Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer Essay

Novella Carpenter, being a woman who grew up loving the city life but leading the farm life with her parents, decided to make the two, city life and farm life, part of her life. Novella's parents taught her how to love nature and live on fresh vegetables. The parents claimed living on vegetables was not only healthy but also essentially cheap to plant and make available. Novella moves to Oakland and is finally presented with the chance to live where she could access museums, concerts, a mart mere that functioned round the clock, and bars, as she still nurtures her interest in owning a farm with plants and animals including bees, pigs, turkeys, vegetable, fruits, and chicken (Carpenter, 50). Novella seems to love the city life because of its energy, crowds, and culture; however, she also fears the influence and violence that include mugging, killings, and drug use. However, this could be majorly contributed to by the fact that Novella does not, actually, live in a decent neighborhood, but in in a ghetto estate full of street people; some homeless hovering around collecting metals, and plastics among other wastes that could be sold at the collection centers just blocks away from her residence. Being that Novella keeps an animal farm in a small backyard in an apartment in the ghetto presents her with various challenges including theft, noise, violence and farm inversion among others. As an innovative farmer, Novella finds solutions to farming challenges, then focuses on the challenges posed by other people on her farm. The novel is not only entertaining due to the humor with which she writes her life story but also presents basic and fundamental pieces of information that help people become urban farmers even today. To make the content of the storybook more helpful, this paper presents the summary of the events in the book, the challenges faced by Novella, how she deals with the various challenges, the important farmer qualities she demonstrates while setting up and managing the farm, and how she becomes a resourceful educator on city farming possibilities.

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In the book, the writer, who is also the main character in the story, tells her life's experience as an urban farmer with generosity and grace. She tells of her journey as a farmer with a view to encouraging farming in the city for those who wish to try it. She tells her struggles with her boyfriend Bill, who helps her develop her squatter's small vegetable garden into a profitable animal farm in the worst part of the Bay Area. She explains how she develops the farm garden by venturing into beekeeping, advancing into poultry introduction and then the introduction of pigs and rabbits. She keeps the farm animals, mainly, for home-raised meat, eggs, and home-harvested honey. As always expected, farming in the city would be meted with challenges such as noise and interferences by both animals and humans. Such challenges make farming in the city seem impossible to other people. That is why people read the book to help them understand how possible it is for a person to farm in a city setup. The way she deals with the challenges is what makes her an outstanding city farmer with a story to tell about her success. The success of raising one turkey that survived to the age it would be used for a meal, she gets encouraged, and the success drives her to try rearing other farm animals such as rabbits(Carpenter, 146). Her success makes her set a goal of getting her food entirely from her farm with the exception of fruits and other vegetables not available within the farm. The success of Novella in successfully owning and raising pigs, from an E.B white, was inspired by her life in Idaho where she grows up seeing her parents rare such animals. The story, however, is not only about rearing the farm animals; it also includes the sensitive and graceful ways of slaughtering animals, the ways of cooking and consumption of the meat with gastronome's passion. The writer uses poetic names of the birds and eloquently describes her ordeals in the ghetto. This creates a clear picture of the life she leads to the extent that one does not need to be there to understand what she goes through to become a successful and famous urban farmer.

The challenges that Novella faces on her farm are not like the challenges that contemporary farmers face in the countryside. Being that Novella's farm is in the city makes it a controversy that draws the attention of the readers to want to know how someone can become a successful farmer of vegetables, farm animals, and flies in a small plot in a city neighborhood. The first challenge that Novella face is figuring out the best place she could do her farming without being a nuisance to the neighbors (Carpenter, 89). Farming in neighborhoods where people think agriculture is dirty can be unsettling as one can be sued for noises from the farm animals, the dirt caused by the farm animals and the scary sign of bees hovering around. This became the first challenge Novella had to figure out before settling in a ghetto neighborhood. Another challenge was the utilization of a small piece of abandoned land to hold the farm animals, vegetables, and fruits. Designing the farm to include rabbitry, poultry, pig keeping, beekeeping, vegetable growing, and goats keeping requires one to be a planner, good resource manager, and a person who understands the minimum requirements by the various products in the farm. The interrelation among the farm animals, the plants, and the flies is one thing Novella majored on as a way of ensuring that the farm is self-reliant. Another challenge was noise from the passing vehicles and the shouting children around the neighborhood. This presents a problem, especially, because Novella keeps bees that require silence. Noise in an environment where bees have kept the lead to disturbances of the hive that may lead to the bees becoming violent. The insecurity in the area is a threat too as Novella claims she doubted if she could survive in the neighborhood where people looked violent, unfriendly and dangerous. Lastly, invasion into the farm by strangers from the neighborhood is another challenge as it endangers the lives of the animals on the farm. The last challenge that Novella faces is the cost and availability of food for the animals. Animals, the birds, and the flies require food to grow, develop and to reproduce. The hens need appropriate food to be able to lay eggs, the pigs need food to grow, and the bees need water and nectar to be able to survive and to make honey(Carpenter, 197). Using the available resources, to provide for the animals on the farm is a challenge Novella manages in her quest to remain known as a successful city farmer.

