These Chicago Urban Farmers Are Growing Local Food in the Wake of Steel Industry Pollution
Surrounded by the pollution resulting from decades of steel production, a community garden is providing relief to Chicagoland communities.
By Paul Gordon
Civil Eats
January 26, 2023
Excerpt:
UGC runs the South Chicago Farm, an urban farm in the Southeast that offers farm-fresh food while engaging the community and teaching farm skills. A mile short of the Indiana border and across the street from Steelworkers Park (formerly part of the U.S. Steel Complex), the farm sits within Clara Schaffer Park, which opened in 2015 as a 14-acre public space.
Occupying half of the park, the farm is outfitted with greenhouses, a community garden, a burgeoning orchard, rows of plant beds, and goats. The garden produces thousands of pounds of fresh food which are distributed to the community by a mobile farmers’ market, a converted bus that acts as a “produce aisle on wheels,” traveling to under-served communities and setting up shop near frequented neighborhood locations like schools, health clinics, and community centers. Like urban farms elsewhere in the U.S.—in Pittsburgh, Oakland, D.C., and NYC—the farm is stepping up to serve the unmet needs of its community.
“Green spaces are places for us to gather and build community,” says Bea Fry, AUA’s development and strategic partnership steward. “It is a place to convene, just chat it up with one another, and discuss community issues.”
Working both at the city level and in the Chicago region, the group works to support urban farmers and the policies that make their work possible. At the root of it, says Fry, AUA’s work is to reimagine what it means to be in relation to nature and one another. “The things we put in our body, whether it be the air that the trees produce, the food that we are growing—these green spaces and farms directly nourish ourselves, our families, and community members,” Fry says. “We have the opportunity, and we are already creating something renewed.”
