Detroit/The Urban Farming Movement's Youngest Recruits, Te

It isn't often you see the words teen pregnancy and urban agriculture in the same sentence. Not only are these two words now being used together, but for one Detroit school, urban farming is a tool to help pregnant women get the nutritional food they need and hopefully turn them into future farmers of America. The Ferguson Academy for Young Women is an alternative high school located in Detroit, where education and resources are provided for pregnant teens, grades 9-12. Here the students continue their education with classes in music, home repair, IT, fine arts and parenting. But unlike other teenagers, these young women also grow crops and care for the school's farm animals housed in the barns that lie adjacent to the school. In the past, I have written about Detroit as the next agrarian paradise, but this program uniquely brings together a multitude of social, cultural, economic and environmental issues.

These young mothers and pregnant teens, who were initially averse to the physical work of farm life, are being taught agricultural skills, harvesting crops for themselves, the community and selling produce to the market. With the land and the crops thriving, without the use of pesticides, and with plenty of native flowers growing on these lots, the city's bee population is uniquely healthier than most of America. In this nearly extinct urban environment, innovation is providing the city's future generations with a better, healthier future, painting a renewed image of America.

Detroit has earned its notorious title as one of the most dangerous cities in the U.S. due to a struggling automotive industry, increasingly high unemployment, poverty, race issues, vacant houses, high crime rates and decreased public services. Places where houses, factories and schools were once thriving are left abandoned because only half of the city's original population remains. In the last fifty years, one of the wealthiest cities in America has transformed into one of the most economically and socially challenged.

Satellite images speak for themselves, more than one third of the city has become green again just as it was before the industrial era. This new landscape is creating opportunities and hope for the city and its residents. Land that was used for farming a century ago has again been cultivated, this time by the urban farmer. The urban farmer turns out, whether out of necessity or not, to have a right to exist. Vacant lots in the heart of the city are being returned to fertile land. Some harvest the crops for their own use, some share with the neighbors or community, while others sell their produce at the market. For instance the bee population, almost extinct in America, is flourishing in Detroit. The extensive variety of native flowers on the vacant lots and the lack of pesticides make Detroit's unique environment perfect for a very pure honey production. In such an impoverished urban environment, it is refreshing to see such ingenuity. This is an image of the Unites States that is rarely shown.

Grown in Detroit focuses on the urban gardening efforts managed by a public school of 300, mainly african-american, pregnant and parenting teenagers. In Detroit alone, there are annually more than 3,000 pregnant teenagers who drop out of high school. This school is one of three located in the United States. As part of the curriculum, the girls are taught agricultural skills on the school's own farm located behind the school building what used to be the playground. The young mothers, often still children themselves, are learning by farming to become more independent women and knowledgeable about the importance of nutritional foods. Many of them start out disliking the often physically hard work on the farm but this aversion disappears as they see their crops growing and being sold for profit. "Back to the roots", a simple yet effective solution for a city that has to start all over again and perhaps a lesson to be learned for the rest of the world.

Grown in Detroit
Dir. Mascha & Manfred Poppenk
[filmmij; 2009]
by PAUL BOWER

In the 1930s, a dozen writers based out of Nashville's Vanderbilt University, including John Gould Fletcher and Robert Penn Warren, wrote a manifesto of sorts concerning humankind's relationship to and reliance upon the land. I'll Take My Stand, the collection of essays by The Southern Agrarians (as they came to call themselves), echoed several perennial themes in American thought, but probably the most important was the idea that if humanity continues to detach itself from the land, society will eventually turn to ruin. With a watchful eye on the rampant industrialization of the United States, the writers argued the importance of farming and ecological responsibility as a means to keep humanity grounded in reality.

This idea is at the heart of a small, progressive, and very specialized public school in Detroit. The Catherine Ferguson Academy for Young Women, located in one of the roughest areas of the Midwest's most cherished post-apocalyptic wasteland, serves the educational needs of impoverished teenage mothers. The group of young ladies who attend the school range from mothers of two-year-old children to those who are expecting their first. Almost without exception, the fathers of these children haven abandoned them. To call the lives of these young women physically and emotionally debilitating would do injustice to the inimitable courage they display on a daily basis.

