Scrappy Episode 5: Greensgrow

Chris Straigis – 0:48
This week we celebrate Thanksgiving – traditionally a time of family and service and reflection; a day filled with food prepared by, and shared with our loved ones. This week boasts the busiest travel days out of the entire year as a testament to the idea of us wanting to be with others – our personal community, our family village. These feelings these activities are rooted deeply within our nature, dating long before the first official Thanksgiving in 1863, or even the first US traditions of the early 1600s. This idea of sharing food as a celebration of the communal experience goes back to the earliest humans. You might even say it’s in our DNA.

Chris Straigis – 1:34
So to honor food and community and how intertwined those two things can be. This week, we’re going to visit Greensgrow, an urban farm and the Kensington area of Philadelphia. This little oasis lives in the heart of a socio-economically challenged community, turning what once was a steel galvanizing factory, into a factory for growth, both literally and figuratively. But it wasn’t easy. It took the steely resolve of a person like Mary Seton Corboy. Mary built Greensgrow from the ground up and ran it until she passed in 2016. I spoke with her successor, Ryan Kuck.

Ryan Kuck – 2:14
My name is Ryan Kuck. I’m the executive director of Greensgrow Philadelphia project, aka Greensgrow, and we’re sitting here in our beautiful greenhouse in Kensington and Northeast Philadelphia. What I like about urban farming is that its place, right, its soil. It’s direct connection to the earth, and especially in cities where that sometimes feel like they’re changing all the time, farms can be literally rooted, they can root you in a place and in an experience that is different from everything around it. And so, to me, that’s the most important aspect of urban farming. It’s it’s creating these places that feel different from everything else around them that people can use as an expression for all kinds of different interests that they have, whether it’s art or culture, or yes, cooking or food. There is this idea that urban farming is this new thing or something that’s now exploding, but honestly, we had twice ss many urban farms in Philadelphia 30 or 40 years ago than we do now. But they just weren’t known about because they mostly happened in black and brown communities, immigrant families that were just growing food because that was part of their, their cultural tradition, or they came up with those skills from the south or from other places around the world where the agrarian lifestyle was more common. And so they tend to be under the radar.

Ryan Kuck – 3:23
What I like about Greensgrow is that we’re constantly asking that question ourselves, we’re constantly trying to figure out – how does a farm How does agriculture relate to how people live in cities into the city environment, the built environment, the social environment, the health environment? How is farming relevant as we believe it is to how people go about the rest of their daily lives here living in a metropolis and a place where maybe food growing is unexpected, or maybe not something you would naturally think of first and foremost. So to me, it’s it’s about green space, and it’s about connecting people to what is latent in our DNA. When you see the ripe red of a tomato in a green vine, your eyes are drawn to it. There’s something that’s, that’s primal. And I think really important to how we interface with the natural world and farms. Food is a common denominator, something that we all share. And it’s a really easy touch point for people from all kinds of different backgrounds, all kinds of different skill sets to define commonality and share something that’s meaningful and important to them. You know, we’re, you know, talked a lot about as a pioneering urban farm, but really we’re carrying on this torch, we’re doing it a little different in a more organized way perhaps.

Chris Straigis – 4:32
The origin story of Greensgrow isn’t really about being a farm, it’s so much more. It’s about common purpose, and defining and manifesting something out of nothing. And projecting that mission those ideals on to the entire neighborhood they call home, so that everyone benefits.

Ryan Kuck – 4:51
Greensgrow started with this idea of can we not only grow food in a city, right? Is this something that is possible for those that hadn’t seen it that hadn’t experienced in the way that others have? But also, can we turn into a triple-bottom-line enterprise? Can we take care of creating jobs? Can we create an environmental impact that is a net-positive for the city? So I think that triple bottom line approach is still what sets Greensgrow apart – that it’s not just about creating profit, it’s not just about growing food, it’s all those things together and creating a multi dimensional impact into these neighborhoods that we serve. You know, I’ll be the first to say that urban agriculture isn’t about feeding people, right? It’s about how can we be a linchpin? How can we connect people to the systems of food to the to the agricultural economy that does sustain us as the center cities? And then part of that is just happening again, conversations but giving them access in a different way.

