Food Forests: A Four Act Play

How Philadelphia Orchard Project Cultivates Community

By Makenna Damhorst

One: Gridlock

I found myself standing in a grocery store, holding a clamshell of blueberries in my hand, yet again questioning how to live with moral consistency.

I stare down at three words in fine print on the plastic container: “Product of Chile.”

Standing in an ACME in Philadelphia, I think about what it might have taken for them to get here. A barge? Long-haul trucks? God forbid—a plane? It makes me uneasy to think about the mass of carbon emissions and other pollutants produced in transit.

The stale lights glare at me. It’s been an unreasonable amount of time. I put the container back and keep walking.

This dilemma follows me throughout the store. How do I make choices that align with my values when I’m surrounded by plastic packaging—often used once—that could last for centuries, refrigeration that utilizes greenhouse gases nearly 4,000 times more potent at inflicting climatic changes than carbon dioxide, and products from companies employing pesticides, exploitative labor, and unreasonable water use practices? The immoralities embedded in our food system supply chains start to feel endless and part of a structure I don’t want my money to fund.

And all of that was before I learned that citrus production is strongly associated with the rise of the Sicilian mafia.

But there’s something different about the embedded immoralities in today’s agricultural supply chains—in the face of which nascent 19th-century Italian organized crime pales. Climate change and plastic pollution are more pernicious, more ubiquitous than the mafia could ever dream of being.

Sure, the mafia could burn my house down, but they probably wouldn’t decimate entire swaths of old growth forests—300-foot tall redwoods which have stood for millenia, that taught me the meaning of beauty here on earth as a kid, replacing indescribably fresh air with thick, oppressive smoke for months at a time. Not to mention the millions of total acres burned and the impacts of that smoke on the learning outcomes of students beyond the fires.

This is what leaves me frozen in the fresh produce section.

Alright. Breathe. In... Out…

Okay. What now?

A decentralized and massive problem like climate change is something to chip at from all angles. After you break it down into solution categories, the subsequent slivers for action under each start to feel infinitesimally small. Yet they still matter. Why? I’m glad you asked.

This is the story of one of those slivers.

I’ll preface this by saying multiple experts emphasized that the following approach is not a direct alternative for industrial agriculture. It simply doesn’t have the capacity to feed people on the scale that is needed. However, it is a chip in the rock that is climate change, and a framework for thinking about how we can improve our current systems.

With that said, let me take you on a journey to explore another reality of produce cultivation: The world of food forests.

Two: Food Forests

I first learned about food forests through a book called “Total Garbage” by Edward Humes. In it, he discusses various forms of waste, including, he argues, American lawns: “...chemically drenched ecological wastelands that nourish no butterfly, bee, bird, or human—just the voracious appetite of the $126 billion lawn care industry.” In one chapter, Humes follows the story of a man named Jamiah Hargins. He created the nonprofit LA Crop Swap which replaces residential lawns throughout Los Angeles with vibrant microfarms that are lush with strawberries, cherry tomatoes, and kale, and rich with community collaboration. Their projects foster a range of plants, including lettuces, rainbow Swiss chard, fresh herbs, native species to form pollinator gardens, and more.

Food forests strategically layer various crops to produce a variety of edible or otherwise useful yields in concert. According to one definition, food forests generally have eight layers: the overstory, understory, shrub layer, herbaceous layer, groundcover layer, root layer, vine layer, and mycelial layer.

From Regenerative Farmers of America

While they take significant effort and expertise to maintain, they are incredibly efficient. In the case of the LA Crop Swap project, these microfarms use only 8% of the water the previous lawn had consumed. They are also spatially optimized, as species are selected to complement each other and reduce competition, which makes them particularly valuable as a land use type.

California may seem far away, but this is happening right here in Philadelphia.

Three: The Philadelphia Orchards Project

A mourning dove nests in the grape vines that snake across a concrete wall bordering the small plot of land that makes up Penn Farm, a food forest at the edge of Penn’s campus. This is one of 70 projects the Philadelphia Orchards Project (POP) manages across 24 zip codes in Philadelphia. They partner with schools, houses of worship, urban farms, community gardens, and various non-profits around the city to help establish community gardens and food forests. They further provide support in the form of training and seasonal tasks like pruning and pest and disease management, according to Phil Forsyth, co-executive director of POP. After the project is established, the community takes care of it: weeding, watering, harvesting, and distributing produce to their neighborhoods. Forsyth also leads volunteer events, like today’s mourning-dove-graced gathering.

Woody fig stems fall onto dried leaves as our small volunteer team takes pruning shears to the shrub-like tree. As my shears cut through the soft branches, I’m met with a sense of meditative focus and a new appreciation for the consistent and ongoing effort needed to maintain these orchards. There’s a warmth and ease in the cool morning air. I’m comforted by the rustling of those working around me and the shared quiet moments of intentional effort.

I also feel a sense of stillness. Time seems to slow in this form of community climate action.

POP recently collaborated with Penn to survey 165 trees across six community orchards in North and West Philadelphia to estimate the carbon sequestration—how much carbon the plants remove from the atmosphere—and storage resulting from the projects. They found that the orchards sequestered 1,679 pounds of carbon annually and stored 30 tons of carbon overall, with sweet almond and fig trees performing the best. Because of their heartiness, figs are the one of the most common fruits planted with POP, and growing them locally also poses a significant climate benefit. Figs in supermarkets are normally shipped in from places like Turkey, Chile, or California. When compared to commercial produce, figs grown in POP orchards had a carbon intensity—the carbon emissions associated with packaging, transportation, and retail—70% lower than that of commercial figs. Further, produce grown by POP-supported projects does not have the same refrigeration demands of commercial produce and does not utilize the same plastic packaging often used in stores.

While POP is contributing to climate solutions, their projects are also feeling the direct impacts of climate change in real time. They are beginning to shift the types of crops they cultivate to match the specific climate adaptations of each species. Plants are classified by zone based on the type of climate they thrive in. Forsyth told me that when he started working with POP, Philadelphia was classified as a zone 6 region, but over his time working, the city’s zone has shifted due to climate change.

USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map from Almanac

Philadelphia is now better suited for species at increasingly southern latitudes. Two years ago, the city shifted from zone 6, to zone 7a. Now, we were recently changed to zone 7b, and will likely move to zone 8 within the next decade based on the current climate trajectory. As average annual minimum temperatures rise due to the increased radiative forcing—less heat energy escapes back out to space—from greenhouse gases. These shifts are impacting not only POP, but also global food systems and security. If we stop emitting greenhouse gases, our climate would stop warming within a few years to decades, but it would likely take many centuries for it to return back to preindustrial conditions, as carbon is removed from the atmosphere at a much slower rate by natural processes.

Four: Better

We cannot be discouraged when our actions don’t yield immediate results. Each sliver is a vote for something better. All we can focus on is staying curious, and seeking ways to make our votes bigger and more frequent.

Individual climate action is more than the minute details of our daily decisions, it’s an opportunity to choose your own adventure. What excites me? What bugs me about our current systems? What am I good at? What could I make time for? And most importantly: how can I connect with the people around me to make this impact more powerful?

Climate action is about consistently voting for a world we want to live in.

And the work of POP? It’s a vote for a more connected community, a more stable climate, a world with more biodiversity, and more ethical supply chains.

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Curious about ways you can support POP?

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Check out upcoming POP events!

• Open Orchard Hours are happening THIS Sunday, 4/26, 11am-2pm at the Woodlands

• Penn Park Orchard Work Day happening Wednesday, 5/6, 9:30am-12pm at Penn Park