Exit Interview

It's all in the presentation...

Content:

(1) What is your essential question, and what are your answers?  What is your best answer and why?

- My essential question is: How can Urban Farming redefine the way a community obtains and consumes food?

- My first answer to this inquiry of mine is realizing the support behind the idea of urban farming, particularly that of its philosophy.  Cathy Morrison, my third interviewee, covered this newfound vigorous attraction to urban farming as having to do with the fact that my senior project topic offers long-term sustainability for a community and the world’s functioning at large.  Such support transforms the values of a community into ones that offer a more wholesome relationship with its environment and social inclusivity.  A community, to this end, learn to appreciate its responsibility to the Earth and each other, as well as progressive policy where profit is sacrificed for the common good.  In this way, our food system is made personable and a guarantee for customer satisfaction, if it is invested in.  My second answer concerns the environmental benefits of urban farming, and how these make urban farming a homage to humanity’s roots in the soil, by maintaining soil health and growing organically, then reaping the rewards of such consciousness.  Such rewards include climate change adaption and prevention and nutrition-longevity.  My third answer concerns the social benefits of urban farming, including those of adequate food security and spurring of education and health.  My best answer is probably my first, since it enables the other two, and allows their potential to be realized as urban farming is made a pathway towards sustainability.

(2) What process did you take to arrive at this answer?

- I arrived mostly thanks to my interviews.  Meeting with my active and able interviewees inspired me to look at the reason for urban farming’s attractiveness to the average community member.  The appeal of urban farming, I discovered was shrouded in mystery simply because the devotion to its principles is so great and impassioned.  Seeing this in something that was very intangible for me and my research, I figured that an answer with just as much ambiguity would be reasonable.  The ambiguity of my first answer is due to the its answering of the ‘why’ when it comes to choosing urban farming as a way of life within a community.  This ambiguity is thus the fire beneath the development of urban farming as a policy, culture, and agricultural future.  This ambiguity is what drives my interviewees in their livelihoods revolved about  and hopes for my project topic.

(3) What problems did you face?  How did you resolve them?

- Two particularly challenging problems temporarily confused me when trying to pin down a ‘best answer’.  First, there came the trouble in deciding what the word ‘best’ implied in regards to urban farming.  My research though clarified a correlation between ‘best’ and the potential of urban farming in changing a community’s functioning.  This relationship was bent on realizing on urban farming provided for a newfound philosophy when it came tp providing food and beyond.  By exceeding expectations, urban farming was the ‘best’ policy safeguarding sustainability in my mind, and so I found peace in pursuing an answer that proved this newfound assertion of mine.  My second roadblock came when trying to find the right setting for urban farming.  There was a time when I simply could not imagine urban farming in a tangible form and what it meant by farming in a city versus farming in a faraway field, if both methods seemingly simply provided food for society.  It turns out that how urban farming is handled and developed within the setting of an urban community is most important when tapping into the idea-turned-practice’s influence within said community.  The notion of bringing farming into the city environment and personalizing man’s relationship with agriculture - and subsequent caring of Earth and what wonders it has to provide - is enhanced by the community that accomplishes in bringing this notion into reality.

(4) What are the two most significant sources you used to answer your essential question and why?

- The two most significant sources, besides those of my interviews, are the books “Farm City”, by Novella Carpenter, and “Grass, Soil, Hope”, by Courtney White.  These books offer a dynamic view of urban farming and insider scoop on its purpose by offering a playful glimpse into the life of an urban farmer through Novella’s piece and an ecological glimpse into the imprint of sustainable farming practices on the Earth.  Such farming practices can be more conveniently be adopted through urban farming that with conventional farming.  With these books on my night table, I now know urban farming as an enlightening pastime and a sustainable practice, and I can now analyze it while practicing it and juggling its wide-reaching benefits.