Ryan Kuck – 5:50
And so I like to say that we have the opposite problem a lot of farmers we have the market – we’re sitting here in the hottest neighborhood in America. You’re right outside our doors, we have people looking for food. What we don’t have as farms. But Philadelphia has, Pennsylvania has the fourth most productive agricultural land in the country. So people think about Lancaster County maybe or South Jersey and Jersey tomatoes, but they don’t think about like how huge the agricultural industry is in this in this state. And, but it’s also very threatened, we’re losing. I think it’s 50,000 family farms a year. Like the agriculture industry, and the country is really threatened. That’s here too, with development pressures and everything else. And so how can we really make sure that we’re sustaining our access to fresh food in these counties around Philadelphia, instead of just saying, oh, urban agriculture is going to solve the problem – that’s bullshit, it’s never going to happen. We’re going to need people growing tomatoes in South Jersey, we’re going to need the Amish in Lancaster County growing food. And if we can ease the burden on them if we can find the markets for them, instead of having them sit on a street corner every Sunday morning, then we can help them grow and sustain themselves and be better, more resilient and better sustained in the face of all the other pressures they face being farmers, which is the hardest job in America.

Ryan Kuck – 6:58
I’ve been in Philly. 20 years now and land is precious, and you and you have a whole city block; I feel a tremendous responsibility to make sure that city block feels like everyone owns a piece of it, right? That it’s not just ours. There’s some interesting studies being done now about how community gardens improve home values and can actually improve mental health, right? So there’s all the benefits that you can get from green space. But you can’t you can’t interact with it, you can’t access it, right? And so because, you know, there’s no, there’s no staff, there’s no people there to have this conversation. So what I like about Greensgrow is that our gates are open as many days a week as we can afford. But there’s someone here to talk to all the time and that’s what people really love and and that allows us to listen. And so again, when we’re at our best we’re not overextended. And we can take that time, we can have conversations with 20,000 people and really get a pulse for what’s going on and then find those ways that we can engage with that and that’s that’s really the secret of success.

Chris Straigis – 8:00
Most people familiar with Kensington have a mental image of the neighborhood – poverty, crime, trash. It’s an area hit hard by dynamic change in the last 50 years. But in 1997, Mary and her original co founder, Tom Sereduk, saw something very different – potential.

Ryan Kuck – 8:22
You can go a block away and there’s still another plant around. But it’s a giant steel building, clad in sheet metal, where they would have dipping tanks. They would take raw steel and raw iron and dip it in heavy metals to coat it with a protective galvanizing layer, and then ship it out to make fence poles or whatever else. And when that business folded then a construction company kind of bought and was operating here, but they didn’t do anything to deal with the giant tubs of heavy metals or anything else that was left behind and the building that was coated and all kinds of particulates and everything else. This is before I think, well definitely Kensington was not on anyone’s Radar but definitely I think you know, these point sources of examination didn’t have the funding or the priority or the really the awareness of the general public about how dangerous these people were. I talked to neighbors around to with come swimming and those pits you know when they would fill up with rainwater, and so this neighborhood being this industrial neighborhood had a lot of different parcels like this that were, again, actively poisoning this community.

Ryan Kuck – 9:26
They tell stories about how the sirens would go off and everyone had to close their windows there would be just like dust like covering their cars and the windowsills and everything else from factories like this not just this one but everything else like that. Right so the the, the stories here and the legacy here is unimaginable and a lot of ways and so the neighborhood actually rallied to clean up the site the the thought was to make to be senior housing. There was an original protest, people wearing gas masks, old ladies walking down the street, you know, really saying you know, do something about this in the 80s 90s and the EPA was persuaded to come in and declared a brownfield site and they cleaned it up so those of you know sort of a they’re exactly what they called it. But they came they took out the top three feet of soil, did the sonar imaging making sure there wasn’t anything buried that was suspicious they dug out some big tanks and then capped and filled it with clean dirt and put a penetration barrier and everything else.

