Nestled on top of a hill off Minnehaha Avenue and Milton Street in St. Paul, Frogtown Farm grew and distributed some 7,000 pounds of food last year, most of it landing on the plates of low-income St. Paul residents through partnerships with charities such as Feeding Frogtown and the Sanneh Foundation.

The garlic, zucchini, eggplants, beets, carrots, cabbages, tomatoes and herbs were plentiful. The funding was not, leaving Frogtown Farm, an 11-year-old nonprofit urban farming organization that operates on city-owned parkland, shouldering a $150,000 budget deficit at the outset of a new growing season.

“Coming into an organization as an executive director, from my nonprofit work of the last 20 years, this is one of the most challenging situations I’ve seen,” said Lachelle Cunningham, a healthy foods advocate who was hired last July as the organization’s executive director. Her three-month employment contract is now being renewed, month to month.

“We haven’t decided to disband. We’re actively talking about the possibility,” Cunningham said.

Turnover

Money isn’t the only issue. Turnover among leadership, including staff and board members, reached a recent tipping point, hammered home when husband-and-wife founders Seitu Jones and Soyini Guyton retrenched from the nonprofit. Jones, once the public face of Frogtown Farm, hasn’t been involved in about a year. Guyton’s term as board chair also came to a close in 2023. Neither of them could be reached for comment.

Over the summer, the entire six-member board turned over. With the exception of Jones and Guyton, a previous board almost entirely turned over in 2019.

Cunningham, a chef and food business training instructor by trade, has tried to raise Frogtown Farm’s public profile through her community radio show, newsletters and social media. She’s the first to admit it hasn’t worked.

“The organization went through a lot of struggles, prior to even trying to become financially stable,” Cunningham said. “We find ourselves in a dire situation with our financials and our land access. It’s really struggle mode.”

Lease expires

In December, the urban farm’s eight-year lease with the city of St. Paul also expired.

The nonprofit continues to maintain its hoop house, three growing fields, outdoor pizza oven, sizable storage containers and two work shacks on the 5.5-acre site on a month-to-month basis, but the city issued a request for proposals on Feb. 1 for what could be a new managing partner for the land.

The deadline for applications is April 16.

A spokesperson for St. Paul Parks and Recreation said it was not uncommon for the city to test the market after a lease expires and issue an RFP to see what different organizations might bring to the table, but Cunningham and others associated with the farm said they have few illusions. The city seems open to a divorce of sorts.

Until an emergency board meeting on March 28, it was unclear if Frogtown Farm would even apply.

“We’re looking at that application and started building a proposal, but we also find ourselves in a really dire situation even to be sustainable in this current growing season,” Cunningham said. “We find ourselves post-COVID still trying to recover from (the pandemic). Land access is an issue, but it’s secondary.”

Farming plots

In 2013, the Trust for Public Land acquired 13 acres of land from the Amherst H. Wilder Foundation that now comprises both Frogtown Farm and the city parkland it sits on.

The land was later conveyed to the city with the goal of increasing access to public parklands and healthy foods in Frogtown, one of the city’s most racially and ethnically diverse but least green neighborhoods. The concept — operating a nonprofit urban farm on the same site as an urban park — was celebrated as novel and well-intentioned, but infighting overshadowed some of its progress almost from the start.

Some community advocates quickly took diverging positions on whether the farm should open up farming plots to Frogtown residents in the vein of a community garden, or treat the farm as more of a privately-run demonstration project that would rely on groups of visitors for volunteer labor. In the end, the latter strategy prevailed.

Patricia Ohmans once thought of her own urban gardening nonprofit, Frogtown Green, as a key partner in Frogtown Park and Farm. Her initial involvement was short-lived. In 2020, she and a fellow healthy foods advocate petitioned the city in an unsuccessful effort to force the nonprofit to keep the farm open during the pandemic, on the premise that access to affordable fresh vegetables was suddenly as important as ever. Citing funding challenges and the potential for COVID-19 exposure among volunteers, Frogtown Farm put growing on hold through 2021.

