Reconnecting people to food

About Jones Valley Urban Farm

Jones Valley Urban Farm is a non-profit organization dedicated to reclaiming vacant urban lots and converting them to productive use. In addition to growing fruits, vegetables and cut flowers, the urban farm is an important community resource providing educational and economic opportunities in an urban setting.

Starting with a one-acre production farm on the Southside of Birmingham, the farm has grown to include these locations (please note selling places, dates and times if you want to buy our organic produce):

• Southside Garden
• Rushton Garden
• East Avondale Community Garden on 3rd Ave. South off Crestwood Blvd.
• Alabama School of Fine Arts Garden

A Brief History

The Beginning

JVUF is a 501c3 non-profit project started in 2001 as an experiment by Page Allison and Edwin Marty to transform vacant land in downtown Birmingham into production organic farm land. They started developing their first lot in Southside by developing a job-training project with the YWCA. In the first summer, they sold their produce at the Pepper Place Farmers Market and to local restaurants. The following year, JVUF added 2 more sites for organic production.

The East Avondale Community Garden is a collaborative project between the Neighborhood Association, Youth Serve, and JVUF. It's a unique and successful project where the neighborhood uses part of the garden to grow their own produce, First Serve uses part of the garden to run their education programs, and JVUF uses another section for the production of organic produce and flowers for sale.

The third garden JVUF uses for production is called the Garden of Hope. It's located downtown adjacent to a public housing neighborhood. This garden is also a mixed use project where the neighborhood uses part of the garden to grow their own food and JVUF uses the other section for organic produce and flower production.

In 2003, JVUF also created a collaborative education program with the Alabama School of Fine Arts (ASFA). This accredited experiential education course is called the Arts and Science of Agriculture (ASAP). It's offered for 2 semesters each summer, with each semester lasting 4 weeks. The students come out to the urban farm 5 days a week for 5 hours and help with all aspects of production, such as sowing seeds, weeding, and harvesting. Twice a week, they have lectures on various agroecology subjects, take field trips, and present research projects.

In 2004, ASFA and JVUF expanded the education class to include an academic year component, with 2 semesters each year in Fall and Spring. The course is based around the school garden JVUF helped develop and offers ASFA students an opportunity to receive a science credit for this experiential course at their own school.

In 2005, JVUF teamed up with a youth education group in Marengo County called TUCCA to provide a youth agri-cultural exchange program, called City and Rural Exchange (CARE). For this program, ASFA students taking the summer course went to Marengo County to work on organic farms in the rural area and experience life outside of the city. TUCCA students came up to Birmingham to work at JVUF urban farms and experience life in the city. At the end of the week, the two groups came together to share their experiences.

JVUF is part of collaboration called The Greater Birmingham Community Food Partners. This group seeks to address why there is food insecurity in Birmingham and what steps we can take to eliminate it. JVUF's role in this group is to help develop new community gardens and farmers markets throughout the Birmingham area.

Over the years of operation, JVUF has continued to grow produce, herbs, and flowers on their 3 sites and selling these at 2 farmers markets and to local restaurants. They have worked with various youth volunteer groups, such as First Serve, Jack-n-Jill, and the YMCA. Staff at the farm includes an executive director, a farm manager, an education coordinator, and summer interns.

The Gardens of Park Place

Building on years of successful urban farming in downtown Birmingham, Jones Valley Urban Farm began to transform a 3 ½ acre city block into a production urban organic teaching farm in 2006. This site, called The Gardens of Park Place, is the new home for all of JVUF's operations and a hub for both sustainable agriculture and urban restorations.

After 4 years of successful collaboration with JVUF, the James Rushton One Foundation committed to assisting JVUF to develop their property at 7th Ave North and 25th Street into a model demonstration urban farm and community garden. The first step was to hire a landscape architect to develop a master plan. An initial meeting with Auburn's Urban Studio led to some intriguing discussions and eventually to hiring landscape architect Jane Reed Ross, with Land Ross Design.