Aside from fulfilling the Michigan State academic standards for high school studies, the faculty at Catherine Ferguson High instruct their pupils in an entirely different field of inquiry: agriculture. Every student at the school is required to assist in the day-to-day activities of the school's small plot of arable land. The leadership of the school, witnessing the wholesale abandonment of the city over the last few decades (between 1970 and 2008, Detroit's population shrank by roughly 600,000), saw an opportunity presented by the unprecedented number of vacant lots sitting dormant in their industrial milieu: through grueling physical labor and ecologically informed planning, the school bought and prepared several plots of land and began growing an impressive variety of crops. By growing and selling their own produce, the young women are given something concrete, a tactile result of their efforts, and something to be truly proud of in a city where, for many, despair and futility are the order of the day.

The work of the Academy piqued the interest of Dutch filmmakers Mascha and Manfred Poppenk, and the two set out to make Grown in Detroit. The film takes its title from the labels the school puts on all of the produce it sells at Detroit's Eastern Market, an immense farmer's market that operates every Saturday on the east side of the city. The filmmakers were granted full access to the operations of the school and crafted an insightful, realistic, and uplifting documentary about the school and the students whose lives it enriches. Shots of young women, many of them pregnant, harvesting and planting crops across the street from abandoned, burnt-out houses and crack dens are surreal to say the least.

One of the most sought after products of the Academy is their honey. An administrator of the school explains that owing to both an overabundance of wildflowers in abandoned lots and area homeowners' lack of funds to buy harmful pesticides and fertilizer, the bee population of Detroit is one of the healthiest in the state. She describes Detroit as a phoenix, rising from the ashes and broken dreams of a rust-belt tragedy. It's an apt allegory for both the school and its students, ardently reaching for something real amidst a landscape of crushing urban decay.

Perhaps the most hopeful part of Grown in Detroit is the womens' insistence on continuing to garden and grow their own food after graduation. The care and respect shown to these vulnerable young women by everyone at the school is a testament to the goodwill and charity of which humans are thankfully still capable. But when all is said and done, it is the unabashed realism of the faculty and staff of the Catherine Ferguson Academy for Young Women that convinces us of the integrity of their good intentions. The Poppenks have made a truly remarkable documentary about a story of real, honest-to-goodness hope in one of the most unlikely places.

By Adam Goodall
01st December 2009
Detroit, Michigan is a city known around the world as the heart of the American automotive industry. General Motors, Ford and Chrysler call the city home, and with the automotive industry being one of the most important industries to America's economy (it represented 3.3% of US Gross Domestic Product in 2002) its importance to Detroit's survival follows naturally. This makes the industry's decline over the last decade, caused and exacerbated by international competition, 9/11, the recent economic recession and the rising price of crude oil, a particular problem for The Motor City. Indeed, in their documentary Grown in Detroit, Dutch filmmakers Mascha and Manfred Poppenk waste no time showing us just how bad the automotive industry crisis has hit that city, with abandoned buildings and overgrown, vacant lots on every block. The thinning of the city's lifeblood has made it one of the most dangerous in America and caused over one-third of its population to flee it, and the Poppenks show us that, while this is an unsavoury situation, it's not one that can only get worse.

The specific focus of this sixty-minute documentary is The Catherine Ferguson Academy for Young Women, a high school for teenage mothers located in a largely-abandoned area of Detroit. The school puts a primacy on the study of agriculture. Teachers extol the virtues of growing your own fruits and vegetables and selling them; practical lessons are held on the 'Farm', a large area of abandoned land now used as an expansive garden by the school; the headmistress talks of staging a summer school programme for the girls to learn which crops sell best and how to grow them. It's more than a little astonishing to see how effortlessly and successfully this system works, and one can't help but marvel at what's on display. In a city where crime, violence and failure are rife, and in a society where these girls would likely be financially and socially crippled by their having a child, the Academy stands out as a small, but nonetheless bright, glimmer of hope.

The Poppenks acknowledge this and let the students, teachers and Academy speak for themselves, only revealing as much information as necessary. Rather than going into great detail about the students and the school, the regular inter-titles focus on the state of Detroit itself. Providing information that can't be presented through images with these inter-titles, the Poppenks draw parallels between the girls and the dying city they live in, pointing out that, even in the most dire of circumstances, there is still a way out - and that way out may well be the urban farming that the Academy champions.

