New Haven -- The Farm

With an overflowing vegetable patch on James Street and work underway at three vacant city lots, Rebecca Kline’s Fair Haven garden empire is taking root as she plots to “see New Haven cross the line between urban and rural.”

Last year, Kline organized a community garden in a small section of land belonging to the Chabaso bakery on James Street. The participants in a diabetes prevention program at the Fair Haven Community Health Center (FHCHC)—mostly Spanish speaking women from Latin America—work in the garden and reap the benefits of exercise and healthy produce.

As that program continues to thrive, Kline has begun to realize a larger vision. She founded an organization called New Haven Farms with the mission of spreading urban agriculture in the city. With the help of New Haven government’s Livable City Initiative (LCI), she has secured three sliver lots for new gardens, one of which is already planted with new vegetable crops. She’s working with the parks department to find another spot to plant.

Ultimately, Kline said, she’d like to find a plot as big as an acre within the city where New Haven Farms could have a larger-scale vegetable operation along with ongoing satellite gardens at various locations. The produce would be available at a subsidized cost to certain groups, like FHCHC patients, while others could earn veggies by helping to grow them.

Seeing that plan from seed to fruit will take an infusion of money, land, and labor. It’s a lot to ask for. But so far those resources have rained down almost magically for New Haven Farms, the latest of several official and unofficial grassroots take-back-the-land efforts in town. 

On Tuesday evening, as a couple of dozen women and children program participants harvested basil, beans, and tomatoes at the James Street garden, an ebullient Kline spoke about how her new organization came together.

Six months ago, Kline was fired up about the garden aspect of the FHCHC diabetes prevention program and ready to take it further. The clinic was understandably not interested in “getting into the farming business,” Kline said. So she called a meeting of local people interested in farming and food security in New haven.

Thirty people showed up and hashed out the idea for New Haven Farms. “Who wants to get their hands dirty?” Kline asked the group at the end of the meeting. Six people came forward, formed an “executive committee,” and set about making the idea a reality.

New Haven Farms is in the process of getting its 501(c)3 approval to become a recognized not-for-profit. In the meantime, with FHCHC as the fiscal agent, the organization has been able to accept donations including a grant from the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven.
 

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