Ryan Kuck – 10:30
But then the market crashed, and the the funding for the housing went away, and so then it just was sitting. So then you had you know, hopefully was safer, but it still was, again an entire city block of nothing, right? And you think about the the what that does to a community, to have, to feel forgotten, to feel like no one cares. That you can just have a trashy parking lot in the middle of your neighborhood and what does that mean? I think is damaging and emotionally damaging a lot of different ways. And so it’s that for another couple years. And So Mary approached the local community development corporation that, I think she had $10,000 originally to start the place and build it – brought in all the trays and, and just started growing food. And at that time again, no one cared about Philadelphia, no one definitely cared about Kensington, and so there was very little risk involved and it paid off.

Ryan Kuck – 11:21
I started in 2006 so Greensgrow was still doing a lot of hydroponic lettuce and still incorporating a lot of the original elements and it was still it was a very small team. When I started there was only four of us. It was a very different time but i think knowing Mary, I think, if i can imagine her just… She was a chef, she was working in these restaurants and seeing how food was being transported all across the country and all across the world and you know getting this you know, romaine lettuce or Iceberg lettuce more likely, you know, from California and I can just imagine it being like ‘this is stupid’ you know, ‘this is this is you know, idiotic that we’re transporting this lettuce all across the country and it tastes like shit. So can we do something better? Can we actually like elevate food?’ She was a foodie, you know, before that term existed. And so someone that really cared about quality product and experience around food, and we can do this with a greater impact than just making a business? We can do this with something that is going to actually make the city better, and hopefully create ideas that other people can use to make the whole world a better place. I mean, I have a picture of her my office of just kind of looking skeptically at me, you know, keeping that that contrarian voice around, you know, I think we worked well together because we both tend to have a reverence for doing things just because that’s the way it’s been done before.

Ryan Kuck – 12:36
But it’s also the secret of our success is you know, she really instilled a culture in this organization of being unafraid of change and being unafraid to try something new and and really going for it. She grew up around Maryland. There’s stories of her, you know, kind of being a rabble rouser in Catholic school, you know, growing up standing on tables leading, you know, mini rebellions. So I think, you know, she was a natural born leader, someone that people gravitated to and you wanted to be around and wanted to follow. And I think that’s, you know, also what, what really allowed Greensboro to grow and flourish is people wanting to be a part of it. And people wanted to be around her, and that was an important thing. And she also was crass and irreverent and could also be abrasive and, you know, kind of, you know, didn’t give a damn a lot of times, but she, she was unafraid and, you know, worked incredibly hard was always, you know, sacrificing herself to to make this place work and make this place run.

Ryan Kuck – 13:33
And I think lead by example of someone who is really dedicated to an idea and willing to, you know, put it all on the table to make make it happen. And she was a cancer survivor. So a lot, most of her time here at Greensgrow was either going through treatment and diagnosis and everything else with her cancer and then ultimately all the complications that came from that treatment that ended up killing her. Going through that while also carrying this place on her back was a superhuman feat for sure. Even after she had her cancer and they removed most of her intestine, the doctors told her she would never eat real food again. You know, I think it was two weeks later she was eating a hamburger just because she loved the experience of eating food and so, you know, proved them all wrong and just, you know, said no, if I’m going to live, I’m going to I’m going to eat food. And so but you know, she got sick and she would have times where she couldn’t physically just eat it, she would still feed people and still cook and still, you know, I think really appreciated and wanted to share. What I was saying earlier, it’s just that that very basic human need to to eat and respect food and have it be a part of our culture and our daily you know, rhythm and everything else. And so that was an important part of what she created Greensgrow to do is find new ways for food to engage with people. So when she was diagnosed, I mean she kept a lot of that struggle private. It was one of the things that was also frustrating, but admirable about her is that you know, she really did insulate the staff from the tremendous personal pain and suffering that she was going through. And looking back now I realizing how much effort she had to put in to make that happen, and it’s it’s inspiring.

Chris Straigis – 15:29
I asked Ryan about his relationship with Mary. As he shared the stories, I got the impression that Mary saw something in him, the kind of traits that resonated deeply with her. It seemed as though she was probably grooming him for the role long before he knew it. Eventually, as her health deteriorated, she felt he was ready for the ask. So she approached him about being her successor.

Ryan Kuck – 15:53
I laughed in our face and I had to go back and apologize later because I didn’t, at the time, I didn’t quite see again, like how important that would question that was for her.

