Food in Boston

As regular readers already know, I spent the first few months of 2007 talking to Boston food producers and related organizations, seeking to come up with a basic idea of what’s being done and who’s doing it. This post is intended to provide a single place for listing my findings.

The posts so far:

• about the value and quantity of food produced
• a list of producers and related organizations
• a look at people and jobs involved in food production.

Like the other aspects of the survey, it has proved difficult to put a simple number on the number of jobs directly related to food production in Boston, not to mention volunteer and personal producers. Partly this is due to the seasonal nature of food production, partly to the wide variety of jobs, which include head growers, laborers, interns, and volunteer coordinators. Jobs fell into three categories:

• Full-time, year round: 5 1/2, mostly growers, but some acting more as coordinaters
• Full-time during the growing season: 8, including a couple assistant growers, and the field crew at Allandale Farm.
• interns / trainees during the season: the equivalent of about 14 full-time positions, though this is a little misleading as some are working quite a bit less than full time throughout the growing season.

When you consider the quantity and value of food produced in Boston, and factor in the educational aspects of most of these producers, it shouldn’t be surprising that a serious amount of volunteer labor is also involved. I really didn’t get a sense for the overall magnitude of volunteer involvement, other than to note that ReVision House alone has on the order of 1600 volunteer hours over course of a given season, and it’s the smallest of the nonprofit farms.

There are also approximately 3000 community garden plots in town, and untold numbers of private vegetable plots on private property, so we know that there are thousands more involved in smaller-scale food production.

Following are the people and organizations I talked to for today’s Farming the City Conference. Everyone was enthusiastic about helping and very generous with their time — thanks again! Also a big thanks to the conference organizers, presenters, and other attendees.

Non-profit farms:

• Bob Burns and Danielle Andrews at The Food Project, in Roxbury.
• Matt Kochka at ReVision House, in Dorchester.
• Jean-Claude Bourrut at the Farm at Long Island Shelter, on the harbor.
• Mark Smith of Brookwood Community Farm, on the Canton / Milton line.

Community Gardens:

• Jeremy Dick of Boston Natural Area Networks, downtown.
• Betsy Johnson of the South End / Lower Roxbury Open Space Land Trust.

From the Boston metro’s only for-profit farm, John Lee of Allandale Farm, in Brookline.
Finally, representing the 43 orchards in the Boston metro, Ben Crouch of Earthworks, in Roxbury.

I’d welcome any information about producers or related organizations not listed here, along with other information related to the survey. Still working on how to communicate what I learned, and figuring out where the information will be of use. More to come!

I’ve been working on an informal survey of food production in Boston, to be presented briefly at this Saturday’s Farming the City conference. There are a number of interesting things that came out of my survey, but for this post I’ll just do some wild speculation about how much food is produced in Boston and what its value might be.

1. Allandale Farm, the only for-profit food producer in Boston, takes in around $500,000 / year. I believe that number also takes into account some aspects of the business that aren’t directly related to food production, but do go into making the farm business viable.
2. The four nonprofit farms I talked to all primarily track their output in terms of pounds. Given yearly variations, they collectively produce 50,000 - 60,000 lbs. of vegetables a year.
3. Community gardens are tricky to summarize, in that there’s not so much organization. BNAN estimates that the average plot in its gardens produces enough vegetables for three people for the growing season. BNAN’s 29 affiliated gardens have 620 plots; if this is extrapolated out to Boston’s 150 total community gardens, that would be 3100 plots.
4. Trickier yet are Boston’s urban orchards. Earthworks has its hands in most of those, which number 43, and contain around 450 food-producing trees and shrubs.
5. So tricky as to be unquantifiable, at least for now, are Boston’s many personal gardens. There’s plenty of food being produced on private property, to be sure, but I’m not aware of any even rough estimates about how much. For example, the Food Project has done soil testing in about 150 gardens right around their offices, but how many other hundreds of plots are there?

The above quantities include dollars, pounds, persons-fed-with-veggies, and plants. Time for some wild speculation to reconcile these various units.

First, pounds to dollars - I have a notion that the fresh, chemical-free foods produced locally might retail for somewhere around $2/lb. if you could average out the many types of vegetables, fruits, nuts, and herbs collectively produced.

Next is the persons-fed-with-veggies number - according to the USDA (PDF), families with 2 or more people and two wage earners spend $144/week on food. But what portion of that might be veggies? Perhaps better as a measure would be a CSA, which provides comparable quantity and quality of veggies for around $30 / week. Multiplied by 10 weeks of reliable production in the growing season, that gives us $300/year per plot.

If we knew the average yield per orchard plant, we could come up with something persuasive given our knowledge of how many plants are bearing fruit and nuts in Boston’s urban orchards. Anyone? Failing that, here’s a wildly speculative chain of reasoning: Earthworks estimates that their orchards yield somewhere around 1000 bushels of apples per year. A bushel of apples is 48 pounds, giving us about 50,000 lbs. of apples. There’s a similar amount of pear production to apple production, and together those two crops comprise about 2/3 of the orchard’s output, so there may be something on the order of 150,000 lbs. of food produced in the orchards.

Of course, suggestions or corrections for any of these estimates or methods are more than welcome. Particularly in the next 24 hours.

minor update: cut a few weeks off the estimate for length of growing season, updated numbers accordingly.

minor update 2: after further thought, further reduced the estimated time of productivity for community garden plots, and calculated value by comparing to CSA’s (thanks Simca and Lisa)