Forget What You Heard: Urban Farming in New Orleans Didn't Start After Katrina

If you read mainstream articles about urban farming in New Orleans, the narrative usually goes something like this: Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, devastated the city, and in the aftermath, a wave of green-minded organizers arrived to plant community gardens, kickstart food justice initiatives, and introduce the city to sustainable urban agriculture.

It’s a neat, inspiring story. It’s also completely wrong.

The idea that growing food in the Crescent City is a trendy, post-2005 invention completely erases a vibrant, decades-long history of Black-led agricultural brilliance. Long before today's buzzwords like aquaponics or farm-to-school hit the mainstream, Black educators in New Orleans were running world-class, tech-forward agricultural programs right in the middle of the city.

At the center of that forgotten history stands a man named Floyd Jenkins—and it's time we talk about his legacy.

The Living Archive: A 35-Year Career

For a long time, academia did what it unfortunately does too often: it let a vital piece of community history slip through the cracks. In fact, a recently published academic article mistakenly suggested that Floyd Jenkins had passed away.

But on March 19, 2026, researcher Mark T. Williams II hopped on a phone call and spent over an hour talking to the man himself. Jenkins laughed off the rumor of his demise. He isn’t just alive; he is a walking, talking library of New Orleans history.

Lineage of Urban Agriculture 

1942 - Joe Merrick starts the Ag program at BTWHS

1960’s - Sydney Jordan takes the reins

1971 - Floyd Jenkins arrives from rural Tallulah

Jenkins arrived at New Orleans’ Booker T. Washington High School in 1971. He wasn't an isolated anomaly; he was part of a rich pipeline moving agricultural brilliance from rural Louisiana (via institutions like Southern University and Grambling) straight into the urban core.

Jenkins took over a program that had been running since 1942. For the next 35 years, he transformed it into an absolute powerhouse.

High-Tech Farming in the 1980s

When people think of high school vocational traits from the 70s and 80s, they usually picture basic gardening or livestock care. Jenkins and his students laughed at those limitations.

Because urban soil can be unpredictable, Jenkins bypassed it entirely. Long before modern hipsters were building DIY hydroponic setups, Jenkins turned his school lab into a cutting-edge aquaculture and hydroponics center.

The Setup: In the late 1980s, Jenkins and his students hand-built recirculating tank systems.

The Livestock: They bred and raised catfish, tilapia, hybrid striped bass, and koi.

The Crops: They used the nutrient-rich water from the fish tanks to grow massive yields of strawberries and lettuce.

This wasn't a cute little after-school club. It was a sophisticated scientific research hub. The program was so advanced that it received national grants, and visitors traveled from all across the United States—and even nations in Africa—just to see what a group of Black teenagers in inner-city New Orleans was building by hand.

More Than Food: Total Community Infrastructure

Jenkins’ program wasn't just about farming; it was a blueprint for economic survival, collective agency, and environmental action.

"Growing food was a life-affirming, collective strategy."

— Dr. Monica M. White, Author of Freedom Farmers

Booker T. Washington High School was a true vocational powerhouse. Jenkins’ ag students worked alongside kids learning brick masonry, auto mechanics, and drafting. They built a hyper-local, self-sustaining ecosystem:

Ecosystem Restoration: Long before the climate crisis dominated headlines, Jenkins took his students down to the coast to plant marsh grasses, actively stabilizing Louisiana's shrinking wetlands and protecting the city from storm surges.

Summer Workforce Pipelines: Partnering with the city and George Washington Carver High School, Jenkins ran city-wide summer employment programs. Kids from neighborhoods often dismissed as "depressed" were paid city wages to learn horticulture and landscaping, hopping on city buses to gain real-world entrepreneurial skills.

The Price of Erasure

So, what happened? Hurricane Katrina.

When the storm hit in 2005, it didn't just break the levees; the political aftermath shattered the city's public school system. Booker T. Washington was restructured, the traditional vocational frameworks were dismantled, and a 50-year-old agricultural legacy was quietly swept under the rug.

When outsiders came into the city post-Katrina to "introduce" urban farming, they weren't bringing something new—they were standing on the ruins of a system that had already perfected the craft.

This is what scholars call epistemic marginalization—a fancy term for when the intellectual contributions of marginalized people are ignored, while material contributions (like a wealthy donor funding a building) get all the credit. It’s why we know the names of big-money donors, but we forget pioneers like Floyd Jenkins, or Norbert Rillieux (the Black engineer who revolutionized sugar refining), or Fannie Lou Hamer’s revolutionary Freedom Farm Cooperative.

Bringing the Legacy Forward

Floyd Jenkins’ career proves that urban agriculture in Black communities has never been just about a hobby or a patch of green space. It has always been a site of resistance, a tool for self-determination, and a rigorous academic pursuit.

Floyd Jenkins' students at Booker T. Washington High School circa late 1990's.

Right now, much of Jenkins' brilliant work lives in a fragile state—tucked away in personal binders filled with old photographs, typed lesson plans, and student achievement records. The next critical step is simple but urgent: we need a massive, community-led push to digitize this archive.

Rebuilding culturally rooted, egalitarian agriculture in our cities today doesn't require us to reinvent the wheel. We just need to look at the blueprints Floyd Jenkins already drew for us.