farm city

What do you get when you take a few pigs, a bunch of goats, some rabbits, chickens, turkeys and a ton of veggies, and you plop them right in the middle of a city? Novella Carpenter found out when she started a small farm right next to her apartment in Oakland, California. She writes about her experience as an urban farmer in her memoir, Farm City. eMusic’s Jess Sauer talked to the author about the myriad challenges she faces every day, from the perils of dumpster diving in order to provide her pigs with slop, to her realization that she can’t stay out and party anymore because she has to get home to put the goats to bed. The unabridged interview is after the jump.

You have three jobs. How do you manage your time? Is the farming one of those jobs?

Farming is one of them. Farming is one of the jobs now.

And writing is one of them as well.

Yeah, and then I’m a freelance writer. Besides writing books I’m a journalist. So I’ve been doing that, and then I work at a biodiesel station.

Exactly how picky are the animals when it comes to time? I know that you had to wake up to milk the goats this morning. Has it been a challenge to juggle the time needs of the farm with your other commitments?

I used to keep turkeys and that kind of thing, smaller animals. It’s different with the goats. You get up in the morning, feed them, and then go to work. It’s something that even rural farmers do. There’s no money in farming and so you have to have another job. So it’s just one of those things that you balance out. You do what you can in the early morning, because most people don’t have to be at work at 7. Then when you come home from work, you just do your chores at night. With the goats, they have a really specific schedule. They’re like children, and so they have to be fed at 7 or they’ll just freak out. And then they need to be put to bed at 11.

You have to put them to bed?

You have to put them away, and make sure they feel safe. Give them a little grain. It’s just like putting kids to bed. You take them down to their little pens and put them to bed. It kind of makes it hard to have a rock and roll lifestyle. If I go out late and go to a show or something, I’ll either put the goats away earlier or wait and pay the price later, because then in the morning they’re all freaked. They know that you put them away at 2 in the morning instead of 11, and they act weird all day. It’s one of those things where you just realize, “Okay, I can’t really do that anymore.”

You did a little book tour. Did Bill take care of them, or did you need a babysitter type of situation?

Luckily, Bill took care of them. We also have these new downstairs neighbors who are totally awesome. He’s from Cuba, and in Cuba they do this thing where you’re trained in guerilla warfare and also trained in farming at the same time. It’s like, milk a goat, shoot a gun — so he really fits in in Oakland well. He comes and milks the goats. But it’s funny because I just did a reading last night with Mas Masumoto, a peach farmer, and he was the same way, like, “Holy crap, I have to be gone for three days.” And that’s what I did too, I’d have to be gone for three days and I’d come back and it would just be total pandemonium. You just have to go and do the book tour and rush back as fast as you can.

You talk a lot about the difficulties and rewards of urban farming in the book. It does seem like your parents were a really big influence on you. I’m wondering if you feel like you could have gone through some of the harder moments — killing the possum who killed your birds, for instance — without the perspective of your parents’ experience. Do you think if you’d been raised in a suburban setting from the get-go, you’d be able to handle the grittier realities of farming?

I think that it really does help to have this well that you can draw upon, because otherwise you’re like, “Wow, this has gotten so out of control. I’m executing a possum in my yard. Is this really normal?” Because it’s part of my heritage, it does make it easier to do, because farming is hard. When I was talking to Mas last night — he’s a third-generation peach farmer — he was reading this part of his book about how hard the work is. You sweat constantly and you’re getting old from growing the food, and it hurts a little bit. But at the same time, you look back and you see that your father did it, and this is just your lifestyle. It’s kind of reassuring. If my parents had been investment bankers, there’s no way I would be doing this. No way.

You talk about urban farming being the Utopia 9.0 to your parents’ Utopia 8.5. Do you think the current movement is sort of picking up where your parents left off, or do you think it’s more of a case of cultural amnesia?

I think it is actually cultural amnesia. People are like, “Urban farming forever, right?” But it’s not like that because that is not how we operate. If you read any history of urban farming, it usually happens during a recession — hello — or some kind of economic calamity: the World Wars, the Great Depression. That’s when people start urban farming, but then they stop, because it is a lot of hard work, and it isn’t like your fantasy about farming. Americans have this whole idea about it, built up by Martha Stewart, that you have to live in this perfect, beautiful fantasy world, and if you’re not doing that, you’re not doing it right. So I think that there’s a lot of pressure.

