The Farm on Ogden’s First Year
A project of the Chicago Botanic Garden and Lawndale Christian Health Center
In this report, you will learn how the Farm on Ogden’s inaugural year transformed a block in North Lawndale, engaged thousands of Chicago residents, and significantly strengthened the local food movement. Windy City Harvest, the Chicago Botanic Garden's urban agriculture initiative, is thriving with the Farm as its home base.
Health
VeggieRx offers 330 nutrition sessions and distributes 11,000 pounds of free produce in 2019.
Food
Production. The Farm is the central aggregation and processing hub for Windy City Harvest, which will have 15 farm sites by 2020. The facility created many firsts for Windy City Harvest in aggregation, distribution, and food safety. Multiple walk-in coolers, an indoor wash-pack station, and an electronic tracking system support food safety adherence, training, and certifications.
Farm Stand. Staff were unsure how popular produce would be in the community, but the demand for low-cost fresh produce is growing. Farm-stand sales exceeded estimates by 84%. Windy City Harvest asked residents to give feedback on what food they would like to access in the community, and staff swiftly responded. In addition to produce from Windy City Harvest’s farm sites, longtime partner Midwest Foods now supplies fresh fruits and vegetables for sale year-round. Eggs, milk, yogurt, healthy snacks, coffee, and other staples are also stocked regularly. The Farm earned its retail food establishment license, enabling expansion of the indoor market. In 2019, the stand will serve an estimated 10,000 customers and generate $60,000 in gross revenue.
Aquaponics. Every Monday, Windy City Harvest staff and trainees harvest 1,700 heads of ultra-fresh lettuce from an ecologically efficient, closed-loop system that uses water, fish, and plants to grow produce. This year, $50,000 from lettuce sales will help support the Farm’s operations. Once a shade curtain is installed in the greenhouse to protect fragile lettuce leaves from the hot sun, production will double to 3,400 heads a week. Customers frequently comment on how delicious hyper-local lettuce tastes and how long it stays fresh at home.
Health
VeggieRx. The Farm’s aggregation and distribution capacity, plus a four-year $492,000 grant from the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Food Insecurity and Nutrition program, is helping Windy City Harvest expand the VeggieRx produce prescription program. A team of 100 Lawndale Christian Health Center providers—physicians, nurses, and others—“prescribe” cooking lessons led by Chicago Partnership for Health Promotion dieticians. The participants also receive free weekly “doses” of fresh produce. Windy City Harvest now operates the program at PCC Wellness in Chicago’s Austin community. Nutrition and cooking sessions in English and Spanish are offered for patients, and this year, Windy City Harvest will distribute almost 11,000 pounds of free produce to prepare at home. This food will reach more than 1,000 household members, half of whom are children.
Teaching Kitchen. This accessible, flexible space is used to teach food preparation and safety. With a convection oven, microwave, portable stove-top, and moveable counter space, the open kitchen now hosts VeggieRx cooking demonstrations and Youth Farm food preparation activities. It also houses training for Corps transitional workers, helping them obtain ServSafe food safety certification, an asset in food service industry jobs.
Jobs
Workforce Development. The Farm houses Windy City Harvest’s staff and several core training programs. Here, 45 Youth Farm teens from North Lawndale and surrounding communities gain job readiness, social emotional skills, and healthy habits while earning an income. The Farm has enabled expansion of the Corps transitional jobs program for non-violent ex-offenders—from 28 men and women in 2018 to 35 this year. Every Friday morning, Corps trainees meet in the classroom area to learn job, academic, and healthy food skills while they build healthy communities. On Friday afternoons, Job Club supports Corps members and graduates in finding employment. Three Apprenticeship students are completing their paid work experience at the Farm this summer and 10 incubator farmers use the aggregation and distribution facilities to support their businesses.
Entrepreneurship. With its aggregation, storage, and distribution space, the Farm helps ten Windy City Harvest incubator farmers operate four businesses and become more competitive in the marketplace. The facility supports current and graduated incubator farmers in other ways, such as a “land-match” event held in June, where three farmers pitched their businesses to land owners. A vendor connection meeting to link urban farmers from across the region with restaurants, food distributors, nonprofits, and other organizations is planned for the fall.
Community and Professional Training. The Farm provides learning programs for small-scale urban gardeners, as well as more intensive programming for aspiring and current farmers. In a three-day aquaponics intensive course, 12 farmers from across the region learned about aquaponics food production on a commercial scale; this training will be held two more times this year.
Success Stories
“They teach you how to grow food, but they’re really growing people.”
A year and a half ago, Laquantus was unable to find consistent work. His aunt told him about the Windy City Harvest Corps transitional jobs program for nonviolent ex-offenders. “It started out as a job opportunity, it was difficult, a lot of physical labor when it was really, really hot," he said. "But my lifestyle started changing, I was eating right, drinking more water, the educational parts of it, growing food and feeding people so they feel better—it just started clicking.” With support from Windy City Harvest Job Club volunteers and staff, Laquantus secured a position at Garfield Produce, an indoor vertical hydroponics farm. He enrolled in the 2019 Apprenticeship class, chose to intern with the aquaponics system this summer, and was able to participate in the first three-day intensive aquaponics training held at the Farm on Ogden.
"I applied to the Apprenticeship program to further my education in urban agriculture and aquaponics, and to find a job."
Art found Windy City Harvest when he volunteered at the PCC Wellness Center’s farm site in Chicago’s Austin community. The Windy City Harvest coordinator there helped recruit him to the Corps program last year, where Art helped to build the Farm’s aquaponics system. He is currently enrolled in the nine-month Apprenticeship program, working toward the goal of owning his own farm. Art wants to give back to the program he started out with—he has volunteered every week this summer to check in patients for VeggieRx at the PCC Wellness farm. Angela Mason, associate vice president of urban agriculture, said, “I tried to tell him we could build the VeggieRx volunteerism into his work day and he said, ‘No, it’s my way of giving back.’ Art has progressed through various parts of the program and his success is vital to our operation.”
“This farm creates pride and it’s a place to go when people want something to eat.”
Kely got involved with Windy City Harvest Youth Farm as a senior at Back of the Yards High School; her global politics class required students to volunteer with a service project in their community. She had been watching the Farm on Ogden’s construction and when it was complete, stopped in to learn about how she could become involved. Kely joined the spring Youth Farm program, where she “liked the fact that we learned every aspect of this farm,” and decided to come back in the summer because she “wanted to keep giving back to the community.”
“It’s not just about growing food—, it’s what we do after and how it changes peoples’ lives.”
“You haven’t worked until you’ve got some dirt under your nails” is Natasha’s motto. As Rodeo Farm coordinator, Natasha supervises a 12-person team—two Apprenticeship students, a crew leader, and eight Corps trainees. She is responsible for overseeing a two-acre farm site that includes food production, composting, and beehives. Natasha embarked on an urban agriculture career in 2013 at the Washington Park Youth Farm when she was a student at Dunbar Vocational Career Academy in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood. “My mind was nowhere in this field. But it turned out that Windy City Harvest helped me shape who I was already,” said Natasha on her advancement from Youth Farm crew member to leader, Apprenticeship student, and employee at a local hydroponics business.