Ohmans said the city’s Parks and Recreation Department should take a firmer hand with oversight. Better-established groups could help. There’s no shortage of urban farm advocates in the Twin Cities associated with the Good Acre, Dream of Wild Health, Urban Roots, Urban Ventures, Youth Farm, the Hmong American Farmers Association and others operating in the nonprofit space.

“I know there are other organizations in Minneapolis and St. Paul that see the vast possibilities that this site offers,” Ohmans said. “Whether they feel like they have the capacity to take on the job is a different question.”

‘Save Frogtown Farm’

After four years of leading instructional tours pointing out the wild medicinal herbs that grow throughout the farm, Eva Nyrie Garrett was appointed Frogtown Farm’s board chair in January. Under Cunningham’s direction, the farm had just regained its lost tax-exempt status and hired two graduate students on a part-time basis to help with communications, fundraising and programming activities. Cunningham said the nonprofit had to return some funding last year because the farm had fallen out of compliance with specific grant requirements.

“It was in such despair when we jumped in,” said Garrett, a master herbalist and naturopath. “We’re brainstorming, reaching out to different contacts that we know and organizations that we know and pleading for help, really. Not just financially, but can you come and grow? Can you donate seedlings? Can you volunteer? It’s a ‘Save Frogtown Farm’ campaign.”

Seven urban farmers who had previously served on the board of Frogtown Farm, worked for Frogtown Farm or were otherwise involved either declined comment for this article or did not return messages.

Cunningham said the nonprofit operates on an annual budget of about $500,000, all of it funded through piecemeal grants. As best as she could tell digging through 40 separate email accounts and old annual reports, the nonprofit had not landed a grant larger than $50,000 in years, or developed any kind of revenue-generating partnerships, such as sub-leases with urban growers and other nonprofits.

It’s springtime, Cunningham acknowledged, and the nonprofit still needs to raise at least $475,000 to keep basic growing and distribution operations afloat this year. It would take another $60,000 to restart educational programming and community outreach in earnest.

“We have a handful of grants that we’re in the process of securing right now,” Cunningham said. “At this point, we have a deficit of at least $150,000.”

Cunningham’s professional background includes combining globally-inspired cooking with social justice work through ventures like her Healthy Roots Institute, a food education initiative she launched in 2018, and her catering and restaurant consulting business, Chelle’s Kitchen. Neither of those ventures involved mastering the art of soliciting donations.

“We really need more technical assistance — strategic planning, fundraising,” she acknowledged. “My background is not in fund development. We’re looking for help anywhere we can get it, as far as financial support, or advisement or connection with other funders. We have a very unique situation that doesn’t really exist in too many areas around the world in farming on public land.”

New faces

When Cunningham was hired in July, the nonprofit had only one salaried employee — a farm manager who handled everything from payroll to social media.

Frogtown Farm now maintains a small staff with two salaried employees — a farm manager and administrative manager — and four temporary contract staff, including Cunningham, a program manager, communications manager and farm operations adviser.

There are no Asians on the nonprofit’s board. Given the long history of immigrant farmers in the neighborhood, even some longtime supporters of the concept of a park-based urban farm have found the disconnect with the surrounding area striking.

Asians — mainly Southeast Asian immigrant families from Laos, Thailand and Myanmar (formerly Burma) — make up a third of the neighborhood, followed by Blacks at about 26% and Caucasians at 24%, according to the Wilder Foundation’s Minnesota Compass Project. It was unclear what percentage of the neighborhood hails directly from Africa, but about 43% of the neighborhood speaks a language other than English at home, and 28% are foreign-born.

“In its early years, Frogtown Farm was on its way to becoming a community hub, with carefully tended fields, regularly scheduled community festivals, volunteer opportunities, educational programming and more,” said Ohmans of Frogtown Green. “Its decline over the past several years has been a tragedy. But that doesn’t mean that its successes can’t be recreated. It needs coherent leadership that harnesses technical skills in farming, nonprofit management and community organizing, and that recognizes Frogtown as a place of many diverse cultures, all of which must be included.”

Cunningham said she’s had meetings with Asian growers, but no success in recruiting them to the board. Recognizing a growing disconnect with neighbors, she launched a radio show on WFNU Frogtown Community Radio, “Voices of Frogtown Farm,” and has hosted two “community conversations” focusing on how the farm could better meet community needs. The board is also recruiting residents for a new advisory committee. It’s been slow going.

