The urban market for local produce must support more and better agriculture than CSAs

Wendell Berry's daughter, Mary Berry, suggests that urban consumers can help leverage a new agrarian revolution:

Urban people’s interest in where their food comes from, and the quality of it—their worry about poisoned food, soil loss, toxicity, etc.—is a good thing. Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs), farmers markets, urban gardens, community gardens and school gardens are also all good. The worry, to me, is that all of this is entrepreneurial. Too many CSAs in any given area can make it hard for a farmer to sell enough CSA shares to get by. Our work is to try to get farmers out of a faddish economy.

The other day, I was talking to a friend of mine who had the first CSA in Kentucky. He was saying that the CSA is a great model for a young farmer. He paid off his farm with a CSA. (He had borrowed the money in the 1980s, at 13 percent interest.) But he said, “You know what? It’s a young person’s game.” And that’s true, simply because it’s really hard work. He’s 55 now, sustainably logging on his own land and doing fine, but do we want farmers to quit at 55? No. We need a place for farmers, an economy for them to function in.

Those of us who live in the urban core need to do more than visit the Farmers Market and buy CSA produce; we need to hold major distributors and big chains accountable, especially as they spout advertising about buying local. We're a vital link in this growing sustainable food chain of produce raised in Davidson County. We have to be informed and ready to spend sustainably and smart. It is a youthful market we can help age well.

One I could submit to "You are so Nashville if ..."

Dean atop his monument to visitors and tourists
                        Photo source: Nashville Underground Radio

You are so Nashville if

... you make green roofs for the tourists to enjoy but poison your watershed and neighborhoods with toxic landfills to save some money

Bells Bend farms live, May Town development is dead

I have steadfastly followed the prospects of the residents of Bells Bend for several years now. Including news last year that Nashville Yazoo micro-brewery had developed a partnership with local organic farmers to bring hops to local beer production.

Of course, what spurred my interest in Bells Bend long before that was the cause to save the farmland from May Town developers who wanted to flip it into a second downtown without regard for community planning or the wishes of Scottsboro-Bell Bend who would have been displaced by developers's sprawl. The developers put a full court press on North Nashville to try and convince us that the trickle-down jobs that would result would benefit us. Many of us here did not buy the pitch. West Nashvillians who would have been inundated by extra traffic resulting from three new state-built bridges across the Cumberland River also had something to say about the matter. And many, many other Nashvillians were sympathetic because they knew it could have just as easily been them facing bulldozers and unsmart growth. Opponents of May Town grew and galvanized to support the cause.

Now a whole lot of people beyond concerned neighborhood leaders are celebrating the partnership between Yazoo and Bells Bend. Check out Nashville Scene on the bandwagon:

In this autumn's batch of Yazoo Brewing Co.'s pale ale, one flavorful adjective will trump the rest: local. Because the bright-citrus-and-cilantro-scented hints of fresh-cut grass on the head of the limited edition Bells Bend Preservation Ale come courtesy of hops grown in the fertile fields of Davidson County ....

In recent years, the rural area, minutes from downtown, has been the target of development efforts, such as the proposed May Town project. Residents objected to the mixed-use development, fearing it would flood their quiet country roads with traffic and end life as they knew it in the bucolic acres near Scottsboro. They organized, branding their cause with the lyrical logo of whooping cranes, in honor of two endangered birds that took up residence in a Bells Bend field.

The May Town controversy subsided when city officials denied approval for the project, but the whooping crane remains a symbol of the community's commitment to preserving its open spaces and agriculture. This fall, the bird is also the symbol of Yazoo's dry-hopped beer.

The May Town drama did not just subside because of city officials who did not go along. It also ground to a halt because of the hard work and organizing of neighborhoods across Nashville who wrote letters, cajoled council members and commissioners, showed up for every public meeting, and held their own meetings to strategize against the public relations campaign conducted by wealthy developers, pitch men, and lawyers. I tried to document as much of the story as possible here on Enclave because I do not believe it should be forgotten.

I'll continue to watch the annual celebrations of Bells Bend--which now has a sustainable, self-perpetuating relationship with a successful local entrepreneur--content in the knowledge that I joined something larger than myself, a throng of other leaders whose conviction to save rural Bells Bend from urban sprawl made these days possible. I am thankful for that.


UPDATE: Upon further reflection, I remembered how proponents of protecting Bells Bend (agri)culture were labelled "NIMBY" ("Not In My Back Yard") and cast as negative for opposing May Town. It was always clear to me that the neighborhood leaders taking on the developers were positive, progressive actors in the story and that they were "QIMBY" ("Quality In My Back Yard"). Quality is exactly what they got in the organic production of hops for Yazoo to craft a new line of ale.

