Attack on our Local Food System
Goats at BadSeed Farm
Food Not Lawns is about converting unproductive resource intensive landscapes into productive sustainable permascapes. It’s about growing our own food near the back door and creating a secure local food system. All the work and time the Kansas City Food Circle and the Kansas City Center for Urban Agriculture and all of you have invested is under attack. Brooke Salvaggio and Daniel Heryer who operate BadSeed Farm in south Kansas City Missouri face a concerted effort to shut them down by Kansas City officials. If the city is successful in their prosecution then all urban farms in Kansas City are at risk. BadSeed farm is the poster child of the Food Not Lawns movement in Kansas City. Brook eradicated an acre of lawn liberating the soil of its bondage to turf. She grows food for our community with loving care in the living soil she nurtured back to health.
The following is a letter from Brook to her supporters.
Dear Eaters,
To me, it seems absurd that a group of our neighbors should so greatly fear a small, organic farm in a suburban backyard. They would sooner seek its demise than walk through its open gates to see it firsthand.
Amidst the worst economic times in recent memory, people fear for their jobs, for their homes, for their marriages, for their very way of living. So we should not be surprised when a long-time neighbor tells us that she fears she may have to move back into her second home if she cannot sell it due to our organic efforts.
Afraid of declining property values and an invasion from poorer black neighborhoods to the east, our politically powerful neighbors fingered us for troublemakers and demanded the city do something. The officials in the city issued us with numerous violations, despite our compliance with city codes, because they fear for their jobs.
How many of us stay in jobs we dislike for fear of losing health or retirement benefits?
To be free is to live without fear. I have lived in America for 27 years. I have visited Cuba, China, Europe, and Peru, and I find this definition of freedom to be the truest. And yet, I believe that Americans are less free than ever before. And we are more fearful than ever before.
We are fearful not because of the economy, not because of the value of our homes, not because of our jobs. We are fearful because we have lost the ability to control our own destinies. We have lost the ability to do for ourselves. For if we have the ability to feed ourselves, to build our own homes, to sew our own clothes and to mend our own wounds, what have we left to fear?
Answer: Natural disasters, and the government. These are my greatest fears.
Brooke Salvaggio & Daniel Heryer
BadSeed Farm
Kansas City Missouri
August 27 2009