“Last year, we had over 500 volunteer hours, but we need a lot more than that,” she said. “We’ve been promoting on social media and through the newsletter, but we haven’t necessarily gotten the response that we need.”

An online listening session scheduled for March 28 on the topic of park safety was rescheduled to April 18 to allow time for an emergency board meeting.

Cunningham said it’s not uncommon to arrive on the site and find produce stolen or witness illicit behavior in the parking lot. Someone once set a bale of hay on fire adjacent to farm equipment.

“We have issues with safety and security in the park, with vandalism and encampments,” she said. “We can’t build a giant fence. It’s a public park.”

She added: “When we have to deal with these safety issues, that’s taking away from our ability to just build and grow.”

Partnerships and land investments

Cunningham, who recently hosted two members of Frogtown Green on her podcast, acknowledged that it will take time to build bridges with community groups it may now need to rely upon for survival.

“There’s other organizations that have a spotty relationship with the farm because of things that have happened in the past,” she said.

In addition to its hoop house and physical structures, Frogtown Farm has invested heavily in the soil, making improvements known as soil amendments and growing cover crops that improve soil fertility, investments she’d hate to lose.

Among repeat supporters, the nonprofit has received grants from the United Way, the HRF Family Foundation, the Patrick and Amy Butler Family Foundation and the St. Paul Foundation. Grant applications have been sent off to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Minnesota Department of Agriculture, the Otto Bremer Trust and others.

The nonprofit may need all of them and more to stay afloat, said Cunningham, who sent out a mass fundraising call for help via email on a recent Friday, and on the Friday before that: “Frogtown Farm faces a critical juncture that demands immediate financial assistance to continue our valuable work. … Without it, we risk discontinuing our efforts, depriving our community of essential services, fresh produce, and a space for social unity. We do not ask lightly.”

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Canada’s population surpassed 40 million last year, recording its highest growth rate since 1957. The vast majority of this growth — 97.6% — was from international migration, both permanent (almost 500,000 people) and temporary (just more than 800,000). As a cosmopolitan and classical liberal, I applaud this kind of openness. Yet it also worries me.

It’s not just Canada — Ireland, New Zealand and the UK are seeing historically high levels of immigration as well. How long will citizens of these countries continue to accept this trend? Who exactly benefits, and how? Why hasn’t the backlash been stronger?

After all, immigrants do not bring an immediate economic boom. When New Zealand closed its borders during COVID, for example, output did not fall, and the post-pandemic resumption of immigration did not cause a noticeable boost. In the UK, meanwhile, economic stagnation has accompanied a wave of immigration. Whatever the benefits of the migrant arrivals may be, they lie in the more distant future, which does not help its political popularity now.

And yet, for all the cultural and economic adjustments immigration may require, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that, for many countries, high rates of immigration are simply flat-out necessary.

In Canada, for instance, the current fertility rate is about 1.33 children per woman, the lowest on record, and it probably would have been lower yet without recent immigrant arrivals. Canada’s geography also argues for more immigration. It is likely to have much more usable territory, due to global warming, so a much larger population is feasible. If Canada wants to maintain a reasonable balance of power with the U.S., and have the resources to develop and protect its Arctic and Arctic-adjacent areas, it needs a commensurately large population and economy.

Toronto has become one of the most interesting cities in North America, and immigrants deserve much of the credit for that, as well as for the growth of Vancouver. Canada is now also a premier spot for international dining. My point is not to make travel recommendations (though the restaurants in the town of Scarborough remain a particular favorite), but to show how Canada is connected to many global trends that will help keep it vital.

In general, Canada — like Ireland, where the fertility rate is about 1.77, higher than in Canada but still below replacement — faces a choice: Either take in migrants or depopulate. Perhaps one reason voters are tolerating such high migration rates is an intuitive fear of living in an empty, stagnant country. Voters tend to want their country to be able to project influence and defend its interests.

Economic debates about immigration typically focus on the wage effects on domestic workers, and there the impact of immigration is often neutral or marginal. But the more important effects of immigration may be more impressionistic: how it affects people’s views of their own country and what it’s like to live there, as well as its global reputation.

