VOA常速英语:Urban Farm Takes Root Amid Strip Malls

EcoCity Farms grows vegetables in winter. The Edmonston, Maryland, farm near Washington is an unlikely place to harvest produce in any season. Its four climate-controlled greenhouses stand out in an otherwise bleak landscape dotted with small homes, strip malls and car repair shops.

Over the past two years, the farm has become a magnet for the community, attracting volunteers like Marcy Clark, who homeschools her four children. On this day, Clark uses EcoCity Farms as a lesson in sustainable agriculture.

“It’s important that the children understand the connection between the food that they eat, the soil, the air, the pollution, how all this is connected to their well-being,” she says.

The Clark children - Hannah, Caleb, John and Alston - weed and harvest fresh rows of spinach, mustard greens, lettuce, Swiss chard and carrots.

Hannah Clark, 17, says she likes to garden. 

Her 11-year-old brother, Caleb, agrees. “It may not be like fun, fun, but it is fun because you’re learning and not like writing something out on a piece of paper.” 

The other Clark boys, John, 13, and Alston, 15, say the farm has changed their perspective on food. 

“Instead of feeling down when I have to eat vegetables, I feel happy," John says. "They do good things from the top of your head to your feet.”

Alston agrees, “You connect with the earth where the food comes from.”

EcoCity Farms cultivates that connection in a working class community with limited access to fresh food. Rates of obesity are high here, and residents are at greater risk for diet-related disease.

Founder Margaret Morgan-Hubbard sees the farm as an oasis where a healthier lifestyle can take root.

“Our view is that what happens in a community influences the culture of that community," Morgan-Hubbard says. "So our idea was growing food in a community, and showing that you can have farms, even in urban areas, redefines what’s possible in that area, in that community and brings people together.”

When they leave, she wants neighbors to take away more than vegetables. “Every piece of what we do here is a demonstration to show people everything about how to have a sustainable community.”

That means not only farming food and raising chickens and bees, but also improving the soil with home-grown compost. Sixteen chest-high wooden bins are filled with worms deployed to turn food waste into compost.

Benny Erez manages this labor force and sees it as another teaching moment. “When people come and look at this obviously we show them a technique, and close the circle and bring the food back from being food to composted and then use it on the farm,  back to growing vegetables.”

EcoCity Farms is an ‘off the grid’ experimental operation that gets its electricity from solar panels. Its hooplike greenhouses are heated using a geothermal system of buried tubes that pumps ground temperature air into the structures, allowing vegetables to be grown year round. 

So, once a week, all winter long, neighbors like Chris Moss and her three children bicycle to the farm to pick up a share of the harvest.

Five-year-old Owen Moss says he “likes eating vegetables.”

And, if you can get a five-year-old to like vegetables, there’s hope for the future.