A paler shade of green

CLARIFICATION (May 21, 2012): Mike Kenner finally got back with me with a request that I take scrub the original post below off the blog. He insists that he never mentioned LEED to Salemtown reps in August last year and that his company never planned on this development being LEED-certified. Freddie O'Connell, who was the Salemtown officer mentioned below who reported to the association that Mr. Kenner told him he was planning on LEED, responded to the developer's request that, while he acknowledges that it was his own interpretation of the August discussion, he stands by his original report to the association.

So, we are left with two different interpretations of what was said about the original discussion about the rezoning and plans for the development at 5th and Coffee. The issue is not the development itself (as I point out below, there is absolutely nothing wrong with Energy Star). The question remains, "What was communicated?" and that question causes me to want to be more diligent about combing over the details of future requests for rezoning by Kenner McLean in Salemtown. There is nothing sinister about my decision to pay closer attention if the development company seeks mixed use rezoning should they purchase more property. Rezoning requests involve a public process, which includes community feedback. I am simply trying to relate my views on planning and zoning as I always have here. Granted, developers have not always appreciated my views because they do not always share my priorities.

But with this update, you the readers can make your own judgments about what was said. The developer says he never intended nor introduced LEED. The former SNNA president interpreted the developer to say he planned on LEED-certification. You can make up your own mind.


Townhouses being built at the corner of 5th and Coffee seem to have become less green than originally described when developers made their pitch to get community support for rezoning.

Last August, a Salemtown officer met Kenner McLean Development executive Mike Kenner to discuss their proposal and reported back to the association:

While his plans aren't ideal, I do think they overall bring what was equivalent to a vacant lot forward a bit in terms of progress .... project planned to be LEED-certified, reasonable price points, one unit already pre-sold, designed to be owner-occupied (not a guarantee, mind you).

Between August and February of this year, developers apparently backed away from projections of LEED certification, actually choosing "Energy Star-rated" structures instead.

The difference between LEED and Energy Star, according to Green-Buildings.com:

Energy Star was created by the EPA in 1992 and provides commercial building owners with strategic energy management plans designed to benefit both the environment and the owner's bottom line. Energy Star is designed to measure a building's performance, create practical operating (energy use) benchmarks/goals, help monitor performance and also reward energy efficiency ....

LEED operates through the U.S. Green Building Council and takes a much broader "triple bottom line" approach considering people, planet and profit, not just energy use. The triple bottom line factors in the economic, environmental and social issues present throughout the entire building process from concept, design, development and future operation.

LEED is a highly quantified and systematic approach to buildings of all types. Because it has accomplished so much and been so broadly accepted, LEED is becoming the standard by which many green buildings are measured. LEED quantifies a building's performance in the following major categories:
* sustainable sites
* water efficiency
* energy and atmosphere
* materials and resources
* indoor environmental quality
* innovation in design and operations

I emailed Mike Kenner, who lives in West Nashville, the day before yesterday asking for clarification of the LEED vs. Energy Star question, and I have not heard back from him. I also raised the question of LEED in email correspondence on several questions last January without getting a reply on certification.

Besides a winter meeting where we chatted about the possibility of me blogging on his development, Mr. Kenner and I have not had contact since we expressed a difference of opinion on what the North Nashville Community Plan says about developments in Salemtown. However, he did tell me in the past that his company has approached some elderly Salemtown residents along 5th Av N about buying up their properties in order to rezone them for mixed use to make Salemtown more like Germantown.

If they are successful in snagging the properties of long-time residents, and then they seek rezoning (which requires public feedback), I will not forget that the "triple bottom line" build projected in 2011 for 5th and Coffee did not materialize as such in 2012 (there is nothing wrong with Energy Star as an energy saver, but it falls well short of LEED's sustainability principle). Should Kenner McLean achieve future Salemtown acquisitions, will the mixed use they initially propose to motivate rezoning eventually materialize?

Nashville enjoys "livability" ranking based on a narrow definition of "livability"

You see it everywhere. The increasing divide between matters of sustainability and environmentalism on the one hand and wealth/poverty polarization on the other. Both sides concern questions of what make communities livable, but the divide seems to grow, especially as those progressives concerned with the environment start from class-specific points on livability without considering economic disparity as a brake on livability.

The world's largest car sharing club recently commissioned a study of 36 cities and ranked them for the urban policies that contribute to livability based on the criteria of innovation, sustainability, vibrancy, safety, efficiency, and optimism. Take lists with a grain of salt to begin with, because they generally suit our proclivities to order and list more than they reveal immutable truths about things, but Nashville came out with a relatively high overall ranking of 16.

However, before we go patting ourselves on the back for a score, we should consider the factors that the data published failed to include in the study. Any ranking of cities based on the question of livability policy matters cannot be reliable if they do not factor in delivery of social services, levels of diversity, and opportunities for livable wages. Zipcar's data is limited and biased from that side. So, would Nashville's high ranking stand up to broader studies that crossed the class-based divide between progressives' views on livability?