Photo Credit: Erin Bloodgood
Photographer
David Johnson is a relatively new farmer who found his passion for farming through community work. His experience working with urban food pantries and community gardens sparked his interest in food and the power it has to build relationships. “What makes the farm work is other people,” says Johnson. He started his urban farm in 2014 in Milwaukee’s 30th Street corridor with the desire to be in the heart of the city, closer to his customers. With his young farm, Johnson wants to prove that urban agriculture can be a successful business while also using it as a tool to teach community members.
In 2008, Johnson took a job at Frieden’s Community Ministries, an organization that operates emergency food pantries. He felt that food pantries were a quick fix to a much larger problem and sought to find a way to address the core issues of homelessness and poverty. Soon after taking the job, he took a tour of Growing Power and realized that growing food could be the answer he was looking for. “I really saw and still believe that there is an economic opportunity for growing food locally, and I wanted to make sure that low-income persons and low-income households had just as much of an opportunity to figure out how to do that as anybody else did.”
That led him to partner with the Guest House of Milwaukee and help develop the Cream City Gardens program. This program uses gardening and urban agriculture to teach previously homeless individuals job skills, helping them to find jobs in the agricultural field. Johnson solidified his love for growing food after managing that program for three years. It was in 2013 that he decided to leave the program and find a way to start his own farm.
As if by fate, the city was working on a project to transform the 30th Street Industrial Corridor when Johnson approached them looking for a plot of land. The city thought that an urban farm would be a perfect way to revitalize the area, so Cream City Farms was started. Johnson got moving quickly with grants that helped him install a cistern to collect water and an electronic monitoring system to regulate water levels powered by solar energy. It didn’t take long for him to start growing and acquire members for his Community Supported Agriculture (CSA).
Growing in popularity as a farming business model, a CSA is a subscription to the farm in which members receive a fresh box of produce each week based on what is in season. “My favorite part about it is the direct farmer-to-consumer interaction,” Johnson says. He is working with the Urban Ecology Center, which is helping farmers sign people up for CSAs at the Local Farmer Open House on Saturday, March 9.
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Each year, Johnson is working to increase his production, so he can sell to local restaurants and eventually employ full-time workers. The farm is meant to be a part of the community, connecting people to the food they eat and helping them understand the process of growing food.
You can learn more about Cream City Farms by visiting creamcityfarms.com. For more of Erin Bloodgood’s work, visit bloodgoodfoto.com.
