Hollygrove market, farm sprout in 'food desert'

NEW ORLEANS – A new breed of market is coming to New Orleans.

After months of tilling soil and tapping funding sources, an unlikely group of barn hands today unveiled the city’s first community-run market and farm on the site of the former Guillot’s Nursery at 8301 Olive St. in Carrollton.

The Hollygrove Market & Farm will sell fresh produce six days a week and on the three-quarter-mile spread that surrounds the store, train budding urban farmers to grow.

“There is a huge demand for affordable, locally grown, fresh produce in this city, and you can’t fill that demand unless someone is breaking their back growing it,” said Kris Pottharst, director of New Orleans Food and Farm Network.

The community-run store and educational facility is collaboration between Pottharst’s organization, Hollygrove Carrollton Community Development Corporation, Tulane University’s City Center and Trinity Christian Church.

Hollygrove has long been described as a “food desert” because of the lack of grocers in the area. The market represents a larger city-wide effort to bring fresh food into grocery-starved neighborhoods without turning to an outside retailer and, instead, teach people to grow their own market-ready food.

“There is the problem of food access but there is also a need for economic development. This is a model that attacks both,” Pottharst said.

In eastern New Orleans, Tulane City Center and NOFFA are working with the Mary Queen of Viet Nam Community Development Corp. to develop a 28-acre site into a fully-functioning farm complete with commercial growing plots, a poultry and livestock area for free-range chickens and goats and three market pavilions where growers can sell fresh-grown delicacies.

“The next generation is not going to come from rural America,” Pottharst said. “It is going to come from urban America.”