As of September 2026, Detroit is home to 3,277 farms and gardens, a figure reported by the nonprofit gardening group Keep Growing Detroit (KGD). This steady growth over recent decades has earned the city national recognition as a leader in urban farming. These efforts are particularly vital as 70% of Detroit households currently face struggles with reliably accessing healthy food.
Across the city, various initiatives demonstrate the breadth of contemporary urban agriculture. In Corktown, Brother Nature Produce cultivates oranges, kiwis, and pomegranates within a subtropical glass greenhouse. Near Rouge Park, D-Town Farm, spanning seven acres, provides a free training program where more than a dozen Detroiters learn to install solar panels. On Detroit’s east side, Sanctuary Farms annually composts thousands of pounds of food waste, producing enough compost to fill 30 commercial dump trucks. Additionally, new apiaries established over the last decade have facilitated the reintroduction of 12 million honeybees, pollinating the city and yielding thousands of pounds of local honey each year.
Growing food in Detroit is not a new phenomenon. The Anishinaabe peoples cultivated food in this region long before the French founded Detroit in 1701 as a fur trading post and military stronghold. Over centuries, both city programs and grassroots groups have consistently supported Detroiters in growing food to sustain themselves during difficult economic periods. Today, as contemporary growers carry forward this long history, they also confront persistent questions regarding land access, funding, and whether a city can produce enough food to feed its population.
At KGD’s two-acre farm in Eastern Market, Anishinaabe farmer and KGD co-director Rosebud Bear Schneider actively works to help Detroiters reclaim their ancestral foodways. She plants tall Cherokee White Eagle corn alongside soup beans and winter squash, a traditional practice known as the Three Sisters. Schneider notes that local tribes, including the Ojibwe, Potawatewa, and Odawa, had a deep relationship with these foods, referring to the plants as “relatives” in their tradition. These tribes migrated to the region from the East Coast, guided by a prophecy to move west until they found "food that grew on the water," which they discovered as wild rice, or manoomin, growing on every riverbed, including along the Detroit River.
Schneider's efforts, including the Three Sisters Garden, aim to restore the memory of these practices, particularly for Native people who lost connection to traditional foodways after being pushed off their land by colonizers, sent to residential boarding schools, or entering industrial work. She emphasizes that Indigenous food sovereignty is "the act of returning to what we knew." The KGD farm also hosts various ancestral food traditions from other communities, including Puerto Rican, Venezuelan, African diaspora, and Filipino gardens.
French colonizers were the first to displace the Anishinaabe, beginning in the 1700s. They established long, narrow "ribbon farms" along the Detroit River, each with direct river access. Some of this land later became known as Black Bottom due to its fertile soil. After the British gained control in 1760, settlers continued to operate these ribbon farms, utilizing the labor of enslaved Native and Black people to cultivate corn, grains, vegetables, and raise fruit trees and livestock. When the United States assumed control in 1796, it opened Detroit’s first land grant office, with the initial grant awarded for Elijah Brush’s ribbon farm.
Detroit’s most notable early urban farming initiative emerged during the economic depression following the Panic of 1893. Mayor Hazen S. Pingree helped fund a program by selling his horse, enabling residents to grow potatoes and vegetables on vacant land. The city secured 430 acres, allowing up to 1,700 families to cultivate food. Jason Hawes, a University of Wyoming professor, identified Detroit as a pioneer in urban agriculture, calling it "one of the first examples of a city incentivizing or facilitating urban [agriculture] through urban policymaking.” Kami Pothukuchi, a professor of urban studies and planning at Wayne State University, noted that cities like New York, Boston, and Denver, along with others abroad, subsequently followed Detroit’s example.
As the economy recovered, these early "potato patches" receded until the next crisis. During World War I, Detroiters planted "war gardens" in their backyards. The Great Depression saw Mayor Frank Murphy, who took office in 1930, initiate "thrift gardens" on vacant land. During World War II, war gardens returned, this time as "victory gardens."
Over these decades, many families whose descendants now lead Detroit’s farming movement arrived from Southern farms during the Great Migration. Malik Yakini, a Detroit Black food sovereignty activist, shared that his grandfather, who moved to Detroit around 1921, maintained a backyard garden after having a victory garden during World War II. Asenath Andrews, also from Great Migration families, recalled her grandfather farming on Eight Mile after moving to Detroit in the 1920s. She remembered yards filled with peach, pear, cherry, and mulberry trees in her 1950s and 1960s childhood, stretching from Cherrylawn to Meyers.
The fertile ground of Black Bottom, which gave the neighborhood its name, was cleared starting in the late 1950s. The city razed Black Bottom and the neighboring Paradise Valley, a vital center of Black life in Detroit, for urban renewal projects and the Chrysler Freeway, displacing thousands of residents.
By the 1970s, Detroit faced another crisis, with an estimated 140,000 residents out of work. In 1975, Mayor Coleman A. Young, who cited Pingree as his favorite mayor in his autobiography, launched the Farm-A-Lot program. This initiative aimed to transform vacant lots into productive gardens, providing residents with seeds, technical assistance, canning supplies, and workshops. Around the same time, the "Gardening Angels" emerged, a group primarily composed of older, Southern-born Black women. They utilized Farm-A-Lot seeds to grow food on vacant land for their families and for homeless shelters. The activist Grace Lee Boggs later credited these "Gardening Angels" with establishing the foundation of the movement.