Director of the Rushton Foundation, Deak Rushton, and JVUF Executive Director, Edwin Marty, began discussions with Jane to get an idea of the farm's needs. JVUF envisioned an acre of organic row crops, an orchard of Asian pears and persimmons, a community garden for families in downtown to grow their own food, and a farm center for education programs. The Rushton Foundation laid plans for an Early Childhood Learning Center to provide educational opportunities for local pre-kindergarten children. The next step was to host a public design charette. After meeting with Architecture Works to discuss buildings on the property, partner Dick Pigford offered his studio for the charette. 30 community participants showed up to discuss the potential of the Gardens of Park Place, representing residents of the adjacent Park Place public housing neighborhood, architects, urban planners, local artists, and members of JVUF's board of directors. Jane gave a description of the initial thoughts for the site and then a lively discussion ensued addressing the site's sustainability, access to community members, and food production capability.

With all this information documented, the Gardens of Park Place design team met again to further sketch the site plan. With input from Kris Nikolich from Architecture Works, it was decided to spend more time looking at how the buildings would impact the site before proceeding.

Also in the winter of 2006, Edwin visited Auburn University to discuss the opportunity for collaboration between JVUF, Auburn's Organic Research Station, and the USDA Soil Tillage Lab. The first step was to get the soil tested and then come up with a game plan for converting the urban soil into usable organic soil. Students from the Alabama School of Fine Arts joined Edwin and farm manager Justin Coley at the site one cold and blustery day to take soil samples. With the site divided into 6 grids, students dug soil samples and labeled them for Auburn's Soil Lab to test. Once the results were back, we knew what were up against. Unfortunately the picture was bleak. The soil was heavily compacted and very low in nutrients. But this is what you come to expect when converting vacant lots into production urban farms. The highlight, however, of the test was that the site was clear of toxins and heavy metals, meaning that we could grow food without worrying about dangerous metals, such as lead, contaminating the produce.

Auburn researchers helped us come up with a game plan for improving the soil at the Gardens of Park Place, which included a full year of cover cropping and importing mushroom compost. Cover cropping is a technique for improving soil by sowing a mixed crop of legumes and grains, then tilling them back into the soil. The result is improved soil fertility. Fortunately, sunflowers were identified as a great summer cover crop, in conjunction with cowpeas.

With a fertility plan in place, Jane finished up the Phase One landscape plan and we hired contractor to help prepare the site. Rob Davis, of Davis Landscapes, brought his crew out to demolish the old community garden fence and remove the asphalt path. They went on to install a cedar split-rail fence along 7th Ave North and deep till the future vegetable fields. We then brought in 300 yards of certified organic mushroom compost and spread it around the field. Next Grant Alspaugh joined the crew and we disked-in the compost and spread the 150 pounds of sunflowers and cowpea seeds. As soon as we finished, a heavy spring rain unloaded 6 inches of rain on the new planted seeds and we knew fortune was smiling upon us.

During the summer of 2006, the sunflowers grew to an impressive height and caught the attention of everyone around downtown Birmingham. We hosted a Sunflower Harvest Block Party when the flowers were in bloom, inviting the neighbors to come out eat food, listen to music, and harvest flowers. When the sunflowers were fading and the cowpeas ready to bloom, we disked the field in, sowed more compost and planted a fall cover crop of winter wheat, vetch, crimson clover, and Austrian winter peas. These grew up over the winter and by the spring of 2007 were ready to be turned back in. JVUF purchased a new Kubota tractor with some used implements in the summer and quickly utilized these new tools to increase production and productivity.

By this time, the Gardens of Park Place design team settled on developing a temporary farm center while the Rushton Foundation further developed their idea for a 20,000 square foot Early Childhood Learning Center. JVUF needed to have a structure for education programs and farming as soon as possible so Architecture Works drew up plans for a “green” outdoor classroom that would fit over a temporary trailer. The trailer would house the farms major operations, including office space, bathrooms, and a walk-in cooler. The farm center's outdoor classroom would be a multi-use structure for classes, events, and vegetable processing. A community garden storage and gathering structure was included in the plan as a miniature of the farm center.

