On Thursdays each week, the farmers of River Queen Greens pack up the vegetables they’ve grown and take them to the Crescent City Farmers Market in New Orleans’ Mid-City neighborhood to sell. They tote a variety of microgreens, root veggies, cooking greens and fresh herbs that haven’t been utilized in their farm share program or by selling to wholesalers or local restaurants across the city.
Their 88-acre farm is located on the west bank of New Orleans in the Lower Coast Algiers neighborhood. Owner Cheryl Nunes, who owns and operates the farm with wife Annie Moore, calls their neighborhood rural and agricultural, in a lesser-known part of the city — pretty far away from the jazz and glamour you might think of in New Orleans. Certainly no parades are passing by their window.
But the couple’s farm is part of a growing agricultural movement in New Orleans, where urban plots are cropping up on top of land that two decades ago held apartment buildings and storefronts.
River Queen Greens got its start on one of those lots, a half-acre tract in the city. Like many of their urban farmer neighbors, Nunes and Moore struggled to build the health of their soil, the foundation for a productive growing environment.
“It was extremely sandy, and it had a lot of urban rubble from construction in it,” Nunes says.
Even in their larger farm farther away from the traditional city-center, she says they still struggle with managing their soil, fighting against the dense clay by adding in amendments.
There are programs in place that can help urban farmers with this and other challenges related to their unique growing conditions. But, piling administrative tasks like finding those opportunities, connecting with the proper channels, filling out the sometimes-arduous paperwork and meeting requirements into an already packed day can sometimes feel like a net negative return on investment.
“That’s a lot of paperwork that growers often are very overwhelmed by, including us,” she says. “That’s just not our forte.”
“It can be isolating to fill out forms when we don’t really know what the language means or if we are doing it correctly.”
“I feel like forms are a big barrier to opportunity.”
Helpful Hands
Margee Green, producer and sustainability director for Sprout, says that this kind of thinking is exactly why her organization exists.
“Farmers are so talented at farming,” she says. “We try to help them just be able to farm.”
“Obviously they are small business owners, and you have to be able to run a small business, but I don’t think it’s fair that farmers have to be able to navigate every system and every program,” she says. “We are like business partners for farmers.”
On the ground, that partnership looks like Sprout running interference, matching farmers like Nunes and Moore with opportunities to enhance their farms and then helping them to navigate the processes that accompany. They host gatherings where farmers come together to fill out forms, share best practices and exchange tools.
One of the primary partnerships that Sprout leverages for Louisiana farmers is with the local USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, which provides technical and financial support for conservation efforts. Through an initiative to provide support to urban and small-scale agriculture, there is a USDA NRCS service center in New Orleans complete with a dedicated urban conservationist.
That urban conservationist is Jorge Penso, and one of his first connections when he arrived in New Orleans was with Sprout.
“Sprout has been one of my biggest helps in terms of meeting farmers and producers, and getting information about NRCS programs out there,” Penso says. “They’ve been here for years. They’re very well organized.”
The organizations are now partnering to provide programming, bringing workshops for growers on topics such as soil health, high tunnels and diversification.
Filling the Void
For Nunes, Sprout and NRCS are stepping in to fill a desperate need for farmers like herself.
“We struggle to find resources that address some of the issues that we face, especially in the South,” she says. “Many resources deal with farmers at a much bigger scale or a national scale or northern climates with much different soil types than we have down here.”
“Sometimes it feels like we are doing a lot of trial and error and learning from our peers in our community.”
Penso is ready with programs to help with this and all of the challenges that urban and peri-urban farmers like Nunes and Moore face. He’s already making use of conservation programs like EQIP to fund high tunnels — River Queen Greens has six in operation on their farm. High tunnels, which elsewhere can be used to extend growing seasons, in Louisiana are often used to protect fragile crops from the climate extremes of the region, like sweltering hot days and torrential flooding. Raised beds are also popular as a way to short-circuit building soil health on former mixed-use sites. Through the CSP program, Penso is facilitating pollinator plantings.
“One of the nice things about working with urban producers is that they are not as heavily invested as a row-crop farmer would be, which makes it difficult to change what they are doing,” he says. “Especially when someone is just getting started, they can be conscious about their choices and be in a mindset to work toward conservation.”
Facilitating Change
What can happen when farmers free up the headspace occupied by administrative tasks? Green believes that is when actual change can occur.
“When we crunch farmers into needing to be everything all at once, there is no possibility for them to breathe and look out onto their land and think about what it could look like in 20 years if they could reintroduce pollinators or native plants or monitor their soil health or trap carbon,” she says. “When we open up space, they can think about sustainability on their farm, both financial and environmental.”
On the River Queen Greens farm, one of those conservation practices that Nunes and Moore are implementing that has them thinking about the next two decades on their farm is cover cropping.
“Something that has us very excited about the future is a very specific type of cover cropping that we started doing,” she says. “We are using sunn hemp, which is a fast-growing, hot-weather-loving crop that we are planting and then crimping with a roller crimper before planting into. The mulch then is lasting us about six months adding a lot of benefit.”
Changes like this are what give Green hope that her “life’s work” at Sprout is starting to grow impact.
“Farmers are such an incredible tool for fighting climate change, if they are able to really run their farms in these holistic ways,” she says. “Nonprofit partners and NRCS, we try to lift a load so that farmers can do what they do best.”
America’s Conservation Ag Movement is a public/private collaborative that meets growers across the country where they are on their conservation journey and empowers their next step with technical assistance from USDA-NRCS and innovation solutions and resources from agriculture’s leading providers. Learn more at www.americasconservationagmovement.com.
Your Next Read:
