Book summary “Farm City”: summary

Introduction

You live in a culture disconnected from the sources of your daily sustenance. Packaged supermarket goods hide the labor, animal slaughter, and soil depletion required to feed modern cities. This distance leaves you vulnerable to industrial food scandals and dulls your appreciation for what you consume.

Novella Carpenter solves this problem by seizing an abandoned, garbage-strewn lot in West Oakland's GhostTown district. She builds a thriving urban farm complete with raised vegetable beds, turkeys, rabbits, bees, and eventually pigs.

Transforming an abandoned Oakland vacant lot and an inner-city apartment into a productive farm reveals the immense physical labor, ethical reckonings, and community connections required to reconnect with our food sources.

The book explores this journey across eight chronological phases. You will discover how to establish infrastructure on concrete, manage livestock in a depressed neighborhood, and sustain a local diet.

• How do you raise livestock in a densely populated urban environment?
• What are the legal and ethical realities of squat farming?
• How does producing your own meat change your relationship with food?

1. Setting the Scene and Starting the Urban Farm

Choosing an unkempt and economically depressed neighborhood provides the physical space and freedom necessary to establish an urban farm. You can escape restrictive suburban HOA rules by relocating to neglected districts like the GhostTown area of Oakland. This environment offers large empty spaces and a laissez-faire social attitude where unconventional practices go largely unchallenged.

Choosing an unkempt and economically depressed neighborhood provides the physical space and freedom necessary to establish an urban farm.

Novella Carpenter and her partner Bill move into a ramshackle 1905 Queen Anne duplex on a dead-end street on 28th Street in Oakland. The property is surrounded by abandoned cars, a Buddhist monastery, and empty lots.

Hatcheries sell mixed poultry packages via mail order, delivering day-old birds directly through the postal service. You can order a Homesteader's Delight package for $42 from the Murray McMurray Hatchery, which arrives via postal jeep containing two turkeys, ten chickens, two geese, and two ducks. Raising these meat birds in an apartment requires setting up artificial brooders and manually teaching each fragile chick how to drink.

• Build a brooder using a cardboard box or washtub lined with shredded paper.
• Suspend a heat lamp above the box to keep the baby birds warm.
• Set up a homemade waterer consisting of a mason jar with drilled holes flipped into a shallow dish.
• Pick up each baby bird and dip its beak into the water dish to teach it how to drink.
• Swab the baby birds' bottoms with Q-tips to remove dried matter and prevent pasted vents caused by shipping.

Vacant lots in neglected urban neighborhoods offer large spaces for growing food if cleared of debris and tested for toxins. Helped by her neighbor Lana, the author clears four-foot-tall weeds from a 4,500-square-foot abandoned lot next to her apartment. They test the soil for heavy metals with the help of an environmental-services lab friend and eventually secure terse approval from the owner, Jack Chan.

2. Gardening on Concrete and Raising Livestock

Urban lots require raised beds over concrete and careful management of poultry and pests to succeed.

Since most of the lot was covered by a one-foot layer of concrete, you cannot dig directly into the ground. Bill gathered scrap lumber and plywood from GhostTown streets, using four chunks of two-by-fours as corners to connect the boxes, only buying screws and an electric drill. You can fill these open-topped wooden boxes with composted horse manure collected fifteen miles away to the horse stable in the hills.

• Build open-topped wooden boxes using scavenged lumber and corners made from two-by-fours connected with screws.
• Fill the boxes with composted horse manure.
• Plant herbs and vegetables directly into the containers.

Cities often provide superior forage for honeybees compared to rural areas because urban gardeners cultivate plants that bloom year-round. You can house a package of about five thousand bees in a shoebox-sized mail package on your upstairs deck, provided you follow local municipal codes like the fifty feet minimum distance from neighboring structures required by Seattle city code.

• Position the beehive to face east so it receives early morning sun.
• Install the hive later in the day to allow bees at least a night inside before venturing out.
• Remove the lid of the bee package and tilt the opening toward the virgin hive body with empty frames.
• Tap the package like a ketchup bottle to release stragglers, and pop the candy plug on the queen chamber to release the queen.

