Michael Hanson Photography

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A farmer at New Roots for Refugees Farm, Kansas City

Seven women in ankle-length floral dresses bend at the waist in rows of kale or arugula or kohlrabi. Their dark-chocolate hands effortlessly scoop and pick and cut the stems and pull the weeds. The low sun is already hot coming through the hazy white sky that makes the Kansas City downtown in the distance look like a mirage. With the low-slung brick buildings of the Juniper Gardens public housing on one side of this seven-acre farm, it’s hard to know which is more out of place, more of a mirage: the city, the farm, the dried-out yards of the apartments, or the farmer women from Burundi, Somalia, Burma, Bhutan, or Sudan.

Participants in the Farm Business Development Program at New Roots for Refugees Farm, Kansas City

The Catholic Charities of Northeast Kansas City started the Farm Business Development Program in 2006. The area sees many refugees from Africa and Asia and some of the women receive classes and support at the Catholic Charities center.

Rachel Bonar was director of women’s programs there in 2005. She heard the women asking for a garden since most of them farmed or at least gardened in their native homes. So they started a community garden at the office.

“Almost immediately, we realized that these women are really good at growing food,” says Rachel. “So the next year we partnered with Kansas City Center for Urban Agriculture and began this farm.”

The New Roots for Refugees Farm is part community farm and part Farm Business Development Program. The business program acts as an incubator farm for 14 women. Once accepted into the program (and after at least one year with a community garden plot), the farmer’s receive a quarter-acre plot. For the first year, everything is paid for – seeds, tools, water, marketing. Rachel even sets up two CSA members to support their crop. Gradually, the farmers take on more responsibility.

A woman tends her 1/4-acre plot at the New Roots for Refugees Farm, Kansas City

In the winter, the farmers take courses in planning, production, marketing, and farm/market-based English instruction. In their second and third years they begin paying for things like seeds (purchased on site from the seed store), marketing, and tools. They organize their own CSA member shares (between 3 and 7, normally). Rachel and the organization still shuttle them to and from the farmer’s markets on the weekend, but the women are on their own selling the produce.

On Saturday morning we follow them from farm to a market in Brookside, an upper-middle-class neighborhood south of downtown. Six New Roots farmers sell here, mixed in with the grass-fed beef booth, the artesenal bread and cheese gang, and other organic produce vendors. The women look elegant and proud in vibrant dresses and evening shoes. Their produce is immaculate and some exotic, native to their homelands but able to be cultivated here.

“I really have seen these women’s disposition change,” Rachel says. “They move here and don’t find anything they’re good at. The language, the systems, etc are all challenges. They aren’t really eligible for other employment. Some go to the meat processing plant to work but its so difficult there and restricted. Here they have the ownership. It’s self determination. They get out what they put in.

“Everyone needs something they’re good at and these women have found it. They’re proud to provide ethnic food to their community. Some weekends Dena Tu (a Karen from Burma) drives hours to Omaha to bring ethnic veggies to the Karen population up there.”

The hope is that after three years, the farmers, who have been saving $200 of their annual sales, can start their own independent farm on a vacant lot within the neighborhood. Though it’s a long-shot that they will be able to single-handedly support their families – most have husbands with full-time work – the farms offer an invaluable monetary supplement as well as filling the fridge and satisfying that essential human hunger for productivity and worthiness.

New Roots for Refugees Farm, Kansas City

Kansas City Center for Urban Agriculture

At this same Brookside Farmer’s Market, I meet Katherine Kelly. She’s the executive director and  co-founder (with Dan Dermitzel) of the Kansas City Center for Urban Agriculture (KCCUA), the other half of the New Roots for Refugees Farm project and supporter of dozens of other farms and gardens in the city.

The KCCUA farm stand has the first tomatoes of the season. They farm a prolific two acres in the city and they do it for a profit. While KCCUA is a non-profit organization, their farm sales have contributed over $22,000 into the organization over the last three years.

Katherine grew up working on neighbors’ farms in Kansas. They were good ole for-profit farms. While working in Boston, she noticed a few non-profit gardens in and around town.

