Hopedance

Farm City the Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter

Review by Elizabeth Johnson

How can a writer and her boyfriend raise bees, rabbits, chicken, ducks, geese, turkeys, and pigs while living in an apartment on a dead-end street near downtown Oakland?  Farm City:  the Education of an Urban Farmer, by Novella Carpenter, answered this question with entertaining detail, but the heart of her tale was the community she shared with neighbors, other urban farmers, and friends.  Farm City is a story about planting oneself in service, respect for the land—vacant, rented, or owned—and respect for the animals that nourish us.  It’s about becoming a good neighbor in a multi-ethnic neighborhood.  Farm City is about sharing one’s energy with that which gives us energy.

Carpenter’s parents had been homesteaders in the 1970s in rural isolation in Idaho and passed along lessons in sustainable living and self-sufficiency to their kids.  The author put these lessons to use in her inner-city homesteading while pursuing a graduate degree in journalism with Michael Pollan at Berkeley.  She called her parents’ homesteading the 8.5 version and her own, the 9.0 version.  Farming in the ghetto brought surprising opportunities and several spectacular successes along with just providing food for the household.

Novella and Bill had raised vegetables and kept bees in Seattle before they moved to Oakland and searched for an affordable apartment with land for gardening.  They found one on a cul-de-sac street strewn with broken glass and rimmed with old houses, abandoned commercial spaces, and empty lots near the freeway.  The neighborhood supported many liquor stores and frequent gunfire, hardly a likely spot to cultivate a personal Eden.  With equal measures of hope and fear, they moved in.  They tested the soil in the adjacent weed-filled lot and the results were heavy metal-free.  Horse manure runs began with a borrowed truck.  This timid squatting on unused land gradually became a confident community garden of heirloom vegetables and animals shared by many for several years.  Novella gave much of her lettuce to the Oakland Black Panther Party for their free meals program.  A homeless man who lived in abandoned cars on their street swept up broken glass and helped out occasionally.  During the next few years, the property owner tried on occasion to sell the lot for condo development, but he never said anything about the garden or the animals, especially the pigs.

Soon after moving in, Novella ordered a poultry combination package through mail, The Homesteader’s Delight.  Included were two turkeys, ten chickens, two geese, and two ducks.  “The poultry package—bought with a credit card and priority over-nighted—had turned me into a farm.”  The next animal phase was raising rabbits, a result of the author’s desire to try a month-long 100 yard diet, eating only what she raised or bartered from other farmers.  Edible rabbits were timed to be her major protein source.  This experiment had mixed results, personally and socially.  The last to join the animal farm were two Red Duroc pigs.

The Pigs section has a different tonal quality.  With the addition of Red Durocs to her farm, Carpenter was able to name herself a Farmer.  As her chef friend says, “When you have a whole pig, you get the complete picture.”  Pigs brought the farm venture to a new level of practical and philosophical complexity.  The time and effort involved to care for them increased substantially.  Novella and Bill’s dumpster diving for pig slop was hilarious as she described finds from particular restaurants.  They got big squeals for the Yummy House Bakery cake with pink icing and even bigger squeals for the Chinese restaurant’s bags of fish guts.  The search for better quality dumpster leavings ultimately introduced Novella to a great Berkeley chef, who taught her some of his Italian salami-making secrets as the pigs grew to maturity. 

Trades and bartering were seriously developed as the farm grew.  Novella discovered that her neighborhood liquor store owners were mostly Yemeni.  When Mosad learned that she was keeping bees, he told her that Yemenis were the very best beekeepers in the world and gratefully accepted a sampling from her hive.  He also ordered a live chicken to harvest according to Islamic law and took home a fava bean stalk loaded with pods, called yaell in Yemeni.

During summers, the local kids were attracted to her place to check out the animals.  She said, “I handed each kid a baby rabbit.  They held the soft little things up to their cheeks, snuggled them, and kissed them.  A gang of small, scrappy kids from the inner-city cuddling with baby rabbits might have been the cutest thing I had ever seen.”

Each segment of this well-written and amusing tale is a product of real people, farm research, literary research, farm resources, and dumpster diving for the best possible foods for the animals.  The story refers to farming in the Roman Empire, the urban gardens of Paris, the multi-ethnic composition of her neighborhood, the ABCs of beekeeping, a Sylvia Plath poem, French provincial rabbit recipes, and Wendell Berry among many others.  The long bibliography is divided into sections on Barnyard—16 titles, Garden—13 titles, Kitchen—9, and Library—22.  The combination of intellectual pursuits and serious farming in an urban ghetto makes for interesting reading.

What are the lessons learned from this urban homesteader?  When you plant yourself, you become part of the landscape.  The more beauty you create around you, the less you fear the unknown.  In Novella’s case, it took her many months to find the courage to explore her neighborhood on foot through abandoned buildings and nightly gunfire.  The beauty she created became extravagant, far more than she and Bill could use themselves, so served as entrée to those around her.

This is how Novella summed up her lessons.  She learned that she was a Farmer, part of a larger spidery web of urban farms that together made a whole.  Her farm grew beyond the concept of self-sustenance; it was about abundance in sharing.



Novella Carpenter will be giving a talk at the Cuesta College Performing Arts Center on Wednesday April 6 from 5 – 7 pm.  She’ll also be signing books at Steynberg Gallery on April 7 from 11:30 – 1 pm. (http://www.hopedance.org/events/icalrepeat.detail/2011/04/06/5216)

EJ