After finding half her watermelon seedlings chewed down to stubs, Novella strapped on an energy-saving headlamp at sunset, hunted down the slugs, and crushed them to save her remaining plants.

• Search for slugs around moist areas where soil contacts wood at sunset.
• Equip yourself with a headlamp to spot them in the dark.
• Manually dispatch the slugs by tearing them in two and squishing them between boards.

3. Livestock Management and Urban Challenges

Starting with docile egg-layers acts as a gateway urban-farm animal, lowering the psychological barrier to keeping more challenging livestock. You might begin with an Americauna named Agnes, inspired by Carla Emery's The Encyclopedia of Country Living, which eventually leads you to maintain an urban flock of 14 chickens, 3 turkeys, 3 ducks, 1 goose, and 50000 bees in Oakland.

Keeping backyard animals exposes urban farmers to disease risks, predators, and the precarity of squat farming.

Industrial poultry breeding in the 1950s focused on rapid growth and standardized sizing for mechanical pluckers, producing birds like the Standard White that reach slaughter size in 2 months. In contrast, heritage turkeys take 6 months to develop fully, while turkeys were first domesticated 2500 years ago. Novella raised heritage standard bronze and royal palm turkeys from McMurray Hatchery.

• Identify resilient local greens like pellitory growing in neighborhood cracks and abandoned lots.
• Take on a resolute attitude to navigate intimidating urban street corners.
• Harvest the soft green stems with strong root systems by hand.
• Bring the fresh greens back to feed poultry and improve their diet.

Urban garden soil often contains heavy metals like lead from past industrial use. At Willow's City Slicker Farm, soil tests revealed lead in the ground, but laboratory tests of the figs and mulberries showed that the fruiting bodies did not contain lead, while the leaves absorbed the toxins.

• Test urban garden soil for heavy metal contamination such as lead.
• Send harvested fruits and vegetables to a laboratory to check for absorbed toxins.
• Haul away toxic leaves that draw heavy metals out of the earth.
• Continue soil remediation practices to progressively clean the ground each year.

Amidst constant news threats of the H5N1 avian flu virus arriving via migrating birds, urban flock owners face mounting community anxiety.

• Monitor World Health Organization reports regarding avian flu risks and transmission vectors.
• Stretch protective netting over chicken enclosures to prevent birds from escaping.
• Relinquish excess poultry via adoption ads when disease threats or neighborhood tensions escalate.

Novella lost her turkey Maude to an auto-shop's pit bull and Rottweiler mix, and later lost a duck and a goose at 3 a.m. when an opossum invaded the garden pen.

• Respond immediately to animal distress sounds during nighttime predator attacks.
• Use lighting equipment such as automotive spotlights to illuminate predator threats.
• Bury deceased animals securely under 4 feet of packed earth cover per local municipal sanitation codes.

Squat farmers who cultivate vacant city lots operate at the absolute mercy of property owners. Jack Chan entered Novella's garden with a developer and placed 4 yellow-sprayed iron posts to mark property lines for condos, signaling that you have just 3 months until condo construction begins on the lot.

• Establish garden beds and enrich soil with manure on vacant urban lots.
• Grow rare heirloom varieties such as Cream of Saskatchewan watermelons.
• Cede cultivated land back to nature or developers when property rights are enforced.

4. Beekeeping, Honey Extraction, and Animal Ethics

Intensive urban farming relies on the principle of stacking functions, where a single item or space serves multiple purposes. In cramped urban environments, objects and spaces must be repurposed. Extra bee supers double as coffee tables, and decks function simultaneously as gardens and bee yards.

Stacking functions and processing your own meat restore sacredness to food production.

Novella explains her urban setup to her friend Joel and his children by showing how extra bee supers serve as a coffee table on their deck. Beekeepers use smoke to calm bees before opening hives to check brood patterns and food reserves. A healthy queen can deposit twelve hundred eggs in a day. The loss of a queen or environmental stressors can cause entire colonies to perish, leaving behind a small cluster of survivors or an empty box.

Novella performs a spring hive inspection using a smoker and hive tool, only to discover that her bee colony has perished, leaving behind an empty brood box and a tiny cluster of dead bees.

