Read Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer for Free Online Page A

look at each other and say, “Someone’s in the doghouse.” So Bobby’s new home seemed perfectly acceptable.
    Besides becoming a squatter, Bobby became a farmer, too—only his crops were cans and metal. He hauled them via a shopping cart to the recycling center a few blocks away. Like a pack rat, he also collected other items: backpacks, light fixtures, exercise equipment. Anything that once had value (but now was stained and smelled weird) Bobby would take home with him. And home was that wheelless Chevy Colt.
    “So that’s horse poop?” he asked while we unloaded the rest of the manure.
    “Yes,” I panted, picking up a bucket and scooping out the corners of the truck bed. When I looked up into our apartment, it was dark except for a warm yellow glow in the living room—the brooder box. The chicks were getting bigger—and louder. They often woke me at dawn with their squabbling.
    “And you grow vegetables in it.” Bobby was wearing a pair of antennas he made out of a girl’s headband and some tinfoil.
    “Yes, it’s really composted down, though,” I assured Bobby. I stood up to stretch my back but found I couldn’t stand up completely. I hunched over, my shoulders caved in, and gasped, “So there aren’t any bad bacteria or whatever.”
    “We used chicken droppings,” Bobby said. “ Whoo, that stuff stunk. Now, this isn’t too bad.” He took a pinch of the manure and sniffed. Bobby had come from Arkansas as a young man. Many of the black people living in Oakland came from families who had migrated from the South in the 1920s to work as longshoremen for the port, as porters for the railroad, or in manufacturing jobs. Back then, Oakland was known as the Detroit of the West. In the 1940s, in what some historians call the second gold rush, manufacturing and military jobs attracted more immigrants from the South, and the black population grew by 227 percent. Oakland, once a monoculture of whiteness, became diverse when people like Bobby’s parents moved in.
    Bill and I surveyed our progress in unloading the horse manure. The truck bed was empty. The raised bed was . . . half empty. I stared at it with contempt. I was exhausted, but this was our last chance to use our friend’s truck. We would have to make another run.
    “Can you make sure no one parks here?” Bill asked Bobby. We needed the area in front of the lot clear so we could unload our next load of horseshit. Bobby nodded and went to get a shopping cart to block the parking spot. He waved at our truck as we drove away, back to the hills, back to the stables.
    We had to cross the county line to get our horse poo. Oakland’s county, Alameda, gave way to Contra Costa County, land of rolling hills, working cattle ranches, and more recently rich folks with McMansions. Lucky for us, rich people like horses. And horses make a lot of manure. Which piles up and composts away until an enterprising gardener arrives and offers to take away this jackpot of tilth and nutrients.
    The horses whinnied when they heard us drive up. I backed the truck as close as possible to the mother lode: a massive mound of composting manure the size of a small barn. The smell—horse sweat, dirt, grass, and that unmistakable odor of cellulose breaking down—was heavenly. It reminded me of growing up on my parents’ property in Idaho. Two of my favorite family photos are one of my father astride a gorgeous pinto in a snowy field and another of me riding a brown pony.
    I was only four years old when my parents’ life on the ranch finally unraveled and my mom, my sister, and I moved to town. I had my first existential crisis when I realized that it was not possible to have a pony in the city. I still remember standing in my bedroom, looking out my window, and feeling the utter horror and emptiness of my horseless life in town. Eventually I got some unicorn posters, and all was healed. Or maybe not all, because I still feel a prickle of almost religious ecstasy at the smell