Des Moines’ Sweet Tooth Farms looking for new land after city forces it to vacate northside lots

“While people’s suggestions of a backyard is wonderfully kind, we are looking to continue to farm. That is very different than gardening and raised beds.”

By Melody Mercado
Des Moines Register
July 6, 2021

Excerpt:

Owczarski’s farm easily sticks out in the industrial park — her leased plot is filled with vegetables of all kinds, surrounded by warehouses and an auto body shop. But that’s the point of her urban farming initiative, Sweet Tooth Farm — to grow food in and for the community she lives in.

Come 2022, Owczarski won’t be able to farm anymore on the land she leases at 101 Franklin Ave. and 1407 Michigan St. The city recently gave notice that her lease, along with other commercial garden leases in the Central Place and Valley Gardens industrial parks, would be terminated next year.

According to an email shared with the Register, the city won’t renew the lease because “the city just does not have a lot of excess property that is not either in a flood plain or for sale for redevelopment.”

“It felt like someone had died, almost, because the spaces that we’ve been working on down there have been vacant and fallow since 1978 and 1979 … to this day, I still pick out chunks of brick, rocks, glass, debris … and we have worked for years to get that soil healthy enough to grow food,” Owczarski said.

Read the complete article here.