• Hold the smoker near the hive entrance and squeeze the bellows to release calming smoke.
• Pry open the lid using a thin metal hive tool.
• Inspect the brood frames for a circular egg-laying pattern and honey stores.
• Check for the presence of brood and a living queen.

Major Hruschka invented the centrifugal extractor in 1865. Instead of destroying honeycombs and straining the honey over days, frames are placed inside a spinning device where centrifugal force extracts the honey against the tank walls. Novella, her friend Joel, and his children used a newly acquired hand-cranked stainless-steel extractor to spin out eight quarts of honey in less than an hour.

• Pull a frame from the beeless honey super.
• Scrape off the wax-capped honey with a serrated knife.
• Mount the frames inside the spinning device and use centrifugal force to launch the honey out.
• Let the honey drizzle out of the bottom spigot into mason jars.

Modern consumers outsource the violence of meat production to commercial slaughterhouses, rendering meat artificially cheap and emotionally detached. Doing the killing personally restores a sense of sacredness and ecological interdependence. Novella raises a 28-pound heritage turkey named Harold from a chick, faces the emotional dread of executing him for Thanksgiving, and ultimately slaughters him with the help of her friend Joel.

• Catch the bird and tie its legs.
• Behead the bird with an ax using two people—one to hold and one to chop.
• Bleed the bird out in a bucket.
• Submerge the body in a large pail of steaming hot water to loosen feathers.
• Pluck the feathers and clean out the viscera.

5. The Hundred-Yard Diet and Urban Foraging

Committing to a strictly local diet tests self-sufficiency limits and relies on dumpster diving and seed saving.

You can transform a seventy-five-square-foot deck into a rabbitry by creating private hutches, boxes, and tunnels using hay and sawdust. You ensure that Simon the buck and the does are separated when not breeding. You wrestle Simon the buck to relocate him to his own cage, suffering two parallel four-inch scratches on her forearm from his claws.

• House adult rabbits in their own private quarters.
• Provide each female rabbit with her own box, water bottle, and food dish.
• Place cages close together so rabbits can smell one another.

You can save heirloom seeds like Brandywines, while F1 hybrids cannot be saved because their offspring lose uniformity and strength. Harvest the biggest tomato from the vine and squeeze out the seeds. Set them on a windowsill to rot for a few days so mold eats away the protective seed coat. Wash the seeds off and store them for the next planting season.

You can heavily supplement urban farming by sourcing discarded produce from commercial district bins. Wearing headlamps and nitrile gloves, you collect bok choy, cabbage, and apples from Chinatown bins twenty blocks away while mah-jongg tiles click in nearby second-story windows.

• Troll commercial district green bins for fresh-looking greens and produce.
• Feed preferred vegetable scraps to rabbits.
• Give rejected items like melons and papayas to the chickens.

You can commit to a strict local self-sufficiency diet for the month of July, measuring 142 pounds on a thrift store scale before starting. You announce your upcoming diet to friends, then go on a massive binge eating Chinese food, sushi, and pastries before the restrictions begin.

• Consume only food from the garden and farm animals.
• Permit foraged fruit from neighborhood trees.
• Prohibit food from Dumpsters for human consumption.
• Allow previously grown and preserved items.
• Allow bartering only for crops grown by other farmers.

You can rescue a failing self-sufficiency diet when potato bugs decimate your potato crop, leaving only two marble-sized tubers. You strip kernels from twelve decorative dried Indian corn cobs stored on your mantel.

• Pry individual kernels from decorative dried Indian corn cobs.
• Grind the corn kernels into powder using a hand-cranked metal coffee grinder.
• Soak an eighth of a cup of the resulting grain in boiling water.
• Crack an egg into the mixture, whip it together, and fry as blobs in a cast-iron pan.

You can barter handmade goods like biodiesel for harvested biodynamic grapes in Mendocino County, producing seventy-five total wine bottles. You and your friend Jennifer organize a grape-stomping party with friends, ferment the juice in glass jugs over the winter, and bottle twenty-five wine bottles as your share on the Fourth of July.

• Barter handmade goods like biodiesel for harvested wine grapes.
• Pull off grape stems by hand with a group of helpers.
• Wash feet thoroughly and stomp destemmed grapes in a large tub.
• Ferment the resulting juice in glass jugs for eight months.
• Bottle and cork the finished wine using a tube, gravity, and clean bottles.

