By all estimations, Cleveland, Ohio, is on the rebound. However, like many of America’s great industrial cities of the Midwest and Northeast, it was crippled by the industrial and jobs migration into the Southeast, from the 1970s to the present day.
Former mayor, and later U.S. senator,George Voinivich(R-Ohio), helped lead the renaissance of Cleveland, home to the Rock n› Roll Hall of Fame and a burgeoning tourism scene, with plans in the works for Amtrak to return to its Union Station rail hub, already topped by a casino and hotel in its iconic public square.
Meanwhile, vacant lots and properties across the city are being converted into gardens and farmland, an innovation pioneered in nearby Detroit.And in one growing and specific corner of Cleveland, treasures are growing out of illegal and abandoned former dumping grounds.At the end of a dead-end street in Kinsman, a Cleveland neighborhood formerly struggling with disinvestment and entrenched poverty, Rid-All Green Partnership began growing trees, vegetables, tilapia – and jobs –on a recently assembled 18 acres, and all for local area residents and restaurants.
Keyma Durdenis one of three cofounders for Rid-All, originally started as an extermination and pest control service.After the foreclosure and financial crisis of 2008, with Cleveland experiencing one of the nation’s highest rates of both, a fellow Rid-All cofounder,Randy McShephard, wrote a 2009 research paper, advocating building urban farms and community gardens on vacant land and plots in the wake of mass foreclosures.
In 2010, the three Rid-All cofounders secured 1.3 acres in Kinsman, then prompted the city of Cleveland to clean out the former illegal dump site that contained burned-out cars, abandoned refrigerators, and discarded appliances, along with more than 2,000 used tires.During the clean-up, the trio also participated in a fivemonth training program at a Milwaukee urban farm called Growing Power.That program gave them two key takeaways: the benefit of investing in fish farming as an income generator and the possibility of creating their own new topsoil to replace contaminated soil on their plot.
Rid-All built its first vegetation hoop house in 2011, to grow plants and vegetables.They collected food waste from local restaurants and businesses to create compost for their new soil, as well as sell it to others. They built a self-sustaining hydroponics systemto grow fish in tanks and vegetables above on a connected top tier, with fish waste fortifying the plants and the plants supplying clean water for the fish.
Within the first three years, one such greenhouse produced 10,000 tilapia, which was enough of a success to secure funding for a 7,200-square-foot urban fish farm now producing roughly 70,000 tilapia each year, which Rid-All sells to local restaurants.
The now 18-acre Rid-All campus contains two massive greenhouses, six hoop houses, a commercial composting station, and a rain catchment pond.The non-profit is also a Cleveland Tree Coalition site, growing and poised to sell more than 5,000 trees over the next few years as part of a larger program to reforest the city.
Rid-All also runs workshops, training, and apprenticeship programs with specific opportunities for youth and veterans.The farm now employs 18 full-time, including many local residents, and offers summer employment for area youth to assist with spring, summer, and fall harvests.
In 2020, Rid-All cemented its ‘circular economy’ model by opening a farmer’s market in Maple Heights, a nearby suburb considered a food desert.A local chef holds monthly workshops in the market, teaching recipes that use products currently for sale.During 2021, Rid-All also opened a community kitchen on its campus, to serve as a neighborhood resource, kitchen, and market prep facility.And of course, any food waste from all of the above operations becomes compost.
Durden oversees the community kitchen, built and styled like a log cabin, where each Tuesday and Friday, rotating guest chefs visit to prepare and sell meals.This setting often brings in professional athletes as well as local area officials, eating alongside once-impoverished Kinsman area residents.Plans are underway to use the community kitchen as an incubator for new restaurants and food trucks.
This full circle of life, not far from where an oil slick once infamously caught this city’s primary waterfront on fire, proves that with ingenuity, innovation, perseverance, and grit, almost anything remains possible.