Ryan Kuck – 16:00
Even after she passed, it wasn’t on my radar. I was like, Okay, I’ll be here I’ll help with the transition, we get the right person and figure it out then I’ll move on, you know? Even though she had been sick for a long time she died suddenly and didn’t really ever leave things in the place where someone else could pick it up very easily. I realized pretty quickly that there was an important role I could play to help maintain and not let this place just disappear. I’ll jump in we’ll see what happens and so you know, it’s two years on. I’m proud I did it, I’m glad I did it. This it’s been an incredibly hard two years and incredibly important for learning experience for me and but I’m really proud of where we’ve gotten we’ve and and really optimistic about the future.

Chris Straigis – 16:43
One of the reasons I love this story was it It seemed to be the raw manifestation of our central idea of Scrappy. Their model wasn’t so much about planning for the future, but more about getting an idea, trying it, evaluating it, and then adapting where needed

Ryan Kuck – 16:59
When she started the CSA, because she had a conversation with a person outside of a restaurant. She was delivering lettuce and they were talking about how they hated going to the grocery store and picking out everything right? And so she’s like, ‘all right, well, I can create a box of food that I like, and maybe someone else will like it, right?’ So, you know, I think she was she was a true entrepreneur and in the spirit of being able to look around at the world and see where there’s an unmet need, and then find a way to meet that. And so all the different ways we’ve grown, we grew to get to that point, didn’t follow a plan or a script, there was never a strategic plan, you know, or anything like that. It was, it was just day day to day conversations and trying new things and being unafraid to just like, hey, we’ll throw this box together a food, we’ll see who likes it. And then all of a sudden that we have 1000 members coming every week to get food. And so it was a true accountability again, to the people looking around with people in this community, that people that were coming here and saying, ‘what are you looking for? What can we meet? How can this farm serve your interest in what you’re trying to do?’

Ryan Kuck – 17:55
You know, Greensgrow was never really invested in itself. And I think it was a point of pride that Mary would carry on, that I would carry, is that, you know, we can do things on the cheap, right? So we built our community kitchen, down the street, the first shared-use kitchen in the city of Philadelphia. And we built it for $60,000. And we had a shrimp boil and raised the money. It’s definitely DIY and people love that aesthetic about it. But I also think it was a liability that we never really to actually throw money behind an idea that was a good one, and maybe capitalize on it, sustain it for something that could really carry it forward and help us to, was that sustain it into the long term. And I think that’s what Mary always was trying to find was, how can I actually run a successful business that does good in the world? But right now we have six different businesses that are all almost profitable, but that still leaves a gap in each one and that can be really exhausting. And you know, if you’re not investing in yourself and not investing in equipment, you know, those costs eat up too and they eat up morale, the time they eat up all these other things.

Ryan Kuck – 18:56
So I think that’s something that Greensgrow is always struggling, you know, thinking about and questioning myself is how do you how do you hold true this idea of you can start small and start organic and be nimble in that way, but also really invest when it’s time to invest to make sure that something is running smoothly and running well, so that you can actually do something that can be replicated or can be sustainable long term? Again, it’s something that we’re still questioning all the time is, is not only how can we provide a good experience in, you know, relationships and value to our neighbors and our customers and everything else, but how do we take care of the people here? How do we take care of our employees and make sure that, that we’re a leader in that arena as well. And that’s definitely been a priority of mine.

Ryan Kuck – 19:52
But you have to be able to let it go. And I think, you know, we had that we had an unofficial three year rule in Greensgrow that you try something, if in three years it doesn’t find a way to sustain itself, then it’s got to go. One example of this is that we just made a decision to end our farm share program, which was one of our signature programs – 30% of our budget. And this is a the CSA the original CSA we changed the farm share a couple years ago to be more reflective of how we’re different than a traditional CSA. That’s usually a single farmer, that customers come and get food just from that farm. We, you know, pioneered this idea of an aggregated box that we can pull from different farmers and have a box that more closely reflects how people actually eat, which is they don’t just eat vegetables, they eat fruit, vegetables, protein, dairy. And so our box was really an industry leader and figuring out how to how to curate something that, now you can look at Blue Apron, they do, you know, all over the country, right? So, you know, the farm share program was also an enormous drain on the organization too. So even though it brought in a tremendous amount of revenue, it cost way more than it brought in, and so in and farm shares and CSAs have been losing market value all across the country for a couple of years now, and we are definitely seeing that here too. It was like, this idea was great, we had 1000 members a couple years ago, this was this huge, you know, game changing idea. But the world’s moved on and we have to move on to we can’t be afraid of losing that revenue.

