Urban farming takes root in Central Arkansas
“I come from a bloodline of sharecroppers,” El-Bey said. “As far as I can remember I was chopping cotton, harvesting peas, selling watermelons, whatever. It’s an agriculture town, a sharecropping town where I’m from.”
By Phillip Powell
Arkansas Times
March 14, 2025
Excerpt:
On a small plot in south Little Rock that was once a junkyard, chef Margie Raimondo leans on her Italian heritage to shape the mission of her nonprofit urban farm, Urbana Farmstead.
There, just off of Arch Street Pike, Raimondo teaches cooking classes, instructing families on how to grow fruits and vegetables and use them in recipes that work for them.
“I think people need to learn to plant, grow, harvest and preserve their own food,” Raimondo said. “You do not have to have 12 acres of rolling hills to be a farmer. You just need a backyard, sunshine, soil and seeds.”
You can find proof of this across Little Rock, where a diverse movement of urban farmers aims to tackle food insecurity in a state long dominated by large, commercial agriculture but paradoxically plagued by hunger.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that between 2021 and 2023, an average of 570,000 households in Arkansas experienced food insecurity, meaning a lack of reliable access to food. At the same time, over 40% of the land in the state is farmland and the agriculture economy, driven by large corporations like Tyson Foods and massive farming operations in the Arkansas Delta, created over $20 billion in revenue for the state.
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Source: https://cityfarmer.info/urban-farming-takes-root-in-central-arkansas/
