Raleigh City Farm’s mission is to transform unexpected downtown spaces into beautiful and nourishing farmland. We will engage city dwellers in the process of growing food, sparking imaginations about agriculture in the city. These highly-visible spaces will be an educational tool to demonstrate responsible, intensive growing techniques as we move toward a restorative, community-based food system.

The chronic diseases that now kill most of us (coronory heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and cancer) can be traced to the industrialization of our food. The rise of highly processed food and refined grains, the use of chemicals to raise plants and animals, the superabundance of cheap calories… and the narrowing of the human diet to a tiny handful of staple crops, notably corn, wheat, and soy.

- Michael Pollan

And it gets worse. Today’s industrial food system is bad for the planet too. Vast amounts of oil and natural gas are used to manufacture fertilizers and harmful pesticides. Food is routinely shipped from needlessly far away. Genetically modified crops are designed, propogated, and consumed while our planet and bodies risk unknown consequences.

At bottom, it might be said, these problems stem from a significant loss of our human self-sufficiency. Every living creature on the planet knows how to strike out from its cave, den, or burrow and find nourishing food — except the human being. When humans living in western society leave their homes to search for food, we enter into a system that is exploitive, dishonest, and profiteering. We walk out our doors and get duped.

Raleigh City Farm is working to dismantle the broken system that dominates today. We are working to endow the human being with their former power to know what real food looks like, where to find it, and even how to call it up out of the ground themselves.

We are doing this by the surprisingly simple act of responsibly growing lots of real food, hyper-locally.