“Part of me felt that making the farm a non-profit says that it isn’t viable,” she says. “It acts like a museum and it’s run like a museum sometimes. Farming shouldn’t be like that. That says you’ve given up in a way.

“I have to say there is a particularly Midwestern emphasis on the free market as the solution. I don’t like a lot of that – the idea that capitalism is the solution to everything. But I believe in small businesses and I know and see how proud the owners are of their businesses.”

Speaking with Katherine feels like taking a giant evolutionary step. Like she’s operating years ahead of the current situation. And yet it’s not idealism that sits around the corner in this movement’s progression forward. Rather, it’s stone-cold practicality, the American Way of supplying a demand and making a profit by selling valuable goods to consumers.

It’s a big-picture approach with its hands in the Kansas City soil. KCCUA as an umbrella organization is a non-profit. It supports small projects in the city, farmers like Lew Edminster and Sherri Harvel who farm vacant lots and sell their produce at small weekly markets for a profit and an income supplement. On the whole, Katherine believes that a new food industrymust be created.

Sherri Harvel at her three-lot garden near downtown Kansas City

“Home gardeners, community gardeners, commercial gardeners. Small farms, medium farms, large farms. When you’ve got that mix, you’ve got resilience and sustainability. You’ve got knowledge that passes along and a support infrastructure with the tools, supplies, services being a part of that. Then you’ve got  an industry, a really healthy community of industry.”

I ask her if this industry will grow out of the city and the visionaries like herself. Must it start here and then move into the surrounding “farmland”?

“We’re land abundant and farmer poor,” she says. “I’ve had so many people call me with 100 acres and no one to farm it. People live in cities so at some level we have to deal with that.”

A farmer bringing produce to his stand at the Brookside Farmer’s Market, Kansas City

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/05/06/travel/20100509-WHYWETRAVEL.html

I am on the road now waiting for the mechanic to fix the bus. Hopefully, it won’t be too much longer. In the meantime, check out Outside, June issue for an article on a proposed dam in Chile. Also, the web gallery on their website :: http://outsideonline.com/travel/travel-gd-damming-chiles-rio-baker-photo-gallery-sidwcmdev_133765.html

I am sitting at the coffee shop in Davenport, CA, just north of Santa Cruz. We are 4 days into a 7-week trip around the US documenting urban farming for a book due out Fall 2011. For the most recent updates, check out www.breakingthroughconcrete.com and/or follow us on Facebook :: Breaking Through Concrete. I’ll try to update as much as possible here but with limited time/power outlets, BTC is the best spot to follow…

Clip from recent Runner’s World – Tate’s Hell State Park, FL

I have been somewhat slack over the past few months in keeping updates flowing on the blog. I am anxiously awaiting the next project and will do my best to keep photos/short text coming in. Next week, 3 of us leave Seattle in a converted veggie diesel short bus, complete with 3 beds, a kitchen, refrig and a nice sound system to make a 7-week, complete loop, counterclockwise of the US. David and my friend, Edwin Marty, have a contract with a publisher for a book on urban farming in America. I will be shooting the images. Another friend of ours, a doc film student out of NY will be joining us and filming the entire trip. Our tentative plans are to visit these 14 cities : San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, Denver, Kansas City, New Orleans, Birmingham, D.C., Philly, NY, Boston, Chicago, and Detroit. Of course, there will be many cities in between where we will stop for a night and hopefully collect some used veggie grease.  More info can be found at www.breakingthroughconcrete.com.

Check back for images, videos, stories, etc.

Images from Peru on GOOD magazine’s website :: http://www.good.is/post/picture-show-sacred-valley-peru/

by Michael Hanson for A Steady Drip Magazine

I was hundreds of  miles from the epicenter of the 5th largest earthquake in recorded history. In fact, nothing felt  abnormal, unless you count the fact that I was staying at 5-star resort in Torres del Paine National Park. Information  trickled in throughout the next week about the damage from not only the earthquake but tsunami as well. I was happy to  be safe, but as a photojournalist, I would have liked to be in the action. We were fortunate to get to the epicenter and see the damage a week later. Small communities throughout the coast were almost completely wiped out,  including Curanipe, a town just north of Buchupureo, our base. The following are images from the damage and the  growing hysteria of a rising sea.

