A large urban farm right in the shadow of Cleveland's iconic West Side Market opened in June 2010. A team of horses could be seen pulling a plow across 6-acres of lawn behind Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority’s Riverview Tower. And so The Ohio City Farm was in business. Also pulling for the farm was CMHA, nonprofit Ohio City Near West Development Corporation and sustainable business adherents such as Great Lakes Brewing Company.

For the past year, CMHA president George Phillips-Olivier and new OCNW director Eric Wobser worked to secure the public housing agency trustees’ permission to put the lawn -- cordoned off behind a chain link fence on W. 25th Street -- into something productive. Doubtless, many Near West Side residents had dreamed of turning the “un-build-able” property located on a dramatic bluff overlooking the Cuyahoga River (and also sliding uncontrollably downhill) into a farm since the early 1990s when a low-rise public housing project was torn down, but credit new leadership and the power of the market for local food for the second farm within Cleveland’s borders.

The land will be divvied up into 1-acre plots, and OCNW will lease them at $10 a year, with discounts for CMHA residents who also have access to a half-acre community garden for free. The farm already has two tenants: Great Lakes Brewing and The Refugee Response – a nonprofit group that works to integrate and resettle refugees in the Cleveland area. The group arranged for unemployed Burmese refugees who were farmers in their country to farm two acres – their own market garden and Great Lakes Brewing’s plot. They have three full-time, but could have seasonal work for up to 10 employees. Great Lakes is paying about a third of the total $80,000 to establish the farm, and will purchase the food that comes from the 2-acres for its restaurant located just across the street on Market Avenue.

The farm is part of a larger initiative to make Ohio City the “capital of local food in Cleveland,” according to OCNW’s Wobser. The nonprofit community developer launched its Ohio City Fresh Food Collaborative, an effort to tie together the West Side Market, restaurants and the growing ranks of urban farmers, many of whom reside in the Near West Side. Plans include a harvest festival this fall, and a feasibility study for an incubator kitchen in Ohio City. OCNW hired Leslie Schaller, director of Athens, Ohio based nonprofit local business incubator ACE-Net to complete the task.

“We’re looking at a place where value added food products could incubate before they find their own space,” Wobser said. “We already have a cluster of local food. We hope the study (expected to be completed by fall) will identify potential sites, costs, businesses that might want in, hours of operation, reasonable rates and a revenue stream.”

Meahwhile, urban agriculture advocates like Cleveland City Councilman Joe Cimperman are ecstatic about the potential for more large scale operations. Council introduced two new pieces of legislation to further the practice of urban agriculture. A proposed amendment to residential zoning districts would permit market gardens, food stands, hoop houses and composting on the property of single-family homes. An Urban Agriculture Overlay District would designate 10,000 sq. ft or larger areas, such as big swaths of vacant land, as urban farms and allow structures serving those operations. That would include a food stand on the property of Ohio City Farm.

Even though each farmer is responsible for their own marketing and sales, Ohio City Farmers have the advantage of being first in the market and thus a lot of powerful people are pulling for them. Cimperman, for one, is eyeing the big prize – the West Side Market.

“I have two goals,” Cimperman said, “Cleveland residents are going to have access to better, fresher local food, and I want to fill up the almost the entirely empty arcade in the West Side Market with food grown across the street.

The first step in making the West Side Market more responsive to sustainability goals occurred this month. The city set up a seven-month pilot food waste composting program at the Market with Rosby Resource Recycling in Independence.

“I want to figure out, how does the Market become the tipping point that makes us number one in the nation for local food.” SustainLane ranked Cleveland second in the nation in local food last year.

Anyone who knows Cimperman, knows he actually has about two hundred goals and the desire to work on all of them simultaneously. I ask him, is local food resonating with Clevelanders outside of the sustainability movement?

“It’s a little bit at a time. When I go to block clubs, sometimes we get laughed out and sometimes we encounter people who’ve gardened their entire lives. Some people resist because they don’t believe it’s in the natural evolution of a city to provide for itself. I ask them, do you want to depend on ‘the man’ for your food all the time? The city should be the model for self sufficiency. Why shouldn’t that same ethic be applied to agriculture?”

In his rapid-fire clip, Cimperman announces a public forum on health and local food for the candidates for county council in July, a farmer’s market coming to Public Square, and the success of the Stanard Farm, the site of a former school in Cimperman’s ward that the city sold to the Department of Developmental Disabilities for a market garden.

Meanwhile, Ohio City is being rewarded for its plan to cluster sustainable development around the Market District. Last week, it learned that Neighborhood Progress, Inc. would fund it as part of its Strategic Investment Initiative. “They based it on two things,” Wobser says, “the creation of a market district and the benefits of mixed use development, and the fresh food collaborative to drive economic development.”