Weavers Way Co-op has been sponsoring the Philadelphia Urban Farm Bike Ride for 11 years now — for the last five years in close partnership with our affiliated nonprofit, Food Moxie. The latest ride was held Sept. 10. Around 100 riders visited nine different farms, starting and ending at the Philadelphia Brewing Company in Kensington. Despite the 95-degree heat this year, everybody who participated loved the ride, as they always do.

This year, in celebration of the many joyful rides we’ve had over the years (with not a single rainout!), I’d like to try to capture why the ride has been such a longstanding success, and what its value is.

Every year on the ride is different — different farms, different players. But it’s also always the same in the passion, intensity, commitment and creativity farmers and community members bring to their farms, which are often in cast-off corners of Philadelphia — the corners most in need of green space and healthy food.

Also the same and ever-changing are the neighborhoods where we ride. This year we pedaled through Kensington, Fishtown, Newbold, Passyunk East, Northern Liberties, Queen Village, Fitler Square and Art Museum — all neighborhoods either doing well or gentrifying. 

But we were mostly passing through those areas on the way to the farms, where most of our trip was spent — in far south South Philadelphia, Point Breeze, Brewerytown and Strawberry Mansion, and across the breadth of North Philadelphia. These neighborhoods have stayed the same in their intractable poverty — a poverty that astonishes and shames every time you see it. 

This year we were riding across the breadth of North Philadelphia on Diamond Street, and I thought of Russell Conwell’s famous “Acres of Diamonds” speech, delivered thousands of times during his long tenure as president of Temple University. Here’s the essence of what he said about the University’s mission:

He who can give to this people better streets, better homes, better schools, better churches, more religion, more of happiness, more of God, he that can be a blessing to the community in which he lives tonight will be great anywhere, but he who cannot be a blessing where he now lives will never be great anywhere on the face of God’s earth. “We live in deeds, not years, in feeling, not in figures on a dial; in thoughts, not breaths; we should count time by heart throbs, in the cause of right.” 

It was a noble aspiration — to turn out students ready to give back to their community and sow it with acres of diamonds. Unfortunately, all we see now across this broad stretch of Philadelphia are acres of broken glass. 

So what does this have to do with the Urban Farm Bike Ride? One of its primary values is the opportunity it gives us to see our city slowly and up close — and to remind us of the work that needs to be done, which the farmers and gardens on our tour are part of. Here are some highlights.

Many of the farms we visit from year to year have been around for over a decade now, testifying to their resilience and value. But every year there are many new farms taking the plunge.

This year seemed to be the year of South Asia. Many Bhutanese and Burmese refugees live in far South Philadelphia, around 8th and Snyder. They appear to have an insatiable hunger to grow their native foods and to assert some control over their destiny, and this has transformed the urban farm movement in Philadelphia. Two of the farms on the tour this year grew to meet the demand for farm and garden space from these refugee populations.

Growing Together, 25th and Reed, is a 4-acre farm and community garden that opened late last year in response to a 300-plus waiting list. The farm has 250 active garden plots this year, maintained by Bhutanese and Burmese families, but also by Congolese refugees and African-American neighbors. Five different languages are spoken. In addition there’s a commercial farm run by refugees as a business that has another several hundred raised-bed plots. (As with many farms in Philadelphia, it’s an old commercial site, covered in concrete and rebar.)

One force that links most of the farms on our tours: They are supported by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s City Harvest Program, which supplies wood for building beds, topsoil and compost, seeds and seedlings, training and much more. PHS received a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to make starting this farm possible.

The expense is great, and the need is great. As an example, one truckload of compost/soil mix costs around $750, and dozens of such truckloads are needed for a farm this size. The installation of a water line cost $40,000. 

Growing Together is a partnership of PHS and the Nationalities Service Center (www.nscphila.org), which works to find homes and jobs for new immigrants.

The farm at the end of the world. If you drive past Citizens Bank Park to the old food distribution center, you’ll run into a fence, beyond which is I-95. That’s where Grow Philly (www.growphilly.org) is located, on the grounds of Novick Brothers food-service company. A few years back, the property was mainly hard-packed clay removed during the construction of I-95. Today it’s full of 100-yard rows of Asian peppers and eggplants, and hundreds of lush roselle bushes, which provide a sour leaf plant used in South Asian cooking. The farm serves the same South Asian populations as Growing Together. Novick partner Gary Novick started the farm several years ago. He found he loved urban farming so much that he quit his job and now works full-time on the farm. He partnered this year with the two farmers at Grow Philly, who’d been working with the South Asian refugees. Resources from PHS also heavily support this farm.

The farm the NFL helped build. Connor Barwin bikes to the Eagles training facility in South Philadelphia via 19th Street. He saw a broken-down basketball court near 20th and Tasker and decided to get involved in renovating it, and in building a community garden on the site of a rundown pocket park. His foundation, Make the World Better, partnered with Urban Roots and the Mural Arts Program to create Ralph Brooks Jr. Community Garden, named after a neighborhood boy who was paralyzed by a stray bullet in 1988. The garden features lots of messages, including a mural memorializing the many victims of gun violence in the neighborhood.

EPRA Farm in Strawberry Mansion. Across the street from Strawberry Mansion High School, close to the intersection of 33rd Street and Ridge Avenue, is the farm and community garden of the East Park Revitalization Alliance (www.epralliance.org). The EPRA farm has a beautiful new open shelter topped with solar panels. It will soon have a greenhouse and hoop house, with a passive heating system developed by PHS that uses solar-heated water running through pipes buried under the greenhouse.

The EPRA farm was jump-started by the same USDA grant that kicked off the growth of Growing Together, and PHS heavily supports the farm. In fact, half of the new greenhouse will be used by PHS — complementing its four other greenhouses around the city, which grow seedlings for hundreds of farms and gardens. (PHS is also hoping to build a greenhouse near Growing Together.)

EPRA works with students in the culinary program at Strawberry Mansion High School, teaching them about soil fertility, helping them raise crops and then working with them to prepare foods using the vegetables they’ve grown. 

Come on next year’s ride and learn more. It will all be different — and the same.

2016 Urban Farm Bike Ride