Pedaling for produce: Bike tour showcases urban farms and food sovereignty

When one thinks of farming, the image of a city landscape does not typically come to mind. However, the image of farming is changing to those living in the metro area with urban farms emerging in recent years.   

On Saturday, the Native American Community Development Institute and East Phillips Improvement Coalition organized a bike tour of four farms that are providing homegrown foods and education to the Phillips community in south Minneapolis.  

Stops on the bike tour included NACDI’s Four Sisters Urban Farm, Tamales y Bicicletas’ urban farm, the East Phillips Community Garden and the East Phillips Neighborhood Institute’s upcoming roof depot farm, which is set to open next year.  

“We’re in such a dense urban center, it's harder to access things like growing space,” said Gloria Iacono, Four Sisters Food Sovereignty manager. “We’re just disconnected in this environment from things, such as being able to grow our own food.”  

Iacono says urban farming is a form of food sovereignty, the reconnection and rebuilding of food systems disrupted by colonization. She says the ways in which people practice food sovereignty can vary and look different from person to person.  

“That can be anything from food access or having access to growing space or being able to use SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits at the market to be able to access fresh produce there,” Iacono said.  

Four Sisters’ farm has plots for community members to grow their own food as well as programming to donate fresh produce throughout the community via the Indian Health Board.  

Dream of Wild Health is a nonprofit organization. Its mission is to restore health and well-being in the Native community by recovering knowledge of and access to healthy Indigenous foods, medicines and lifeways.  

While it’s located in Hugo, the organization often comes to the Four Sisters Farmer’s Market off Franklin Avenue in Minneapolis.  

“Getting fresh produce and unfamiliar foods into the urban Native community and trying to make it more accessible is important to us,” said Rivianna Zeller, the distribution supervisor of Dream of Wild Health.  

Zeller says the organization has educational programming and opportunities for youth and teens, of which a majority travel from the metro area to attend.  

According to Iacono, though urban farms may not be able to produce the same amount of food that rural farms can, she hopes the bike tour shows what can be done when a community comes together.  

“Farms in urban spaces are really special for their visibility and their ability to reach a lot of people in a small space and kind of show what's possible,” Iacono said.   

• Foster care placement case puts Minnesota Native twins at center of ICWA controversy
• Orange Shirt Day raises awareness of Indigenous residential school experiences
• Children who died at a boarding school in the 1800s return to the White Earth Nation