In April 2007, the design team hired the construction firm of JohnsonKries to begin building the structures at the Gardens of Park Place. We purchased a construction trailer outfitted with a walk-in cooler, bathroom, office space, and a meeting room. This structure serves as our “center” while we develop plans for a permanent facility. In addition to the trailer, JohnsonKreis Construction has built a deck and tool shed that now serves as our “Outdoor classroom” for us to run our education programs. The design was done by the same team we are using to develop our permanent facility, ArchitectureWorks and Ross Land Design. We used as many energy conserving components as possible, in both the design and construction, such as a butterfly roof that catches rain water and soy-treated yellow pine timbers to prevent soil contamination. Simultaneously, JohnsonKries helped the community volunteers and JVUF staff build 30 community garden raised beds and a community garden shed for storing tools.

With the first phase of the Gardens of Park Place completed, the design team began to meet again to look at the next phase. We have been re-examining the Gardens of Park Place Farm Center in light of a “green” architecture focus. All the groups involved with this project recognize the tremendous potential impact we can make, and therefore what a great opportunity we have to both educate and serve as a good example. This line of thinking has lead us all to agree that whatever we build should be an example of sustainable resource use, both in the design and the materials we use. There is tremendous excitement for a ‘green roof' on top of the Rushton Early Childhood Learning Center that would allow for even space for JVUF garden education programs. We are currently also considering joint programming for pre-school students, a multi-use indoor/ outdoor kitchen, and garden/ nutrition programs for parents of pre-school students.

Education Programs

In tandem with the development of the Gardens of Park Place as JVUF's physical hub, we also expanded and developed our educational program offerings. JVUF hired its first Education Director, Rachel Reinhart, in summer of 2006. Rachel began by teaching and refining our high school Agriscience curriculum, recruiting a greater number of students to Summer, Fall and Spring semester courses, developing a teacher training program, Teaching From the Garden, to help classroom teachers to use gardens and garden activities as teaching tools in a variety of subjects, and developing Seed 2 Plate, a food and nutrition education field trip program for elementary aged students visiting the JVUF farm and local teaching kitchen.

The number of students in JVUF's Agriscience program has tripled in the last year, and the curriculum's academic rigor and popularity continue to grow. In 2007, JVUF's Agriscience courses at the Alabama School of Fine Arts (ASFA) began including harvesting student-grown produce for preparation and service in the school cafeteria, with students serving and educating their classmates on various topics related to crops, cooking, and nutrition. Finally, JVUF developed a paid internship program in which we hire graduates of our Agriscience courses to assist with farm production, programs, and marketing through the summer months. Since summer of 2006, we have had 9 part-time paid summer interns, most of whom came from ASFA, but two of whom were college students who are local residents of the downtown community surrounding the farm.

In collaboration with local dieticians, chefs, the county health department, the dietetic internship program of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Culinard Institute, and the Downtown YMCA Youth Center, we developed the Seed 2 Plate food education field trip program for elementary aged children. We have developed a curriculum of eight lessons, each team-taught in three parts (farm, nutrition, and kitchen), and built around a theme, and each lesson's theme complementing the others. Most of our Seed 2 Plate participants have come for a series of five or more field trips, so that by the end of their time with us, the children have learned quite a bit about growing, cooking, and eating healthy food. We have also continued to develop and strengthen the networks of people working on food and health related issues in Birmingham by training and using local chefs, dieticians, and other volunteers to help facilitate the programs.

Finally, JVUF has continued to develop and support adult education and outreach programs in the Birmingham community. Between monthly Saturday workshops for the public at the farm and at least weekly presentations and partnerships with gardening, food security, and diet-related health groups in our community, we are building a network of community members and professionals to support production, access, and consumption of fresh, local, healthy produce.

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