Ryan Kuck – 21:16
But at the same time without understanding that the personal the cost it was having on the organization, the people that were running the program where we had so much turnover, people were lasting a year, maybe a year and a half because it was just too overwhelming. The pace of it was nonstop, we added a winter program and now it was all year long, and delivering food every week to 600 families is exhausting and keeping up the communication everything else. And, people now have lots of other options. Lots of people have mimicked what we did, there’s lots of, I don’t like to talk about competition being a nonprofit, but there’s lots of other options. So that idea has now saturated the market. And so we’re not the only ones so we don’t have the competitive advantage. So unless we’re willing to really invest to become the Blue Apron of you know, CSAs, and then, we had to be willing to either do that and take that risk and really try to get market capitalization and dominance. And, or we really had to make the hard call and say, you know what, that’s not really where we want to put our energy.

Ryan Kuck – 22:12
You know, Greensgrow has several other- the community kitchen is another example, that we’re ending that relationship now it was a 10 years old, we were the first shared use kitchen in the city. You know, we’d liked this idea of asking forgiveness rather than permission. And so we got in before there were rules about shared-use kitchens. It’s been a long, long time, many months with lawyers and LNI trying to figure out what are the rules for building a kitchen that other people can use, but really, it was game changer. We helped launch 75 different small entrepreneurs and getting their businesses off the ground, one of them won Shark Tank. People that have gone and grown on and really become, you know, self sustaining businesses, opening storefronts all across the city. So incubating, using food as an incubator to help people live out what their dream is, for what agriculture can mean through a space like the kitchen was was really powerful. But the church is moving on the space was getting harder and harder to sustain, and other people picked up the mantle. There’s other kitchens in the city now and so became something else that we had to say, ‘you know what? Great idea. It’s not working for us anymore. What can we do next?’

Chris Straigis – 23:14
Greensgrow started small and humble. Mary and Tom knew that a model of just rolling up their sleeves and digging in was the best approach, even on a shoestring budget. And part of their success was not just in adapting but innovating and inspiring others about what’s possible.

Ryan Kuck – 23:32
I think Mary realized very quickly, you know, they put up all these trays, they were growing, lettuce. In that first year, right, they made $5,000. The second year, I think they made closer to $30,000. And it was just her and Tom and I think they realized quite quickly that this wasn’t going to be the wonderful economic idea that they thought – it wasn’t gonna you know, pay for their 401Ks. And they realized quite quickly and then became a nonprofit two years later, right. So in 1999, became a nonprofit, I think because someone just offered her some money and was like, ‘well you need you need nonprofit status.’ She’s like, ‘okay, I’ll create a nonprofit.’ But also realizing that it wasn’t profitable, and that, you know, I think starting to get the hint that the legacy of Greensgrow. This neighborhood had to be more about, more than about just lettuce. That culture of innovation and that, I think, realization that Greensgrow existed not to provide a product to people, but really to provide an experience and, I like to call it, the confidence. A lot of the things, what I think a lot about is that the barrier for people doing this work is not about technical know-how or resources, it’s just confidence, just feeling like it’s possible. And so Mary coined the idea of an Idea Farm, right, farming ideas since 1997. That people come here just to feel like ideas are worth pursuing, that ideas are possible, that growing food in the city is something that can happen. If you don’t even have a yard, growing food on concrete can happen. Growing food in water on a tray can happen. Growing food on a wall can happen, right? You can have greenery in a neighborhood even in a neighborhood like Kensington, that’s possible and you don’t need a million dollars to do it, is I think the idea that really took hold. And even still today, people come here to get inspired to feel like hey, I can do this right?

Chris Straigis – 25:09
Another great innovation from Greensboro was born out of a blend of necessity, nature, innovation, and that adaptive spirit that Mary planted at the very beginning. And this opened up not only another revenue stream, but had potential impacts that could be felt far beyond their gates.

