Newark, New Jersey’s story is as long as it is multifarious. Depending upon who you ask, the city can be characterized as a cultural touchstone of the state or a crucible of reinvention amidst a commercial renaissance. As documented by the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (NJDEA), it is also a “Food Desert” that stretches across all five wards, each ranking among the top ten Food Desert communities in NJ.
A “Food Desert” is described as an environment in which it is difficult to access or afford quality food. While the term has been used with increased urgency to highlight the nation’s growing concerns in bridging the gap between its most underserved locales, this has been an ongoing way of life for many residents. In 2018, Ashaki Rouff, Rutgers University-Newark Earth, and Environmental Sciences Professor, said over 2,000 residents lack access to fresh food within one mile of their homes. This is an almost surreal designation for the most populous city in the state – and one only exacerbated by the advent of COVID-19.
During the height of the pandemic, the City of Newark distributed food through many of its public schools, grocery giveaways, Newark Working Kitchens, and in partnership with companies like Hello Fresh. The United States and USDA also allotted up to an extra $95 in SNAP benefits between 2020 and 2021, providing additional relief for some 800,000+ active service applicants that year. However, as the nation began rolling back those very same protections in February 2023 amid rising costs, critical access is necessary. 10% of Newark residents live below the city’s poverty line. The question is how many will adapt without the benefits, those new to food insecurity and those already living through it.
In 2011, Newark established the Adopt-A-Lot Program. This initiative would allow prospective residents to “adopt” a vacant lot for a yearly fee of $1 to create a green space that served as a conduit for community building. Tobias Fox founded Newark Science And Sustainability (Newark SAS), a nonprofit that started through the program. Their mission is to provide Newarkers with fresh produce and knowledge of the fundamentals of urban gardening.
“ I had no agricultural background or knowledge, but I started watching YouTube, and some of the videos I was watching were of urban farmers: people who are growing food in cities and urban environments,” Tobias says. “Even though I didn’t know how to do that, I thought the idea of growing local food was fascinating, so we adopted this vacant lot in early spring of 2012 and decided to transform it into a community garden. I would come every day to this garden – the “People’s Garden,” which we still manage, and I would watch everyone work while I took photos documenting the journey.”
Newark’s gardening network has become quite prolific since then, with mainstays such as the Newark Greater Conservancy’s Hawthorne Ave Farm and Rabbit Hole Farm leading the charge. Newark SAS is classified as a CSA, or “Community-Supported Agriculture Program” through its Farm To Table Coop, which was started in 2018.
The Farm to Table Co-op would reach 20 families annually, but no more than that would be the sustainable capacity to build upon.
The Nourishing Newark Community Grants Program, which was created in 2021, would tremendously aid these efforts. Since its inception, it has sought to supply local initiatives with financial aid to expand operations developed on a grassroots level. This has been beneficial in galvanizing progress toward establishing the foundations of a reliable network.
“In 2023, we received a large grant from the City of Newark through their Nourishing Newark Community Grants Program, so this year, we’ll be scaling it up from 20 families to 100. That just tells me that we must be doing something right to be in a position to receive much more funding. We were a nonprofit organization in 2014, but we didn’t receive our first grant until 2017 – and that was from Whole Cities Foundation, a nonprofit established by Whole Foods. When Whole Foods came into Newark, they brought with them many funding opportunities, especially for grassroots-led initiatives around urban agriculture and nutrition education.”
Whole Foods first established roots in Newark in 2017 and began allowing customers to use their SNAP benefits to purchase goods from the supermarket in 2019. The now Amazon-owned business rests in the heart of the downtown area within the newly-remodeled Hahne Building, where it sits as an intended hub for locals and out-of-town commuters. The diverse array of produce and healthier meal alternatives have been important to the city’s nutritional ecosystem but are not easily accessed with inflation applying to common goods and gas prices. In the absence of supermarkets, neighborhood corner stores or bodegas serve as an anchor to the Five Wards and Garden State.
It’s here that many residents make the bulk of their purchases to supplement what larger chains might be able to provide, sometimes trading cost and variety for convenience. Recognizing this and looking to cultivate investment throughout disproportionately under-resourced cities, a series of partnerships led by and affiliated with NJDEA from 2009 to 2015 led to the Healthy Corner Store Initiative in New Jersey. The collective was created to supply storefronts with the resources to diversify their nutritional selections and educate consumers on eating healthy. This venture would reach over 150 participating stores in townships like Newark, Trenton, and Camden before ending as former Governor Christie vetoed the “Healthy Small Food Retailer Act” in 2016, eliminating the potential for state support.
