FINALLY GROWING
Hantz Farms begins planting saplings in Detroit
By John Gallagher Free Press Business Writer
Nearly three years after businessman John Hantz sparked adebate over urban agriculture as an answer to Detroit’s vacant land problem, his Hantz Farms is finally in the ground and growing.
Mike Score, president of Hantz Farms, began planting 900 oak saplings Thursday on three acres that the city sold to Hantz Farms earlier this year. The area is behind Hantz’s warehouse at 17403 Mt. Elliott.
“It’s very small scale,” Score said Friday. “It’s really more keeping our promise to the city when we bought the land. It was to demonstrate that we could establish a farm and that it would be good for the city and good for the neighbors.”
Under the terms of the land sale to Hantz Farms, the venture is not allowed to grow any food on the site or sell any products grown there pending further review and approval by the city. But the city did permit Hantz Farms to plant wood products that one day might produce some revenue if and when legal and regulatory issues are resolved.
The saplings planted Thursday and Friday are 2to 3feet tall. Score said autumn is a good time of year to plant saplings because there are no leaves on them to draw energy away from building up the body of the tree itself, and the roots can continue to grow until the ground freezes hard.
“As long as the ground’s not frozen, next spring we should have strong saplings that are ready for their first summer,” he said.
The 3-acre tree planting this week remains far shy of the upto-2,000-acre commercial farm that Hantz first proposed to the city. In April 2009, when he first went public, he described his plan as a way to generate jobs and tax base in a city that desperately needed it, as well as a way to bring vacant and abandoned land back to productive use.
But the Hantz Farms proposal, and similar proposals to engage in large-scale commercial farming inside Detroit, ran into a storm of opposition from many quarters. The city hesitated to approve any sweeping plan over fear that Michigan’s Right to Farm law, which protects farmers from undue regulation, would make it impossible to control anything Hantz may want to do.
Then, too, many nonprofit community gardeners that operate small neighborhood plots on a volunteer basis feared they would be elbowed out by corporate farming. And still other critics say they fear that Detroit’s soil is too compromised by decades of industrial use to make it safe to grow food.
Against that background, the 3-acre land sale to Hantz Farms and the tree planting this week are compromises that keep alive the idea of alarger farming project if and when the city is ready to accept it.
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JARRAD HENDERSON/DETROIT FREE PRESS Mike Score of Ann Arbor and Andy Williams of Detroit work to plant trees in a once-vacant lot at Hantz Farms on Thursday near the company’s headquarters in Detroit. They began planting 900 oak saplings Thursday on 3acres that the city sold to Hantz Farms this year.