Ryan Kuck – 25:30
So when I started 2006, we had the raised beds built, we were starting to grow tomatoes and other things. We realized that this neighborhood didn’t have enough green space to support a pollinator community. And so if we wanted to grow tomatoes, then we needed to actually bring in our own pollinators. And so we started with one beehive and now I think we have 12 and we kept growing with the farm. As we were growing more food and bringing in all the flowers in the nursery, we started having more beehives. Then the honey we’re producing became, is still our most popular product, sells out in a weekend, you know, when we can harvest it. But you know, this idea of a symbiotic relationship that’s happening. And then there was some interesting data when the colony collapse became a big thing, that urban bees tended to have a higher survivability rate, they didn’t seem to be as affected by Colony Collapse as their suburban counterparts. And, you know, I think the they’re still learning about all the different factors that contribute to that. But part of it is environmental toxins from landscape sprays and all types of agricultural chemicals, being one of the things that weakens the bees, immune systems.

Ryan Kuck – 26:29
And we think about cities, especially a neighborhood like this, right, we’re on a brownfield site is being toxic to humans, but it’s a different type of toxicity to bees. And so their exposure pathways are different. And so we started noticing and beekeepers started noticing that our bees and other bees in the city were healthier. And so actually there were some beekeepers in the country that started bringing their bees for summer vacations in Philly. And so they actually they would tuck their bees in for the growing season, then bring them back out to the country for the winter. And we do that every year, to be an insulator right from those from those exposures. And our beekeeper the last couple years started noticing a couple things – he always liked liked our bees – we trade a CSA share to Don Shump who runs Philadelphia Bee Company. So Don was doing the same thing, he started bringing more and more bees here, and he keeps bees all over the city now, he has bees at different community gardens and other places on rooftops, at a hotel, and at a candy shop and all kinds of things. But start noticing, especially our bees were doing really well. He was seeing in some cases 30% – 40% of the bees die off every winter but Greensgrow’s seemed to, you know, only have a 10% die-off rate. He wasn’t getting as much honey, but when they would do mite counts, they would have mites, but they seem to be healthy the mite counts were stable the mites weren’t getting a toehold. And so he started doing more experiments and bringing more hives here separating more queens, and then this year actually took all our bees to Georgia to give them a little bit of a head start in the season in the spring to start actually breeding what he’s calling the Kensington Bee, which he thinks is a new genetic strain.

Chris Straigis – 26:32
This City Philadelphia was built on ideas rooted deep in our human nature – community, service, ingenuity. This, once the capital of our nation, was even the birthplace of our core mission statement, the Declaration of Independence. Those concepts, those ideals, are baked into who we are as a society. And their resonance rings through Greensgrow in ways big and small.

Ryan Kuck – 28:33
It’s the fundamental questions of showing someone a ripe tomato on a vine and triggering that little flash in their back of their eye, and that DNA, of saying ‘this is important’ and that maybe not even knowing why. But being drawn to it and then figuring out okay, how can we take that spark and nurture it into a flame and see where it goes out into the world. This idea that Philadelphia is a place where if you have an idea, you can you can put it in motion and see it comes to something. But also there’s a there’s a desperation and a need, and a willingness to try something different because it’s clear that the things that were tried before weren’t, aren’t working. And so I love that combination of having a skill set and a tool like farming that can touch everybody, that can be done without a lot of initial capital. A seed is cheap, but can have such a profound impact from, as I was saying earlier, from changing a whole neighborhood, creating jobs, creating green space and changing the environment, to creating a new species of bee to improving people’s mental health by walking by a flowering plant, you know, in the morning to changing their diet and how they approach their life, what they put on the food for their families, how a kid grows up, being willing to try a new thing because they’ve experienced something in a natural setting that’s different than this; finding something new on your plate. All these different ways that a single seed can can really create a whole different world for people is a magical thing.

Chris Straigis – 30:19
Thanks for listening to Scrappy, you can go to scrappypod.com to find transcripts from today’s show and links to Greensgrow farm. This time of year they have all sorts of special events for the holidays, be sure to make the trip and share in their extraordinary mission. Please also remember to subscribe to Scrapy wherever you get your podcast and give us a rating to let us know what you think. If you know someone who would make a great guest for our next season, go to scrappypod.com and send us a message. We’d love to hear from you.