Newark SAS, in addition to many other local distributors, has sought to bridge that gap itself, but there are key components that need to be added to realize that vision.
“So how do we materialize these types of ideas? We, as growers, need the infrastructure to do that. We have access to land through Adopt-a-Lot, we have access to producers outside of the urban environment, and it’s creating an external infrastructure. An internal infrastructure we need is refrigeration, a water system, high tunnels, and/or greenhouses that can extend the season beyond that window of opportunity through May and November.
Infrastructure is one of the major keys that’s slowing us from materializing that idea – and it can be done. There’s no reason local produce grown from green spaces can’t be sold in bodegas, but they need refrigeration. It would have to be something like a pop-up partnership with those establishments to achieve that for the time being, but we need to think about more permanent infrastructure to sustain this. That’s why I believe that a “Community Green Development” classification is important.”
This classification, Tobias believes, would be instrumental to laying the groundwork for many projects to come with the advent of a greener, decentralized zeitgeist on the horizon. It would also make for an easier pathway to permanent community fixtures outside of the limitations imposed upon city-owned property when Adopt-a-Lot owners’ leases can be revoked at any time.
“It’s kind of been a pastime where people just throw some seeds on the ground and in wooden boxes until that land is able to be sold, and redeveloped with some type of housing or commercial structure on it. It hasn’t really been until recently where there’s been a push for people to rethink how land can be used in urban environments, and how that land can be used in a different way to bring about wellness and healthy food access to the lives of the people that are highly affected by all these environmental challenges like food insecurity.”
Newark SAS has been able to demonstrate proof of concept in this matter by acquiring the rights to land that will serve as both a year-round urban farm and their new headquarters, centering the solutions within the problem, an all-too-important act in the city reckoning with the rampant acquisition of property by external forces.
“We’re combining all these things with the focus of food production and development because we’ve been educated in this very industrial mindset where our thinking has become so compartmentalized that when we talk about a green economy, we tend to almost exclude agriculture.
This classification is important because they look at the development that we’re doing, which is a community urban farm, as no different from building a high rise or some major commercial development. For the permit fees, there’s no waiver or discounts involved in it.
The construction contractors don’t know how to approach projects like ours unless they have some knowledge of agriculture. This opens up new opportunities, especially new career opportunities, in a green economy that includes not only clean energy, but logical connections to agriculture.”
Considering all of this reveals the magnitude of the undertaking to find a solution. Infrastructure, as well as the means to secure the property that enables this work, is a must for the community, but so is a partnership.
Jersey Fresh, a quality grading program originally launched in 1984, has sought to pass a bill through the New Jersey State Legislature to enable individual townships to create kiosks and storefronts that give folks access to more produce. However, this is still in debate. Tobias echoes the need to establish a connection with the community through also exploring the challenges of urging executive action on a legislative level:
“I’ve been learning a lot about how policy plays into every aspect of our social lives and how important it is to help those who are not well informed about the environment or agriculture. It’s important for them to better understand the relevance of this work that we’re doing, and that’s been the biggest challenge. A person that comes from a background of a History teacher, and now they’re a governor or a lawyer, but they have no knowledge or understanding of agriculture and clean energy; they kind of almost narrow themselves to what they believe is the right and correct way of moving forward. How do I best communicate with someone who is in a position of creating some legislative changes that can make the work that I’m doing far more accessible and less stressful? How do I help that person understand the world from my lips?”
Investment goes beyond citizens and the state, as well. Different businesses and institutions are being asked to advocate for causes that directly affect the world we share. Here, Tobias shares that sentiment through his affiliation with Rutgers University. Their Law branch helped establish Newark SAS as a nonprofit in 2014, and the school has provided resources for various initiatives around New Jersey.
Support the work of Newark Science & Sustainability (Newark SAS) by visiting their website and donating to the organization,. Also, visit their farms located at The People’s Garden, 86 Garside Street, Newark, NJ 07104 & Headquarters & Urban Agricultural Hub, 3-7 Fairmount Avenue, Newark, NJ 07107.