Getting Ready for Urban Grown

I'm really looking forward to the Urban Grown tour this summer! The girls and I went two years ago and we had such a nice time. The first time I went was 2009, back before Cultivate KC was even called Cultivate KC! Now the organization is celebrating their 10 year anniversary, and I was asked to write a piece for their Urban Grown newsletter that went out in March. Here it is...

Looking Back, Looking Forward: Ten Year of Local Food 
By Emily Akins, Kansas City Food Circle.
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED HERE. 

This year will be my 10th season with my Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm, which was my first step down a long and winding path of amazing people, delicious local and organic food, and incredible connections.

Along that path I found out about the Kansas City Center for Urban Agriculture, which was renamed Cultivate Kansas City in 2011. I signed up to take a class at Whole Foods, taught in part by Katherine Kelly, co-founder of Cultivate Kansas City, which included a farm tour of what is now called the Gibbs Road Farm. By then I had already begun working as a volunteer for the KC Food Circle, a non-profit that connects eaters with local, organic, and free-range farmers and was beginning to find my way around the great resources available in Kansas City. And I had already learned to appreciate where my food comes from.

When I heard about KCCUA’s Urban Farms and Gardens Tour I decided to sign up to help. It was winter. The days were short and the vegetable crispers in my fridge were empty, but I began meeting regularly with the amazing volunteers who were planning and preparing the 2009 Urban Farms and Gardens Tour. Before I knew it, it was a hot summer day, the growing season was in full swing, and I was driving around from farm to farm helping to keep the tour running smoothly. I was also enjoying my opportunity to learn about urban agriculture. I went to small farms, large farms, urban farms and backyard farms. Each one provided a wealth of food and information.

I wasn’t the only one who responded so positively to the tour. It has grown each year – as I think much of the local food movement has in Kansas City. With the KC Food Circle, we’ve seen a steady increase of farmers and eaters who want to become part of our organization, and great support from our volunteers and our community partners like Cultivate Kansas City.

I’ve learned a lot and enjoyed food so much in the years since my first season. And I inadvertently became much healthier. I hadn’t set out to eat more whole foods, but buying directly from our local farmers encouraged me to do so. I think this makes my family and me healthier but I also think it makes our community healthier.

This is the beauty of food grown so close to home -- I know the people who grow my food. They have taught me how to store, prepare, and preserve all the delicious produce that comes to me fresh from their farm every week. I can even visit the farms and see with my own eyes where my food comes from. Best of all they have provided me with confidence. I know that their sustainable farming practices both enrich the earth and make for delicious, fresh produce. And I know that each crop and each farmer and each urban farm is enabling Kansas City to grow stronger every year.

I am excited to see the growth that has already happened in Kansas City and I am even more excited to see where Kansas City will be in the next 10 years as more farmers farm, more eaters eat, and as the efforts of Cultivate Kansas City continue to fill our urban core full of delicious food.

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Here are some of my favorite pics from the Urban Grown Tour in 2013. All the pics are HERE.

"Looking back, looking forward: Ten years of local food"

This article appeared in Cultivate KC's newsletter, Urban Grown, in March, 2015 in anticipation of their 10th anniversary. Happy Anniversary, Cultivate! 

Looking back, looking forward: Ten years of local food

By Emily Akins, Kansas City Food Circle

This year will be my 10th season with my Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm, which was my first step down a long and winding path of amazing people, delicious local and organic food, and incredible connections.

Along that path I found out about the Kansas City Center for Urban Agriculture, which was renamed Cultivate Kansas City in 2011. I signed up to take a class at Whole Foods, taught in part by Katherine Kelly, co-founder of Cultivate Kansas City, which included a farm tour of what is now called the Gibbs Road Farm. By then I had already begun working as a volunteer for the KC Food Circle, a non-profit that connects eaters with local, organic, and free-range farmers and was beginning to find my way around the great resources available in Kansas City. And I had already learned to appreciate where my food comes from.

When I heard about KCCUA’s Urban Farms and Gardens Tour I decided to sign up to help. It was winter.

The days were short and the vegetable crispers in my fridge were empty, but I began meeting regularly with the amazing volunteers who were planning and preparing the 2009 Urban Farms and Gardens Tour. Before I knew it, it was a hot summer day, the growing season was in full swing, and I was driving around from farm to farm helping to keep the tour running smoothly. I was also enjoying my opportunity to learn about urban agriculture. I went to small farms, large farms, urban farms and backyard farms. Each one provided a wealth of food and information.

I wasn’t the only one who responded so positively to the tour. It has grown each year – as I think much of the local food movement has in Kansas City. With the KC Food Circle, we’ve seen a steady increase of farmers and eaters who want to become part of our organization, and great support from our volunteers and our community partners like Cultivate Kansas City.