Managing challenges in a farming business may be similar for small scale and large scale in various ways; however, when it comes to the challenges that face farmers in the urban setups, then the needed solutions become different. City dwellers do not associate themselves with farming because of lack of affordable land that can be used in agriculture, multiple construction activities that lead to burying of fertile soil and industrial waste dumping that make the soil toxic to plants. Other issues facing urban farmers include theft, which manifests in the Novella's story. Some people from the neighborhood invade her farm and slaughter her animals, steal her farm produce and cause destruction to the farm. As a way of doing away with opposition from people from the neighborhoods, Novella tries to develop a positive relationship with the people so that they could see that the farm is for the benefit of everyone, not just herself. She does this too as a way of making other people be part of her initiative to support urban farming to produce food. Her participation in thanksgiving among other humanitarian contributions makes her initiative acceptable to the neighbors (Carpenter, 59). By building a positive relationship with the neighbors, the farm becomes more secure as many people will be contributing to her success by protecting the farm from invasions and stealing. The challenge of access the animal feed is addressed in the story in terms of the cost and availability. Novella solves this by including plants in the farm to provide the bees with flowers and nectar. That way, she earns from the plants and provides for the bees as well. Introduction of sugared water for the bees is another way that he provided for the materials the bees needed to make honey. For the case of the animals, getting the feed from the wastes in the dumpster worked for her, as she did not have to look for nippier grass, twigs or green grass to feed the animals. Lastly, Novella made her business relevant in the neighborhood by becoming an inspiration to the people, teaching them how to do urban farming on small pieces of land and becoming a pioneer urban farmer in the area. Her story inspires many people who try out some of her tricks and succeed in urban food production through small-scale agriculture (Carpenter, 110). The challenge of having to live her parents' dream of depending on nature to provide for food and at the same time achieving life in the busy urban set up was achieved by her living in an urban setup and still practicing agriculture.

The qualities Novella demonstrates as she tries to set up the farm include a display of confidence, ambition, patience, public relation, and innovation. She uses the qualities as a way of educating other people to become successful city farmers. When Novella moved to Oakland, she lived in a poor neighborhood with thugs, drug dealers and all sorts of violence perpetrators, but still, her confidence made her pursue her ambition in the slightest opportunity that presented itself to her. Novella followed her ambition of living a city life as she also followed her passion of becoming a farmer. The ambition is evident in the way she never gives up, even though she is faced with so many challenges in her life as a farmer in the city. By nurturing her ambition, Novella becomes one of the most recognized city farmers and educators on city farming. Novella's patience is seen in the way she waits for the turkeys. Moreover, it is her patience that makes her succeed as a city farmer. The novella is patient with the farm animals, not hurrying to sell them even as she faces challenges. Lastly, Novella displays her innovativeness in including the people from the neighborhood in her farming program as a way of building her relationship with the community. When one is doing business such as farming in an urban setup, there might be an opposition that one can only solve by becoming friendly to people and involving them in the program. Novella taught the other people the art of farming in the city by way of demonstrations in her farm, forums and through writing her experiences. The demonstrations in her were the most important way through which people learn the success of urban farming from a practical example.

Conclusion

In summary, Novella, the author and the main character in the story tells her story of success as an urban farmer with a small backyard garden she uses to rare farm animals, birds, flies, and some vegetables. She moved from Idaho to Oakland in the ghetto where she faces some challenges ranging from noises and violence to invasion and interferences. What Novella starts out as the keeping of just a few egg-laying chickens grows into a more advanced animal farm containing ducks, geese, and turkeys. She later introduces other animals such as three-hundred-pound pigs and rabbits. The animals Novella keeps in her garden are neither pets nor animals on display for tourism purposes; her main purpose for keeping the animals is to eat either their meat or pork or their products. Novella claims in the story that she is not a zookeeper,...