Historically, Americans have mostly done it during depressions. But if you go to England, they have these beautiful allotment gardens, and that’s part of the culture. Until urban farming becomes part of the culture here, it’s never going to hold on. In America, culture is a moving target. The only thing that gives me hope is that there’s a huge immigrant population in America always, and those are the people who are doing urban farming because they can’t find certain vegetables or animals available on the market, so they’re going to have to do it themselves.

There is a tradition of Americans being amateurs, having a little amateur hobby farm, for instance. Amateurs are often the ones who keep culture going, because they’re doing stuff not for money, but for love.

You mention a few times in the book instances of rural farmers not necessarily being enthusiastic about what you’re doing. Have you gotten any feedback from the rural farming community?

I am totally humbled by real rural farmers. They are the ones growing the majority of our food. Even in places like Detroit, where they have so much urban farming it’s insane, they only grow 3% of their food in the city. So that number’s tiny. It’s really important not to sound like, “Hey, come out of the country and start urban farming!” The land is hard to acquire and access. It’s impossible to grow those crops they really need, wheat and rice. You can’t really have a cow in the city. Urban farming is like subsistence farming. I have some surplus that I give to my neighbors or sell to underground restaurants and stuff, but for the most part it’s really just scrapping. Rural farming is really important. I don’t want to be either/or, urban farming or rural farming. We can do both, and we should support each other.

But people are psyched. I actually had this lady write me through my blog, where she was like, “I have 3,000 acres in the Central Valley, and you have your little lot, and we’re both farmers.” I thought, “That’s so cool, she’s like a real farmer.” So I think people are positive about it because they want us to know how much work it is to be a farmer. Even on a small scale, it’s just a shit-ton of work. If it’s a lot of work for me on my little plot, imagine having acres and acres that you’re taking care of. I think urban farming has opened people up, because in an urban population, if you’re exposed to it, you realize, “Wow, this lettuce really took a lot of work. I shouldn’t just eat half of my salad and throw it away. It’s really valuable and important.”

You do raise meat animals, and I’ve read a few interviews with you when you seem surprised that you haven’t received the phone call from PETA you were fearing.

I’ve been really surprised. A lot of vegans and vegetarians come to my readings. We’ll be talking afterward, and I don’t know they’re vegetarian, and they’ll tell me and I’ll say, “Oh my God, why are you at my reading? Why do you like my book?” And they say, “Well, these are the issues that people who eat meat don’t think about. They’re not looking it in the eyes. They’re just consuming what’s available in front of them without any thought.” So I feel like people who choose not to eat meat are excited that I’m showing people what it really does mean. I’m not always that psyched on it. We just killed one of our male goats, and it was really sad. I was just thinking, “God, I can’t believe how many times I’ve eaten goat tacos or something and just not really thought about it that much.” It’s not all fun and games, that’s for sure.

When you first got turkeys, you were reluctant to name them. Do you now name your meat animals?

I do name the meat animals now, because I think it’s a way to show respect. If you name something, it’s kind of like you’re saying, “This thing is important,” instead of being like “Oh, that one,” or whatever. I think it’s really important to name an animal that you’re going to kill. And you also want to give them an extra good life, because they’re going to have a short life. So why not make it the best available?

You have goats now. Are they your main project

I have bees and rabbits and chickens and goats. The goats are the ones who take up most of my bandwidth right now. They’re like cats: They’re kind of independent, but at the same time they kind of want to cuddle with you. They’re just really great. And it’s great to have a milk goat. I haven’t bought milk in a long time. That’s a really nice feeling, too. Especially when you hear the crap about dairies. So many chemicals poured down the drain in the name of cleanliness.