I’ve learned a lot and enjoyed food so much in the years since my first season. And I inadvertently became much healthier. I hadn’t set out to eat more whole foods, but buying directly from our local farmers encouraged me to do so. I think this makes my family and me healthier but I also think it makes our community healthier.

This is the beauty of food grown so close to home -- I know the people who grow my food. They have taught me how to store, prepare, and preserve all the delicious produce that comes to me fresh from their farm every week. I can even visit the farms and see with my own eyes where my food comes from. Best of all they have provided me with confidence. I know that their sustainable farming practices both enrich the earth and make for delicious, fresh produce. And I know that each crop and each farmer and each urban farm is enabling Kansas City to grow stronger every year.

I am excited to see the growth that has already happened in Kansas City and I am even more excited to see where Kansas City will be in the next 10 years as more farmers farm, more eaters eat, and as the efforts of Cultivate Kansas City continue to fill our urban core full of delicious food. 

"You Can't Eat Gold," Urban Grown, June 2009

For the last six months I have been volunteering with the KC Center for Urban Agriculture, helping to plan their 2009 Urban Farms and Gardens Tour (which is going to be here in less than two weeks!). The following is a piece that I wrote for the June issue of the KCCUA newsletter - Urban Grown.

"You Can't Eat Gold" Urban farms tour volunteer chooses to invest in food, relationships during economic crisis.

Emily Akins is an editorial director at Hallmark, Inc. by day and an avid locavore by night. She is a member of Fair Share Farm in Kearney, MO. She is on the coordinating committee of the Kansas City Food Circle, works with the Kansas City CSA Coalition and is a first-time volunteer with KCCUA. She blogs about food and more at www.everythingbeginswithane.blogspot.com.

There are only a few weeks left until all the efforts of KCCUA staff and volunteers culminate in the 2009 Urban Farms and Gardens Tour, aka Food from the City for the City. Our committees have been meeting and planning since the cold, long evenings of December. But my path here started even before then.

Last September I went to Salina, KS, to attend the Land Institute's Prairie Festival. Barbara Kingsolver and Steven Hopp--authors of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle--were guest speakers. I had just finished reading their book over the summer and had been transformed. Actually, that was not the very beginning either. In truth, the transformation began in 2005 when my decision to join a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) planted the first locavore seed in me. The cycle has long since taken hold and I can't imagine my culinary world without my weekly share of genuinely fresh vegetables, my trips to the farmers markets to get the best of each season, and, now, my preserved harvest during the winter.

After I read Kingsolver and Hopp last year, my interests grew even stronger, and when I was presented with the opportunity to help plan the 2009 Urban Farms and Gardens Tour, I gladly took the chance. I am impressed with KCCUA's not-just-local-but-urban approach that brings the vital process of growing sustenance right into our own neighborhoods. I believe it is significant to have farming in the foreground since food is an everyday element in our lives. Urban agriculture and the local food movement make farms more visible so that perhaps some day growing will be as familiar as groceries. Even as I love the beautiful land of the more rural farm of our CSA, I also love knowing that I can happen upon an urban farm on my way to an art gallery during First Fridays; I love that more farmers are creating productive urban spaces and making the city limits a lot less limiting. This broad range of farms makes for a rich and valuable agricultural portfolio right here in Kansas City.

But back to Barbara Kingsolver's talk in the big red barn at the Prairie Festival: Kingsolver told us that a friend of hers had asked if, given the economic crisis, we all should be investing in gold or something. Kingsolver's response was to tell her friend that "you can't eat gold." The essentials should be our focus. "Food," she told us, "is the one consumer choice we have to keep making." Food is fundamental and isn't to be overlooked, even--and especially--at times like these.

In the process of getting to know my food and where it comes from, I've begun to see how critical it really is. Yesterday at work I was eating a salad I'd brought from home. I came across a surprise sprig of thyme and in my excitement hollered to my cubicle neighbors: "Hey! There's thyme in my salad!" One colleague seemed surprised and asked incredulously if I'd gotten my salad in the cafeteria; "No," I told her, "it came from the farmers market." But beyond that it came from Lew, Steve, Sherri, Brooke and Dan and I surprised even myself when I found that I was actually able to point out which parts of my salad came from which farmer. This is how urban agriculture and local food build community. It is essential in more ways than one--it is food, yes, but so much more.

Being a locavore has taught me about new vegetables and recipes and about the nutritional value of food. Being in a CSA has enabled me to see relationships that surround food. Being a volunteer for KCCUA has given me the opportunity to learn more about the impressive effort that goes into producing good food, urban food. And I know that the effort it takes to grow food goes a long way to grow communities and relationships, too. Growing food in sustainable, reliable ways is an incredible investment to which I am pleased to be able to contribute.

Our thanks to Emily and ALL the wonderful volunteers working on Food from the City for the City.