Southern Dallas is ripe for this farming project
Brownfields can be made green again.
By Michael Hogue
Dallas News
Jan 27, 2024
A scarecrow watched over vegetable demonstration beds at Urban County Farm on Wednesday, July 20, 2022, in Garland. A nonprofit called the South Dallas Employment Project hopes to reclaim brownfields in southern Dallas for agricultural purposes.(Shafkat Anowar / Staff Photographer)
With the support of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and other grant-making bodies, a nonprofit called the South Dallas Employment Project is launching a plan to spur tree cultivation, urban farming and other “bioeconomy” in some of the city’s most economically depressed districts. The project gives Dallas a chance to take on unemployment, climate inequality, carbon emissions, heat islands, malnutrition, diabetes, food deserts and city beautification in one green swoop. This is a virtuous cycle, proved to work in global cities from Singapore to Philadelphia, that we should all get behind.
Sound too good to be true? To be sure, this kind of urban planning takes a lot of capital and a clear vision. Farming is a tough business, even in rural places where the land has been tilled for generations.
But the benefits to the dire southern Dallas economic, health and sustainability situation are not theoretical. And, as illustrated in a webinar hosted Jan. 16 by the South Dallas Employment Project organization, the funding, volunteer power and federal-agency will are all there to turn some of the most blighted areas of Dallas into a hub of local food production and biodiversity.
Recently, the U.S. Department of Agriculture selected Dallas as one of 17 locations for its new Urban Service Centers, designed to educate and fund local city-based farms.
Think about it: There are vast amounts of “brownfield” sites, disused paved-over land once occupied by factories, malls or substations all over southern Dallas. If the city reclaimed even a sliver of that land, it could change the whole nature of the region.
Through the magic of biology, even badly polluted sites can be brought back into the food chain. One way to achieve this is via “phytoremediation,” where plants are used to leach heavy metals and other contaminants out of the soil.
Once the land is reclaimed, the South Dallas Employment Project argues, urban farms could become major local employers in southern Dallas.
One brownfield site — the infamous “Shingle Mountain” area in southeast Dallas — is already being reclaimed as a park. And the much-celebrated Bonton Farms has proved the concept can work in southern Dallas food deserts as arid as the Sahara.
By selling its own produce at a market, Bonton is riding the “local food” trend, giving the community a healthy option that doesn’t have to be hauled over sea and land like food from big box grocers.
“We basically asked the question, could urban agriculture be used as a way to provide a food catalyst for some perhaps more profound changes,” said Brad Boa, one of the founders of Dallas urban farming initiative Restorative Farms. “How we envisioned it was the Dallas agrisystem would create jobs, provide food for communities, provide for markets outside Dallas and bring money back into Dallas.”
The city of Dallas estimates there are 15 acres of urban farmland in its limits and aims to quadruple that space to roughly 66 acres by 2030, said Carlos Evans, of the city’s Office of Environmental Quality. Evans views Dallas’ environmental struggles as inextricable from its racial-equity and malnutrition issues.
Tree and plant cultivation is another simple but effective way to reverse some of the most pernicious trends in big cities.
As much as 35% of the land in Dallas is “impervious surface,” said Janette Monear, of Texas Trees, a nonprofit. “That’s where you see flooding, where you see urban heat islands, where you see complex issues of heat [variation].”
Perhaps the most successful example of reclaiming “brownfield” space in Dallas is Klyde Warren Park. It’s hard to imagine all those soccer kickarounds, that bustling playground, the al fresco cafes and those food-truck picnics are happening on a sort of pedestrian Woodall Rodgers Freeway flyover. Could there be anything more dystopian than the concrete of Dallas freeways, or anything more bucolic than Klyde Warren?
The city of Medellín, Colombia, was little more than a giant, smoggy, rundown shantytown when the national government turned sustainable-minded city planners and architects loose on it following the end of the drug wars in the area. Now, disused Medellín buildings have been converted into giant flower pots known as “vertical gardens.” Parts of the city look like vast greenhouses with skyscrapers tastefully embedded in miles of parkland; while gondolas move through successive belts of green and dense housing.
That comparison may sound grandiose, but the idea is the same: reclaiming land that has been misused or neglected, so it can contribute to a sustainable and beautiful city. That’s a project all of Dallas should support.
