FROM DECEMBER 2021 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX

Massive vegetable plots in parks and suburban backyards, gardens on condo rooftops, rows upon rows of crops planted in sprawling hydro corridors – urban farming is happening all across Toronto.

Nearly 10 years ago, the city introduced its GrowTO action plan to encourage more urban agriculture in Toronto. Since then, new initiatives have popped up, including the backyard chickens pilot project and aquafarms in shipping containers. There are many reasons why Toronto needs more robust urban agriculture: combatting the climate crisis by lowering emissions from food transportation, addressing food insecurity in neighbourhoods that lack high-quality grocery stores, and becoming a food-sovereign city that isn’t reliant on farms across borders and thousands of miles away.

Toronto is home to about 23 urban farms now, according to Toronto Urban Growers, including leaders in the urban farming movement, such as FoodShare, Black Creek Community Farm, Afri-Can Food Basket and Fresh City Farms. But to feed a city of three million, we need to do more.

Food justice activists argue that to truly embrace urban farming, more land needs to be allocated for growing food, whether that’s turning city-owned golf courses into farms or transforming underutilized spaces into gardens.

“Urban farmers are pushing through the policy barriers and experimenting with different operating models,” says Rhonda Teitel-Payne, co-coordinator of Toronto Urban Growers. “It’s a tough struggle, though, and not everyone has the resources to navigate complicated, lengthy and expensive approval processes.” Earlier this month, Toronto City Council passed a new climate strategy to reduce the city’s greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2040, which Teitel-Payne says could create opportunities for more local growing, community composting and funding for new farms.

WEP spoke to three farmers whose projects show the different forms urban farming can take in the city, from a 1.5-acre organic farm that’s TTC-accessible to compact greenhouses in neighbourhood backyards to linear farms in hydro corridors. They also offer innovative distribution systems, including affordable on-site farmers’ markets and hyper-local Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) boxes, a production and marketing model where consumers buy shares of a farm’s harvest in advance.

Flemo Farm

More than 100 years ago, Flemingdon Park was farmland owned by former Toronto mayor Robert John Fleming. After his death in 1925, it was sold to become public land, and by the 1960s, dozens of new high-rises sprouted up in the area, making it one of Toronto’s first “apartment city” communities. Now, for the first time in a century, there’s farmland in Flemingdon Park again.

A joint project between FoodShare and Flemingdon Health Centre, Flemo Farm is built in one of the city’s hydro corridors – ribbons of green space beneath towering power lines – near Don Mills Road and Overlea Boulevard. In the spring and summer, more than 50 types of herbs and vegetables are grown on the farm, including strawberries, bitter melon, artichokes, Asian long beans, okra, onions, corn and several varieties of squash.

Half the farm is tended to by Flemo Farm staff who grow and harvest the veggies, which are then sold at the weekly farmer’s market on-site and distributed through non-profits in the Flemingdon Park and Thorncliffe Park neighbourhoods. The other half is farmed by six community farmers, who each have 2,400-square-foot plots.

One of those farmers is Anishinaabe chef Charles Catchpole. This past year, on his farm Gitigaanes (Ojibway for “Little Farm”), he grew heirloom tomatoes, hot and sweet peppers, potatoes, beans and the Three Sisters vegetables (beans, corn and squash) in the traditional way of planting them, close together in mounds instead of in long, narrow beds. He used his produce in his Indigenous catering business, Charger Foods, and sold it through CSA boxes in his neighbourhood, Oakwood Village, and at Flemo’s farmers’ market.

“I don’t think there’s any farmers’ market as diverse as Flemo’s – and it’s only 100 meters away from where everything’s grown,” says Catchpole, who says the unique location also shows the opportunities of urban agriculture in Toronto. “[The farm] is beside a basketball court and a kids’ splash pad, and you can hear the rumble of the DVP.”

Flemo Farm also runs a community compost program. Local residents, many of whom live in apartment buildings without on-site composting, can bring their food scraps to the farm in exchange for vouchers for the farmers’ market. It’s a closed-loop system – the food waste is diverted from landfills, the compost provides nutrients for the farm and residents get greater access to fresh produce.

Javad Mozafari, the community engagement coordinator at Flemo Farm, says that he hopes the farm can be a model replicated in other hydro corridors and underutilized spaces in Toronto and other cities around the world.

“After COVID hit, Toronto realized that it would be pertinent to be a food-sovereign city, rather than to keep importing fresh vegetables from thousands of miles away,” says Mozafari. “We’re working toward food sovereignty, as well as food justice and food security.”

