because people want to know where their food comes from and how it’s grown.”
“Last year we gave away 35,000 plants to community gardens, from the greenhouse.” In addition, he says, Urban Harvest assists community gardens in other ways. Those can include, among other things, information and education, help with grant research, tools and equipment, materials (compost, manure, straw, etc.), and field operations with the Urban Harvest tractor, vehicles and other power equipment.
Urban Harvest also shares volunteers and helps to coordinate among gardens, and hosts meetings at the Regional Food Bank facility.

From worms in the compost, to fish in the greenhouse, to gardens in unused corners of the city and countryside, Urban Harvest offers many shining examples of ways to think outside the box – or inside the tank – to solve the all too common problems of poverty and hunger.