233. Agrihoods | Michigan Urban Farming Initiative | Tyson Gersh | Detroit, MI

Published: July 16, 2018, 9:09 p.m.

The http://www.miufi.org/ (Michigan Urban Farming Initiative) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that seeks to engage members of the Michigan community in sustainable agriculture. Using a agriculture as a platform to promote education, sustainability, and community, while simultaneously building reducing socioeconomic disparity We’re a non-profit in the Detroit’s north end neighborhood. We’ve got a 3 acre campus The work that we do falls into 1 of 3 categories 1st structural quality in the food system by increased act of  locally sourced produce driving innovation through blooming green infrastructure Challenging  the urban development paradigm through piloting this America’s first sustainable Agrihood model. 100% volunteer run That was a lot of descriptive words in a very short amount of time. What is an agrihood? I did also talk to 3 other amazing rockstar millennials from that area:https://organicgardenerpodcast.com/81-tess-burzynski-growing-organic-mushrooms-detroit-michigan/ (Tess Burzynski ) , https://organicgardenerpodcast.com/88-adam-pruett-biology-student-%E2%80%A2-community-garden-and-farmers-market-at-wayne-state-university-detroit-mi/ (Adam Pruett )andhttps://organicgardenerpodcast.com/72-jamie-todek-gardening-and-designing-at-the-lone-oak-farm-oxford-mi/ (Jamie Todek). What ‘s an Agrihood? Agrihood is an emerging residential development strategy that basically is taking a working urban farm and is centering it as the main part of a residential development There are about 200 of them across the country located in rural or suburban areas likend to the modern golf course often a really beautiful green space that is often leveraged as an amenity to increase the attractiveness or walkability or property values interesting-ness of a neighborhood. Probably the most famous example is http://serenbe.com/ (Serenbe in GA) if you look across the different Agrihood models fairly high income. So it’s sort of you talk to a lot of urban planners and developers.  bring up urban agriculture academics super interested who don’t really understand the industry, in theory it makes a lot of sense but if you look at numbers, it’s not the highest and best use urban ag isn’t performing really well as far as the performance on the land itself but the impact that it has demonstrated to have on adjacent property values. It may be an opportunity what  sustainable land use in urban. So I am going to back up, incase you haven’t understood or missed it, so it’s basically like a mini central park except a farm in the middle of a community. Is it the size of a football field or a track? How big is it visual? The campus itself is 3 acres The production farm is one acre So a typical lot is what a 1/3 of an acre? It seems like there are a lot of houses of it.  so the campus is not where the housing a typical lot is 30 feet by 100 feet We are located on 3 acres, it’s 19 parcels total. Of that 1 acre is production farm and the other 2 acres are our: community center intern house children’s garden The housing around is part of that Agrihood model but not within the campus itself. The food that’s grown there do the people come grow the food or who eats it? Do they buy it? All the food is free for anybody that wants it! And who grows it? The people who live near there? its mostly volunteers of the non-profit people who live near by that are involved. We have a ton of volunteers It’s not like a community garden where people come in manage their own plot. The non-profit basically through it’s own resources manages the farm. We harvest everything, basically if you are somebody who wants produce you can come to the farm whenever you want and we’ll do the harvesting for you. You can have as much as you want as we physically have. We do the harvesting and weigh it out.  Priority is sort of given to area residents... Support this podcast