Sundance Harvest

With her 1.5-acre farm in northwest Toronto, Cheyenne Sundance is disrupting the status quo, proving that organic urban farming can be equitable, rooted in food justice – and profitable.

She started Sundance Harvest in 2019 when she was 21 years old, and from the get-go she knew she wanted to do things differently: no unpaid internships, which are the norm in organic farming; being an actual profitable farm with an output that rivals its rural counter-parts; and creating space for BIPOC youth to learn how to have a career in urban agriculture and start their own food-sovereignty movements.

Located in Downsview Park, Sundance Harvest is an all-season farm the size of two and a half football fields. Right now, in the cold season, there’s thyme, rosemary, chives, sage and root vegetables like carrots, beets and radishes in the fields, and kale, lettuce and chard in the two heated greenhouses. She sells her produce through CSA boxes – she has 50 right now and will be increasing to 150 next spring – as well as at West End farmers’ markets. Next spring, Sundance Harvest is launching a U-Pick flower farm every Saturday and will sell their produce on-site for the first time. “I want urban agriculture not to be seen as some cute niche hobby, especially for young Black women, but as an actual viable career,” says Sundance.

And with her 12-week training program Growing in the Margins, she’s being the mentor she didn’t have when she first started farming. The program teaches BIPOC youth everything from growing and harvesting basics to crop planning and leasing land.

Some of the participants from Growing in the Margins have gone on to become urban farmers themselves, including Aliyah Fraser, who started Lucky Bug Farm in Wellington County, and Hermmela Tafesse, who launched Kassa Harvest and sells her microgreens at the Leslieville Farmers’ Market. Others have gone on to work at FoodShare and Black Creek Community Farm. The program will take its next cohorts in the spring and summer of 2022.

Sundance’s ideal city would be full of urban farms, something she says would require Toronto to take urban agriculture seriously.

“The first thing is to make sure that land is set aside for urban agriculture – and not just community gardens, but acreage,” says Sundance. “And if we’re thinking about the climate crisis, we need to learn how to grow food in the city. Small farms feed the majority of people globally.”

Zawadi Farm

Jessey Njau’s backyard in Rexdale isn’t what you would expect to find in Toronto. He’s transformed a swath of unused lawn into a 2,500-square-foot urban farm, complete with seven 50-foot-long garden beds and a greenhouse bursting with tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and more. In total, his backyard farm grows more than two dozen varieties of herbs and vegetables.

Njau’s backyard is just one plot in a network of nine urbans farms that make up Zawadi Farm. But he never planned to become a farmer. Born in Kenya, he came to Canada in 1999 to study and work in technology. But around five years ago, he heard a CBC podcast with Vancouver-based urban farmer Michael Ableman, who built a farm in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. It made him realize how farming can be used as a tool to uplift marginalized communities.

“Where I come from, farming is the lowest of the low job you could ever take on,” says Njau. “I had to do a lot of unlearning.”

Soon after, Njau quit his lucrative tech job and jumped into farming full-time. He teamed up with Misha Shodjaee, a master of environmental science student, and together they launched Zawadi Farm, which means “gift” in Swahili.

Since the first greenhouse in Njau’s yard went up, the company has put down roots across Toronto. When a neighbour saw Njau’s greenhouse, she offered up her backyard to the farm too, doubling his space. Shodjaee built a 35-foot greenhouse in his own backyard, and the farm got two large plots at Downsview Park through Fresh City Farms. Word got around and more people started offering up their backyards to Zawadi Farm. Now, they have plots in backyards, parks, a church and a school.

Zawadi sells 75 farm shares a year, which get customers weekly or bi-weekly CSA boxes for 25 weeks, stuffed with vegetables like eggplants, tomatoes and microgreens. Any leftover produce is then sold at subsidized prices. “I live in Rexdale and there are a lot of low-income neighbourhoods. I wanted to make my food accessible because a lot of people can’t afford good food,” says Njau.

People who donate their backyard to Zawadi can either get a weekly CSA box in exchange for using the space, or they can choose to donate the box to food security non-profits. They can also choose to manage the land themselves – with training and resources from Njau and Shodjaee – or someone from Zawadi can farm it for them.

Njau understands that this kind of model has some challenges. Since they don’t own most of the land, it’s harder to plan long-term and they have to worry about losing the space they do have unexpectedly. But by working directly with their community, it’s also a way to show how anywhere can potentially become farmland, and anyone can become a farmer. A backyard in downtown Toronto can become a flourishing farm with a little work.