Sole Food Farm

The farm I am apprenticing at here in Vancouver is called Sole Food. Originally a project of the organization United We Can, Sole Food started as a way to provide employment for residents of the downtown eastside - folks that are often working through addictions and mental health challenges. Seann Dory was the Manager of Sustainability at United We Can and he recruited Michael Ableman to help him start this project. The first farm was built on a half acre parking lot beside the Astoria hotel, an SRO (single room occupancy) hotel on East Hastings.

Farm site at the Astoria Hotel

The downtown eastside neighborhood is an interesting place. There are disproportionately high levels of homelessness, material poverty, drug use, Hep C, HIV and diabetes. It is an incredibly food insecure place. Housing is mainly SRO units, transitional housing and BC social housing. Most folks do not have access to a kitchen and there is one grocery store in the entire DTES. If interested, this report from the DTES Kitchen Tables Project has lots of good info on the food security of the DTES.

The neighborhood is also a warm place full of people that care about their community and care about their neighbours. They say hi on the streets and check in with each other. It's been a fulfilling place to farm. I'll share more thoughts about the complexities of this place in another post. 

With only a half acre parking lot to work with, the farm was able to accomplish a lot. They grew year round, crops of delicious veggies - kale, rainbow chard, beans, peas, melons, tomatoes, beets, herbs, strawberries, lettuce, arugula, spinach. They sold at Farmer's Markets and to some restuarants, genereting over $60,000 in sales in year 3. An impressive feat for a small scale urban operation.

The farm has always relied on community grants to operate and to be able to employ folks from the neighborhood. This winter, they dreamed up a plan to expand their acreage to be able to grow enough to become commercially viable. With lots of hard work and serious planning, the farm worked out a model that would see expansion into a network of small farm sites (totalling 4 acres,) that would allow the farm to be completely self financing within four years. This is big, folks. Lots of urban farming projects in North America still rely heavily on grant money or private funders. They are often symbolic demonstration sites or teaching gardens (and these are good!) But this here is a real honest-to-goodness farm with high production levels.

This season we have worked so hard - dragging 3,000 pallets across a 2 acre site to set up growing boxes, building 4 greenhouses in a month of pouring rain, setting up 1.5 acres of farm on contaminated brownfields, growing massive amounts of produce that had to be cooled in fridge space located on the second floor of an historic building with a broken elevator. But! It has been so wonderful and I have learned massive amounts. More stories to follow.

Pallets being laid out - soon to become growing boxes.