If you’re talking to someone who was raised in the suburbs or the city, and really doesn’t have the experience you have, would you recommend that they try urban farming

I don’t want to tell anybody what to do. I would say you can totally do it if your parents weren’t farmers. Especially now. Maybe a while ago it was a little bit more of a strange thing to do, but now there are so many urban farm organizations in every single city that you can totally find a community that way. If I moved to a new city, I would be like, “Okay, where’s my urban farm? Who are my peeps?” It’s a total community now. I think you can really access that in a way that you probably wouldn’t have been able to 10 years ago. Because of that, you’re less of a nut ball. You can draw strength from talking to other people. Also, it’s comforting to read historical accounts of urban farming. Because if you live in the city, everybody’s history is that. Historically, everybody was a farmer in America at some point, or has some roots. It’s like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, most people can find a connection to urban farming, or farming of some sort, in their family.

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How do you balance the writing with farming? Do you have a schedule or do you just squeeze it in whenever you can?

It’s pretty much whenever I can squeeze the time in. I have a deadline for a project. I’ve been going, for the last three months, just total balls-to-the-wall and I am tired. I’m like, I can’t keep doing this. So I’m going to start just rejecting assignments and not taking on any new projects at this point. For my sanity, I just can’t do it. The paradox is that now because the book is out, everybody is like, “Hey, will you host third graders?” “Will you read this blog contest?” “Would you write this article?” So it’s really becoming totally overwhelming, and I have to figure out how to do it.

Do you have plans for a new book?

I’m working on a book. It’s due October 1st. That’s partially why I’m so stressed out. It’s a how-to book, so it’s going to come out in paperback at the same time as the paperback version of Farm City. So that’ll be really cool, because one of the things I noticed — well, I knew this was going to happen — is that as you tour, people have technical questions. They’re like, “What do I do about my chicken when it looks like this?” or whatever. And it’s kind of like, “Well, I just wrote a memoir…” So I paired up with Willow Rosenthal, who’s the founder of City Slicker Farms in Oakland, and we’re writing a how-to together. It’s been so great working with another person to write a book, because when you’re writing alone, you feel kind of crazy, and this way you can feel crazy together.

Is it a general urban-farming how-to?

Willow’s writing the vegetable sections — she’s doing the whole vegetable farming thing. She has a lot of experience with setting up urban farms, so she’s writing “If you see a vacant lot and you want to turn it into a farm, here’s the legal stuff you have to do.” Really useful stuff like that. And I’m doing livestock, how to raise animals and do slaughtering. That’s my part of the book.

Is what we perceive as a spike in urban farming actually sort of an illusion that comes with being in progressive places like the Bay Area, or is it really catching on everywhere?

I don’t know if Detroit is considered progressive, but it is the headquarters of urban farming. So I think it’s happening in a lot of communities where there’s blight and there are places that have been neglected for a long time, and people are like, “Wow, we can urban farm here.” It’s also happening in Manhattan and Chicago and all of those places too. So it’s interesting that it’s not sort of a liberal thing to do, that it’s not necessarily a progressive concept. It appeals to a lot of different people, but for the most part it is happening in cities, and people in cities tend to be less conservative.

There are lots of battles, though. I have a friend in Kansas City, who’s having this huge problem where she’s trying to do urban farming more in the suburbs. She said, “You know, you do urban farming in the inner city, and you’re a hero. You try to do urban farming near the suburbs, and you’re a total villain. Because there’s total NIMBYism, and they have power. So these people are like, “We don’t care if that’s the law, we’re going to change the law so you can’t keep goats.” There’s always battles. People aren’t always pro-urban farming, that’s for sure. A lot of people are like, “You’re just living out this fantasy,” but I think it actually is economically viable. You have to be a super scrounger. You have to be willing to use every single resource available.

And not be afraid to dive into a Dumpster from time to time.

It’s so funny. People think I’ve been tamed because I have a book out now. I did this reading, and they were like, “Oh, but you don’t Dumpster dive anymore.” I’m like, “Actually… I’m going to be going after this reading.” It’s not like just because I published a book, I don’t do these things still.

What would the alternative be? You’re getting gourmet slop now?


I know! Like, “Oh, thank God I don’t have to Dumpster dive anymore.” And that’s the sad thing. People think that if you become successful you don’t have to follow your own rules anymore.