6. Foraging Fruit, Swarming Bees, and Processing Rabbits

Urban foraging and home slaughter build a deep connection to sustenance despite physical exhaustion.

Raw-pack canning preserves foraged fruit by sterilizing jars and processing raw produce directly in a boiling water bath. You can secure a winter supply without added sugar.

Novella scrubs her foraged plums, crams them into jars, and boils them for about an hour until they turn a fuchsia color and transform into a thick, wine-colored nectar.

• Load oven with wide-mouthed jars and boil water in a giant blue enamel canning pot.
• Cram as many whole plums into the sterilized hot jars as can fit.
• Boil the jars of plums in a water bath until the plums soften and cook down.
• Cram in a few more plums until they are an inch from the top of the jar.
• Screw on the lids and let the jars rumble under two inches of boiling water for about an hour.
• Pull the jars from the water and place them into the pantry to cool down overnight and set the seal.

Resting newly slaughtered meat allows natural enzymes to break down bound protein filaments, ensuring tenderness and rich flavor. Drawing on Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking, you learn that immediate cooking results in tough meat because rigor mortis binds the proteins. Allowing cathepsins to work for twenty-four hours tenderizes the muscle.

Bee swarming is a natural colony division process driven by population growth and queen cell creation, allowing beekeepers to capture new colonies. When worker bees feel cramped, they create peanut-shaped queen cells fed with royal jelly.

Novella witnesses a swarm emerge in Jennifer's yard, tracks them to a neighbor's lemon tree during an open house, and successfully shakes them into a vacant bee box.

• Set up a ladder near the clustered swarm.
• Place the bottom bee box under the tree containing the cluster.
• Gently prod a few bees down into the box or firmly shake the tree branch so a clump of bees tumbles into the container.
• Slap a lid over the box once the queen joins the cluster and stuff a T-shirt into the hive entrance.

Home slaughter and dressing of rabbits provides vital protein and deep connection to food sources while challenging urban disconnect. After three weeks of strict diet constraints, Novella's weight drops to 128 pounds.

• Put the bunny's neck under the wooden handle of a rake.
• Stand on the handle and pull the rabbit's back legs upward to dislocate the neck.
• Cut the rabbit's throat with a sharp pair of pruners to let it bleed out.
• Hang the rabbit in a tree using a coat hanger tied to the back legs with baling twine.
• Make a few hesitant cuts with kitchen shears until the pink flesh is revealed, then peel off the hide inside out.
• Remove the entrails, leaving the kidneys attached, and separate the gallbladder from the four-lobed liver.

Bartering homegrown produce for prepared meals breaks down rigid dietary rules and builds cooperative community bonds. You can trade garden surpluses for comforting local dishes.

7. Raising Pigs and Historical Urban Agriculture

Stray dogs massacre two geese and five ducks in the backyard. You process the meat immediately instead of letting it go to waste.

Pigs serve as ultimate urban garbage disposals, connecting modern homesteaders to historical livestock practices.

You hang the two geese and five ducks in your bathroom from the shower rod and process them with Bill. You preserve the duck breasts by making prosciutto with salt and pepper in the fridge. You make duck confit by slow-cooking the legs in cast-iron pans and storing them in jars under a thick layer of rendered fat.

• Slice off breast meat from ducks for prosciutto by rubbing with salt and pepper, then storing in the fridge for a few weeks.
• Cook remaining duck parts in cast-iron pans on low heat in the oven, pouring off drippings hourly.
• Place cooked meat in a jar and cover with a thick layer of rendered fat to create confit.

You and Bill travel the 150 miles from Oakland to Boonville to purchase two shoats, a barrow and a gilt, for 150 dollars each. The red piglet weighs 38 pounds at purchase. You feed your growing pigs using restaurant and market waste scavenged from Chinatown Dumpsters, including pastry, fruit, and fish guts.

• Scavenge food waste from urban green bins and restaurant Dumpsters.
• Supplement fruit and bakery waste with protein sources like fish guts to ensure proper nutrition for growing pigs.
• Deliver the mixed food waste in buckets directly to the pigs' feeding trough twice daily.

