Political Farming

They weren't tilling the city's vacant landscape. Nor were they starting the ripples of the city's GREEN wave. The four right-handed shovellers were simply laying out rows of dirt for the season's plantings. In an empty plot of land connected to hundreds of others in this once-bustling Victorian neighborhood of the Motor City, four young people, two black and two white were preparing a new section of the expanding farm. But still it drew the public eye.

First it was a young couple drifting by riding bikes- she on a standard issue and he on a home-made double-decker, with the panting lab at their heels. Then it was folks from the neighborhood, a crying woman who'd lived in her house for 50 years, through thick and thin as they say- but then again they probly don't know thin like she knows thin. She broke down as she explained how she was about to lose her house. She can't afford the taxes. She remembered when this farmer first moved here five years ago- a newborn among residents who'd mostly lived there for twenty-plus years- and the positive direction she saw the neighborhood going since. After some consoling and encouraging she walked back to her home.

Later in the afternoon a woman running for city council came by with her daughter. Both of them pretty and well spoken, they introduced themselves to all the shovellers and toured around the farm. Delicately, they wondered if they could pose for pictures with the shovellers and use them for the politican's website. The woman praised the benefits of urban farming and the opportunity it holds for Detroit. Politely asking which tool she could hold without disturbing the progress, she stepped into the soft dirt rows while her daughter snapped away.

As the light changed that day and the next, the dirt rows were laid out across the changing lot. The woman said she might be returning with a real photographer to get some better shots. Compared to past years where groups of plantings huddled in small patches in the yard and its greenhouses, the clean long lines marked a stride towards a full-on farm.