Farmers tend to think that farming is a cornerstone of a healthy culture: Children with a strong work ethic. Practical people who know how to fix things and make all kinds of useful tools from stuff just lying around. Folks that are familiar with the inevitable uncertainties of life and death. Businesses that spend their money in town, strengthening the local economy. People who know how to grow food.

But most economists and politicians have no time for such lofty thinking. They tell us that farming is not an economic driver; that the exodus of people from the farm to the city was progress; and that resources like land and water are probably better off fueling other industries. It’s enough to give us agricultural folks a bit of an inferiority complex!

Maybe that’s why the stories coming out of Detroit caught our ear. Yes, Detroit, the city that used to be an industrial powerhouse. Detroit has been losing population and businesses and is now home to an enormous amount of abandoned land and empty lots—at least 40 square miles of blight. A city of 2 million in the 1950s, Detroit has declined to less than half that number. Faced with a $300 million budget deficit and a dwindling tax base, the city has few options.

Given these hard realities, it seems that the community activists, the city moguls and the Mayor, Dave Bing, have come to an uneasy meeting of the ways: Why not demolish the blighted, desolated sections of Detroit, move the few remaining residents into healthier neighborhoods, and replace the vacant lots with farms?!

Detroit is already at the forefront of a vibrant grassroots urban gardening movement, and has 900 urban gardens within the city limits. It is well established that while they don’t always make money, the urban gardens are great as antidotes to urban blight. They provide healthy food in a city that has no chain supermarkets; they provide work to the chronically unemployed; and they are beacons around which disintegrating communities can begin to rebuild.

The experts are calling it a “downsizing” of the city, and the already successful urban gardeners are skeptical, but the idea is no longer dismissed as ludicrous.  “Things that were unthinkable are now becoming thinkable,” said James W. Hughes, Dean of the School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. “Detroit is particularly well suited to become a pioneer in urban agriculture at a commercial scale,” says a recent report of the American Institute of Architects. “Farming is how Detroit started, and farming is how Detroit can be saved,” said Michael Score, president of Hantz Farms which is buying up abandoned sections of the city, planning to transform them into commercial farms. True, none of these “experts” have ever actually farmed, but maybe if we sent a few farmers to Detroit this vision would take off!

Who knows how deep agriculture will take root in the netherworlds of Detroit, and who knows how much agriculture will be successful at rebuilding Detroit’s culture. No matter, it’s a back-to-basics-in-a-time-of-trouble vision that we can endorse.

By Judith Redmond