Buchupureo, Chile. Farmers gather potatos in a field in Buchupureo. Within seconds of taking this image, an aftershock of 7.2 hit Rancagua, a town to the northeast. Almost immediately, people dropped their tools and fled to the hills fearing a tsunami. We were somewhat skeptical, but after radio reports did issue the 1st tsunami warning since the original quake, we too headed for higher ground.

Buchupureo, Chile. Everyone, including animals, go to the highest point and wait. The sea is patiently watched, waiting for that mysterious wave to appear and quickly move through town. The town waited. The wave never showed.

Buchupureo, Chile. Men wait and keep their eyes fixed on the small waves crashing hundreds of feet below. They felt the aftershock less than an hour ago and have seen the damage from last week’s tsunami. They’ll wait patiently.

Buchupureo, Chile. A young girl comforts her grandfather at a makeshift campfire pit at the top of the highest point outside of town. Residents of this town depend on the sea for almost everything, being lulled by it soothing presence. The younger generation never knew of its destructive power.  Now the sea is seen in a different light.

Buchupureo, Chile. Men and women build makeshift homes, knowing that the fear of the sea isn’t going away. Aftershocks could last for a long time and the growing threat of another tsunami has forced many to abandoned their homes below for simple shacks on higher ground. Perhaps the greatest legacy of this earthquake, will be the perpetual fear of a rising sea that will linger throughout new homes and long past cleanup crews.

Between Curanipe and Buchupureo, Chile. A woman watches as two men work on removing all the tiles. The roof will be rebuilt. More than food and water, residents say they are in need of building supplies. Even if they weren’t shaken to the ground, a great number of buildings will have to bulldozed due to unsafe conditions.

Between Curanipe and Buchupureo, Chile. A woman sits in her kitchen at a home in the countryside. The damage to this house was greater than one would think from the outside. This wall barely stands and will come down soon.

Curanipe, Chile. A home, damaged by the earthquake and subsequent aftershocks, catches fire and burns completely, despite the efforts of a tired and short-staffed fire crew. Homeowners stand in tears watching their home, which survived the 8.8 earthquake, burn to the ground.

Curanipe, Chile. A woman sits at her dinner table in the backyard after the tsunami destroyed her home.

Curanipe, Chile. A woman speaks with her insurance agency after visiting her home one morning to find that looters had robbed her of what little remained. The wheels on her car were the latest possession stolen. In many areas of the country, Chileans took advantage of the chaos by looting residences and businesses. Reports from Conception, the 2nd largest city and scene of immense damage, said that groups of Chileans were running through the streets with not only essentials (water, food, clothing) but plasma screen TVs, computers, speakers, etc. In some areas, authorities allowed looting for items crucial for survival. HD DVD players are not crucial.

Buchupureo, Chile. A woman begins the cleanup process of a home leveled by the 8.8 earthquake. It will take months.

A number of organizations are working on the front lines. Savethewaves.org has had a presence in the area for a while and is doing a great job of providing support throughout the communities along the coast.

Our friends, Chris and Dayna and their two kids, were less than a mile from the epicenter. They watched from a hilltop, as two waves formed, one moved north, and one moved south. Their hotel became a community base camp the following week, providing food, transportation, etc. to their neighbors. This community depends on tourism. If you like the beach, good surf, amazingly fresh food, nice people, a sweet hotel, and a relaxing vacation, then La Joya del Mar in Buchupureo, Chile, is the spot. And you’ll be helping a rocked community, anxious to get back on its feet.

note :: a steady drip is an new form of distributing content started by a close friend, Andrew Kornylak. Check it out – a steady drip

The Rio Baker is in a hurry.

I spent the last four days next to this blue-green ribbon flowing beneath steep peaks and through tight canyons where eddies and currents link patient glaciers to an anxious sea. I photographed the people that wake to the distant sound of waves crashing onto the banks as if the tide were coming in. Mysterious trout invite anglers from around the world to share a quick, friendly battle.

The proposed dams would ruin all of this and the river knows it. It’s urgency is obvious. The Rio Baker knows something is coming, something unnatural.