Harvesting Hope: The Urban Farms Helping Save A City’s Aging Sewer System

This story is one in a series about the confluence of capitalism, conservation and cultural identity in the Mississippi River Basin. It is part of Waterline and is sponsored by the Walton Family Foundation.

In late August, Donna Washington picked a couple pawpaws from the half dozen trees growing in the orchard down the street from her home in north St. Louis, Missouri.

The trees were planted half a decade ago, when Jubilee Community Church expanded a small garden in the adjacent 1.5 acre lot into an urban farm, complete with rows of vegetables, a border of native plants and an orchard.

This was the first year the pawpaw trees produced, giving Washington her first chance to try the green-skinned, yellow-fleshed fruit native to North America. Washington, a regular volunteer at the garden, was hooked.

Jubilee Oasis Farm’s rainwater collection system helps the urban farm grow crops in a part of the city where other options for getting fresh produce are scarce. At the same time, it contributes to solving a longstanding problem in St. Louis whereby rainwater mixes with sewage in the city’s storm drains during heavy rain, causing wastewater to overflow into the Mississippi River and other waterways.

By keeping and using rain where it lands, Jubilee Oasis Farm is one of a number of initiatives making St. Louis’s landscape more absorbent — and much healthier in the process.

“It has saved water from going into the stormwater [system], and created opportunities for growth of organic food in the heart of north St. Louis,” says Andy Krumsieg, who leads the farm and is the administrative pastor at Jubilee Community Church.

In natural landscapes, when precipitation falls, a lot of it gets absorbed into the soil and used by plants. But cities — including St. Louis — tend to be filled with impermeable surfaces, like concrete.

Typically, systems to address rainfall are designed to syphon water out of cities as fast as possible to reduce flooding. But when water washes off parking lots, sidewalks and manicured lawns, it carries pollution, salt and fertilizer straight into rivers and creeks.

This harmful contamination problem is compounded in cities where their stormwater and wastewater systems are connected, such as in St. Louis. Here, the water that runs off streets ends up in the same pipes as water flushing out of household drains. That adds extra risk when there’s heavy rain: If the system is overloaded, wastewater either overflows — sending pollutants directly into the Mississippi River — or backs up, into basements or streets.

In 2016, St. Louis was named as one of the U.S. cities that had released the highest amount of sewage overflow — as much as 200 million gallons in about a year and a half.

The Metropolitan St. Louis Sewer District is in the midst of a multi-decade overhaul to address issues with wastewater, including changing the system underlying the city. At the same time, the district is working aboveground to make the urban landscape more absorbent, explains Jenna Jarvis, green infrastructure manager at the Metropolitan St. Louis Sewer District. 

The district is investing $120 million by 2034 on projects that reduce the amount of stormwater that flows out of St. Louis, reimbursing landowners who use methods to keep water on their property. Projects range from bioretention basins — depressions filled with plants that gather water — to backyard rain barrels that collect precipitation and use it to irrigate native plant or vegetable gardens.

So far, according to Jarvis, green infrastructure projects built around the St. Louis area have kept an estimated 89 million gallons of wastewater from overflowing into the river.

Jubilee Oasis Farm is one of a couple projects the city has supported that are using the captured water to produce food, including a now-closed rooftop garden, and a few forthcoming urban farms. Jarvis says these types of projects can be more complex — they tend not to hold as much water as models like bioretention basins, and the technical aspects can make them challenging to design and maintain. But they also provide unique opportunities for the neighborhood.

“Any amount of stormwater we can capture and also provide a benefit to the community is helpful,” she says.

Members of Jubilee Community Church were already growing vegetables on a small scale when the opportunity came up to get reimbursed by the sewer district for installing an irrigation system.

The project involved digging a 100-square-foot hole 10 feet deep, and connecting downspouts from the church roof to a 150,000-gallon cistern, realized with help from The Nature Conservancy.

After installing the water system, members of the church and volunteers from the community, schools and colleges helped build the vegetable garden, piling mounds of soil and planting seeds and seedlings.

At times, the farm has invited members of the wider community to take food. Many people in the neighborhood are homeless, and struggle with addiction or mental illness.

Washington says that giving away food to vulnerable residents has been invaluable: “It fed people that would otherwise not have been able to eat.” 

This part of St. Louis, she explains, is a food desert. Without a car, residents need to take two buses to get to a grocery store.

Growing food at the farm introduces community members to foods they have never tried before, says Jubilee’s Krumsieg. “It opens up a new world of food that is absolutely healthy for you and tastes great too.”

Beyond reducing the need for the farm to use municipal water, and lowering the water bill, Krumsieg has noticed that less water pools in the alley by the church during heavy rain. However, the system, he says, is probably over-designed. The cistern has never filled to capacity, so potentially could take on water from other roofs nearby. 

For Jubilee, the biggest challenge is manpower. Maintaining the farm takes a lot of work — prepping and planting each spring, weeding and mowing, harvesting summer crops, then planting again for the fall. Early on, Washington says, the church had lots of help from school groups and other community partners, but volunteers dropped off during the pandemic and haven’t rebounded.

“Our farm could produce enough to support a full time person and a couple of part time people, but we need those people identified and need a capital base to start with,” says Krumsieg.

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Implementing stormwater programs in cities is challenging, says Rob Hunt, director of resilient waters for The Nature Conservancy in Missouri. Projects that work with farmers in rural areas can impact thousands of acres. But in cities, where there’s a dense mosaic of landowners and interests, it can be hard to get uptake on a large scale for stormwater projects.

Ultimately, individual projects — like cisterns and rain barrels — have a small impact on stormwater quality. Collectively, however, they add up. 

Beyond improving water quality, green infrastructure projects can be a boon for the people who live in the communities around them and who get to enjoy natural spaces, shadier streets and cleaner air.

One of the main benefits of projects like Jubilee Oasis Farms, according to Hunt, is that it shows what can be achieved when stormwater quality initiatives are paired with efforts to address other social and environmental challenges.

“It’s good to see these sorts of projects to know what’s possible,” Hunt says.

Scrolling photos courtesy of Andy Krumsieg / Jubilee Community Church.