Jun 30, 2021
Urban Food Forest at Browns Mill; image sourced from Jeffrey Landau
Editor’s note: The following information is derived from an interview Agritecture conducted with Mario Cambardella, former Director of Urban Agriculture for the City of Atlanta, at the Urban Food Forest at Browns Mill. This post is part of a series of urban agriculture-related interviews conducted by Agritecture’s Director of Business Development, Jeffrey Landau, on his travels to farms around the United States. Follow Jeffrey’s Farms Unkown adventure.
The City Of Atlanta’s Urban Agricultural Endeavours
Through their digital hub for all things urban ag, AgLanta, the City of Atlanta’s Mayor Office of Resilience has been advancing and accelerating an urban agriculture strategy to not only build city-wide resilience, but to also engage the city’s residents, foster community involvement, and highlight the plentiful economic opportunities for companies to work in Atlanta, Georgia.
As part of this ambitious strategy, Atlanta opened their first Community Urban Food Forest inside their Browns Mill Park at the start of 2021. Located in a food desert area, this new model for a City of Atlanta park is already altering the community’s relationship with food and nutrition, making numerous fresh and flavorful nuts, fruits, vegetables, herbs, and mushrooms available for public consumption.
Landscape architect and former Director of Urban Agriculture for the City of Atlanta, Mario Cambardella, shares that all forests are food forests. “It’s any healthy ecosystem providing food, nourishment, and shelter for the living things in it. The city government is playing a key role in making sure that this space can become a food forest for not only the flora and fauna, but also a place for people to weave through that, share the fruits of the landscape, and cultivate and curate it along the way.”
Urban Food Forest at Browns Mill; image sourced from Jeffrey Landau
The Role Of Community
This food forest is the largest municipal food forest in the country at 7.1 acres. Given its scale, it has several features to offer the public, including a community garden, walking paths, and a communal space. Cambardella shares that one of the most interesting things about this garden is that “whether you're growing radishes or sweet peppers, it's the whole community that gets to curate the garden and produce.”
Referencing his experience working with the city on their urban agricultural development, Cambardella adds that “we have few built structures here that support food harvesting in the community. There are also policies and certain guidelines in place for any participant, whether they live in this neighborhood or not. Our goal is for people to be mindful of the place and community.”
How Was The Food Forest Designed?
Community was again a key player in the design of the forest. At the time, Cambardella’s team had asked questions like “What is a food forest to you? What could a food forest be like? And, what should our forest be like? Breaking down those questions helped us talk about what activities, adjectives, and verbs the community would use to describe this place at completion.”
Rendering the forest as such required a number of community outreach activities, including larger discussions both on-site and at the local community center about what could be done with the site. Cambardella calls this the “community orchard. Community members wanted a chance to plant year-round fruit-producing trees, herbs, and medicinals, to curate and collect these types of plantings for various purposes, and an opportunity to test out different types of methodologies for planting.”
Urban Food Forest at Browns Mill; image sourced from Jeffrey Landau
The community was greatly successful in achieving this diversity in planting methodologies. For instance, the food forest boasts strawberries grown with the Hügelkultur horticultural technique of using a mound constructed from decaying wood debris to absorb some of the moisture. “We worked with landscape designers and ecological designers to lay out these mounds such that they’re working parallel with the contour lines of the site,” says Cambardella.
Signage was also a key component of the planning stage as “it gives an indication for participants on how to culinarily use and consume specific crops. Sometimes the leaves are edible, sometimes they’re not, etc. It helps with the safety aspects of a Municipal Food Forest.”
Atlanta's Agricultural Past
The property historically had been a working farm with evidence of one of the oldest pecan orchards onsite. Prior to the City taking ownership, Ruby and Willie owned and operated their farm on this very land. The Morgans were known to leave excess produce from their farm on fence posts for neighbors. The City remains committed to providing a communal space that provides nutritional, social, and environmental benefits to the community.
A major benefit of food forests is their ability to manage stormwater runoff. As part of the City’s design, stormwater will flow through the community garden, allowing it to retain some moisture and leave the excess to be collected by the active rain garden on both sides of the forest. As “this is one of the last pecan orchards in the city of Atlanta, it's really a deep look into Atlanta's agricultural past of how black African American farmers used the land for sustaining themselves and their community.”
Urban Food Forest at Browns Mill; image sourced from Jeffrey Landau
Vision For The Future
Looking to the future, Mario shares how the community developed a 30-year vision for the Browns Mill Food Forest. Currently, “only about two and a half acres have been activated. So there’s about four more acres to go.” In working towards this expansion, the team is constantly going back to the master plan to assess what can be improved and if the community’s needs have changed.
Mario shares that “when people ask us, when is the food forest going to start? When are you going to have kickoff? From the very first day, I’ve said that the food forest has already begun. It's like a seed. You plant the seed, and you hope to let it grow and thrive for its entire life. You never really start, and you never really finish. It's just a constant curation and exploration and enjoyment for anybody that steps foot on this property.”
