Writer, farmer, eater: an interview with Novella Carpenter.

AuthorLueders, Bill
PositionInterview

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Novella Carpenter has grown lettuce for the Black Panthers, gone dumpster diving at gourmet restaurants to feed her pigs, and subsisted for an entire month on what she was able to produce on Ghost Town Farm--a vacant lot in a rundown neighborhood near downtown Oakland, California.

She is a pioneering practitioner of urban farming, in which city dwellers claim what space they can to grow food, raise animals, and reestablish the broken connection between food production and consumption. Her 2009 book, Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer, became a bestseller and helped draw other people into what has become, pun intended, a growing movement.

Carpenter's eponymous blog site, Ghost Town Farm, lists more than a dozen similar operations across the country. She co-authored with Willow Rosenthal The Essential Urban Farmer, a guidebook on how to find appropriate vacant land, woo landlords into agreement, test for toxins, and raise crops and animals. In 2011, she was able to buy the 4,500-square-foot lot on which her farm is located, ending the omnipresent worry of eviction.

The daughter of "back-to-the-earth hippies," Carpenter grew up in Idaho and Washington State, watching her mother milk cows and butcher rabbits. She came to farming knowing that setbacks and failure were part of the process. She is caring (the lettuce went to make salad for a Panthers literacy program) but tough, writing in Farm City about being accosted by a group of young neighborhood kids, one brandishing a gun. "What do you think the police will do to you if they see you with a gun?" she demands of him. "I'll tell you. The cops will kill you."

Carpenter, forty-three, is an engaging and often funny writer, but she's not just in it for chuckles. She graduated with a degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied with Michael Pollan. Urban farming, for her, is a serious business. Her email tagline reads: Novella Carpenter, writer:farmer:eater.

I recently spoke to Carpenter by phone about urban farming, the raising of food and killing of animals, and other topics.

Q: What's new on Ghost Town Farm?

Novella Carpenter: We just started breaking up a lot of concrete. The farm is built on the foundation of a former giant building. When I was squatting there, I would just pile soil and compost over the concrete [in raised beds]. But now I own the land and am finally getting around to busting up the concrete. They took...

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