Willow travels to Caracas, Venezuela, to study squatter village urban agriculture and adapts the model to West Oakland by bringing raised beds, soil, and plants to residents' backyards. The West Oakland neighborhood lacks grocery stores or produce markets within a two-mile radius.

• Clear unwanted weeds from a residential backyard space.
• Install a premade wooden raised bed and fill it with donated garden soil.
• Plant vegetable seedlings such as collards, tomatoes, and celery, and provide ongoing volunteer guidance on harvesting.

8. Salumi Apprenticeship and Heavyweight Slaughter

Mastering traditional charcuterie and confronting heavyweight livestock slaughter mark the pinnacle of urban farming.

As the pigs grow larger, you must upgrade your waste sources to sustain their massive caloric needs. You expand your foraging routes to the tony parts of Oakland and Berkeley, salvaging whole roast chickens, Spanish rice, bread, and fine restaurant scraps from commercial Dumpsters.

Novella gets caught by a manager in a blue Italian suit while foraging in the Eccolo Dumpster in Berkeley, which surprisingly leads to an introduction with the restaurant's owner and chef, Christopher Lee.

You must handle animals weighing nearly 200 pounds, which represents the heaviest burden of the urban farming experience.

Chris Lee dissects Big Guy at the restaurant in two hours, separating out delicate cuts like the tenderloin and showing Novella how to massage salt into the hams for prosciutto. Eighteen months of curing are required for procsiuttos. The restaurant has 50 seats. Big Guy weighs 175 pounds and the pigs consume 4 full-sized buckets of food daily.

You initiate an apprenticeship with chef Christopher Lee at Eccolo, learning how to process pork shoulders and back fat into artisanal cured meats. This involves strict adherence to spice weights in grams and understanding traditional Italian preservation methods such as salumi, coppa, pancetta, Petit Jesus, and finocchino.

You can follow specific steps to prepare the meat:

• Trim pork shoulders and cut into one-inch chunks, separating them by degree of fat into extreme fat and no fat corners.
• Weigh out spices and curing agents on a digital scale in grams.
• Whip the meat and spices together in a mixer until it reaches the point where it starts to hold together.
• Stuff the seasoned meat into soaked beef middle casings using a stuffer machine, tie the ends with string, and age or cure according to recipe.

Professional Italian butchering techniques transform home-raised pork into high-value cured meats while connecting modern farmers to ancient food traditions described in De re rustica by Cato the Elder and Pliny the Elder, including prosciutto, pancetta, soppressata, lardo, and soria.

You use traditional methods to salt and preserve the hams:

• Take a half peck of ground Roman salt for each ham.
• Cover the bottom of the jar or tub with salt and put in a ham, skin down.
• Cover the whole with salt and put another ham on top, and cover this in the same manner.
• When the hams have been in salt five days, take them all out with the salt and repack them, putting those which were on top at the bottom.
• After the twelfth day remove the hams finally, brush off the salt and hang them for two days in the wind.

10 Key Ideas

1. Transforming an abandoned Oakland vacant lot and an inner-city apartment into a productive farm reveals the immense physical labor, ethical reckonings, and community connections required to reconnect with our food sources.
2. Choosing an unkempt and economically depressed neighborhood provides the physical space and freedom necessary to establish an urban farm.
3. Urban lots require raised beds over concrete and careful management of poultry and pests to succeed.
4. Keeping backyard animals exposes urban farmers to disease risks, predators, and the precarity of squat farming.
5. Stacking functions and processing your own meat restore sacredness to food production.
6. Committing to a strictly local diet tests self-sufficiency limits and relies on dumpster diving and seed saving.
7. Urban foraging and home slaughter build a deep connection to sustenance despite physical exhaustion.
8. Pigs serve as ultimate urban garbage disposals, connecting modern homesteaders to historical livestock practices.
9. Mastering traditional charcuterie and confronting heavyweight livestock slaughter mark the pinnacle of urban farming.
10. Professional Italian butchering techniques transform home-raised pork into high-value cured meats while connecting modern farmers to ancient food traditions described in De re rustica by Cato the Elder and Pliny the Elder, including prosciutto, pancetta, soppressata, lardo, and soria.