In this sense, Canada is ahead of much of the rest of the world in seeing the importance of these factors and turning it into actionable policy. It is willing to give up some of its present cultural identity to achieve a brighter cultural and political future.

This trade-off is much better than it looks at first. For one thing, birth rates for native-born citizens may fall further than they have already. If a country wants to preserve its national culture, it may be better off allowing more migration now, when there is still a critical mass of native-born citizens to ease assimilation.

To put the point more generally: Whatever costs there might be to immigration, successful nations will have to deal with them sooner or later. And the sooner they do, the better off they will be. The choice is not so much between more immigration and less immigration, but rather a lot of immigration now or a lot later. This choice will become all the more pressing as the need to fund national retirement programs requires more tax-paying citizens.

One of the most common criticisms of immigrants is that they push up real estate prices. Yet there is a home-grown explanation: Stringent regulations on building make it difficult for the supply of housing to respond when demand increases.

In fact, there is a way immigration can help address this problem. First, immigrants may themselves induce their adopted country to free up its real estate markets. So immigration might increase real estate costs in the short run, but help reduce them in the longer run. Second, immigrants can help lower-tier cities move to the fore. The suburbs of Toronto, for example, have seen much of their growth driven by Asian in-migration, and longer term that will give Canadians more residential (and commercial) options.

These points aside, note that higher real estate prices, to the extent they result from immigrant demands, largely translate into capital gains for homeowners — most of whom are native-born. To be sure, the higher home prices may be bad for many younger Canadians, who may be locked out of housing markets, but eventually many of them will inherit high-valued homes from their parents.

My argument is not that there aren’t short-run transition costs to high levels of immigration — especially in housing, where Canada is seeing some now. In the long term, however, more immigration is better for a country than less. To me, the question is not so much why Canada and similar countries are allowing so much immigration. It is how long voters in these countries will allow this experiment to continue.

Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of economics at George Mason University and host of the Marginal Revolution blog.

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The Timberwolves may have a matchup problem.

It was easy to dismiss a mid-November drubbing in Phoenix as the result of circumstance. That tip time was 23 hours after Minnesota downed Golden State in a game better known for the fight that took place two minutes into the contest.

Phoenix looked ready for the game, and Minnesota did not. Schedule loss is the term so flippantly thrown around the Association.

Surely, in other scenarios, Minnesota would have no problem dispatching a Phoenix team that simply hasn’t clicked all season.

Or maybe not.

Five months later, the result was the same. The Suns jumped all over Minnesota early and often Friday in Phoenix, handing the Wolves a 97-87 defeat.

The loss pushed Minnesota back into a tie with Denver in the race for the No. 1 seed in the Western Conference. And while Minnesota still owns the tiebreaker, the lack of breathing room in the standings looms large with the Wolves and Nuggets set to square off Wednesday in Denver.

This game — and all the ones down the stretch — matter. The same is true for Phoenix, who’s scratching and clawing to secure a to-six seed and, thus, avoid the dreaded play-in tournament. So the stakes were high Friday. Neither team played the night prior.

The playing field was relatively level. Minnesota has won nine of its past 11 games and had seemingly found a nice groove, even sans the injured Karl-Anthony Towns.

But Phoenix scored the first 15 points Friday, and never really looked back. The Wolves never even pulled within single digits after that.

The Wolves turned the ball over a bevy of times, which led to a number of Suns’ buckets. Minnesota didn’t play poor defensively, but was seemingly flummoxed on the offensive end all night. Anthony Edwards again struggled from the field and, this time, there was no one else stepping up to pick up the slack.

The entire starting lineup had issues knocking down shots. Conversely, every Phoenix starter scored in double figures. Even on a night where Devin Booker struggled from the field, he had a double-double, serving as an offensive maestro with double-digit assists.

Phoenix center Jusuf Nurkic notched a double-double early in the fourth frame and was a disruptor on defense.

Again, Minnesota had no answer for the Suns. The two teams will meet again in the regular season finale. There’s no telling if either team will have something at stake at that point. At this point, the Wolves should hope not, as they’re also probably hoping to not square off with Phoenix in Round 1 of the playoffs.