Grown in Detroit is an interesting film in this regard, as it seemingly works with an eye towards the bigger picture rather than towards the individual. At the same time, however, the camera is regularly called on to provide close-ups and shots that emphasise each individual, suggesting a more personal approach is, at least, desired by the filmmakers. The documentary also has a tendency to focus on certain members of the Academy's community - the science teacher who championed agrarian-based education in the school; a single teenage mother of two given her "third chance" to attend the school; a girl who delivers her child during the documentary's filming and comments on how the baby's father hasn't shown since; the Academy's genial and progressive headmistress. If the descriptions I have given seem to be missing something, that's because they are - names. Two of these people have their names mentioned, but there's never any sense that their identity is important. It's an awkward approach, because while the film's emphasis on the Academy as a whole and the city of Detroit points to a documentary interested with the larger implications of what this remarkable school is teaching, the documentary also tries to give the film a personal, more human angle, as if to pin real people to the overarching theme. However, with no names, these people become identity-less, just faces on the street that we recognise because we've seen them once or twice before. They seem to exist as metaphors, not as people in and of themselves, and it renders the documentary's human angle at once self-conscious and less effective than it should be.

Food on Screen: Grown in Detroit

Leave it to the Dutch to fund a documentary that Americans across the country should watch. I don't know if or when this film will arrive stateside, but I was lucky to catch it at the Austin Film Festival, where it won the prize for best documentary.

In a nutshell, GROWN IN DETROIT is about urban farming in, well, Detroit, where there are a lot of unused and vacant lots, high unemployment and poverty. Specifically, the film is about a program for teenage moms that not only provides day care/education for their kids, but also teaches the girls agricultural skills - with the hope that they will both feed the city and their families, and make some money doing it.

The school, one of only two in the US that has a similar program, is called Catherine Ferguson Academy. It's pretty amazing stuff (though might fall under the category of common sense...). The directors, a young Dutch couple, were at the screening I attended, and unfortunately it seems that the school has lost funding and had to fire half their staff last year. This will obviously affect the quality of the program. But on the bright side, the number of gardens in Detroit is mushrooming - from 300 to 800 in a little over a year.

Catch this documentary if you have the chance. The sight of an urban environment, usually so far from nature, being transformed not only into a green place, but one that can sustain food (and bees! the bees love it in Detroit!) makes you feel hope where it might seem none is possible.
Catherine Ferguson Academy for Young Women in Detroit
The Ferguson Academy for Young Women is an alternative high school located in Detroit, MI. They provide education and resources for pregnant teens, grades 9-12. Many of the teens come from underprivileged backgrounds and are faced with daily challenges that infringe upon their educational opportunities. The Catherine Ferguson Academy strives to provide quality education in order to ensure a bright future for each child. The goal of the principal and teachers at the academy is to prevent the pregnancy cycle from reoccurring in the next generation of infants. Lots used for farming and a barn built by the students lie adjacent to the school. The barn houses a variety of farm animals that the students help care for.

Eligibility
The Ferguson Academy is open to any high school age pregnant teen that lives in Detroit. They hold a citywide baby showers in order to encourage teen mothers and pregnant teens who were not attending school, to enroll in their program. Each student must be accepted to a two year college or four year university before they are eligible to graduate.

Services
The academy offers many features to encourage the success of their students. Some of the amenities include childcare and hands-on interactive techniques. The school offers choir, sports, and holds special events for the teens. The kids have the opportunity to attend movie and lunch outings, and are able to attend a high school dance facilitated by the staff. The principal and staff of the Catherine Ferguson Academy do their best to ensure that their students are prepared for standardized college exams. Tutoring programs for the ACT and MEAP are available after school.

On-site Daycare
The majority of pregnant teens drop out because they have no access to childcare. The academy offers a fully equipped nursery, complete with cribs high chairs, and refrigerators. In order to accommodate the students' parental obligations outside of class, the academy provides onsite medical clinics and WIC services. The students are conveniently able to attend class and care for their babies in the same environment. The principal and staff at the Catherine Ferguson academy encourage students to implement interactive learning techniques while they care for the infants. Many of the students enjoy reading to their children in the nursery's soothing environment.

Available Courses
The students follow the normal curriculum established by the Detroit School District. They have additional access to college preparatory and career courses and electives.
Some of the following include:
*       Music
   *       Home Repair
     *       Technology/IT
   *       Fine Arts
       *       Parenting
The school has an Urban Farming course under the direction of science teacher Paul Weertz. The students learn how to grow and nurture plants in an urban environment. Fresh produce is often scarce in urban environments and too costly for financially burdened students. Ninety percent of the student body qualify for free or reduced meals. As a result of this farming program, 100 percent of the students have access to fresh produce that is often unavailable to many of the teens.